Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Pitts.
Joshua, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
When I graduated from the University of Houston in 2011, I had just finished interning for a private bank where I was involved in financial transactions greater than $10 MM dollars. I was at the top of the top in the financial world but I was an analyst and the pay was finite.
I wanted the ability to make a lot of money so I went to one of the bank’s clients who owned a manufacturing business. The owner made me call him (no exaggeration about 20 times) until he hired me. I was at this company for about 1.5 years when I sold the largest account in the company’s 25 years history. This was interesting timing as the owner had just sold the company and he was my mentor. Al Ross, My mentor, asked what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and I told him, “I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to build a business and I want to make a lot of money so I can use that money to help others one day.” He told me right then and there to start a company, what to name it and to get a website up asap. He told me to make a one-page business plan and I did. I won’t lie. I was scared shitless because I had to turn around and quit my job but I had low overhead personally and he told me to get a night job bartending to cover bills and I did. For me, that’s the model any entrepreneur should have starting out – entrepreneur by day and bartender or similar at night so you can have money coming in while your business gets going.
That year I did $80,000 in sales and the next year, I cleared $1,000,000 in sales and that was eight years ago. Fast forward today and National LED is the leader in converting large factories, office buildings and parking lots to LED. The savings are incredible so the product sells itself but we beat the competition because we have a few core competencies that other people just can’t seem to get a grasp on.
Has it been a smooth road?
Hiring is a real challenge. We are always looking for really aggressive salespersons. We train all new salespersons to be better than others in our field and that’s a part of our success. We have guest speakers come in a teach us which is really helpful and in my personal opinion it’s best to get someone with little to no sales experience so that I can train them on how to do the sales process correctly and not have them start with bad habits they picked up elsewhere. I learned that because I have hired a number of bad salespersons and in the end it wasn’t so much the money I lost on them but more so the time. Growing a company isn’t the hard part in my opinion its hiring people that’s a challenge. People cant interview well and be terrible at their job, I’ve learned the best way to finds out if someones a good hire is to spend as much time with them as possible.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the National LED story. Tell us more about the business.
National LED is a leader in turn key LED lighting services. What that means is we travel around the country (we even have a few international accounts) and we design and implement LED lighting packages. Most importantly we are consultants. Fortune 500 companies will come to us and will ask how to lower their energy bill and reduce maintenance on their existing lighting so we tell them what type of LED lights they need, how many and where to put them. We basically handle everything from A-Z which is a lot and if you’re not good at execution can lend to problems on the project management side. You may not know this but lighting can be one of the biggest expenses for a large company other than cost of goods sold or payroll. Every business in the united states will convert over to LED lighting as the old-style lighting is becoming too costly to maintain and even hard to find ad manufacturing for it has declined. We are capitalizing on that have been since anyone else saw the trend years ago when we started.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
The industry will continue to have new players that will come and go. That’s the biggest problem I see; we have a low barrier to entry and many companies come in trying to make some money and end up losing their rear end on large deals because they don’t know the ins and outs of the business. When you get deep into the subject you’re talking about electrical engineering, voltages of buildings and a number of factors that people cant grasp if they haven’t had proper training and experience. National LED has never had a job that was a failure but we have had some experiences that required an engineer, master electrician or someone really skilled in our area to fix. This is another one of our competitive advantages, we have access to more skilled labor than any company I’ve ran into in our field.
Contact Info:
- Address: 6807 portwest drive Houston TX 77024
- Website: NationalLED.com
- Phone: 8327407983
- Email: jpitts@nationalled.com
Suggest a story: VoyageHouston is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
