The Home Service Expert Podcast - Achieving Freedom By Taking Control of Your Financial Future

Episode Date: September 6, 2018

Damion Lupo is the CEO & Founder of Total Control Financial, an Austin-based company that provides retirement solutions and support. He is a sought-after financial consultant from high profile clients, and serves as a financial mentor and host to the Transformation Nation podcast. Damion’s mission is to help 1 million people achieve financial freedom, by empowering them to take control of their financial future. In this episode, we talked about profitability, operations, hiring...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey there, home service experts. Tommy Mello back at you here. I've got Damian Lupo on the call

today, and we're going to learn a lot about taking control of our financials and also really creating a lot more freedom in our lives. It's great to have you on, Damian. How's your day going? Sorry, it's going off to bed. I'm really glad to be here and be able to share some stories and give people some tools and some ideas to kind of disrupt them and give them some more power that they might have been missing.

So I'm excited about what we're doing. Yeah, this is great. I mean, you got a lot of solid feedback to give us, I think, and I'm really looking forward to it. I mean, you started a business at 11. You got your parents on board to help you out. And you've since then owned over 30 different companies. And today your mission is to help millions of people achieve financial freedom. Tell me a little bit about how you got started and how this mission came about. I think, you know, my story is a lot like people that are listening.

I was hungry. I was out there creating solutions by doing different things, all sorts of stuff, selling insurance. I had a car washing business as a kid. I was doing landscaping. I had a landscaping company. So I had a lot of different things, and I was always looking for ways to provide value for people. And ultimately, that evolved into me opening a bookstore in college, getting thrown out of school because I put the bookstore on campus out of business. And I realized I need to do something different. And I ended up in real estate, doing a lot of real estate investing,

listening to guys at seminars, and I just modeled. And ultimately ultimately that led to creating a ton of money, which I was really good at. And then I realized I was really crappy at keeping the money. And I think that's where a lot of people end up because there's a different skill set around making money versus keeping and growing money. So I had to start learning the difference. And now I teach how to keep the money in addition to making it, but really how to keep it and grow it so that you're not just a slave to making it all the time. I love the concept. So you've actually got a different background than most people.

Tell me a little bit about the yoga and Aikido and your 4X Black Belt Pro. Tell me all about that. So this is something that kind of hit me. When I was looking around for the thing outside of work, I found martial arts and I found Aikido and I started diving into it and I fell in love with it. It's what resonated with my heart and my soul. And after a number of years of training with just Aikido, I got into yoga and I realized how connected those two were. And I developed something called Yo Kido.

It's the blend of both of these that has everything to do with breath and presence. And the value there is that the more present you are and the practice you have of becoming present, the more powerful you are in everything, including business. If you're not present, you're going to miss out on what's happening right in front of you. And so I just went deeper and deeper into this. And it really helped after I lost the $20 million portfolio and had to start over. Finding a place where I could practice and just be still was

incredibly powerful for resetting and reinventing my life, which ultimately led to Reinvented Life, the book that I wrote with my best friend about that process. It had a lot to do with the martial arts and learning how to be present and powerful and not having all the tension and force that builds up in the world that we live in. Yeah, I've done yoga, but it's hard for me to slow down and actually enjoy it. And Aikido is what Steven Seagal does, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a flow. It's where you're redirecting energy and it makes most people crazy.

So I've got four different black belts in different arts and most martial artists don't like Aikido or they think it's beautiful, but it makes them nuts because it's so subtle. And that's kind of the essence of life. Things are subtle. And if you really want to experience things, you have to be still, which is hard. Like you just mentioned, it's really hard to be still in yoga. Like meditating is brutal, more than 15 seconds for most people because they have squirrel brains. And I'm one of them. It takes a lot of practice. Yeah. Yeah. I like the concept of using other people's momentum in that but uh i definitely am going to look into that i like the concept that i've heard the people that actually learn how to meditate slow down reflect and breathe correctly it just

changes your life it changes everything it makes you more healthy everything about it. Is that the case for you? It is. What I've found both in myself and teaching over the years is that we hold a lot of tension. And when we hold tension, we're not really open. We're not breathing. We're just, we're compressed. And so when you can start letting go of that tension, you can actually start experiencing things and you have a lot more power. Great book is called Power Versus Force. And it's that most of our lives are focused on force. We're forcing things instead of having the power of being present and redirecting and just having control. So that's the essence of the martial art. It's the essence of business. The more powerful you are, it has everything to do with being present and letting go of the tension

that tends to control us. Okay. That's very, very interesting. I'm taking notes right now. So, you know, when I started business, it was a lot of work. I mean, anybody that thinks you're going to get into business and not really work a lot of hours and make a lot of sacrifices and just really start to put systems together, doesn't really know what they're getting themselves into. So many of us, we go out there and we assume that getting, you know, I want to be my own boss. Number one, I don't want to have to take any crap from anybody is what a lot of people say. And number two is they end up being really good at a job, but they don't end up being a really good owner. And I've made my mistakes and I've had to retrain myself on what owning a business

was all about. But I know you built, you know, your 20 million fortune and then you lost it. Tell me the lessons you learned from that failure. Well, there's a massive amount that you can learn by failing. And one of the greatest lessons is that failing does not make you a failure. It makes you a different, more enlightened person with that scar tissue. And the biggest takeaway is that failure is not something we should be afraid of. It's something we should embrace and realize that that's going to allow us to grow. And growth is one of the six human needs that we have to have. And so if we want

to grow a business, if we want to expand and create more wealth, we have to be willing to make all these mistakes. And so for anybody that's doing things, the idea that you mentioned, to grow it, you have to test things. You have to be willing to work a lot of hours. What I see right now is especially in younger people, but even in boomers, there's this thing

where there's this focus on everything happening immediately. And especially somebody that's maybe in their 50s, they're thinking, I need to create some wealth really fast because I don't have

that much time. And the problem is that's not how business works. It's not. Overnight success stories take 10 or 20 years to actually create the foundation in many, many cases. And if you're not willing to do that, you're basically sunk from the beginning

because there's no, this isn't, Tim Ferriss has a great book called The 4-Hour Workweek. But the reality is it's more than four hours to create something big and powerful and, you you know financial freedom it takes 10 000 hours for many many things to create any sense of mastery so the takeaway was you're going to create wealth if you're willing to be a farmer but if you are just hunting like i made all my money in real estate by buying stuff and letting it sit and letting it kind of grow

and increase in value and it was rental property when I tried to force things and say, I'm going to make a quick 20 or 50 or $100,000 more often than not, I lost that money because I was trying to force things instead of allowing the universe to nurture and grow things. So patience is kind of sorely missing. It's not very common. And that's where you create a lot of value and a lot of wealth. It's allowing yourself to grow by being patient and sticking with something. But people are so impatient that they don't stay in line. They keep getting in the back of the line for the new thing.

And I realized that as I started different businesses, that they took longer than I thought. They often took more money than I thought. And you have to be willing to stick with things. The people that are successful have stuck with things. It was never overnight. That's just not the case. No, it's taken me a long time to turn a pretty significant amount of profit each year.

And it's like, I feel like once you figure out some major lessons that you can't just say, it's about building systems. People always say that, but once you build the systems and once you create an organization that can live in, and actually it's an organism that evolves itself without you being there and without any two or three key people,

and there's cross training and a lot of training going on all the time. It's, it's actually a culture. And when you can create that culture and you've done it, it's easier to recreate it. I've met a lot of people that have lost everything and within a couple of years, they get it all back. And I think it's because as a business owner, we have to take chances. Don't you believe that? Yeah, I do. And one of the things you're touching on that's really important is the culture that you're creating and the right people and understanding that when you build a system, it can work on its own. But if you hear people talk about how they're going to set something up so that they start generating a business that's

kicking out 20, 30, 50,000 bucks a month, and they think this is going to happen in a month or six months. And you know what, that could happen if you've already done it. But it might take you several, three, four, five, 10 years to be able to understand how to build a system that can generate that stuff. Once you've got that skill set, you're right. You can flip a switch and go recreate it. But what we're talking about really is the confidence. You've got the muscle that you've built, and that's the hard part about business. It's actually the training, being out there with live bullets flying around, like real-world stuff happening, building the muscle,

and that confidence sets you free. It's not the cash, and it's not necessarily the cash flow from the business that you might have hit and done really well with. It's building that muscle, and then you're truly able to go and recreate almost overnight, and it seems effortless, but it took years to get to that point. Yeah, that's a good analogy. When you work out and you flex that muscle and it seems effortless but it took years to get to that point yeah that's a good analogy when you work out and you flex that muscle and it's a business muscle i love

working that muscle i love learning about new stuff too you mentioned there's six basic human needs and growth was one of them can you just kind of give me a rough overview of each of those i'm just curious yeah absolutely the one that drives most people is the certainty one. This is why people spend all this time going and either they're working a business or they're working a job and it's all about having cash. And they think that that's going to make them happy. So people tend to spend an over excessive amount of time on that one. The other one is variety. So things like variation, experiencing different things out in the world, traveling. That's kind of the counter to certainty.

It's the other side of it. And then you have love and connection. And that's your relationships with people. And you also have growth. And that's kind of your relationship with yourself and just how you expand. And the sad thing is we were talking earlier about how many books that you have in your library, which is incredible to me. It's over 700.

And I've read 100 times as many books after I left school as I did in school, and most people don't. They don't go to seminars. Growth is key. It's paramount to expanding because if you're not growing, you're dying. There is no flat line. And so we have to find ways to continue to grow. And then the last two are contribution and significance.

The problem with significance is it tends to be ego-driven. Like when I was building up my portfolio of my original businesses, I was excited about going out there and showcasing who I was by the stuff I had. Everything was shiny, so I had my Ferrari and all that stuff. It made me feel significant, but it wasn't a significance based on something that was really fulfilling. It was my ego. What I've shifted into now is the last one, the contribution piece. And the contribution is all about lifting others up.

If we focus on serving others in a bigger and bigger way, the interesting thing is all these financial benefits and all this wealth and all this freedom happens as a side effect. We don't have to necessarily focus on it. And that's not ego driven. That's more of a mission, a vision for a life that's soul driven. Yeah, I was with a buddy of mine a couple of weeks ago and I just had an epiphany. And I realized that after I got done golfing, he asked me how my round went. He called me three times to ask me. And then he always tags me or friends on Facebook that he's thinking about. He calls his friends and

asks how the kids are doing, but he doesn't even realize there's no extra effort. He's always just, it's small little things. Like he'll go to a friend's house and he'll bring them like peanut butter because he knows they love peanut butter. Like I'm like, man, it's something that he has that I want that I don't necessarily. It's something that I'm like every person, significant other of our good friends. They're like, I love Chad. He's just this amazing guy because and he doesn't realize he does it, but he does it. And I just I admire that. And I think that would fit into the contribution, wouldn't it?

It would. When you truly think about how you can do something for other people and that's your focus. And this could be as simple as sending somebody a card and say, hey, I was just thinking about you. And, you know, here's something. I read a really cool book you might be interested in. It could be three sentences. It's finding ways to connect with other people. And almost rudimentary or silly as that sounds, the fact is very few people are doing it. Like,

I can tell you that I probably received one or two physical handwritten things in the last year from anybody. And one of them happened to be a vendor that I bought a microphone from. And it was funny because I wouldn't expect this guy to send me anything ever. But if I'm going to go get any audio equipment, I'm going to go right back to that guy. And if somebody sent me a jar of peanut butter, I'd be like, yeah, you know what? Let me tell you about this friend of mine. She sent me peanut butter. I love peanut butter.

It's those small things that make a huge difference because people are so squirrel-brained. They're not really connecting. They're not really looking out for other people. And it really does stand out. It's a great leverage point if you're wanting to have better relationships and if you're wanting to grow your business, doing those small things makes a huge difference. I love it. I love the handwritten notes. That's great. So tell me, you've been doing business. You've been coaching people for a long time. What's the biggest mistake that most entrepreneurs make when it comes to finance? The biggest mistake I see, and I see this all the time with people that build up a million or two million bucks in the bank.

They have cash flow from something, especially when they have cash. I have a client now that has four or five billion bucks in the bank. He is terrified. He cannot imagine quitting the work that he's doing. And I look at him, and what people don't realize is that it's not about the money. He doesn't have the confidence in his ability. He feels like if this all goes away, he's screwed. And the biggest mistake people make is thinking that cash is going to solve their problem.

The truth is, if you don't believe in your ability to create, then no amount of cash is ever going to solve anything. One of my friends, he had $100 million in cash with the sale of his company and he ran through it in 20 years. Now he's terrified of what he's going to do

because he has no real way to recreate it. Once you have that confidence of creating it, which is why the work that I end up doing with people one-on-one is about creating all these little seeds of those confidence muscles.

And they practice. And ultimately, they don't need me because they've built the muscle. They can go out there and do whatever, and they're not worried about how much money is in the bank. So the biggest mistake people make is thinking that cash is going to set them free. Cash is just trash. Confidence will set you free. And that only happens because you've gone out there and you've done the workout, you've sweated and you've bled. That's how you end up becoming free. And that's the key to it.

So how do you tap that inner, you talk about this on your website, you tap the inner guru inside every man and woman and have a chance to tap into the space where all the answers lie. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, I mean, one of the things that we tend to be afraid of doing is asking the question, what do we really love? And I always ask people if they would do what they do for free, and almost never do they say yes. And the moment that we say, yeah, because the work I do,

a lot of times I do it for free. And it's because I love it so much, whether it's my businesses or teaching or whatever. And so tapping into the thing that you would do because you love it so much tends to expand you and put you in a place of authority and credibility and great power. And the inner guru starts to grow where you're finding the answers because you're opening that channel. And people are afraid of doing that because they're so addicted to their paycheck or their business. And ultimately, I mean, this hit me really hard a few years ago before my dad passed away. And I was having a conversation with him. We were sitting there and it was about two months before he died.

And he hadn't really traveled and he really kind of held back. He played it really safe. It was all about security, that first human need. And he looked at me and he said, you know, I just had so many things that I wanted to do. And what he hadn't done is he had never sat still and said, what do I really love doing? And let me focus on that. He was always so scared that he wouldn't have money. And the truth is, he's part of the Lucky Sperm Club. Like anybody in Western civilization, especially in America,

we have all these options. We're not in a Syrian refugee camp. But yet we act as though we're trapped and we can't make a decision to do the thing that really touches us and that will open that channel. And I think that's one of the keys that we have to be willing to step into that unknown. And then all of a sudden, all these divine providence happen where different resources

and people come kind of into our life and they sort of support this thing. But they'll never support that if we're not focused on something that's deeply emotional and important to us. So what's the best way to really do some inner soul searching and really identify? You know, for me, it's just I like to golf. I like to go to movies. I like to do a lot of stuff and I enjoy business. I really do thoroughly. I was at the dentist earlier and she's like, you work all the time.

Why do you work so much? I'm like, I like it. I'm like, I really do truly like to work. I like working around people. And it's not work to me. I don't wake up in the morning and I'm like, oh, God, I got to go in. I'm like, oh, I can go in at any time I want. I just like to go to work, you know.

So tell me a little bit about really identifying that stuff. Well, one of the things that I love doing is asking somebody, you know, if they're excited about, you know, do they wake up in the morning before the sun because they're so excited to get started? And very rarely does somebody say yes. That is, I'm like you. I love working. To me, it's play.

I have a good time with the stuff I'm doing. And I also think there's incredible value with what you just talked about, getting out there and getting out from behind the screen or just breaking out of your environment, because our environment keeps us in a similar thinking space. And so I tend to travel the world, moving out into different spaces, but you're present with the question of what really makes you happy and what is really true. And that is the one question that I would tell everybody to ask yourself and then ask over and over again, what is true?

If you ask that question, you're going to go deep into it. You'll find the truth that should be driving you. And probably it's a little different than what is driving you because you have to start getting really honest. I spent two years asking that question after my meltdown. And I realized that I was a really bad person, that I didn't have any ethics or morals driving me. I had an ego full of greed and need for significance. And what I really was at my core was a teacher. And I realized that I needed to spend time in those environments. And it changed everything.

But I had to ask that question for two years. Yeah, that's pretty interesting stuff. There's that line of morals and ethics that you got to be true to yourself. I think that's what you said when we first started is staying true to oneself. And even in relationships, if you can't be happy with yourself, it's very, very difficult to make, whether they're kids, wife, husband, immediate family, father and son type stuff. But, yeah, that's good stuff. So let me ask you this. If you were to hire someone in the financial consulting industry, what are the three questions you would ask right off the bat? And why are those questions important?

Well, the most important one I would ask, there's two that I tend to ask everybody, and I suggest they ask whether they work with me or anybody else. One of them is, I want to know what kind of mistakes the person I'm working with has made. I want to know what they've done that's screwed up, what they've done where they've lost money. If somebody sits out a perfect track record or they're trying to pitch a return that's consistently 10% or 12% a year or whatever they're doing, I don't have any faith or trust in that. It just tells me that they're lying or they're brand new.

And so I have no interest in working with that person. The other thing that is really important is asking somebody in the financial space how they make their money. Is it just selling products? And this is very typical in the space of life insurance, where people that sell life insurance, and I did this 20 years ago, they make their money selling it based on commission. What they're not doing is making money based on the actual product that they're telling you you should buy if you can make money. And I have a huge problem with that. What I love is somebody being really honest and saying, I make my money selling this stuff, or here's my balance sheet. Ask a financial advisor or somebody that's coaching you for their balance sheet. Say, hey, I want to know who I'm dealing

with. And that'll tell you a lot that the reason being numbers don't lie. They tell a story. And when the work that I do with people is to dig into the numbers to figure out what's really going on, because you can't just ignore what you do day to day, month to month on your profit and loss statement or your personal financial statement. And your balance sheet tells the story about the last month and years of your life and what you hold dear, what your values are. And that's really where you have to start. Most people don't want to disclose it because it's embarrassing. You want to pretend that something's different than what's real and what's real is what your numbers say. You can't get around that. The numbers don't lie. So those are really the two things that I ask. I want to find out what kind of mistakes people have made. And I've written a couple of books on the that I ask. I want to find out what kind of mistakes people have made.

And I've written a couple of books on the mistakes on purpose because I wanted to be very transparent about my mistakes, the millions that I've lost. And also, it's really important for people to understand that I eat my cooking. So what I'm suggesting people do, I suggest they buy gold and silver. I suggest they have their own business. And I do that. I don't just tell somebody, hey, I read a book about this. You should do it. I think that's BS.

And I think that's the way a lot of advisors are. They just regurgitate crap. And I think that's a very poor advisor, something that's just regurgitating and not actually living it. Yeah, there's a lot of advisors that their goal is just to get as many people as possible. And they get to make their numbers. And they really don't care for their clients. And they say, are you looking to be at your age? You should be living on a little bit more of a,

you don't need the money as bad so you can be a little more risky, right? Yeah, there's a lot of nonsense dogma that's pitched in the financial world. Advisors, the typical advisor model is they get your money and they charge a percentage of it, whether it's on the surface or it's kind of hidden. And then their job is to build up $100 billion or $1 billion worth of assets. And they just sit there and they live easily.

And what happens is it's your money that's at risk and they have no risk. And they make the majority of the profits. I keep that model. So what I encourage people to do is to take control of their money and actually start making the choices and stop paying all those fees. And that's why Total Control Financial was founded. It was to give people total control of their money instead of just handing over their money and advocating responsibility

and then smoking a bunch of hopium thinking that it was going to work out in 20 years. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, that you can just turn your money over and it'll all be bigger. Or the stupid thing that I've heard is, hey, you're going to spend less money when you're older. You'll be in a lower tax bracket. Why would you want to be poor when you're older? That is a terrible plan.

You want to be rich. So how are you going to do that? You got to take control. You can't just hand over your money and hope it works out. Yeah, I know how that works. Theoretically, that's what a Roth IRA is built for. Or not actually a regular IRA is theoretically you put money in this regular IRA. You haven't paid taxes on it.

So you're having a larger amount you're putting in that actually makes that compound interest when you go to pull it out. Because you're at a lower income bracket bracket because theoretically you're going to retire. You'll pay less taxes on it, but that money will work harder for itself. I'm a big fan of a Roth IRA, but you can only put so much money into that. Let me blow your mind for a second. If you're listening to this thing, take a pen out and write this word out. It's called the QRP, and it's literally an IRA. There's a book I wrote called the QRP book. And it's about, it's a qualified retirement plan.

The most important thing here is that you can, especially if you're in a service business, or you've got your own business, you can put up to $55,000, $56,000 a year into this. It can be Roth money. And like you mentioned before, that's after-tax money. And what that means to you is that you don't have to worry about tax rates when you're 59 or 60 years old. Because when you pull all your money out down the road, it's tax-free. All of it's tax-free. And you get to give it to your heirs, and they get to grow it and spend it tax-free. So you can literally create this family legacy wealth for 100 years where nobody's paying taxes on all this growth.

So over the next 20 years, here's the important thing. With a QRP, you can contribute a million bucks into something and grow it and things that you control and then not pay taxes when you pull it out. So all of a sudden, that whole conversation about you need to be poor when you're older because you need to be in a lower tax bracket, you take it out of the equation completely. It will change your life completely if you're in that type of vehicle, which you can invest in all sorts of things, real estate, businesses, metals, stocks, whatever you want. It's a very different model. And the reason that you don't know about it is because you have control of your money.

And Wall Street hates that idea because you're no longer paying fees. So if you want to know how to get control of your money and not pay those fees and never pay taxes again, it's called the QRP. And that will revolutionize your financial life. So QRP right now, what I did is I took money out of my Roth. I got a good buddy of mine. I'll just tell you straight up. I put a hundred thousand of Roth money into a guy that I know very well that flips apartments. He's averaged 26% a year on the money. I know him very well. I do all of his garage doors. So he gives me a ton of business on top of that. And he said, even if the market took a crap, it's a five-year investment. But he said, we own the apartments, we rent them out. He goes, we could go through any recession. Now,

what I did was a self-directed, right? I self-directed the money into his portfolio or I could self-direct it into anything. I could buy a house and flip it. I could also put it into a business. If I started another, let's say, landscaping company, I could put the money into that self-directed. Tell me a little bit about what a QRP is versus a self-directed. Well, a QRP is a self-directed tool. The difference between a QRP and the IRA in large part is you can put 10 times as much money each year into a QRP, and you truly have checkbook control with the QRP. With an IRA, there's always a custodian, and they can block your stuff, and they're

always going to charge fees. And one of the big advantages with the QRP is there's two main things, the reasons people like it, because you can buy precious metals and hold them. And two, when you go out and you do real estate, like with an apartment, and there's debt, there's something called UDFI. What that means is that if you go buy an apartment or you invest with an IRA, a self-directed IRA, and you invest in that apartment and there's debt, there is a taxable event where profits that are basically because of the debt, because you use the leverage of debt, you get taxed immediately. And with a QRP, you've got this checkbook.

You write checks. If there's debt, you don't pay any taxes. It's exempt from that. That changes the picture when you have any type of debt. And with real estate, there's typically debt. So it gives you checkbook control. You're not paying the fees. You can put 10 times as much money into it and it can be robbed so that you're never paying taxes down the road. So it literally changes the game, but you don't know about it because it's not profitable for Wall Street at all. They lose all of the control,

all the fees, all the power. Okay. One final question about this. So you got a 401k in generic or specifically with a 401k model for a business, you need to offer certain things to employees to be able to put that 50, 60,000 bucks away. If you're going to run it through the business, how does a QRP differ from that? QRP just gives you more options. The same rules apply to 401k rules. And so as a business owner, you're going to offer these options to your employees. And so if you want to contribute, if you're going to match money for yourself,

you're going to match money for them. It basically just gives everybody more options. And it's just a function of somebody managing that stuff. When you have employees, it gets a little more complicated. So you have an administrator. And I have a lot of clients that end up setting those up because they want to have the ability to invest a lot of money and actually create a sticky environment for the employees. Because when you're setting that up to be successful, man, it's awesome.

Yeah. Anything you give the employees, pay time off, insurance, health facilities, especially a 401k, they don't want to leave. No, and you're probably going to be the only one in your industry, because this is so rare, that's giving them options

that are more than just mutual funds, because that's typical 401k. You have like five options for stocks and bonds and some cash, and that's it. But if you start creating alternative stuff you say look you've got you could use your 401k we're setting up for all these other things metals apartments real estate all you know these different things you're gonna have some people that are going crazy excited about the options you put in front of them yeah i like that that's great I'm excited about it. I'm going to buy your book. So being disrupted, in large part by Amazon or these tech titans. But even in any industry, whether it's garage stores or anything else, there's always somebody out there that's trying to find a way to disrupt us or do better or do cheaper or these things.

If we're thinking about how we're going to grow our business at 10% a year and we're going to maybe double it over the next five or 10 years, somebody else is going to radically innovate and probably destroy us with their marketing, their messaging, their service, something. The only way for us to continue to grow and expand and to do well is to have a different mentality of not 10% but 10 times. And what it forces us to do is to ask a different question. If our business is a million bucks a year and we said, okay, how could our business be a $10 million business? We're probably going to have to look at different resources and different people and just different ways of

operating that are completely different. Because if you think about 10 or 20% growth, you can do what you did last year and just do a little bit more of it. There's no way you can do the same thing you did last year and grow your business 10 times in the next 12 months. You have to do something radically different acquisitions or something. It forces you to think differently and to look outside of your bubble. And that's the big part. That's the big reason we do it. There's a book that I read. I think it's by Grant Cardone. It's the 10 times rule or something like that. And it talks about basically the same philosophy. Does that sound right?

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the books that I've studied in this whole idea is the 10x rule. Because it forces you to hustle, but it's really changing your mindset around how you see things. And it breaks you free of whatever is trapping you, the old ideas. And that's the big part. You can't stay in the old because everything is being disrupted. If you do, you can run over. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

You know, I do like the idea of setting huge goals. And so many people say you need to grow 10%. I grew 100% last year. We're going for 100% every year. It gets a little bit more intricate. But there's so many different businesses that I work on that I could grow 100 times a year, it gets a little bit more intricate. But there's so many different businesses that I work on that I could grow 100 times a year, like lead generation, like search engine optimization, if I'm delivering results. People don't care what they're paying as long as it's a multiple

of their revenue. Like if it's 10% and they're making $10 million a month and they got to pay $1 million a month, okay, I'm making a lot of money. So I like the thought process that goes behind the 10X rule. You know, every single morning I open my computer. I mean, I'm on here all day long looking at my KPI dashboard. Now, if you ask many home service entrepreneurs out there, they won't even know what a KPI is. You know, KPI is key performance indicator, you know that, but how would you convince a home service entrepreneur the importance of knowing those numbers and those key performance indicators? If you ask about mistakes and things,

that may be the goal that people don't, they don't drive their business based on numbers, they drive based on hustling. And so they go, well, I don't really know what's going on. I know that my accountant said I made $700,000. That's what my income was. They have no idea. And you can't operate a rational business.

You sure can't grow it in any type of realistic way without the KPI. The problem people have is that they don't have the connection between their critical drivers and the KPI. So if you think of it as your critical drivers are your input, it's like when you're going out there and you're doing activities, that drives, those are the things that you're doing. It's the marketing knowledge you're spending. And then with the dashboard and the KPI, that's the outcome.

You can't necessarily always drive your outcome. You can't pick your sales, but you sure can figure out how many appointments, how many doors you're going to knock on or whatever that is, this driving stuff. If you can fall in love with those drivers and you can say, okay, we're going to increase our drivers and we know that we're going to have a 10 to 1 for every 10 doors you knock on, we're going to have that one sale. You say, great, I want a 10X this thing and then you 10 times the same doors and I know that I'm going to have the outcome.

But here's the thing, if numbers aren't the thing, if you're good at the rest of your business, you've got to have somebody that comes in that can give it to you in a digestible format. And I've done that with people, and there are people that do that kind of work. It's invaluable. It is worth every dollar you're going to spend on that because you're going to have clarity.

And clarity is what power is. Without the clarity, it's chaos, and you're not going to be able to grow, and you're really not going to have peace because you're not going to be predictable to grow, and you're really not going to have peace because you're not going to be predictable. Yeah, that's deep, man. I really think the audience needs to rewind and re-listen to that. I mean, that's the way to do business.

Tell me a little bit about how you've been able to really identify what those KPIs and those measurements are of your business. And it applies differently to different types of businesses. What's the best answer to that? Well, there's two things. Another mistake that all too often happens, and I even saw somebody writing about this, but I don't think it was Grant Cardone. It actually might have been Grant Cardone. It was somebody I was studying recently, and it was talking about the top line. Just keep building that top line, your sales, your revenue.

To me, that's the ego number. You can say, hey, I've got a $10 million company, and I have a precious metal company. My margins are 1% or 2%. So I can say I've got a $10 million company. People go, that's great. I go, yeah, I'm starving to death because I'm making $10,000 in debt. And so here's the thing. You've got to figure out what the net is, the bottom line, the actual cash.

And it's a huge mistake people make with their financials, if they get financials, others in their tax returns, they get profit loss balance sheet. If you don't have a cash flow statement that actually shows you cash, you're going to hurt yourself because cash is how you live. Cash is what you write checks. I mean, you spend cash, you don't spend profits. And I made that mistake when I was building a real estate company because with a statement of cash flow, you can see whether you're making money in operations

or you're making money with finance, or you're making money with things, maybe you're buying and selling assets. And what I didn't realize at the time, huge mistake, I was making a ton of money in the financial station, meaning I was refinancing properties, I was buying and selling properties,

but my actual operation was bleeding to death and I didn't know it because I didn't have a cash flow statement that was really showing me where the cash was coming from. I just had a top line profit model that was saying, hey, you are really profitable.

And I was like, oh, it's no big deal. I'm spending $75,000 a month on my personal overhead because I have a multi-million dollar profitable business. So not having anybody able to share what was really happening, I didn't know any better. And that's what led to me losing $20 million. So, you know, use me as an outpouring and make sure somebody is giving you reality on your stuff and they're explaining what your numbers need. And make sure your bottom line debt is real and it's more important than your top line because that's what you're going to actually be able to spend and you got to know that big cash flow it's not just about profit yeah you know i hired a consultant that i

keep that actually keeps an eye with my controller and cfo i mean at the end of the day you want to hold people accountable and personally i don't enjoy finances. I've got a master's in business, which really the only thing I got out of that, and I learned some stuff, but I've met a lot of great people. But I understand income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet. I can look at an annual report and tell you exactly what's going on with the company. But do I love it? No. So it's not a passion of mine. So I recommend there's two things in life, in business that you have to be a master of if you're going to own your business. And that's know your numbers like the back of your hand and be in touch with marketing because

marketing is the lifeblood of your company. And if your marketing shuts off, unless you've got this crazy, you know, cookie business that all the neighbors buy from you. Marketing is such an important piece. But I learned so much about my business and it's crazy. Like even when I go through my Amex bills, I'm like, what is this? Why is this? What is this? So once a year we cancel all of our credit cards and we get frantic calls for all my manufacturers and everything.

We know to call the big ones, but we just, we cancel them all and just do a reset because, you know, certain guys need certain things for our website optimization and different parts of the business. And it's pretty simple. We just get a new credit card, give them the new number if it's important, but it's an exercise that I recommend everybody should do.

I know it's a little extreme and you're gonna look like an idiot to some people, but if you tell them, look, I cancel this, get used to this once a year, it's a reset button for us. Especially if you're going through millions of dollars of transactions a month like I am. It's just best practices. But yeah, there's nothing more important than knowing your numbers and cash is king. And I love that statement because when I look at my cash flow, there's like four or five huge things that pop out. Obviously, payroll, cost of goods sold, things that are coming off and things that you're spending money on really is what you're spending the money on.

Vehicles, this, that, maintenance. But then you got all these small ones. You might have 20 or 30 small ones that roll into things. And those small ones add up. I mean, the 1.2 percent, the 3.1 percent. Take a look at those. And, you know, there's a book called The Two Second Lean. It's about creating things in your life to get two seconds faster. And focus on the small ones. What would you say to somebody like me that just, you know, focuses, you got to stop the bleeding on the big ones, but what do you have to say about those small ones? I actually love your idea about canceling a credit card once a year. And then you have to

really justify when somebody comes back and you get a bill and it says your card doesn't work and you have to decide, am I going to to spend money we end up doing these things where we go on to autopilot and we're just we're bleeding to death having somebody that is a math geek that loves numbers i love the numbers i love dialing into somebody's stuff doing pfo work and then telling them the story and what's fascinating to me is that i'll talk to somebody and share the numbers i'll say your numbers say a different thing than what you're telling me. Your numbers say that you're actually doing really well, or you're doing really terrible and you've convinced yourself you're doing well. And then we can start making adjustments and change behaviors because of the numbers versus just

saying, I work 10 more hours a week. That's the key. It might be working less. You never know, but actually having a clear understanding of what the heck is going on, it's massive. And then you can start doing what you said, which is focusing on the marketing dollars you're spending. People start slowing down and then they reduce marketing. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Why would you stop the thing that's driving the business into your system when you need more business? Like you're literally shooting yourself in the other foot when your foot's bleeding. I mean, it's nuts. So I couldn't agree with you more. I think that it's nuts, though. I couldn't agree with you more.

I think that's brilliant what you're doing. Yeah, it's very alarming. And so many times we convince ourselves that we don't want to look at the numbers. We know they're pretty good. And I got to tell you, it's kind of like going to a doctor. You know, nobody really likes Damien. You've done it before where you're like something you just don't want to deal with whatever it is or you might have a ticket you

gotta go pay you know you gotta go pay it it's just a nuisance and I feel the same way a lot of times or at least I did about my numbers or my call booking rate I'm like yeah I know it's good and it's we're doing okay so So I don't know. I think you just got to do it. It's like you got to get it done. You got to know where you're at. And I really think there's certain things you need to focus on, but I have a map for home service companies.

It's eight KPIs. And number eight is how much money you want to make that year. And we work backwards. And we say, look, what if we could get you 10 times this and bring you this? How many calls would you need to make that year. And we work backwards. And we say, look, what if we could get you 10 times this and bring you this? How many calls would you need to have come in? How many of those would you need to book? How many of those would have to turn into a technician going out there?

How much would the average ticket need to be? And you go through these steps. And what's crazy is there's always two or three KPIs that are just like, dude, we got to work on this stuff. Don't spend any more money on marketing until you get to at least a 70% booking rate. Because right now you're at 42%. So I help to teach people how to recognize and really automate their KPI tracking. Because if they don't have an automated way to do that, they'll never know the real numbers. And if you don't know the real numbers, it's all pie in the sky until we figure that out. And I'm sure that's the same thing with your business, right? Yeah, it is. And really understanding something that's called the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule and understanding what is driving the big part of your revenue.

And so one of the things that I did with a client a few years ago that was in the insurance business was figuring out where the revenue was coming from. And after a year of working together, one, she had changed what she was focusing on in terms of the type of person that was coming in. So she peeled back and stopped working with about 60% of the people that she had been working with because she thought an important number was the number of new people, new policies she wrote. And that was a big driver for her. And I said, that's not true. You need to get rid of about half of these. And all of a sudden, she was just focusing on the ones that were driving most of the revenue. And at the end of the year, she ended up having, instead of working six days a week, she was working three and a half days a week, and she was making about 30% more money. And it was funny because all it took was recognizing what the numbers were saying.

And it was understanding the conversion and then getting rid of some of the ones that were taking up time and not really serving her financially. Yeah, and I love what you say. The numbers don't lie. I mean, I just got out of a market recently. And trust me, when I go into a market, I feel like a failure. I mean, I'll just tell everybody it was Yuma, Arizona. We're closing up shop there. I only have a couple of technicians and it just wasn't profitable.

And people don't respond to advertising the same there. And I cut my losses because I said I have to make a decision on the facts. And, you know, I'm switching from buying my trucks to renting my trucks because I'm making a decision. I'm putting my money in appreciating assets rather than depreciating assets. I got rid of Home Depot because Home Depot, when I look back and really looked at the real costs,

I was losing money servicing all the Home Depots. So, so many people are like, man, I'm making $3 million a year. No, you're not. You're probably losing money on three of the things and making good money on seven of the things. How can we build your top one, which is the 80-20 rule? Let's focus on that top 20% and grow that to the whole business. And let's get rid of that other 80%. And it's so hard to get rid of it. And the people out there listening, I can tell you,

it's actually a relief when you could actually look at the numbers and say, wow, the money is in the bank. I look at my statements and you're like, dude, this is awesome. I was robbing Peter to pay Paul before. And it changes when you actually have those numbers. And I think it's so important. And one of the things I wanted to ask you is technology has allowed me to do this. I even have an app on my phone that I put in all the meals I eat.

It counts my macros. I mean, how important is technology to you to be able to really adopt some of these principles you're talking about? It's important if it's narrow. If it's, what the problem we have now is we have 80 billion different app options and we have all these different things.

Like there's a ton of dashboards and it takes time to really engage. You have to choose, and you have to choose carefully. And if this isn't your thing, what's really powerful is having somebody that can help you and keeps you accountable to diving in to where you'll actually use something. I have tons of apps, like probably a lot of folks listening, and I don't use them.

And so are they useful? No. They're just taking up space on my phone. So if you have one, like a lot of people use Mint for their own, they're just, they're spending stuff. Whatever you use, use it. Whatever is there, actually use it or delete it. If it's not being used, get rid of that crap because it's going to take up bandwidth. But it takes a decision.

And the question is, what's the right app? I don't know. Have somebody that's already using one help you choose so that like you can tell somebody what you use and then you can probably help them through the process of their startup using it. But if you're just searching on Google or the App Store, you're just going to have an app that's going to confuse you probably. So I think taking somebody's advice on what they're already using is a really valuable way to take it. Otherwise, it's just a waste of space. Yeah, I agree. I mean, so many people get into all this stuff and you know

i downloaded this app on my phone to open up my garage door i was so excited i'm like now i know if my garage is open on my phone i'm like it's my industry and it's still good to have because i show people and they get all excited about it but after the first six months i'm like look my garage door was closed an hour ago and i'm like ah i got, I got a clicker at my, you know, my visor. I use the clicker and, you know, my car programs too. But, you know, the point is sometimes I do think we get overloaded with all this technology. And I do think the CRM is vital. I don't think you should ever, ever, ever run a business on paper anymore.

And you got to grab these numbers and you got to have a call recording software. And there's so many different things that a CRM will help you do, but you need to make that a part of your culture. You need to breed it and you need to live it because if you don't get on it, none of your people will get on it. It's like today I was hand-washing my walls throughout the whole office. And I had seven people come and grab a rag and help me. And it's just, they're like, wow, this is important to him. Like it's important to us, but if the owner is not going to do it, then why would I do it? So it's just those little things

that I think you really got to show people what you care about. So Damien, I always like to ask just a few things. Number one, I will tell you, I just ordered the guide to QRP. I ordered that on Amazon and then Reinvented Life. I ordered that. So I ordered those two books. Tell me how else I could get more of you. What are ways to communicate with you? And what are some of the stuff that you put out there that we should get? The best way to connect with me is DannyHupo.com. And you'll see the work that I do, the books I put out, and the tools that I offer to people. It's where I kind of raise up. And I'm always thinking of new tools.

It's just I can't help myself. I'm always coming up with things. And so I'll share those. That's where people are going to see the books I'm writing. One of my books that's coming out later this year is called Unicornomics. And it's about building a uniform, which if you haven't heard that term, it's a billion-dollar company. And it's kind of behind the scenes of what that really looks like.

It's not just what you see on Shark Tank. It's not what you see on the part of Forbes who is the next Uber. It's kind of that story. So I'm sharing behind the scenes the reality of that, and if you have an interest in doing that, what that actually requires, you can have a rational expectation.

And so that's where you're going to find all that stuff that I'm working on. It's definitely the place where I live, usually, at DamianLupo.com. Okay. So you got all the books. You got everything on there. So just go there. As far as getting a hold of you, just go onto that site and just message you, or what's the easiest way if they want to talk to you personally?

Yeah, go into the site. It's a gateway. So if you're going to find Twitter or Facebook, if you're going to find whatever works for you, you're going to be able to get to me pretty easy. I'm sort of easy to find. I'm not a ghost on the Internet. So if you just go to the site, you're going to find the gateway to whatever you want.

You just connect with me, and you'll actually have me communicating back to you, which if that matters to you then go to hockey okay and another thing i like to ask is you mentioned a book power versus force i haven't read that one and i have read the four-hour work week probably 10 times but is there any other books that really made a huge difference i don't care if it's business related or not that means a lot to you. Yeah, there's two. One I read many years

ago and it's called Mastery. It's by a guy named George Leonard. He's a martial artist like me. He's a style. It's a book that really has to do with your life and how you're going to master you and whatever it is you're showing up with, however you're going to

go about the world. It's a process of what that means for mastery. It's the understanding that you're going to go through many years of potentially plateauing and nothing's happening or doesn't feel like it. It helps you understand the need for sticking with things and continue to train and grow, even if it doesn't look on the surface like you're growing. So I highly recommend that one. And the one I just read last year,

best book I read last year was called Principles by Ray Dalio, who runs and started Bridgewater, and one of the richest people in the world. And one of the most grounded people I've ever read. I studied this book because it's so valuable to understand whether it's building culture inside of a company that you've got 1,500 people, or it's understanding what to understand whether it's building culture inside of a company that you've got 1,500 people or it's understanding what to do with wealth, what to teach your kids about wealth, how to interact so that you're not screwing them up.

You build a big business. You don't want to give your kids $10 million. It's probably going to screw them up and become junkies in many cases because they have no real drive. He has an opinion on that, and I love what he talks about. He's very candid, so I highly endorse principles and mastery. I love that. I suggest everyone read those.

Whose principles by again? Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio. Got it. Yeah, Ray Dalio. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, I am going to read your books.

I'll probably, realistically, they'll come in hopefully this week. I would say I could have them read by the second week of March. But what I'll do is I'll touch base with you for sure. And I'd love to have you back on and discuss your books after I get done with them. So really appreciate you taking the time today. And I got a ton out of this.

Lesson after lesson, a lot of stuff. I love the QRP. I'm excited to make a couple of phone calls after this. So thank you so much for your time. And like I said, I'll be connecting with you here shortly. Awesome, Tommy. Thanks so much. It's been really, really fun.

I'm looking forward to listening to this and learning myself. So thank you very much. All right. Thanks. We'll talk soon. This was the Home Service Expert podcast. Now listen up. Do you want to dominate your market, triple the profit you make without working those

long 12-hour days, seven days a week? If the answer is yes, my team and I are opening up some new time slots to help you solve your biggest business challenge. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book a free 30-minute call with our team today. I will repeat that, homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book your free call today.