The Home Service Expert Podcast - An Inside Look Into A1 Garage Doors’ Strategies for Cultivating Top-tier Technicians

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Alisa Imperial is a Project Manager at A1 Garage Door Services, where she leads a team dedicated to providing leadership and support to industry leaders in home services. Prior to joining the company, she spent over ten years at Spectra, where she worked as a Regional Human Resource Operations Manager during her final year. In this episode, we talked about technician training, customer service, ride-along forms, employee engagement…

Well, you know, here's the trick to it, Tommy. People want to work for good people. They want to work for people that are like them. And when you treat your team like your family, like we do, people don't want to leave. And it's just finding those common like people. I always love the quote that people don't quit organizations. They quit people and they quit their leader. And, you know, when you treat people in a way that you invest in them, it's kind of

hard not to have good people. So when you find those people and you look them in their face that you invest in them, it's kind of hard not to have good people. So when you find those people and you look them in their face and you say, you know what, we're going to do this together and I'm going to believe in you and I'm going to reach you on, I'm going to give you every resource and you can do this. That's powerful stuff.

I've got guys in class that say, well, why do people leave? And I said, well, because it's hard, but we'll be here. 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.

Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take N-O-T-E-S to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevate and win.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. All right, guys, a quick disclaimer before we get into this episode. I've recorded this interview in 2022 and never released it anywhere before. The guest is one of my top performers. And our goal with this conversation is to give

you a glance at how we operate at A1. Just so you know, some of the numbers that we talk about might be a little bit outdated, but the insights you'll gain in this episode are what truly matters. So let's jump into it. Today, I have a very, very special guest to me. She's got my heart and soul. She's an amazing person, amazing mom, amazing coach. Her name is Elisa Imperial. We're going to be talking about your training, your recruiting, and how to become the best version of yourself and a role model for all your employees. Can't wait to have Alisa on. Make sure you join this podcast. This is Alisa, not to be mistaken for Alyssa. Correct.

Which was the next girlfriend, which is crazy. Hopefully, Brie doesn't watch this. But anyways, I don't want to just... So this is... What day is today? Today's Saturday. February. 19th, sir. 19th. 20... 22. 2022. So this podcast is going to be all about kind of the inner circle here. It's really what's happening here to create a billion dollar company 100 million was my dream and if we went to an old old house like three hours ago and you got in the shower and just turned it all the way hot and fogged it up i can almost guarantee you that a mirror uh-huh right at the top of it still has 100 million like the the what would you call it yeah like the old marker on it.

But for some reason we always want more. I don't know. But this is going to be awesome. It's the first time we're doing this. It's really, I get so many questions. I've got just on the way here, I had 10 people asking me questions. One of them was about HubSpot and the buyer's guide. It's a culmination of experience, reading a lot, and just going to visit a lot of smart people.

Yeah. So let's just get this ball going here. You came into our life about a year ago. About a year ago. Yep. Started in January. Tell us a little bit about what you did a little pre-A1. Well, pre-A1, I worked for 24-hour intense food and beverage and hospitality organizations and tribal gaming.

So nonstop, super competitive, big teams, big goals, just lots of dreams. Yeah, we got an interview. I'll tell a quick story. Adam said I got the person. Adam was like, I've got the trainer this gal was amazing and uh brian goes no no no no no brian davenport goes i've got the perfect trainer and so i happen to be in vegas at the time in the middle of purchasing a small mom and pop garage company and um i think i talked to the first one.

Maybe we talked to you first. I don't know. But Adam goes, oh, my God, she's better than mine. And I remember you saying, listen, night or day, weekend or anything, I'll be here. I don't sleep at night till things get done. Absolutely. It's a lifestyle, man. It's like your perseverance. It's coming from that. Listen, when I go to a casino, it seems like everything's got to be right. You got a pit boss, you got the food, you've got just so many things going on. What I love about a casino is there's so many checks and balances. Absolutely. You want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. I mean, it's like a giant organism. Everything lives and breathes and everybody's going the same direction, but they're going 100 miles an hour. So without orchestration and everybody being hungry, nobody gets to win. So it's a pass or fail, win or lose. And like I said, it's a lifestyle. We don't, you're either all in

or you're all out in the casino world. Well, that's interesting because I always tell people, they're like, what is the one attribute you'd have to say that you look for in a technician? And by the way, Elisa is the head of all of training for our complete training program, came in and just owned it. And we've got a lot of stories to discuss on that. But I say the number one attribute is being competitive. It's wanting to win.

Aspire to be number one is our core value. It's our second core value, but I think that's the main one. Aspire to be number one is our core value. It's our second core value, but I think that's the main one. What do you look for? We see the guys that need to win. We see them if they're not number one. They're almost angry, but you see them kind of angry at themselves. And then you see other people. You've probably sat home out of our training class. So they got to work. So the way our training works, you want to describe the four weeks, the four weeks? Yeah. I mean, they have to work four weeks hard in their market to really build reputations and their brotherhood, but they have to graduate out of that in market

apprenticeship. And once they get here to Phoenix, they're in finishing school. They come to work with the biggest, baddest ass technicians in the industry and they can't keep up. They're not made of the same cloth. They just don't make it. I mean, Tommy, really a technician has to be better than they're yesterday. They can never be as good as they were yesterday. And truly that's our culture. So I think that's what makes me be here day in, day out and get excited. So there's, you sent home how many so far this last class? We sent four home in this last class. Four out of 17. Yeah. Well,

this is actually the first class that they tapped out because they knew that they weren't good enough, which is, they see the expectation and the rocket ship and they knew

that they couldn't ride the rocket ship. So they're kind of just self. Yeah, they're self tapping out. Self tapping out. Okay. So now

you manage about six other trainers. Correct. We've got a team of six, yeah. And so seven total. Seven total, yes. And part of the plan was to really, they should never walk in here surprised on who they're meeting. They should be contacting. There's the four weeks in market.

We call that our apprenticeship. And I'll give Al Levy a lot of credit because he's always talked about an apprenticeship. Hire for attitude. Train the systems, the checklists, and really train the skill. Yep. Will and skill. We're very fortunate because garage doors aren't like plumbing. You don't need a five-year journeyman or whatever they call it.

Correct, yeah. So, but it's also not window washing, which takes a few weeks. So, there's like a, it's a hybrid in between. What is it that, in those four weeks, we've got our, let's just start from the beginning. So, we find the person, maybe on Indeed, maybe it's a referral. Yep. And then we've got what we call a ride-along form. Correct.

Tell me a little bit about our ride-along form. And I'm giving all of our... Guys, if you don't understand this for some reason, either I'm the dumbest guy in the world or maybe one smart gene because I give all of our stuff away. So you should be tuning in if you want to know how we're going to do $150 million this year and how we're going to get to a billion because these little secrets that I give out, I remember the first time I did this, Adam goes, what in the hell are you doing? Yeah. And I said, listen, you know, we built a really amazing, the people look at us differently

now, not to mention there's probably 20 jobs a day of the listeners that are using it just to experience what we do. I'm hoping we did a five-star. So tell me a little bit about the Ride Along Forum. So the Ride Along Forum is really focused on making sure that the candidate or the apprentice has the aptitude. They're engaged with what we're doing. They have the spirit of A1 from day one. For us, A1 from day one is that heart and soul of really being competitive and driving. And so in that four weeks apprenticeship, we're really looking to see if they have those skills and they're showing us that they're hungry and they want to be a part of the group. You know, the technician is filling out that ride along form and that ride along, the apprentice is really telling us if they really feel like they're

A1 from day one. Well, it's also a good idea for them to kind of understand what the position looks like from their point of view. Oh my gosh, I didn't know this was going to be so salesy, maybe. And one of the mistakes I made, and you might remember this, is I'd always say, listen, if you can't cut it as a technician, you could always be an installer. And what did that make installers feel like? It said they were second rate, and they're not second rate. They're kind of the machine of the organization.

Installers are top-notch. They're very – I'd say they're more of a skilled trade than a technician. They've really got to know how to do work with their hands even to the next level. Yep, meticulous, consistent, really executing at a level that's – no matter what house they go to, they get the same level of service and their door looks amazing when it's done. Talk to me a little bit about the perfect tech versus the perfect installer. When you meet them, how do you know you say you should be a tech, you should be an installer? What's the difference? You know, a technician really is going to be that person that wants to provide service. They want to make those exceptional moments with our clients and really build that book of the neighborhood garage door expert, where our installer is super hyper-focused on those details.

And they want to make sure it's 1,000% right, and they're looking at that process and organization. So they're usually two separate guys. They have similar skill, but you can see that sparkle in the eye of the technician. It's like, man, I can't wait to meet my next client. I can't wait to pet the dog. I can't wait. And they're telling stories, man. I love our break room is so fun because they come back, they're all on fire between jobs. I met the coolest person and they showed me their hot rod or they showed me their dune buggy that they're rolling with it. That's the stuff that makes me excited. I got to tell you, you can tell the difference. You know, what's interesting is we decided to kind of force our installers to sell. And we decided to take a second crack at it. And it's amazing when you see some of our best installers. We've got several

installers, but we've got some guys that just go out there and they'll sell an extra, and it's not the same, but they'll sell an extra 5,000 a week, five grand worth of stuff. Maybe it's an upgrade to an opener. Maybe it's a second strut. Do you think it was a good idea to have those guys selling? You know, I think they're selling it to a place where the client is so incredibly happy that they're looking for anything that got missed. So whether it's a better ORB, whether it's an upgraded operator, whether it's a membership, Tommy, if they can get us to really make sure that they're protecting that investment, I think our installers do an excellent job of really just finishing that service.

And just anything, any low-hanging fruit that got left, they make sure they get it. That's interesting you brought that up. So we're talking a little bit about sales, and sales is a bad word for most. Educating. People really, they say, listen, I'm not going to, I don't like to pay commissions. I'm not a sales company. I don't believe in that crap. You sell people they don't need. You know, I've got my own perspective on this and I don't think anybody really needs a garage or an air conditioning unit. I think I need food, water. I might need a little bit of sleep and oxygen. I mean, those are like the four essentials, you know, we don't need, no one needs

a nest on their wall. That's connected to their phone. Correct. No one needs a house over really 800 square feet. I mean, I love it. People didn't need that. I've always said, what does the customer want? Well, let's not buy out of our own pockets. Why don't we give choices and give them the options to decide if they want a really nice opener that they control from their phone that closes itself?

But what is your perspective when someone says, oh, I'm not a salesman? I don't, oh. Well, you know, first of all, we aren't really salesmen, but what we are is we're service providers. So we sell a service that's undeniably better than anybody else's. Through whatever our products are, we have exceptional products. You're not going to get the same service. When that technician leaves, they're going to know their name. They're going to be connected. And when they spend that extra $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 on their door, they're happy. They want to give you their money because they made a new friend.

And so if you look at it from sales and an aha moment, and I'm going to get them, you're doing it wrong. So we really just try to leave those exceptional moments with our clients, Tommy. I love that. You know, we had Joe Cassara come out for a brief moment. And I'll tell you this. I love Joe. I think Joe's an amazing guy. But I think it was just great to hear some of the stuff we say backed up from a guy that

says, I call those magic moments. We call them special moments. You know, everything he said almost fit into the box. He said, give more choices. He backed it up with some relevant statistics and some case studies, but it was really cool. Just Darius. Yeah. I love Darius. So good. Darius. So Darius, he's at the letter event and there's this casino called Talking Stick and he didn't say casino. And he goes, yeah, I was at Talking Stick last night. And yes,

I got peddled on my booty all night. They took all my money. But it was kind of funny. That was a great story. You've got a lot of choices, obviously. You could have gone, right now, stuff's kind of coming out of the thing. And you work 24-7. I mean, you really, you were forced to work 24-7. You still like to work 24-7. I love it. You have a lot of choices, though. Why A1? You know, A1 for me is a family. I believe in what we're doing to a place where I talk about it all the time. Shoot, I've got a seven-year-old son, and he looks at me, and I think I've been here maybe two weeks, and he's got his arms crossed, and he says, Mommy, I want to be this guy when I grow up. And he's got, if

you look at any of our vans, there's this great picture of a Tommy on a cartoon character, but it's our spirit. I got to tell you, it's everything we believe in and that we don't do anything just to do it. We do it because we do it with purpose. And I want to do something I can be proud of. And I love being here. So that's a, it's important to me. And I love that. Thank you for being here. You're a very special person for us. You know, we're building a new training center and you know, my goal is a hundred technicians per month. Yes. Which probably means 130, 140 that make it through their apprenticeship. Correct. As we get better and we come out of this, it's a different work environment. You know, you ever heard of a buyer's market versus a seller's market for housing? Absolutely.

When you've got a seller's market, that means I can put it on for 10 grand more than it's worth and I'll get 50 offers. Correct. I feel like it's a seller's market for employees. Totally. Because they get to pick and choose. They say, do you have this, this, this, and this? And it's forcing shitty companies to become better. Absolutely. And it's really

magnifying the good companies out there and saying, hey. Well, you know, here's the trick to it, Tommy. People want to work for good people. They want to work for people that are like them. And when you treat your team like your family, like we do, people don't want to leave. And it's just finding those common like people. I always love the quote, people don't want to leave. And it's just finding those common like people. I always love the quote that people don't quit organizations. They quit people and they quit their leader. And when you treat people in a way that you invest in them, it's kind of hard not to have good people. So when you find those people and you look them in their face and you say, you know what, we're going to do this together. And I'm going to believe in you. And I'm going

to reach you on. I'm going to give you every resource. And you can do this. That's powerful stuff. I've got guys in class that say, well, why do people leave? And I said, well, because it's hard. But we'll be here. Well, it is. And it is.

And sometimes you feel left on an island. The deal is, I don't have kids. But I'll tell you this. I have a nephew that feels a little bit left out sometimes. But I'll tell you this. My sister goes, I had no idea. I had no idea he felt this way. And the thing is, is sometimes we don't talk.

Sometimes as a leader, we got to be able to pry because our employees, which basically I have to say, sometimes we're moms and dads and we need to basically pry things out of people. And when they talk, I remember who said they were just last week, somebody said they were about to quit. And Brian and Tim talked to the guy that said, dude, you're killing it. Like, let's just talk about this. Let's figure out a way. Correct.

And he came back and even he doubled what he was already doing. But he was already like in the 70th percentile of the company. Yeah. I just said, guys, I'm letting you down. And he said, I got to put in my two weeks. And we had no idea. Correct. I mean, how does that happen?

I'm just curious from your perspective. You know, we're running 100 miles an hour, you know, sometimes a thousand, and we're on a rocket most of the time. It's making those moments. It's qualifying time, doing the one-on-ones, and connecting with them. And you know what? Good morning, and looking at somebody in their face and using their name, Tommy. It goes 100 miles and asking people about their life because it's one thing to know about the job. It's a whole other thing to say, how are you doing? And actually genuinely listen.

A lot of people ask you how you're doing, Tommy, and they don't even stop to hear your answer. And that's not good leadership. So, you know, stopping and hearing those answers. And I think I think we do that well. And making those moments is huge. You know, I had Julian and you met Julian. Yeah. Super sharp guy. Love him. He's the CEO of a company called Nextar Network. And they got about 800, 850, 900 HX plumbing electrical companies. And he sat down at my desk and he said, you've got one huge problem.

He said, if anybody could do it, I think you've got the team to do it. He said, I see one big, huge flaw that every company faces is the ability to build leaders. And he goes, you're going to have to look from without side of the home service. Hence, Elisa right here. But you said use their name. And I've got this necklace, this big old necklace I'm buying. I'm going to put use my name 15 times for the clients. But yet we have these internal customers. Absolutely. And I got to tell you this. I told Jim this morning that I really need to see pictures along. Service time doesn't allow us to see a

nice big picture. I need to see every employee's face. Absolutely. And I want to be, we're creating a system and I'm on my fourth system of how to be able to reach out and send a nice video. You know, I told everybody my job now is to be a cheerleader. It's to literally reach out and say, how are you doing? And that's where I want my time going. So I wrote something down on my whiteboard and I didn't, I told a few people this, but I want to tell you, I came home exhausted the other night. It was, it was past 10 o'clock and I got Jim in town. We're trying to get a lot of stuff done. And I wrote down on the whiteboard. I said, if you're going to grow at a hundred percent a year and be able to step out, sometimes you need a new design, design the life that you want.

For a minute, myself, I wrote this. You're going to need more grace, more happiness, more enjoyment, and you're going to have to slow down. And I said, you need to hire the right people, motivate them, show them appreciation. And then I just circled. What is that that I circled there on the bottom? Watch. Just watch. Watch them do what they do best. I think that's the hardest part for me is, is, is really stepping away. I get people that walk through the company all the time, like new employees and they go, you know, my company timing that I came from was another

garage company. We did 4 million and I never seen the owner maybe once every two months. You're going to see me here nights and weekends as well. I mean, I love what I do. I just love, I love what we're doing right now. If this is work, sign me up. Yeah, I love it. So you, what was the biggest challenge for you at A1 when you first started and going through this first year? I mean, it's constantly evolving and changing. You know, I think the first thing that was probably the most difficult is getting through that barrier of the old ways and the mentality of how we train a garage door guy. So I had to get in. I had to be an expert. I had to learn the trade. I had to be able to put my money where my mouth was, right? They let a girl in the garage, which was a little traumatic for some of the gentlemen. And I had to build trust and honor the garage doorway.

But still, you know, through that trust, I was able to show them change and ways that were efficient. And, you know, it wasn't an easy thing, I got to tell you. But now we're flourishing. We got through that wall and we're on full sprint. So it probably took you, I'd say, three to six months to just learn. But it wasn't as much learning the garage doors or even the new people. It was coming into the culture. And then what happened is she replaced, you know, tell me a little bit about, we don't

need to use names, obviously, but a couple of people had to fall off and a couple of people, you know, they got in the way in a lot of ways. And maybe they didn't respect, you felt, and I felt that looking back hindsight, they maybe didn't respect me or the company. You know, I think a lot of people get really nervous with change, Tommy. And unfortunately, they were experts at what they did in the garage door, but they didn't want to effectively accept the change and what we needed to do to build the new machine. And so when you make change, people start to make bad decisions sometimes that way. And, you know, we gave lots of opportunities

because we want everybody to be here if they want to be here and do the right things for the group. But ultimately we had to separate directions because we grew out of them. You know, we grew past their abilities to support the company in a way that was exceptional. I mean, good's one

thing, but we want to be exceptional, Tommy. So you got to be able to, listen, I'm a different person. Actually, I talked to one of the market leads in Texas this week and he's seen me from the beginning and he said, you're a better person. You're the best version of you and you're better than you were when you got here. And he goes, you're A1 from day one. He goes, and everybody has that chance when they get here. And I said, that's the best compliment I've got all week because, you know, that's the truth. Was it the Denver Elite Tech? No, it was Mr. Colbert. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. And that's a big deal from our Texas friends. So it's interesting. I was talking to Bree last night, and right now we have apartments in different areas, and we happen to fall short of room this time.

We did. And Elisa somehow—Bree was like, we're driving into the apartments, and she said, well, Elisa's going to let somebody stay at her house. I'm like, why? And she's like, it's just a retrain. Well, that's what you said. Tell me the predicament of what the thought was behind that. Well, the great news is, is we had more guys that are ready to come to Phoenix, Tommy, coming in March.

And we make these promises to our existing guys to be able to come back and do refreshers. And I know these guys. These are guys that I would wake up in the night and go help them if they needed it. And so when we came short, I just said, hey, I got an extra room. One of our guys from Tucson wants to, or excuse me, Albuquerque wants to come up. And I said, he can stay in my room. I don't care. We need a place. He needs refreshers. So let's do this. So. Well, that's crazy. How many people do you, how many trainers are going to let some random dude, well, you know him, but still that's, that's above and beyond what any expectation would be. And I think if you guys have a trainer, this might be a little glimpse of maybe something

you should show them. I don't think everybody needs to let people into their home, but that's how tight things have been and how good they're getting here. What's the most important thing you're currently working on? I've got some notes here. I mean, we've got market expansion training programs, traveling teams, retention starting to become one of our focal points because you can't have five coming in and four going out.

Absolutely. You know, some of the biggest things we're working on is definitely the new training center, Tommy. We're working on a state-of-the-art, you know, to house this hundred plus technicians that are going to come through each month and teach them in a way that they can get their hands on more real life. I mean, they're going to be so engrossed in garage doors by the time they leave. That's a huge project.

We're also working on betting on our best of the processes we have now. So our in-market apprenticeship, we kicked off. We're doing actual live Zoom weekly meetings with the guys that are in their markets. We're touching all 30 markets every week. We're looking at their face. We know what their dog is. We know what their kids are about. We're really getting them to meet the group before they even get here to Phoenix. And we want them so

excited by the time they get to Phoenix that they're just on fire and ready to rock and roll and do some great role-playing and things. So that's just some of the couple of things we're doing. And there's a lot, there's, there's, that's a few of the, the like 42 things we got going on. So I kind of tasked you with something a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. And listen, at the end of the day, it's, I think the hardest part for someone like you, and quite frankly, a lot of our managers is you feel like I'm going to critique it and make, I need to be perfect. When the fact is that it really doesn't. But some of the little things is I want to know exactly where I'm supposed to park, when I'm supposed to smile, exactly what to say verbatim.

I want to make a decision tree and that if you say yes or no, there's exact words. I want to say when your rollers are not working correctly, I want to say, have you ever gone down the highway with your emergency brake on in your car? What kind of car do you have? And then I want to go through and I want to say, can you imagine pulling that e-brake and just continue to drive a mile? What would happen? That's exactly what's going on with this garage door right now. And being able to repeat after me.

There's a guy named Tom Hopkins. I wrote him down here. He's awesome. And he said, until you could make it exactly like I tell you exactly verbatim, then I don't want you to make it your own ever. Now the own, the part that you make the own is, is when they got a Harley or a dog. I mean, I don't have a certain way to pet the dog. Like, you know, so you make that your own, but, but that's a pretty big task because, you know, I've got even a section in there that I'm putting in there that when you're changing the bearing place, you're down on one knee looking up at the customer and you're giving them kind of, they're the boss.

You're allowing them to be that. So you look a lot more. You're subservient service. Yeah, you're there to provide. So what has that task been like? And I realized you've got a whole team. So you've done a great job of being able to delegate and trust. So, you know, Tommy, we're really building those service guarantees that we're going

to provide for our clients. And we've got everybody on the team involved in that because it's not just one person. You know, we've looked at your presentations. We've looked at our curriculum. We're, I mean, we've been grinding on it for, like you said, a couple of weeks now, and we want to make sure that this is so full of knowledge for our techs that there's no mystery in it, right? They know exactly if you, again, I've been telling them it's like the Plinko version. I put the chip up here and at the end of the day, we all get to the same place and we all hit the right markers all the way down the line. So

it's been actually one of the more fun projects that we've done because we really get to kind of look at all the secret sauce that we put together in every technician and give them a guide. So there's no mystery. They really understand the words they should be using. You know, one thing I love about podcasting is it just, I could talk through things that we don't normally get to talk about for an hour long. And it just gives me like a little bit of just thinking backwards and just going, oh my gosh, like, obviously we've got a plan, but I was just thinking like, why not each, why not build it into a group? There's the discovery period, right? We have a really nice discovery period. Absolutely. And put the exact phrases the body language when we how we touch

like a lot of times if people for me they don't want to shake correct because of like the virus yeah and so how do you deal with that and then i've heard of another guy say never ever ring the doorbell always knock and i don't know the science behind that, but those are the little subtleties, the tiniest things, you know, we assume, and I, I make a mistake. We assume so many things like that's kind of common sense, right? Like you ask a lot of questions. Well, sometimes guys walk in and say, Oh, it's a broken spring. Ah. And, and the one thing that I've always told you that I care the most about is I told you, I had a dream that me and Luke walked into the training center. Can you explain that dream and what you think about it?

So Tommy's dream is for him and Luke to grab each brand new technician, each one a piece, bring them across the garage and have them role play in the identical fashion so that they are dueling in sync. And we're building that direction. And this document is going to help us to really make sure that when we get them to that last week on that eighth week, Tommy, that that's their final test. Oh, I can't wait. So we're going to record them. And I'm hoping we're going to see a lot of the same. They go to the same spot in the garage. They say the same things. Ultimately, I always, you hear me probably talk about McDonald's 10 times a week because I've been to China. I've been to four parts of China. I've been to South America, about eight different parts. I've been to Canada, Mexico.

I've been to Thailand. I've been to a lot of places. And there's one thing that I know about McDonald's is the burger tastes the same. I don't love a Big Mac. I'm not like, oh, my God, I dream of a Big Mac. But I love that I know what McDonald's is the burger tastes the same. I don't love a Big Mac. I'm not like, oh, my God, I dream of a Big Mac. But I love that I know what I'm getting. It's consistent. And I think that's what I want the most is to say it might not be perfect because everybody says we can't launch this yet.

We can't launch this. We can't launch this. We can't launch it. It's not perfect. And there are so many people, and I can name a dozen on our team, that need things to be, it's not ready. It's not ready. It's not ready.

And I'm like, good is good enough. But then we can start to change it. Can you imagine if we had all these little things of, I don't know, just different chemicals to make a soda pop? And we said, everybody make their best version of cola. And it all tastes different. You can never make any changes. Let's decide on one flavor, one taste, and then we can start to adapt it. If I was your consumer, I'd never trust you, Tommy, because I could never guarantee I'd

get the same thing twice. That's it. And you have to be able to get the same thing every time. Because when I tell my neighbor, oh my God, you got to call A1 because they're amazing. And then the neighbor gets a different experience. We have failed them and we're no longer that trusted garage door company. And that's our mission. That's what we want to do. I was at an event that I paid $10,000 for a week and a half ago. And Larry Fitzgerald was there. Larry Fitzgerald is one of the best receivers of all time.

And he goes, I learned a lot from a man named Kurt Warner. Kurt Warner is a quarterback. Yeah. And he goes, when I was running plays, he goes, I was naturally probably one of the most talented football players. He goes, I'm not tooting my own horn, but I'm just naturally athletic and I could get away with some stuff that no one else. I got longer reach. I've got a bigger wingspan. I'm faster. I'm taller. And Kurt Warner came up to him one day and says, dude, I can't pass you anymore. He goes, what do you mean you can't pass to me? He goes, well, I can't trust you. He goes, we obviously have a big trust issue. He goes, what do you mean we have a trust issue?

He goes, well, the pattern says to go eight and a half feet and turn. You're going 11 feet. He goes, I've got to be able to trust my players to run the exact play. I practiced that throw at this exact break. And so Larry said, when I started learning exactly what to do, I mean, when I started to pace myself, I'd run and I counted on my head. He goes, the tactical side of it, I became an MVP. I became one of the best players in football because I became trustworthy and I started to run the exact play. I didn't have to use... So many people are best players. They use their inside knowledge and they say, I've got this because I'm that good. But when they learn the tactics that we teach them and they learn the exact play,

it's amazing. Even our turnover program, which I don't want to dive too deep into because that could be another hour. Once it's done perfectly, they make way more money. Our top guy started to use it. I think he did 30 grand in one day. Yeah. I believe it. Hey,

I hope you're enjoying today's podcast. I just wanted to let you know that the super early bird tickets for the freedom event are now available. This means 800 bucks off the elite or VIP tickets and 20% discount on general admission tickets. Listen, if you enjoyed Freedom 2023, this year we're taking the event to a whole new level. Jocko Willick, the Navy SEAL who wrote the book Extreme Ownership, is already confirmed as one of our keynote speakers, and there's still a lot more to come. So go to freedomevent.com forward slash podcast and get your super early bird tickets now. That's freedomevent.com forward slash podcast. Just make sure you do it before the prices go up on June 3rd. Now let's get back to today's episode. So how do you be the best in this role?

Because people are asking, what do I need in a training director or the top person in my training program? Well, you have to be a student first, Tommy. I never let anything we do. I never assume that what I'm doing right now is good enough, and I'm always learning. I'm out there with Travis Rackley, who's our trading manager, being nerdy about it. And we constantly are hungry to make our better version. And there's not a training class that we've executed that was the same as the month before because it's always better every month. And I never sit on any type of level of complacency. You just can't. I had another guy that one of our many visits, the friends that came up from Florida, and

they said, how did you get up to speed? I said, cause I ask a hundred questions. I never sit still. Was that yesterday? No, it was Keegan's group. Oh, okay. And they came up. So never sit still. Just can't. So give me a really, really cool story about A1 and some of your experience here. Oh goodness. There's so many of them. One of my favorite things is, Tommy, when I get the call, I had a guy come in. He was in from Denver yesterday. He's here visiting family, and he came in through the shop, and he said, you know what? You guys didn't lie to me in that one stitch. I needed everything you told me, and I wrote it all down in my notebook. But you know what? The second I needed help, I had a guy, the other guy that's been selling doors out of

Denver that did 32 grand in like a week. His bestie called him. He said, how are you smashing this? And he said, you can do it because you get the same training. And he goes, show me. So they walked through it, Tommy, their accountability partners. They did it two months ago. And he made the little change.

He's starting to sell doors. And those are the stories where they help themselves. We've taught them how to help themselves that make the hair stand on my arms. It does. It makes me stand too. So first of all, I would say one of the coolest things we do, what's the one fun thing we, we always try to do fun things, but what's the one big thing we do? I believe it's Monday graduation. Was it Monday graduation? I know they're testing on Monday. We do two really cool things. First of all, we welcome them in when they're here in Phoenix.

We cook breakfast and we have a great time doing it. We got two flat top grills out there. We make it a day. We got music going on. We're having a little orange juice and coffee. We got the grill going. The whole neighborhood smells amazing. And they really feel like they're part of the family.

Then when we graduate them, we take them bowling. After we do our graduation ceremony and we cheer them on, we zoom in all the other markets so the whole country is watching them. We let them know how proud of them they are and they give them the certificate. And we tell them the certificate's worth more than anything you're going to get. You could take the certificate and work for anybody in the garage door industry because it says A1 on it. And then we take them bowling. And man, is that a great time too. Bowling is one of the best things ever. They have a lot of fun with the bowling. And you know, here's the thing, we get tickets. Yeah, we do.

And then the guys pay the punching game. We shoot some pool. We pay big buck on it. One of the things that I was recently at that thing that I said last week, and there was a really, really smart guy, Chad Peterman, who's got a really great training center. And he said, one of the things we do when we do their graduation is we let all the family members know the mom and dad, the wife, the husband, whatever it is. We try to get their best friends on. We try to make it, we try to do a Facebook live during the ceremony. Yeah. And we try to get a couple hundred people where there's each guy's got five people. And when they walk up, they talk a little bit about what it was like. And he goes, we probably get an extra 50 applicants just from that.

So on this next one, let's really say, listen, we really want to see. We're going to give $100 gift card to whoever gets the most attendees. That's awesome. And let's make sure they come up and let's make it a little an extra hour. It's just I didn't even talk to's make it a little, an extra hour. Okay. It's just, I didn't even talk to you about this. See, this is the kind of stuff. All day long.

Well, yeah. This is better than whiteboarding sometimes. So I want to do one thing here. We'll call it the audience questions and we'll start plowing through some of these. So this will be our speed round. Cody Johnson, of course, has 18 questions. I'd love to hear about scripts, greeting, finding issues, and price presentation. So just a little bit is just touch upon some of the stuff that we've got lined up and some of the stuff we do out in the garage.

So we do a lot of role play, Tommy. So greetings for us is we take the guy's natural base personality and we teach them how to engage with our clients in a way that they appreciate. That's a big thing. We're reading the room. We're watching through. We do disk profiling. We share with them how to connect with the dog, the kid, the cat, the motorcycle, whatever is going on inside the garage independently. And in a way that's, you know, we got a couple of guys are super quiet. We got guys that are slow and low. And we've got some guys that are great cartoon characters. And so we teach them how to leverage that personality in there. And then the price presentation. I mean, here's the deal. ServiceSite does a lot of the work for us. Correct.

ServiceSite can make it a monthly payment. We can toggle between monthly payment and total. Our promotions, yeah. Through the promotions. You know, Al Levy is just, he's been a big impact on me. And he continues to say, go back to the manual. Because a guy will show up with a huge tattoo on their face. We've let people go for tattoos.

Literally, a guy came up with his whole hands wrapped after he knew. And he signed the handbook in the manual. Guys break down on their trucks. They don't know what to do. And one of the coolest things are when you really learn the manual, you say itbook in the manual. Guys break down on their trucks. They don't know what to do. And one of the coolest things are when you really learn the manual, you say it's in the manual and you got to constantly be updating that.

And it's hard to learn to train out of the manual because the manual could be boring at times. But do you think a manual is important? I feel like it trains you how to play the game. Yeah, it's really just here are the rules of the game. And we train the manual the first day, the last day. It's on their final test. We do a lot of quizzes every day. They've got a quiz of some kind. They've got homework of some kind, because again, we're teaching them how to be students when they're here in our training center. I love this. I love this stuff. I'm actually speaking

at Service Titan. That's going to be fun. Well, yeah, you're coming, right? If you say so. Well, here I am. I've been invited. So I'd like you to be there. It's really about somewhat the training center and kind of my dream of the new training center. And the new training center is just going to be light. You know how much we're investing in that? I do. I do. Yeah, I do.

But what's the key word there? It's an investment. Investment. It's an investment in our future. When a trainee shows an attitude problem, how do you coach them out of it before you tell them it's not going to work out? We sit them down, Tommy.

We want to have an aha moment with them because sometimes the guy doesn't even know that they're presenting an attitude. So we say, hey, do you know this is going on? And we coach them. We ask them why they think they're doing what they're doing and can they make that change. And we've had guys just flip completely out of it and be like, I'm so sorry. I apologize.

I didn't even realize I was doing that. And then we have some guys that that's their natural baseline. And, well, I get them a ticket to go home. You know, it's interesting because there's a guy who runs our Vegas market that was a real bad first experience. And for some reason, you and I both decided to give him a shot because we didn't, he showed up to a kind of dirty apartment. He was waiting at the airport for a couple hours. It was just not, we didn't make him feel special. And that was on us. And that's why, because when I fail at my job, I can't criticize others on theirs. Correct. But what has happened with that guy over the last, at my job, I can't criticize others on theirs.

But what has happened with that guy over the last, he came on, I don't know, I want to say about eight months ago. What are your thoughts? You know, he took ownership of his market and he really spends time with his technicians and installers to get to know them and really make them feel special. I was up there a couple of months ago and, you know, he's cooking breakfast for the guys, doing the same heart and soul stuff. And he really knows them. He's asking about their family and their progress and he listens to them. It's interesting because a guy walks into my office and the guy is from Vegas and he's just a new guy, but he has experience. And he goes, man, I'll do anything for that manager, Travis. Yeah, absolutely. And I said, what do you mean you'll do anything for him?

You've only known him a couple of weeks or a month in the program. And he goes, you don't understand. He goes, I didn't want to tell you the story, Tommy. He goes, but I was really kind of down on my last dollar. He goes, it's embarrassing. He goes, don't judge me because of this. And he goes, I told Travis, just things are going to be tougher as far as groceries go. And Travis pulls out his wallet and takes out $400, hands it to me and says, get me back when you can.

And he looked at me, winked and walked away. And he goes, that there just showed me who he was and just changed the dynamic of everything. And I'll go to war for that guy. And it's just those little things. And it's not always about money. It's the, I think there's a lot to just making people. We've got five waffle machines that I can't wait to use. Oh my gosh.

I'm so excited. It's loyalty, Tommy. At the end of the day, people are loyal because you're loyal to them. Yeah, you're right. You make the investment in them and they become loyal to you as a person. And that's what I said. People don't quit organizations. They quit the people they work with. For the new guys that I find a rude client can ruin their week.

Yeah. And it's true. We try to teach them to get out of their own head. There are going to be those bad moments. There are going to be great moments. I mean, one thing we learned is never start a guy out with a warranty call. Don't get their day started with a crap call. Like, oh man, it just, it deflates them. I swear, there's guys probably wearing lucky underwear, lucky socks. Like, this is how I feel like some of our guys. So how do you coach them to get over it and not take it personal? You know, Joe Crisar, I'll give him the credit. He says, your ego's not your amigo, and you need to release your need to be judged and accepted by others. And truly, that's what we teach them. We teach them that it's not about you in the garage. If you come in there in a position

that you understand that it's not the golden rule, Tommy, we don't treat others in the way we think we need to be treated. It's a platinum rule. I treat the client in the way that they need to be treated. Then I forget that I'm here for myself. I'm only here for the client. I think it's so important that we talk about ways to get the stuff, just ask questions, but I can read a salesperson. Oh, how long have you lived here? Or, oh my gosh. Wow. Did you guys, did this house come with crown molding? Because I haven't seen crown molding since I've been in the Midwest. When'd you guys decide to do this? I love it. It just, it makes me feel like I'm in a colonial home and I just love the old feel. Like I love old house. Actually on my phone, I've got all these old, like, like, and

then I'm, then they're telling me, well, we moved in here. I already know. Cause I checked the silo out. Correct. But there's way to have a conversation without just being, or I'm into it. And I go, you know, listen, we've got a few choices, but what I like to do is hear what's best for you. If you're flipping the house and you're out next week, we've got a different plan for you. And I want to treat you, one of the things I always talked about is, I really do, because I used to get this all the time, is if I was your mom, what would you do?

And so finally I came up with this thought of just treat people like mom. Because typically in most of our lives, our mom and, I mean, we were on an umbilical cord for a long time. So like we get this kinship, this this this a lot of times with our mom, we're the closest to. And there's really not a lot more people unless you lost your mom or unless maybe the bad relationship. But typically, if you treat people like mom, that's the most endearing thing you could do.

Correct. And if my mom needed me to take down the lights on her house, if she needed me to move a briefcase or a big case off or just change a light bulb, I'm doing that for my mom. Correct. And why don't the guys take the time to do those little things? Some guys are just like, no, I'm here. I got to go make my next paycheck. You know, naturally, naturally, we seem to fuse with guys that are good guys and they treat everybody with that same level of respect and endearment. And you're going to see it in the guys. One of the things we do in training is we take them for charity. And it's kind of our last week before we graduate them. I want to see if

their eyes sparkle when we're helping pack food for kids for a third world country, or if they're helping this Christmas, we helped move out and hand out bikes and toys for kids. When you look at a guy and he's so excited on fire by the time we leave that, he's A1 from day one. We did shop with a cop and I had two little girls. They were probably three and four. And I got to tell you, they had a $50 budget. They blew their budget on the first thing they bought. And Bree's like, her shoe's untied.

So I got down on one knee and tied her shoe real tight. And they were just like, oh, my gosh, we don't get things like this. So we went over the budget, covered it. But it was so much fun to watch these little girls and their face light up. Because Christmas is supposed to be the best holiday for a kid it was always mine was that your favorite yeah it's special you know we don't know ourselves when we're kids but we're so excited we couldn't sleep the night before yeah i think it's important that kids get to realize that what's a what's a good mix of a class hands

on video reading where do you feel because you can see these guys' eyes daze over if you're just doing one thing all day. You can't do that, for sure. So we've got a general, we try to make most of our time kinetic learning. So down inside the garage, there's visual learning, audio learning, and kinetic learning. We spend as few of time as possible before lunch, of course, up in the lab. We like to call it the lab because that's when we're putting in work. We're doing our experiments. We're trying to not call it the classroom. And we want to give them that knowledge. Then we want to explain why we're doing what we're doing.

And then we go downstairs and we practice it. And I call it show, tell, do, review. I want to show them how to do it. I want to tell them how to do it. I want to practice it with them and I want to let them break it. So. So they do a lot-along stories the last couple of weeks of training. Yep. Finishing school. Finishing school. So when does a guy, when do you just say, look, you guys, you might not even have a trainer out there, but you do have a set of eyes, second pair of eyes, you pair them up. When do you just like, I feel good about you guys not getting hurt?

You know, we assess that pretty quickly, Tommy. You can see a sloppy guy that cares about what he does very quickly. Usually it's in the first or second week while they're here in Phoenix. If they're not going to wear their gloves and their glasses and they're putzing around and putting tools on the top of their ladder and being careless, they're probably going to be careless with our client and not take good care and pet the dog and look at them in their eyes like their mom. And so it's really easy to tell. They look different than all the other guys. So they're the outlier usually. What do you think is the main deliverable when you're hiring a training

director? I think the main deliverable is somebody that is open to change. Because in an organization that's evolving like we do, they have to be open to be a student, but they also have to be open to the fact that they're not actually the driving force. I actually collaborate. I'm really more a collaborator than I am anything else, Tommy. It's not my ideas. It's 100 people's ideas. And my job is to package them and put them in a way that everybody can hear them. And when I do that best, that's the secret of what I do is I really, I bring people together. I make sure everyone's comfortable and then I packages it and then I can make the engine go. So. Yeah. It's a culmination of everybody's

thoughts. I asked a guy this yesterday, a really, really smart guy that teaches sales and wrote five bestsellers. And he said, the one thing I look for in a salesperson is that they're insatiably inquisitive. And he said, meaning that when I ask a question, you've looked at our website, right? Absolutely. But let's say I was going to hire you. Number one, I'll ask that question because a lot of times they don't. So I'll say, that's what he said. You've looked at our website and sometimes they haven't. But you say, what's one thing you would probably change? And if they did look at it, they'll say, well, I saw that group photo. Yeah. There was only one woman in there. Is there a reason that you did that? Yeah. And if they ask a question to a question, yeah. Sell me a pen. Really? Do you mind if I ask you what you're going to be

using the pen for and how often you're going to be using it now? If they're that's what, you know, one of the things that I love to do is go visit other successful shops. I love to read books that people recommend. I love to go out there and I love to be curious. I'm always curious, always. And I don't care how successful I become, the more curious I get. And I think that's one of the things you should look for in a tech. When I watched Brandon Colby, he's like, he's so obsessed with cars and motorcycles or just bikes and just how machines work and you can see it's like a little kid yeah and he asks questions and he smiles and and and even Robin he's got his little white dog little yeah tease and he talks to the dogs and shows people the dogs and I was working out and he shows people's workouts I think it's important

to have that let's make a couple more here. We'll finish up. So what was the first step in thinking about a training program, building an outline of the necessary skills? You know, the first step is understanding where you want to go, not where you are. I think that a lot of people build their program based on what they're doing today, not where they want to be in the next year, two years, three years, five years. So when we looked at the program a year ago, I was building on literally the first day I met you while I was here. And you're scribbling and writeboarding. And I still have that piece of scribble from the first day where you're telling me about the trail of communication and where we're going and the million-dollar performers.

And that was the vision that I built on, not what we were doing the day I started. I think if you don't have a destination in mind and be able to reverse engineer it, if someone wanted to walk into our training program, they'd go, dude, I don't want to be a billion-dollar company. I just want to have enough to have a fun life and enjoy my kids. I don't have kids right now. You know, if I did, things might be a little bit different, but I'm the kind of guy that would bring them into work all the time

and have them part of this. And I think, what did your dad used to do? My dad was a barber. Both my parents were barbers. I grew up in a barbershop. And where did you hang out all day? Always with my family in the barbershop. I love that story.

And what do you think that taught you? It taught me how to be a family, but it also taught me how to be in business. I remember- You were a hustler. Yeah, heck yeah. I used to shine shoes from the time I was six up until 17. And my dad looked at me and he said, if you want to wash your backside today, you're going to earn a little money. So here's your shine box. The store's over there. You get your brother and go make it happen. And it taught me a lot about how to be a hustler and always reinventing myself. Is there any, I love that story, is there any type of educational things out there or books

or any audibles or anything that you'd recommend off the top of your head? Yeah. Wolfpack by Abby Womack. She's a World Cup soccer player. And she talks a lot about being on a team and how to lead from the bench. And you don't have to be the VP of the company to be a leader. And she's got some amazing information in there that talks about being the best version of you. And even when you're benched, you're still the leader because you're still supporting the people that are on the field. And she's amazing. I love it. You know, I got to read that. And then I'm going to give you a book later today. It's one that Chad Peterman recommended when he built his training,

and it's called The Ideal Team Player. Perfect. Last thing I always ask on the podcast, and this is the first of its kind, but if you, we talked about so many things today, and we really just wanted to give a broad overview of what it's like to be an amazing trainer and have a training facility. Maybe we left some things out. Maybe there's some thought, maybe there's some message that everybody should be hearing

right now as they're thinking about getting going. For me, I just knew I couldn't find experienced guys. Every time I brought in an experienced guy, he was a prima donna. There was a reason he wasn't working in his last company. Our top 25 guys, you couldn't pay them enough to leave here because they know it's a facade. They know it's short-lived. They know that it won't last. The Victor Raincourse said when he switched to a smaller company, got paid double. He goes, he hated it. There was no structure. There was no checklist. There was no excitement. There was, it didn't matter to be at the top

because there was only six guys. And so that's something that we didn't talk about. But what's something that you think is really, really important to leave the audience with as a final thought? I would tell you, if you want to make change, just start somewhere. I think people get overwhelmed that they have all these dreams and goals and they don't know where to start. Just start. Just put it down, write it down, start somewhere. You just have to make action. I think a lot of people spin out on the idea that they want to do all these great things, but they don't make time for them and they don't just start. So just start somewhere and make some change. Action is what produces more actions.

Perfection is the enemy of beginning or something like that. There's something that just says, it's not good, it's just says, it's not good. It's not good. It's not good. Can you imagine if you waited for the perfect time to have a kid? I'll tell you what, I don't have any kids yet, but there will never be a time in my life that's perfect. So just start. I love that.

Start today. Kick off a program. The first program I had, my guys smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. The guys were like, who is this guy? But at least I had a training program. I was light years ahead of everybody else. And I'll look at it. Thank you for coming on today. That was amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming in on a Saturday. Thanks, guys.

Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service.

So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening. And we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.