The Game with Alex Hormozi - How I Would Build a $10M Service Business (If I Had to Start Over) | Ep 1004

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube   Kaleb's roofing company was doing $20K a month and closing one in every 20 doors knocked in just two months. In this episode of Scale or Fail, Alex identifies what's holding the business back and builds the high-volume repairs machine nobody else wanted to run. 90 days later, Kaleb had gone from $32K to $250K in revenue. In this episode 00:00 Introduction: Kaleb and Keys Roofing Company 02:23 Selling repairs versus replacements 04:47 Building the VSL and sales funnel 09:33 Customer retention: reviews and membership offers 12:06 Sales representative’s closing script 14:02 Leveraging speed as margin 16:28 Kaleb’s position on the scaling roadmap 18:10 90-day results: from $32K to $250K in revenue More Value: Book Your Spot at the 2-Day, Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas        Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle   Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured  Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/  Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi    Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training   DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

I'm about to help a complete stranger build a $7 million per year business. I'm going to give him a step-by-step roadmap on exactly what he needs to do. And 90 days later, we're going to check in with him to see what actually happened. And for all the business owners watching, I've scaled 10 businesses past 10 million, three past 100 million, and I've realized an important lesson, which is that businesses is that businesses behave in patterns at all levels. And so you can take any of the principles and tactics and apply them to your specific business and industry at its current size.

There are far more similarities than there are differences. And so with that being said, let's go meet Caleb. Ready to rock? I'm ready to rock and roll, brother. All right. Tell me about the business. So first off, my name is Caleb with a K. I own Keys Roofing Company.

Also with the K. Yeah, Alex would be nice to meet you. So we are a premium and luxury roofing gutter and downspout contractor in St. Louis, Missouri. So we've been in business for two months. The current revenue, we're a little bit shy of 41,000. Profit is 24,248, so I'm at about 59%. So you're doing like 20K a monthish. Yep, right now.

Correct. The goal within the next three years, is going to be seven to 10 million. Okay. Love that. So how you get customers? So the way that we get customers, two primary acquisition channels currently is door knocking. So I do a ton of canvassing.

And then also referrals, whether that's doing a great job for the person that I currently meet or people within my internal network. So walk me through the money stuff. Yeah. So with the money stuff, I have two streams of revenue. With the full replacements, my average ticket year after year is about 18 to 25,000. The greatest thing about being the solution for the smaller problems is these jobs, Alex, they typically chunk up to those jobs. So if I'm coming through and I replace one downspout for somebody, run a gutters, what have you, nobody else will even show up to even attack that job, which then qualifies me to get the next job and all their future jobs.

How many doors do you need to knock to go to sale? Oh, man, I have a high close rate on that. So if I knock 20 doors, I'm getting a sale. Yeah. Like it's like that. Yeah. No, it's like that. It's like that.

All right. What's stopping you right now? So what's currently stopping me is having more salespeople. Because if I have two more salespeople, one project manager, I'm 100% confident. Seven to 10 million is very doable. All right. Hop on to the side and then we'll dive into it. Awesome.

Okay. So the big thing that you right now have to deal with is like there's one of you and you don't have that minute. Like it's a small. business. Right. And I'm not saying that as a slide I'm saying just factually, right? And so you're going to be resource constrained both time and money. And so I want to focus all efforts on the highest return stuff that you can do right now. What's very good about your business right now, honestly, is you. Because at any given point, you can knock 20 doors and you get a deal. Yep. Right. And so that reliability of being able to just basically go get money is something that a lot of entrepreneurs don't

know how to do. And that gives you a lot of what I'll call it, like cats have nine lives, like entrepreneurs need as many lives that they can. And knowing how to go get money is one of the ways to do that. So I think it's super good. There's a couple key decisions that I wanted to walk through because one of the considerations I had was like, okay, was there a world where we could get repair, average tickets up more meaningfully? And so say 7K is gross profit on the replacements. So that sound fair? Yeah. Okay. So if we have 7K replacements, right, what is the gross profit on a repair? Oh, I mean like 64%. And that average ticket is $1,500?

Yep. So $1,100 gross profit on repairs. So I'll tell you where I was originally thinking was basically, is there a world where, let's say we get this gross profit up to $2,000? Is there a world where you think you could sell three times as many repairs as you could replacements? 100,000%. Right.

So this is what got more interesting to me. It was like, I love when there's something that's been cast aside by other people, right? Like, no one wants to do this particular thing. But then you orient a business to touch a way that you can actually make really good gross profits on it. Part of me was running out the idea of like, What if we just did repairs and you did an absolute, like you just became, it's systemized the living shit out of it.

Right. So what is the aggregate amount of all repairs? What would that ticket look like? So if you did everything minus replacement. These should really be selling for like $2,500 to $5K. The reason that this is interesting to me is that like if we can get this thing to, two, three, you know, 4K, this becomes an incredibly interesting business. Yeah.

Just from the sheer volume that you can do and the reliability of revenue. Because the obvious one is cool. we do repairs and then we try and upsell the roof. Like, that's fine. But I just like that you have this angle a lot. Let's just run this out and like run out a version of the future. Okay. So let's just say that we try and get really, really sexy with our repair sales motion.

Sure. All right. So all the repairs, we try and get our foot in the door quite literally, right? We get our repairs and then they go to have their onboarding call with Amanda. Yep. prior to the onboarding call, I would love to have them watch a VSL that talks about the other benefits of what you guys do. It's a long-term investment, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then Amanda then tries to close them on a menu close of, okay, you got this thing, but you probably

don't need this, you probably don't need this, but what you really are going to probably want to take care of is this and this, which, you know, my partner didn't have enough time to talk about, but given what we now know about it, because we did a little bit more work than just talking to you, we're are going to be there. We're going to have the dumpsters out. where we're going to have the tarps open. It's like the hood's going to get popped. Right. So you might as well just have us fix everything while we're here.

Getting the first sale is the hard part. Getting the proxman sale is significantly easier. Way easier. Right. Can I ask you a question about this? So with the VSL, so I have a high quality YouTube channel, is a VSL kind of the same as a YouTube?

Or is that different? It has a more specific purpose. As you scale the sales team, you might want this video to be more targeted in terms of like more selly. Okay. Right. And so the VL cell structure looks more like this,

which is you have your intro, and then you're going to have your promise of like, hey, in this video, I'm going to explain X, Y, and Z, which is the promise that they want. You're going to have an amazing roof and blah, blah, blah. And it's going to help you avoid this pain that you probably dealt with in the past, X, Y, and Z. And so you might not believe me because you just met me. And so let me just give you some proof of Angie and Daniel and so and so and so that are all around this area, have houses as big or bigger than yours, so you can feel like I work with people of your caliber. And so in this video, I'll show you the plan of how we actually do that. And so then we have Old Way New Way, which is the way that the current industry looks is this. And our special K, process is X, Y, and Z, and that's why it's very different than the old way of doing things. And then we say, okay, now, class typically have a couple questions around the stuff. And so we have objection number one through whatever, and objections that they have. And with each of those, you just break the beliefs. So you're like, they think this, here's why that's wrong, or they didn't know this. This is what's right.

And here's proof. And so, you know, Angela actually, a similar question. She owns whatever house down the street. And she thought this, it actually works like this instead. And so here's proof, right? So each one of those is basically that's just a belief breaking mechanism over and over again. And so that way, your sales guy, when he comes back after, you know, walk in the house, and this is like a seven-minute video, whatever, you can be like, oh, the video giving a little bit more context.

It's completely edifies them, edifies the company, gives a shitload of social proof and stats. Yep. And so, like, I would also bring in something like, you know, houses that have some sort of roofing plan, resell it a higher value. I would put those pieces into it. So it's like you're actually not really paying for this. You're going to pay for it either way. It's just you get to enjoy the house without all the issues the whole time,

but it ends up reflecting your home value. I see. So you might as well just like, the worst thing you can do is fix all these things the day that you sell the house. And you could have just had a nice roof this whole time and sold it for the same value, but instead you're just fixing your house for the next guy. Makes sense.

Okay. That's how I would sell it. Sure. And so this is before you actually close. but then you, before you talk to Amanda, right? They should still watch another one. So they watch one when you're on camp, like on property. And then, because this is about the first sale.

Understood. The VSL that they're going to talk to from Amanda, so this is VSLs in general. But the VSL that they're going to see when they talk to Amanda is about the other stuff. Got it. So it's just framing the conversation. So this is probably a little bit more about us and working with us in general. This is going to be more about other things that people don't know about, like their roots. So it's, you get the difference?

I'm picking up. Okay, got it. Yep. Now, I think that in terms of scale, usually you go all in door to door. Okay. It's what you're good at. Like, I don't think we need to be cute about this.

Sure. And just get really violent with it. Nice. I'm down for that. Yeah. I just like, I'm actually a full focus on this. If you just every 20 doors and maybe it's every 40 for your guys or every 50 for them, whatever, like, it's like, I want to go make money.

It's like great. So you know your commissions. I don't know. What would a commission on this bay? Do we do 10% on repairs? So let's say the average repair, we can get that to like 4K revenue. All right. So 4K revenue, they're going to get 400 bucks.

Yep. Right, divided by 50 doors. So it's like, want to go make 10 bucks? Knock that door. Want to make another 10 bucks? Knock that door. Want to make another 10 bucks? Knock that door.

It's just like, it just makes it really straightforward for them. So it's like how much one you want to make? Just knock that many doors. That's the piece. Right. Yep. And I think you building out this DDD Army is like the clear straight shot. Okay.

So what are you doing on the back? and when you deliver the house. So like full jobs finished, that's what you're saying. So we have like a cleanup process too. So like I come through, make sure that the house is better looking than how we left it. And then the first thing that we're going to do is ask them for a Google review. I also,

I come from a background of like financial advising and mortgage. So I want to make sure LTV is high. And the way that you do that is you actually stay in good contact with your clients. I get a lot of business just by I call these people every six months to a year. Yeah. I have detailed notes. Hey, how's your kids doing? Let me give you a.

cool little thing. What you got? Okay. So you're going to do your, like, you're going to get your review and you're going to get your reel. So what I do is give an incentive. So I want to say, hey, so what most people do is they sign up for our, you know, diamond roofing, all whatever you want, VIP. And it's $15 to $20 a month, just paid annually. So it's $180 to $2.40. It depends on the market, right? You can go a little higher if you want to. And we put $2 for you $1 that you put on this into future repairs. Typically, people need to get their roof checked once a year. And so we'll come out for that to check on everything. Make sure it's up to date. And we'll take it out of the repair that we have to do. Okay. Okay. So you're more talking about like the maintenance program, like something like that.

Okay. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. And then if you want to, and this is like where we can get a little bit niftyer. It's like you can make this $500 a year But if you just leave this review We'll knock it down to $200 Okay And now we have a little A little carrot Yeah

For them But at the end of the day We don't even care with the money We care about the fact that we're going to have Appointe once here That we're going to go out to see the person Yeah And then

Yeah Sell more stuff Let's do that Yeah Good idea, dude Yeah Yeah I should do this for a living

So So Because you're sorting out The, it's funny because the bigger the business, the more tailored the advice has to be because there's just more moving pieces and considerations. The earlier, like at the hypothetical stream in the beginning, the first step of starting a business is always the same, which is that you will need to start an LLC of some kind so that you can accept money. Right? So it's like if every, if you're at zero, the steps are identical. And if you're at a zillion, their steps are entirely unique. You're a few steps from zero, eight weeks, right?

Yeah. And so the process here is really, really straightforward. forward. We need to tweak this front end VSL, add a back end VSL. Amanda needs to follow a script in terms of like, I like the mini clothes. So the menu process works like this. Step one is that Amanda's going to unsell what they don't need. So she gains trust. She's like, hey, looks like you're, this is fine. Looks like this is it. You probably have a couple years on this. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. And then they're like, oh, wow, she's not going to try and I'm selling me a bunch of shit. And you're like, yeah. The second thing is we're going to, we're going to

prescribe what we do think they need. So you don't need this, you don't need this, you don't need this, you don't need this, you don't need this. But what I am saying is you're probably going to need this and this and this. Now, would you prefer A or B? Gotcha. Would you rather have a male or female person doing the install? Would you rather Monday or Tuesday? Would you rather, like, it doesn't matter. Like, would you rather the neon nails or the white nails? Coffee or water. It's a fake, yeah, it's a fake choice, but it just makes the clothes a lot easier. And then for card on file. Great. Do you just put that on the card that we already, the payment method we have? on file. Awesome. That's the script. Yeah. So welcome. We're excited to really have you. I looked

at some of the images. It looks great. Your gutters look great. The bubble of all looks great. You know, beautiful home that you got here. So I don't think you're needed this and this and this. You are going to probably need to take care of this. And so would you rather this or this? Great. You want to take care of that with a car. Javan file? I mean, we already have the hood popped up. That worked for you? Great. Nice. Yeah. Super smooth. Yes. And we're good about this too. So we can definitely do that. Buttery. Nice. And so that's the script for Amanda to follow. Cold. Love. to see it. We, this is the process because all we're doing is we're going to increase average ticket with this via menu, uh, cell process. The two VsLs, one for you and then one for her. Mm-hmm. We're going to get more reoccurring business on the back end with our little membership

that we're going to credit towards any repairs. You're going to need to do it either way. So you might as will just not even feel it. Sure. And then we should have scale the door to door. Got it. I had a speed incentive in play too. It's all margin. Yeah. Oh, for sure. So the way I think about like, the reason that I'm such a big proponent of speed, right, is let's say that you've got, you got House A, B, C, we'll put a little, we'll put some roofs on it for keys, right? So we've got House A, B, C. If, like, we have to do this amount of work, and this amount of work is going to take the same amount of resources. But if C wants to pay us an extra $1,000, and A is still very much within the window of, like, an acceptable time period to get the repair done,

we might as well just make it C, B, A, or CAB, whatever, but literally just reshifting the order of the work by allowing people to spend more. to go first, just makes more money. Correct. And so when you do the end of your repair thing, it's like, hey, you know, we always try to be really fast, but for a lot of our clients, you know, time is money, we have a 20% priority boost. So if you want us to get this done for sure by the end of the week, and if we don't charge it, we basically put you to the front of the line and then you don't have to worry about it. Okay. I'm with that. Yeah, that's good, because if I mix that, I have like a prepayment incentive. So yeah, and I mean, speed's all margin. And in this business,

margin matters a lot. Ton. So I would say you can tack that on to the initial here. But if we can get the average ticket up to that 2, 3, 4K because of this motion, and then you add your speed piece in, all of a sudden you guys can start doing two, three, four repairs a day. It's like doing a full roof replacement a day. That's what I'm saying.

That's why I love the repairs because I'm not competing with anybody on it. These guys think they're too good for it. Yeah. I just like it. I love, if I can, I love high volume businesses. Yeah, I love you high volume. There's more stability. The reps get way more, like the sales reps get way more reps. And because the sales cycle is much shorter. There's way less administrative headache with the insurance and the payment that's delayed. There's basically no cash flow constraints with the business. And you can just and then you just add more of these. And that literally becomes the machine. There's a lot of things that are very exciting right now. And it's also new and whatever. Sure. But like we need to knock our doors and we sell more repairs. Gotcha. How's that said?

That says really well with me. I mean, I came here for some clear direction, and I feel I have actionable steps on when it's to have happen. So it's just a matter of debriefing it with the team and putting systems in play. Simple? Very. Cool. Appreciate you.

Nice to meet you, bro. I think we have a little scaling roadmap. What's take out right now? Four, five once Alejandro, my sales guy joins. Alejandro. Alejandro. Where are we at? So that's going to be one to four to five to nine.

Yep. You're right in this little transition here. So what we were talking about today was basically specializing our product. Okay. Right? From a marketing perspective, the free stuff you've art, like, you're already on your way with this in terms of making the content. So you're on the right direction with that.

Sure. From a sales perspective, you're going to probably have to track this maybe a little bit more than you are right now because right now you're the, it's you. But as the team scales up, this is going to probably be the next piece that you're going to want to have to install. And then you do, it sounds like you have better tracking on the back end because you have some experience there. But in order to get to this next level over here, that's what we have to basically check this box off. And you have about half of them. So I think you are ready to like

gas this. So with this, I want you to think about salespeople as your new customers or your new avatar. Yeah. And some of the marketing that you're going to do is to go get these guys so that all of a sudden you can have four guys on your team or five guys on our team. And you can probably easily manage that on your own. And then that's what's going to allow to unlock this. I think and that's, again, And with volume comes reliability, and with reliability, you can get, you can decrease costs. Yeah. Because you can forecast. Okay.

And so fundamentally what you're discussing is like, I can start forecasting out that if I know I'm going to hit this volume, then I can cut my cost basis in half or my two thirds. It's like, okay, yeah. And that's how business is done. Yeah. Right. In the beginning, it's always super rocky because everything's really volatile. And it's feast or famine.

That's why I like the reliability at this in the beginning. So we get cash flow and there's a heartbeat in the business. And then everyone just kind of like water starts flowing through the pipes. Straight forward though? Yeah. I like it. I want every entrepreneur to win. And so I think what's more important or more interesting is what actually happened when he executed

all the stuff that outlined for him over the next 90 days. And so that's what we're going to show you. Give me the update. So what was revenue three months ago again? So it was a little under 32,000. And then I guess it's been 90 days since then, is it. So what is it now? So right now I am at 250,000.

Hell yeah. Like, yeah, like 247. Hell yeah. But it's been rolling, real. like when I came on I was sub 20 reviews so I'm at 62 five-star reviews 85 services built salt and collected on whereas I was at 32 over there hired the repair tech it's been a lot of stuff dude yeah I've never tried this hard in my entire freaking life and I absolutely love this which things did you do that made the biggest impact so I went all in on door to door first

off and I had to figure out how to structure that Alex who genuinely helped me the most I would say. So I actually went and got an ERP system. So it's like a custom CRM that is built for us. It's allowing me to like run the jobs the way that I want. So now that I have the repair tech, I am doing three to five services every single day. Right. My guy, it's been wild too because he actually ended up having meniscus surgery yesterday. And his brother filled in his role. So when they both come on at the same time, I'm going to take that three to five services a day. And it's really going to look like six to eight. And I am just going to win by just absolute violence. I have decided. I mean, that is the, I think the first thing we said was go all in on door to door as primary

growth engine. Yes, the VSL. So I'm shooting the VSL come next week. Your prescription idea has been monumental to in terms of, I'm going to talk to people about, hey, let's say all the gutter guards. There's one option that, no, you don't want this because of XYZ and then I'm rescribing what they need. So that consultative aspect to selling is increasing trust a lot. And then people are just taking a recommendation. The menu upsell, baby. Yeah. So tweak the motion, went all in on door to door, tweak the tech so you could sell more.

And yeah, and you're getting in only the big dogs in terms of producers, right? Oh, yeah. It sounds like a pretty productive 90 days. All right. And so that was this episode of Scalar fail. Stay tuned for the next one.