Verifier Perspectives: Evolving Your Business and Getting to Your Bottom line
Paul Kreisher, Lightly Treading interview
Title:

I’m Anne Rancourt from the Cadmus Group, and I’m speaking with Paul Kreisher of Lightly Treading Incorporated. Lightly Treading is the leader in rating Indoor airPLUS homes in Colorado.  Paul thanks for joining me. 
I’m happy to be here. 

Paul, tell me a little bit about what’s new with your company.  

For starters, in areas such as Boulder, Colorado in particular, where they have very high energy code standards for the builders building there, our clients have been looking for ways to differentiate themselves, and one of the things that they recognized even before wanting to differentiate themselves was that there are so many more consumers in the last seven, eight, ten years who are coming to them with concerns about having a family member that has respiratory problems, having asthma and hitting them with questions that they weren’t originally that comfortable addressing. They’d say “Oh let me talk to my heating contractor and we’ll figure out some sort of filtration system for you.”  And, builders such as Coast to Coast Developments, and one of their principals Bill Eckert, were really first into the pool, as it were, with this when we shared with them this opportunity. And they said “yeah, we’ve been having these types of clients for years and building code standards are so high that we’re having to build 30 percent better then what ENERGY STAR requirements are already.”  So, to show that we care about our customers and care about the environmental aspects of their lives, they said “this is a great program for us to get connected with.”  What the Indoor airPLUS program has done such a beautiful job with is taking the most important parts of what can impact a homeowner’s indoor air quality, as well as really the durability of the home, when we look at moisture problems inside wall cavities and really has created a great way for Coast to Coast to communicate to their customers “here is a straight forward, really important way for us to better ensure that your indoor air quality is of a higher quality and it’s sanctioned by EPA, connected to the ENERGY STAR program” and they’ve gone forward with it. They’ve done a really good job, with some help from us, on getting marketing pieces together that showcase elements of what they are doing in the home, but even more importantly Bill Eckert and the other partner and other members of his firm are just proud of the fact that they are doing this, and being leaders, and they’re seeing benefits with consumers being really satisfied. So that’s the critical way that we’ve seen it help our business is that by helping our customers see the opportunities for this, it’s lead towards more consulting work for us, it’s lead for additional testing work for us. So it’s probably increased, on our financial side, probably by about 50 percent per job, 30 to 50 percent depending on the job, but a nice bump up in what we are paid to work with a builder. And, the builder is satisfied because they are getting something more out of it. 

Have you found that it had differentiated you in the marketplace?

We certainly do get contact calls from architects now, a couple homeowners that they are aware of the fact that we’ve been working on this with Coast to Coast and a couple of other builders. I’ll throw out another name, John Kurowski with Kurowski Development in Denver, is a custom builder that’s been here since the 1970s and he’s another one that we work with using this program. Yeah, the word of mouth does spread from that. We list it on our Web site that it’s there. From word of mouth, we are getting people calling saying “hey, I’d like to have a home that incorporates this.”  We’re happy to have part of what distinguishes us maybe from other rating firms that’s part of what we do as well.  

What feedback have you gotten from your staff and consumers about Indoor airPLUS? 

From my staff side of things, the people who are here in this company are people that really love understanding how houses work as a system, and one of the critical aspects that this program helps summarize in a good checklist form are details around materials that would out gas, and moisture problems that can come from inside or outside in a home, and radon and other things coming from outside of a home from soil gases. And, so for my staff, they are more satisfied by looking at things comprehensively than just the energy efficiency part of it. From the client perspective, I think no matter how smart or financially prudent people are, homes still have a lot to do with an emotional response, why they want to live there. I think people justify a lot of it around practical things and with that being the case, indoor air quality is one of those things that people have knowledge on and seems to be increasing knowledge on the risks that are out there. Sometimes they are misinformed, that concern that people have makes it that they really like having an assurance from a federal program like EPA.  They know it’s not biased towards specific products that way, that it’s really meant to be objective, gives them an assurance that someone is looking out for them. I think it’s just one more thing that they don’t need to worry about, and they feel much better about it. 

Finally, how has Indoor airPLUS impacted your businesses bottom line?

The way it’s helping our company right now, is it’s great that we can do more consulting. For us as a consulting firm and a testing firm and a training firm, if we are doing more work for a customer, we can bill more and that’s fantastic for us bottom line wise. 

Paul, thank you so much for joining me. 

Yeah, it was a pleasure to talk with you and look forward to it again. 

Thank you, to learn more about EPA’s Indoor airPLUS program or to listen to more podcasts, go to epa.gov/indoorairplus. I’m Anne Rancourt from the Cadmus Group.