The Home Service Expert Podcast - Applying a Holistic Approach to Contracting to Easily Double Your Revenue

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Jim Johnson is the Head Coach of ContractorCoachPRO, a full service coaching company for home service contractors. He has worked closely with over 1,500 contractors and coached 300+ more, and has seen just about every way of succeeding or failing as a contractor, from contractors doing less than $1 million in revenues to companies making over $100 million. In this episode, we talked about contracting, leadership development, business consulting, team building...

most people come to us to grow their business and say, Hey, I want to grow my business. Can you teach me how to hire great people? I'm like, sounds fantastic. How are you going to train them? What's your training program look like? And if you're going to train all those people, how are you going to produce it? How are you going to deliver an experience that is exceptional? And if you're going to produce it, well, how are you going to sell it? What is it going to look like? How are you going to create value that nobody else has and be unique? And if you've got these great salespeople, how are you going to get it? What is it going to look like? How are you going to create value that nobody else has and be unique? And if you've got these great salespeople, how are you going to get them leads? So they all work backwards from this idea of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding.

But if we don't have good leadership and good skilled leadership that understands how to create capacity, manage their time, all the rest of it doesn't happen. It just doesn't work very well. So my advice, if anybody is willing to listen to it a little bit, is to spend some time on that foundational stuff. It's the dirty work. It's the dirty work that makes a clean life. Most people don't spend time there, so they're in a very reactive mode. They're always putting out fires instead of having the systems and processes to not ever let a fire start in the first place. 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. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. Today, we have a guest visiting us from Texas. Jim Johnson is an expert in contracting, leadership development, business consulting, team building. He's based in in new bronfels i don't know if i said that right you're close you're close how do you say it new bronfels the bronfels and what's the weather like yesterday it was 81 degrees today it's doing its add thing and it's 56 or something outside so hey that's not bad man i'm in phoenix and it's 56 or something outside. Hey, that's not bad, man. I'm in Phoenix and the weather's good here.

So you were a contractor coach pro. You're the head coach from 2013 to now. The CatalystGroup.co, vice president, board, still now. Acculinks.com, director of sales in 2013. Founder of the Silver Lining, 2006 to 2009. An American contracting team president from 2004 to 2008. Jim Johnson is the head coach of Contracting Coach Pro, a full-service coaching company for home service contractors.

He's worked closely with over 1,500 contractors and coached 300 or more companies. As the head of Contractor Coach Pro, he's seen just about every way of succeeding or failing as a contractor, from contractors less than a million in revenues to doing over 100 million. Jim, it's first of all, a pleasure for you to come on the show. Yeah, it's an honor, honor. I've actually listened to your show before. So yeah, it's cool to be here. Well, you got a lot of experience. know i get a lot of best-selling authors i have michael gerber on here and really cool people but you've got the the experience with

working with a lot of these guys and gals out there talk to me a little bit about how you got started in the contracting business and what's happened the last you know 20 years and what are you passionate about when it comes to home service? So, yeah, it's kind of a long story, the whole background. So I'll kind of shorten it up a little bit. I've been entrepreneurial ever since I was young. I had a neighbor across the street recognize that. Helped me kind of start up a lawn mowing business that actually became a real business there while I was a teenager.

I went off to college, thought I was going to be a baseball player, got hurt, and didn't have many options, to be honest with you. And so I went to a health club and I said, hey, I don't know anything about what you do at your health club, but I do know how to work out. Can I help other people work out and get paid to do it? And they said yes. And I came in, worked there for about three weeks. I got the opportunity to do a demo for somebody, somebody coming in to buy a membership and went through the whole process, sold them. And the manager came running up to me like, what are you doing? Why are you letting those people go? I said, hey, they're members. Here you go. It's all yours. He's like, holy crap. You sold them the gold membership. I was like, yeah, so? He goes, yeah, but you sold it at full price. I went, aren't we supposed to? He goes, we've never sold one at full price. We're always supposed to cut the price in half. Nobody had super thankful for that experience because I got a ton of training, every kind of

sales training you can possibly imagine I've been to and taken those and built on them, tried to innovate on some of those. And then I got into the contracting world and started out as like a carpenter, working on houses, building houses. I really started to get into niche stuff. And that was the big thing for me. That was a big eye-opener is if I could be really great at one or two things, I could set myself apart from everybody else. And so I got into the roofing game and that actually went really, really well. I worked for somebody for the first couple of years until they stiffed me on some commission. And I went out and started my own company. And I went from zero to

$5 million the first year, $20 million the second year. I'm pretty consistent doing $20, $25 million for quite a few years. And then we went into commercial and started doing that and grew that business. And while I was doing all that, I was building a piece of software for my salespeople to make their lives easier because that's really what I'm passionate about. I was looking at a process and saying, how do you make that thing easier and more effective so that you can do more and less time, thus be more profitable? And so it's just one of those weird things about how my mind works. So I built this piece of software, made our selling process faster, gave them the ability to estimate, order, put together proposals and things like that really fast. Like I could do one in five minutes versus an hour that it would take some of the other companies at that time.

I started selling that software. It went really well. And a company called Acculinks.com saw it and said, hey, we want to buy you. And we want you to come in and help us design and sell our software. So I agreed, did that for about five years. And that's where I got this unique experience that gave me this ability to do some coaching. I had to go into the back office of a thousand different roofing and siding and painting companies and see how they operate. And it'd take about an hour to sell them AccuLinks that wasn't all that hard to do as new technology and putting things on the cloud and communicating better. Project management stuff, CRM.

But I would sit there for two or three more hours answering all kinds of questions. How do I hire better people? And how do I pay my people? And how'd you have so many locations and all those sales guys and those kinds of things? And I went, you know, somebody should probably help these folks out. And so I resigned, stepped away in 2013. And really the game plan, I kind of retired. The game plan was to coach a couple of companies in the morning and then go fishing and golfing

in the afternoon. But this has actually turned into a real business now. We have seven coaches that work for us, experts in all of their areas. And we really take a holistic approach to the business. What we found is that contractors tend to be a little bit of shotgun approach to things. They go to events, they watch a podcast, they hear something, and they're like, that thing's cool. I'm going to go do that. And what the epiphany for us was in all this coaching is we figured something out. There's actually an order to things. There's a literal blueprint to go, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. If I do these things in order, we'll be successful. So we've been coaching according to what we call the contractor's blueprint for the last eight years to some pretty tremendous success it's been really good helping guys go from

a million to 30 40 50 million it's pretty cool to see plus all the life part of it too that's the part i really probably enjoy the most yeah yeah see them live a little bit give them give them their time back i had a guy in here yesterday, two days ago, from Wisconsin. Amazing dude. Cares about his workers. It was interesting because he said to me, I said, what's an average ticket for you? He goes, yeah, we're not really into sales. And I said, huh, okay. So what are we talking here? He goes, two, three hundred bucks and my guys can run 10 jobs a day no problem though okay but you said you're slow because yeah we don't have enough jobs for the guys he goes we don't get enough residential jobs i said well let's say you're really spending a lot of money on marketing let's just say 10 if i'm going to take 10 of my revenue and put it in marketing that's 20 to 30 bucks that i could spend over $200 to $300. Who can you pay for $20 to $30 to get amazing garage door jobs?

Because you can't pay Google. I know that. Oh, yeah. You can't pay Facebook or it's going to be really high in the funnel and you're going to have a hard time. You might be able to do like a deal of the day or something, but you can't pay Yelp. You can't pay HomeAdvisor. Home home advisor home advisor gonna sell to five people you might get one out of five of them but anyway it was really interesting because he goes tommy i just get so caught up in the business i work so hard in the business and i said you told me you did six percent last year told me you paid yourself

60 grand six percent of three million,000 plus 60 grand is 240. Basically said you make about 110 an hour if you work a 40 hour work week. What are you doing if you make 110 bucks an hour that someone else can't be doing? You shouldn't be mowing your own lawn unless you absolutely love mowing your lawn. You shouldn't be cooking.

You shouldn't be cleaning your home unless you absolutely love it. You want to help your wife and your wife helps you and and the kids look up to dad cutting the lawn that's fine but other than that that's what i it's hyper focused we actually have an equation for that we call it the impact equation impact yeah so uh if you take your ability or skill and multiply it by your capacity, that will equal the amount of impact that you have. And so capacity is the amount of time you have to devote to doing whatever it is that you're doing. And we see this a lot with contractors where they're more working in the business than on it. They created a job for themselves than a business or a revenue stream.

And so they get so tied up in the day-to-day and everything that they don't take into consideration that, you know, I could pay somebody to do my paperwork for me and let me go do what I do great, which is to sell. And that would generate more revenue and allow me to have further impact by being able to hire more people, do more jobs. And so your ability, you look at that on like a scale of one to 10, think of that as your skill as a leader, and then your capacity on a scale of one to 10. Let's say you're a three on ability and a two on capacity, your impact is going to be impact to the exponent of five. So a little bit, but not a whole lot. But if you're a 10 and a 10,

your impact is going to be to the exponent of 10. So not 10 times, but exponent 10. So you're going to impact a ton of people. You're going to impact employees. You're going to impact customers. You're going to impact your community. Shoot, who knows? You might impact the whole entire world

if you do things right. I actually have brought on people that do things I do great because I don't have time for those things anymore. And I did that in my contracting business. I did it in the health club world before that, software business, and now here in the coaching thing. And it's really kind of like the secret to being able to grow and expand your business, scale it beyond maybe what you think it could be. You know, there's two things that I tell every owner that they need to focus on no matter what. They need to know their financials. They need to have key performance indicators and need to be able to trust them.

They need to be able to read a balance sheet and an income statement, understand what's in the account. Number two, they got to understand marketing. Because I feel like if you look at the dentist that's not making any money, it's because he's not a good marketer. The dentist, I was pre-dental. I went to the dentist's office and he goes, get a business degree, dude. Before you even think about going into dental, get a business degree

because you got to learn how to run a business. And, you know, we're going to talk a little bit about the e-myth. These entrepreneurs get stuck in the technician role for years and they're underfunded when they go in. And the only way to make the money is by sweat equity. And that's why they got to put in more hours and more time than anybody. You know, I was talking to a guy earlier on a podcast that I was on and he says, when should a company bring on a recruiter? I said, right away. I said, if you could do one in house, great. But if not, I get it because 1A equals 3B. And if you're like me for the first 10 years, if you could pass a fog test, you could

get hired. You were hired because you were desperate. And you get that 1A player, then another one comes up. But A players don't exist unless you give them a manual. Teach them how to play the game because it's your business. You got to teach them how to play the game. How do they win? How do they lose? And this is the kind of stuff that I live and die for. So I wanted, by the way, when I retire, people are like, what? And I'll never retire. But they say, what do you want to do? I said, golf and fish. So perfect. We should look up sometime. I'd love to, man. So roofing, $20 million business. You know,'d love to man so roofing 20 million dollar business you know we talk a lot about roofing i love roofing it's one of those industries where most businesses i know the 1099 the install they run a company does all the quotes they do all the

marketing and the roofers you know there's a guy here in town svg i'm I'm going to call him Anthony D. Really, really big into software training, storm chasing. I always tell people, if I go back in time, they say, would you change anything? I said, I would do roofing, air conditioning, or windows. Because I had 9,000 customers last month. If I had 9,000 roofing customers,

I'd already be where I want to be. My average ticket just can't be that high. So talk to me a little bit about your roofing business. And why did you decide to get out of that? And did you sell it? What happened with that? So first time around, I did not sell it, unfortunately. I actually had a bookkeeper steal a ton of money from us.

We had a partnership. And you mentioned it, not knowing your financials, right? Like that's such a big thing. And I would agree with you. It's one of the number one reasons that contractors go out of business because they don't know their financials. I would agree with you that they're probably lacking on the ability to market well. The other one would be leadership, just the skill of being a great leader. We've watched it over and over and over again. The reason I picked roofing is because it was a higher ticket item, pretty good profit. And so that was what I was looking at.

And I could look at that in a variety of different trades. It just happened to be that we were doing roofing. We say we're a roofing company, but we weren't really. We were a recruiting and sales organization is what we were. We could recruit and we could teach people how to sell. And we just happened to do roofing. I thought it was a pretty wise choice because it's pretty profitable. We don't have to deal as many people. But that bookkeeper made a mistake, caused a fracture in our partnership. And we kind of all went our separate ways.

Then I went into the commercial thing and that went really, really well as well. And it was even better because less customers, higher margins, not as many jobs to have to do, people to keep happy. And so I was working on that same thought process. Right. So what can I be profitable at and not have to deal with a whole lot of people so I can really create an amazing customer experience? And that can be applied to a lot of different trades. Another trade that I would if I was going to get back into it, man, I would get into fencing. You talk about high profit, not hard to do. You can probably do it right over the Internet.

You wouldn't even have to go to anybody's house. I can do the measurements, everything I need to do right from here. It's a low cost of overhead and a very profitable trade to get into. And there's so many more like that. So that's kind of how the story went. The commercial thing I did sell, I sold it to my partner and stepped away from that and went full bore after the software thing. So it's a very unique combination, and I think it makes entrepreneurs deadly.

They're awesome when they understand software and they understand the home service business. Because I'll tell you what, I got four monitors here. I got my CRM here. I'm stacking a marketing CRM on top of service Titan. And I'm obsessed with data. I measure the facts, you know, and I'm like, look, I think you're doing good. I never say, I think you're doing good. We've got a scorecard and it's, it's, I live, die and breathe by this stuff. And we literally said today in our meeting live, die and breathe by this stuff. And, uh, we literally said today

in our meeting, this is what's crazy to me. And I want to ask you this question. I beat stuff to a pulp. I mean, I repeat myself, repeat myself, repeat myself. And all the managers go, dude, you always say the same stuff. I go, I know. Cause it only takes one time to get in someone's head. And so today I said, you guys have got to call on the field supervisor program, not in front of the customer, not in front of the customer. So what happens? First job today, one of the guys goes and does, I mean, we beat this, we beat this, we beat this. We said, you cannot call in front of the customer. He calls in front of the customer. And I'm like, at what point? It's unbelievable. there was 180 guys on that call so i

could understand that maybe in michigan or wisconsin or you know we're all over the country we got 23 locations in 15 states but at what point did we lose you with don't call in front of the customer and well the one thing that i keep telling myself is you got to have one on we're starting to have my big push for this month i always as a ceo have one big push um last month i worked solely on recruiting the month before that i worked on making sure our vans there's an assembly line for the vans and the trucks to be able to produce 50 a month but my point is i make people sign off on stuff they understand it uh-huh uh-huh and it's like dude everybody's laughing because they're like you talk about it all the time and then you don't do it and it's just interesting for me because we delegate well

i feel like you know a lot of owners say the same thing like we tell them do not use this gas we want to use this gas or they then they go put in the premium instead of regular whatever it might be drives people crazy. What is your solution? So that's a common problem. You hear that all the time. I tell this guy this, I tell it, I've even showed this guy this, right? Right. But really, one of the things that we probably want to look at is, have we explained to him why?

Why are we doing it this way? Do they actually understand the psychology behind it, the reasoning behind it, maybe even what's in it for them if they do it the way we want them to do it. It's important to get that why there, but we have the same thing. We would train people on our sales process and presentation and all the other good stuff. And we'd go out in the field and they weren't doing it. Inspect what you expect, right? Yep. So go out in the field and they weren't doing it. And what we realized is the reason they weren't doing is like they were having success some of the time with their shorter

version of doing it. So they kind of got lazy, but they didn't realize that the reason they do it the right way every single time is because they were missing people. It affects their paycheck. It affects paying their bills. It affects transforming their life and being able to buy a house, go to college, do whatever it is that they were passionate about. And that's usually my focus whenever it comes to my people. I want to really know what it is they're after. Because I hate to break it to all you guys that are contractors. None of them are after you building your business. That doesn't happen. That's not what they're about. They're about growth. They're about finding their own path, getting to where they want to be in life. I've helped so many guys that work for me become my competition because that's what they wanted to do. That's what they were after. I gave them the tools to do it and I was cool with that because they helped me to get to where I wanted to be during that time as well. But that's explaining that why behind why we're doing all this stuff that we're doing. Yeah, it's not because I said so. Yeah, I try to share that stuff and I criticize in private,

really talk about the good things in public. This year has been a crazy year, 2020. The pandemic is just crazy. Private equity is flocking into home service. We are essential. It's a crazy industry. I'm really, really excited about the future. I walk in every Monday morning and I just smile and I'm like, it keeps getting better. It keeps getting better. I'm like, I'm not supposed to have this much fun. But I hate it because a lot of people suffered. There's a lot of stuff that happened that's not good. But a lot of people got out of the movie business. They got out of the hospitality, whether that be hotel or restaurants or bars, a lot of places closed. But tell me a little bit about what you're noticing out there with contractors. And what did

this teach us, if anything, when this whole pandemic started? Prepare for everything. We do a thing every single year. We do the strategy conference. We bring in 50, 100 contractors. We spend three days with them and we build out their whole entire mission and strategy for the coming year. And I'll be honest, we didn't plan for a pandemic. We didn't know that was coming and it really didn't even cross our minds. But we did talk about things that you're probably familiar with a SWOT exercise, right? Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities. Yep, SWOT analysis. Yep. And so you've got these threats that are out there and

we talked about threats, but not necessarily a pandemic, but because we talked about those threats, we were able to put things in place to minimize those particular circumstances. And one of the things that we really talked a lot about was technology. If you look at what's happening around you, I don't know anybody that likes to go into Walmart. I really don't. I don't know a single soul that likes to go into Walmart. They would much rather go to Amazon, buy whatever they want and have it delivered to their door. The last time I checked, I haven't met very many people that enjoy having a home service guy come into their house and try and sell them something. And so if they can find a better option and a better option gets created than what they are

currently having to experience, they'll use it. And what kind of clicked to me when my eyes were open to it was when I saw you could buy a car online. I don't think I would ever buy a car online. I want to go drive it. I want to see it. I want to make sure there's no scratch, especially a used car. Right. But people are doing it every day and there's a business there. So if that's a business and people are moving towards this, hey, let me see the thing. Give me the full gamut of it. Like if you go buy a car on Carvana right now, I mean, it shows every scratch, every

ding, every little thing that's wrong with it. And you know exactly what you're getting when it shows up. And if you don't like it, you can send it back. Well, that's going to be applied into our world. Whether we like it or not, somebody's going to step in there and do that stuff. And so we've got to prepare for it. So we were preparing for those types of things. And because of that, it allowed our contractors to be pretty agile and move towards this ability to virtually sell what they do without having any contact with a homeowner. And we actually had some pretty... Amazingly enough, our contractors

did better last year than they did the year before, which we were pretty worried. Like, hey, we got this whole pandemic thing. It's going to throw a wrench in the works. There was a lot of factors that played into it. Now people are home. They had a little time on their hands. They had projects they were wanting to get done. So let's get them done. That was part of it. But there was a certain segment of contractors that didn't have any technological skill. And because of that, it really hurt them bad. And we actually did a program for that called Contractor Evolve. And we spent 30 days every single day getting them up to speed on on technology and marketing and some things that they weren't doing before

and help those guys make it through so i think what it did this whole pandemic it jumped us forward in time about 10 years and what we're going to do with technology in our industry all in the span of about 50 days. Yeah, no, it happened quick. I mean, there was a couple of weeks there where we were a little bit worried because we didn't know there was going to be tanks in the streets. You know, no one knew.

But I got to tell you, one of the things I'm working on with the technology is, I mean, I've got 20 softwares talking to each other through APIs or webhooks. I mean, it's awesome. The data that we could get, the people moving into new homes, the handwritten letters and a text message and a voicemail drop from Twilio. It's so cool the stuff we could do with a CNC machine.

But I thought to myself, what do we really look for when we are looking for customers? What do we want to know? Well, I want to know the age of the equipment. I want to know what the blemishes are. So I'm thinking to myself, if we are building a scoring system for clients, and no one really knows this, it might sound crazy, but we've already done regression testing. We know how much people make. We know their income. We know their credit scores of our perfect avatar. But what I don't know is what do you have in your home? I could do a Google Street View, which is a beautiful tool. But if I could send them a confirmation of their appointment and say, please take five minutes to

do this quick survey. When was the last time the garage door was looked at? Do you know what's going on with it? Can you take a few pictures for us to make sure we get the right truck with the right equipment, with the right tools, the right person out there to work on it? Because there are some tricky systems and parts of different trucks. For the most part, they're similar. But never in my life did I ever want to sell more new doors than now. Meaning that I think most doors that are 10 years old are a piece of crap. They're falling apart. There's all this money you're going to throw into it. Why not just get the new one?

Like I see guys all the time, they'll do a gear and sprock out on an opener. And I'm like everything else in there, the capacitor, the RPM sensor, the safety, they're all 15 years old. You're delaying the inevitable.

You're basically. Just out of curiosity, do you put garage doors in houston texas um no not right now i got i got a guy for you give you a referral right there i know a guy that needs okay yeah no that's great you'd be surprised just from the podcast and stuff like i said 9 000 customers last month but the deal is i really like what you said earlier, but we're working on the technology piece and really figuring stuff out. But what do you want? As an employee, you got two kids. We want to make sure they got a good school to go to, put some money away for college. You said you wanted to go on a honeymoon. You never

really got the real honeymoon you wanted 15 years ago. Let's talk about that. What do you want for your life? And then you got to figure out a way to marry the two and say, look, what I figured out is you can have a really shitty honeymoon or we can do it really good. And here's what you need to do this month, this week, today to have that honeymoon we talked about. And we do Dave Ramsey, you know, the save a dollar, all that stuff. We're here to give them homeownership. Like, this is what I want for everybody. You know what I mean? I truly, as a leader, want that.

You know, people are like, dude, yeah, you got it lucky. And I'm like, look, the reason I get great employees is because I care. I tell them I love them. You know, this sounds really, really bad, but in some ways they're like my kids. And I don't have any kids yet. So I guess they are my kids. And they looked for me for suggestions and they looked for me for advice and security. And they really look up and say, am I being led with a company? And I think we're changing the industry. I think the one thing I've always looked up to is HVAC. HVAC is by far the most robust industry out there. You're not going to find people getting

two, three, 400 million in any industry other than HVAC. They know the multipliers, they know the platforms, they know how to consolidate. And what I love about HVAC is those are the guys I hang out with. Those are the guys I surround myself with. And it can be done in any industry, except for some reason people say, we can't charge that much. You know, everybody that I know says, oh, my God, he does billboards. He must be overcharging. I do billboards, TV, radio. I'm on the top of PPC. I've got new computers.

I can pay for service. I don't care if you don't like it. We've got a beautiful office. We've got a big buck hunter. We've got golden teeth. Everybody's got a new truck and a new van. What is it that makes people think, Jim, that they're not worth it, that they can't charge enough to make a profit? I pay myself a lot a year. I mean, it's six figures. It's not like

millions or quarter million dollars. I pay myself pretty well, but the company still makes a lot of money. That's important. And we have nice things. We got a coffee machine and a tea machine. What is it about people? Because this is the number one concern i have is they go i'm not allowed to make that kind of money i'm not allowed to have nice things what is it so i have a question for you do you believe that you do a better job than everybody else you know most companies say i do drug tests background checks everything else i truly believe that my parts are trademarked they're better they're powder coated we've got a hundred thousand cycle roller that very few people carry the guys that work for me they start out as an apprentice for a month and they come to phoenix for a month

they stay in our apartments they get to know our leadership we have a meeting i have three meetings every morning 7 30 7 45 and 8 i truly believe that there's no one that even comes close. And this is cocky to say because the systems dictate the output. I've got an eight-step sales process that works every time. The minute the eight-step sales process fails is when they skip a step, like you said. They always skip a step and they think if I just go a little quicker and I'm like, the first thing I told this guy the other day is I said, cut your jobs in half. You guys should be running three or four calls a day. Diagnose the person before

you diagnose the problem and offer everybody. Oh, you know, that gym guy, he's got a nice house. He doesn't need financing. Rich people use financing. Everybody uses financing. Biden's putting $1.9 trillion out there. It's called inflation. If I can use other people's money, they'll do it. But no, yet to answer your question, I truly believe that the customer experience, we text them on the way with a profile picture. We use technology. We've got trucks that don't break down because they're brand new. Yeah, I do think that it's... We've got it. We're going to get it done. You answered your question. That's why you believe that you can charge what you charge. You feel like you provide the value and you're truly worth it.

These guys that feel like they aren't probably is because they're not providing the value they feel they can believe in. And so they haven't designed something. And it doesn't matter really what you do. With your particular company, I'm going to bet in your eight-step process, you've got some pretty cool stuff you do that you are fairly proprietary about that your competition doesn't do. It creates this value in the sale, right? Well, that can be applied to any trade, anywhere, anytime, any place. You see these big window companies, you see these big roofing companies, you see big fencing companies.

I mean, I know a fencing company that's $65 million a year. They just do fencing. That's it. And it's because they know how to sell value. They learn how to sell value, how to be profitable, because nobody buys based on price. I will fight you all day long on that one. People buy based on what's the most I can get for the money that I can afford. You know, I've always said there's 4% of the population that's strictly buy on price.

But, you know, the deal is tonight I'm going to stake 44. Probably going to cost about 500 bucks. There's four of us going. I made a reservation to go spend $500 for dinner. They've got a line coming out of the wazoo. Okay. What I'm saying is a lot of people in their home service company goes, you can't pay that. Let me ask you this. I can go to the

store and buy some cheese, some flour, and a couple of ingredients, some pepperoni, and I can make a pizza for right about 50 cents if I buy it in the right box. Why do we pay $20? Why is it okay? You can't go on Amazon and say, well, the parts don't cost that much. How do you get away with that? And the one thing I'll tell you, Jim, is the't go on Amazon and say, well, the parts don't cost that much. How do you get away with that? And the one thing I'll tell you, Jim, is the reason I get away with it is because my wife doesn't answer all my phone calls. My son doesn't work for me for free. I don't work out of a garage in my house. I have a new system.

Why do you say you can never afford anything to have nice things for your employees? I believe that everybody should have a road to be able to hit six figures. The one thing about us, Jim, like it used to be you got home service guys coming out, the 70s and 80s. If you couldn't make it, you'd go become a home service. Now we are the guys that are willing to work 24-7. We're going to work nights, weekends. We're going to cut our hands.

We're going to be in cold temperatures. They need us. We're essential. There's a lot less of us now than there was then per the population. So the price that we can charge is actually more, you know, supply and demand. And so as long as you position yourself right, you really think about what it is that you're going to do and what you're going to provide, the experience you're going to have, the quality you're going to provide, you should be able to charge what you feel you're worth.

And that's the question. What do you feel you're worth? You know, we do this exercise, Jim, and we add it up. We say, okay, here's the holidays in a year. Here's the hours you're going to be in meetings. Here's the ones you're driving. Here's the ones you're going to be getting inventory. The average plumber needs to charge around $380 to $500 an hour while they're in the home. Because that's the way the math breaks down. You've got PTO. You've got insurance. You've got gas.

When you do the math and people go, how in the hell? There's lawyers that don't make that. But you don't understand. It's not just my time. It's my CSR to book the call. It's my warehouse guys. It's our advertising. There's so many other things that people don't calculate. And they go, well, I can find it online for that. We'll go ahead and buy all the tools. I've got the know-how. This is all we do. We are specialists. We are the best.

Well, I could call a handyman. You know what my dad always said? He ran a transmission shop and he owned a couple. He said, do you go to your general practitioner when you need heart surgery? I own AMCO transmissions. We specialize in transmissions. We're not a dealer, a dealer that does a little bit of everything. But I love that. I'm a specialist. But I just love talking about this because you've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. What's one thing when you've been around these $100 million guys? I'm hoping this year we do $100 million. And my whole paradigm, the way I think, the way I talk

is different. And when you get around these groups and these businesses, I swear there's something in the air. I don't know if it's like they're putting in better oxygen, maybe it's the helium laughing gas, but you walk in there, you're just like, whoa, there's work happening. These people have invested interest. It's almost like they're all owners. And when you go walk into a $100 million shop, what do you see the biggest difference between that million dollar to the $100 million shop? They bought into the culture and the vision.

They were able to not just say this is our culture, but they were actually able to live it. Everybody eats, sleeps, and breathes it. I mean, around here, our culture is very about you guys. This would probably go counterculture to you. While I do track all the numbers and I'm a data guy for sure, it's not what we focus on at all. Zero. We focus on our core values, which are to love, serve, and care. We love, serve, and care for our clients. We won't ever have to worry about money.

Now, we charge a fair rate for what we do, and we think it's well worth the investment. But what comes first is that. Everything we do has to follow that muster. Those are core values. Yeah, exactly. And the cool thing about it, though, is everybody eats it, sleeps it, breathes it. We are all remote. All of our coaches, we're not all in one big, huge office. I got one in Colorado Springs, one in Minnesota, one in Houston, Texas, one in Florida, one in Ohio. They all have this stuff on their walls. They believe it.

They sleep. Thinking about it is what we're constantly all about because we know we're after something. We're after something bigger than just being a coaching service. And we're after changing an industry. And so far, so good. We've done a fair job of it. We're about to probably do a much better job of it. So we'll see.

We're all on this mission that we're on this year to kind of change the game a little bit. Change people's lives. I appreciate that. And I think it, I think more people should have a mission, vision, core values and live and breathe them every day. And I'd be reminded of what we're here to do.

I just am a big fan of, and a lot of people have heard this story, but I want to tell you, Jim, I, when I was a kid in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, we called it middle school. It

wasn't junior high. Mr. Donner was our gym teacher. And every Friday, he'd give us a one-sheeter. It was basketball, football, soccer, whatever it was, it had all the stuff. You learned the game. So it was crazy. I got to learn the game. I got to learn exactly what a left tackle was, what a two-point conversion was i knew how to play the game that's my manuals i've got 32 now the kpis is what the score is and if you're like me you always want to win and you want to know the score for me i don't have competitors i don't have any competition i say byb better your best i don't care what they're doing oh did you see that billboard i don't give it i don't care what my competition's doing

because I am my own competition. People say, I wish I had 10 of me. I said, if I had 10 of me, I'd have 10 competitors. But what I love so much is, I love knowing the score because the thing is, is what gets measured, it's improved. Inspect what you expect, like you said. And now we look at your ratings.

We look at your error reports. We look at how long it takes you to install an opener because here's the thing I know. If this guy could have started in a half hour and you're taking two hours, maybe I should have you guys do a ride-along. Maybe you could learn something. Maybe you could learn something from each other. So my favorite one on here, well, there's two of them, but always improving is the first one. And then aspire to be number one. But there was an error in this, the top one.

It was because I put these in the vans, and it said always improvising. One guy comes up to me, he's like, is that really a core value that you guys always are improvising? And I'm like, that's a typo. When you're in one of those places, you said you hang around with those guys. Go ask the employee, why are you working so hard? And he'll tell you. He'll tell you why he's doing it because he's related the business to his own personal needs.

There's opportunity that's been presented for himself. He's seeing the ability to grow. There's something there that's driving him saying, I've got some purpose in life. There's a reason I'm doing this. And that purpose isn't to see that company grow as big as it can grow. He's got something more to it than that. Yeah. We do performance pay for every single person here and they can accumulate a lot of cool stuff. But what's in it for me is the harder you work and it's not only money for me one of the things we've talked about is uh we're building

a special fund for each role of doing for fun stuff so whether that's taking them out to a baseball game we've got a limo bus we bought taking them out getting them their running shoes for a marathon so every time they tie their shoes, they say, man, what other company is going to go by this? Nobody should have a Thanksgiving dinner by themselves. These are the type of things that really show that you do care. And I care about my clients, but it starts at home in my backyard for my internal customers. You care about your employees, your employees will care about your clients. It's just the way it works. It's a pretty simple piece of math there. What do people want more than anything else?

What do they want? Happiness? Freedom? I think recognition. Recognition? Recognition of their contribution, whatever that is. And so we watch somebody do something right 25 times in a row and we don't say anything. But 26, we go, he messes up and we're on him for whatever. You doing what you're doing with those rewards and the limo bus and that kind of, that's recognition. It's like, hey, man, I recognize that you're valuable to me and I want to do something cool for you.

That's why those companies grow the way they grow. Now, obviously, they have great systems, processes, training, and all that other good stuff. They got the tools that other people don't have, but everybody's bought in to what's going on there for them as well. They see the incentive. You ever seen a stepbrothers? I have a funny story about how I saw that the very first time I bought it for my son. He was like 13 years old, which I hadn't ever seen the movie. He gave it to him at Christmas. We put it in the grant.

Cause we were at the grandparents' house for Christmas, but in the DVR at a grandparents' house, it didn't last very long. Let's turn that off. It was so funny because yesterday I had some friends over and I said, at Enterprise, they give you the tools to be successful. It was at the Catalina Wine Mixer. We were just laughing about it.

But here's what I told them. I had all my lead techs out here from every state. So I've got a layer. You go apprentice, junior tech, tech, senior tech, field supervisor. You're going to be a lead tech and you're going to be a market manager, area manager. Then I got all the lead techs out here and I said, guys, do stuff for your guys. And I said, make pancakes. It's not all money. Do stuff to show you care. Spend time, ask questions about their kids. I wish I could ask every single employee here. If I spent five minutes with every employee a day.

Take it all year. Yeah, that's impossible. So I've got to do a good job of saying, look, do we have a system that says, and I hate to be this corporate. And I realize corporate to me just means their systems. Because did we talk to this guy? When's the last time we reached out to him? Did we talk about his parents or how's COVID going? whatever it might be but that's just the communication but just listening and showing love i'm like for every ounce of love you put in you get 10 out it's just that's the way it gives it's a beautiful thing when you actually do care and you go look what's going on how are

you what do you love what do you love? What do you hate? Let's do a SWAT analysis about this job. What can we do to make it better for you? And some people say, you know, I'm glad you asked because I hate working Fridays. Well, what you'll notice is on Fridays, he drops off. So you should have noticed that a long time ago.

I had a guy that used to go to Lake Havasu every Friday. So he'd run his three jobs and he'd be in and out of them in half an hour boom what i noticed is there's certain guys that they make what they need to make for the week and then they shit the bed you know what i'm talking about you know people like that they make their earnings of whatever it is there's mechanics they get piecework and i've already got my stuff completed i always look at those people that are that way. And I ask myself first, are they actually good at what they do? Like, are they actually good at selling or doing or servicing whatever it is that they're

doing for you, right? Wow, they're really good at it. But they have a cap. They get to a point and go, that's all I need. I'm good, right? Where is that next step for them? And is that even important? Like, should I push them for that next step? And I try to encourage it. I'll push it. But if they're good at what they do,

it's just me hiring another guy at that point. Yeah, I agree. I don't like the word top grading, but I just tell you that steve jobs was a smart man jack welch was a smart man they used to get rid of bottom 10 every year they wanted circulation they want to change but i don't want everybody to live in fear i say maybe i'll get canned this year if i you know i don't like that either but uh you know i know you got some really good information on how a company could double really, really quickly. What we could do right now. What should a business owner that's listening right now be saying to themselves as far as you have a whole blueprint?

What are the order of operations? What should we be thinking about if we want to double this year? Okay. So first thing you got to understand is that these businesses are, they're like DNA, right? You know what DNA looks like the Helix deal, right? Everybody's kind of picture that in their mind. Yeah. The Helix of DNA has two backbones. Those two backbones in our entrepreneurial world are foundational and operational. Most contractors focus on the operational side of stuff. And so there's components, if you're looking at that DNA, that connect the two backbones.

And so there's 12 in what we call the contractor's blueprint. And they actually have an order, which is strange. The first six are foundational, the second six are operational. And so first six, leadership, culture, process, HR, finance, and then accountability. And that's where we need to spend our time early on. And yes, it is blood, sweat, and tears to go get the business and make enough sales, but don't miss getting those things in place. Because if you have those things in place, all the operational DNA stuff becomes very easy. Operational DNA being technology, marketing, sales, production, training, and then recruiting, hiring, onboarding. Because most people come to us to grow their business and say, hey, I want to grow my business.

Can you teach me how to hire great people? I'm like, sounds fantastic. How are you going to train them? What's your training program look like? And if you're going to train all those people, how are you going to produce it? How are you going to deliver an experience that is exceptional? And if you're going to produce it,

well, how are you going to sell it? What is it going to look like? How are you going to create value that nobody else has and be unique? And if you've got these great salespeople, how are you going to get them leads? So they all work backwards from this idea of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding. If we don't have good leadership and good skilled leadership that understands how to create capacity, manage their time, all the rest of it doesn't happen. It just doesn't work very well. So my advice, if anybody is willing to

listen to it a little bit, is to spend some time on that foundational stuff. It's the dirty work. It's the dirty work that makes a clean life. Most people don't spend time there, so they're in a very reactive mode. They're always putting out fires instead of having the systems and processes to not ever let a fire start in the first place dude me and you are i was just talking about this today i said a lot of the people love being the firefighter they love being the hero see and that's the thing is it starts to get fun it's like we're bored because there's no problem i mean look if 9 000 jobs last month but you know for the most part, I think.

You have a procedure for it. I guarantee you, you have some kind of procedure. You know, if there's a problem, this is exactly what's going to happen. Someone's going to deal with it. They're going to do this. They're going to make that phone call. They're going to fill out this paperwork. The average contractor out there is like, okay, I'll go deal with it.

Yeah. And they go like this. I can handle anything. But the trick is you're never going to get anybody that's as good as you. I mean, typically in our own minds at least. So the one thing I've done a good job of that you were talking about earlier is I've hired around my weaknesses. I've got to be honest. I'm not the best at Excel.

I can't do a pivot table. I've got guys that can't. I've got people that type 120 words a minute. I've got guys that can't. I've got people that type 120 words a minute. I've got people that are better organizers than I am. They're better time management. So Bree handles that. Look, I know my weaknesses and I can spend years trying to develop my weaknesses or I can spend time sharpening my strengths. And those are the couple of few things, marketing, sales, leadership that I'm in love with. Why not hire around your weaknesses? And I don't think that the owner has to be an amazing leader necessarily if he's an accountant and he's an investor in the business

and he could hire that person, maybe get fan of shares too, because you get a guy in front of a crowd and it's like, today I get it i was like okay wake up guys boom wake up and like some people well you know guys we gotta really do what we need to do to make the customers happy it's like dude come on i'm energetic i'm passionate i'm kicking all over i'm like guys come on and uh i think that's important and if you're not that person don't try to be yeah you really got kind of three different types of leaders is the way we look at it. You have the idealist or visionary, which I'm going to guess that's your role there, Tommy. I'm a 100% V. Yeah. And you'll find as your business grows further and

further, you'll be needed less and less. Your people will do what you need them to do. And then the other side of that is the realist. It's the person that keeps you grounded and says, Hey, we can't do all that stuff, but these two or three things look like the good things to do. And you may have more than one of them. I have several here. Integrators. Yeah. Integrators. And then finally we have what we call champions where they have a skillset that's in something that you're not good at and you notice it right like i freaking hate social media i do i'm on it i post stuff all the time but i'm just not a big fan of messing around with all those facebook ads and all the stuff you got to do there but i got

somebody here that really likes that stuff they enjoy it they're on it all the time and they're like hey do you want to take care of our social media? Are you interested in that? And they're like, yeah, awesome. And you give them ownership over that thing. You tell them the result you want, and you let them run with it. Because they may not be able to do it as good as you. More likely, they're probably going to do it better than you. But it's something you're not having to do.

And when you're not having to do that, you get to go do what you said, concentrating your strengths. I'm the vision guy. I'm the creation guy. I'm the innovation guy. That's what I am around here. Yeah, and I love it. And then you're the same.

It's like we're coming from the same cloth. I mean, the deal is, you're like, well, what are you doing? I really don't have to do anything. You know, this month, what I'm focused on is we're working on what I call the turnover program. So it's your comfort advisor, your comfort consultant. You got an old unit, you transfer it over and you sell them a new unit. It's just a better thing to do.

So I said, these are the 10 things. We're going to rate each turnover. We're going to make sure these certain things are followed exactly. To me, this is fun. And then next month, I got a big, big, big task. And if I can get these things, HubSpot's going to be a huge deal. I think HubSpot's a killer because it's just... Massively cool program. Works very well. That's amazing what you can do. You can

A-B test. I'm going to send out a buyer's guide to each customer. Check this out. You're going to dig this. Buyer's guide. I'm getting them to commit to viewing the buyer's guide before we go out to give them a quote. Now, there is tracking data built into this that I can see what they read. I don't know. Like, they put their eyes on and read that piece. But how much time they spent on that page? What videos did they watch?

What did they click on? Well, let me just tell you something, Jim. If they clicked on Wood Do doors and they were looking at the top end wood doors probably want to send a guy that knows about wood doors who's very very good because those doors could cost 10 grand 20 grand so it's the unfair advantage that technology is giving us and it's so much fun it's like i kind of feel like i'm cheating but i'm not it's just no one else is doing this stuff. Yeah, that's super cool. And we do some similar things with our contractors as far as identifying that buyer, the data behind

them, the home value, what they do for a living, last time they did whatever on their house. But one of the things that we do is no matter what it is that they do, right? Let's say they do roofing or siding or gutters or painting, fencing, whatever, right? We have them do an exit survey. They do this exit survey that says, hey, while I was here, I took a look around and did an inspection for you. And these are the grades on your other stuff. And this is when you might need those type of things to be done. And they agree to it. Well, that becomes a lead for somebody else that I could provide to them in my network, right? And then you teach that network how to do

the same thing and now you're exchanging with each other. There's so many ways to use data that is pretty amazing. So check this out. You're going to love love this i love marketing who would be my perfect people to help me sell garage doors well i know that painters are painting homes every day why would they paint an old piece of shit why don't you let me come out there and sell something nice that's insulated it's not going to fall apart in two years boom perfect affiliate well pest. They don't want bugs to get in. And the number one way of bugs is through the bottom of the garage. So maybe they could get me into the garage with the bottom rubber. Who else? Oh, epoxy guys. They're checking the door, making sure it's closed, right? Tight seal. Boom. Great. So we've got this thing called

schedule engine. They booked the call through here. We go out and sell it. They get a check the same day it goes installed and it's collected on. And the thing about affiliate marketing is you got to protect these people because last thing you want to do to this pest control companies, go out there and something happens to the customer doesn't like us. They fired the pest control company. So one of the things I do is, is my lawyers created a really, really good contract that protects them that says, I'm going to get back 100 of the money if you're a customer not happy i'll do whatever it takes basically i'll go above the end to protect them so i think it's genius when you can find someone that's just they happen to be there doing another

thing and why not replace this you're investing into your home you really want to paint this old door or would you rather put something nice in here and improve your curb appeal i'm always like who sees them the most who sees them the most and consistently and most of the time it's their landscaper that's my affiliate guy that's my guy i really want to get to know and he'll pass out flyers for me he'll drop off stuff for me he'll do all kinds of things for me and i'm going to reward him whenever I get a job. It's those types of things, thinking that way, being strategic about it, and then giving them the proper tactics to do it with and then helping them apply it to their job.

So the deal is with HubSpot, I can reach out to every single pest control company in the United States. I can have them log into the LMS, teach them how to do it, what to say. What's super cool is either they're going to freaking answer me or they're going to freaking be getting voicemail drops and text messages and everything else because the system doesn't stop. No longer do I have to be good at following up because we've automated software to do it. And I believe in a five-pronged approach.

You're getting a phone call, a text message, a voicemail drop. They're getting a handwritten letter. They're getting a postcard. a text message, a voicemail drop. They're getting a handwritten letter. Then they're getting a postcard. Then they're getting a thing of chocolate sand. He's got it. He's got it. A nice tape measure that says, hey, are you measuring the results of your current company? And then you get a nice, what else?

Like a Rubik's Cube that says, I'm still puzzled why we haven't worked together yet. These are all great things that just, you know, a lot of the people that are listening are like, dude, that'd be so awesome if I could do that. Then they read a book and they go, that'd be awesome if I could do that. Then they do this. They throw it all up in the air and nothing gets done. What I recommend is start with leadership.

Start with leadership. Then do culture. Then do process. Get those things in. For me, culture used to be a four-letter word. I'm like, it's easy for these rich guys with $100 million companies. They don't know that this guy is cheating on his wife with this guy, girl. They don't know that they take 28 cigarette breaks a day. And I built a crappy culture when I started. I mean, it was a nightmare. No one enjoyed

themselves. It was me, me, me. What's in it for me? And that's what I built. So I had to wake up one day and go, damn, I hate coming into this shit. It's stressful. And it's, you know, I'm not going to live long if this is the case. And I see all these business owners that go, I will never let my son or daughter take over this business. It's way too stressful. That's because you built that. That's a reflection in the mirror is all that is. That's what I say.

Like I said, you say the exact same stuff I say. Guys, when you win, I don't want you to go, man, Tommy made me win. I gave you some tools, and we helped win together. But when you lose, don't say Tommy made me lose. You can't have your cake we helped win together. But when you lose, don't say, Tommy made me lose. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You know what I mean? Yesterday, I was able to take nothing and make it into something,

but today was bad leads. The leads suck. You suck. It's steak knives. You suck one place or the other. You're either getting your leads from the wrong source and you did that, or you just can't sell. One or the other. You're either getting your leads from the wrong source and you did that or you just can't sell. One or the other. This is so much fun.

Why don't you drop some more gold on us? I think people have a hard time starting. They say, next week I'm going to start that diet. Next week I'm going to start going to church. Next week I'm going to have one less cigarette. What is the biggest thing that needs to happen so prioritization is a big factor in and how we become successful and really and truthfully there's a cool tool you can go find it it's called an action matrix go look it up action matrix yeah if you've never heard of it

before if you anybody that's listening to this um if you guys put our email or whatever it is on the podcast deal, we'll send them our action matrix. And what the tool does is it separates out effort versus impact. We're all about impact right now. I want impact. And every moment I'm spinning awake, I want to have some impact. I want to drive revenue. I want to make things easier. What is that impact I'm going to have? And so then I measure effort. So on a scale of one to 10,

I've got impact scale of one to 10. I've got effort. Anything that's a one in effort and above a five in impact, I'm doing that thing first. I don't care what else I got on my plate. I'm doing that thing first because it's going to bring the most results quickest for me. Now you have something that's like a 10 on effort and a 10 on impact. Well, it's going to be awesome for you. It's going to take some time. It's going to be a big project. You got a lot to do with it and lots of moving parts. That's something that I dedicate time to on a weekly basis until I get it done. But those things that are in the quick wins, man, I'm doing them as fast as I possibly can. So prioritization, but use the action matrix. It works really well.

There's a great book for it too, called the one thing. Yeah. Gary Keller. I love it. I come in every day and I got one thing on my board right there. It's written. See, it says one thing. That's my one thing for the day. And it's already done. I already got that thing done, finished. And it's one step closer to where I'm going to be. And so figure out what the one thing is that you could do each and every day that's going to bring the most impact with the least effort.

You'll be shocked at how fast you get to where you want to be. So at 8 a.m., all my managers, there's 20 of us jump on a call. We go through the one big thing that day. And you know what the worst is? Still people do it. They go, I'm going to be interviewing. Your job is a recruiter. Of course you're going to be interviewed.

You know, they tend to just put stuff. Can you work on a process? Can you figure out a faster way with less steps you know i love this story i took my biggest client out to dinner for christmas and the guy spends a lot of money with us he's just a ball of joy super smart worked at hewlett packard when he was a kid he's from canada really successful person and he goes tommy when I worked at Hewlett Packard, he goes, they took us in the four groups. We didn't know anybody. And so they said, we want you to take these printers,

get them delivered, scan them in and build the process. It's just a drill. And so we did it, the four of us. It took an hour and 18 minutes. The second time that the teacher says, hey guys, you got to go faster than that. So we got it down to 40 minutes. He goes, then we came back. we got it down to 20 minutes. He goes, Tommy, by the 12th time, we got it down to under four seconds. He goes, and the perfect thing that I

want you to take out of this is you always are improving your processes. You're leaning out, you're taking things and making them better. And I think that that's so important because you know what I love about Steve Jobs is they said, here's how fast it goes. He's like, why? My favorite question in the world is why, by the way. He always would say, can we do better? And they say, no, no, no, this isn't fast. Why? Well, then they come back and they go, we got it 10 seconds faster. Then you go, yeah, well, why? And then, or what makes you, let me, Jim, this is what I love saying to customers.

Wow, that's expensive. What makes you say that? Relative to what? You know, it is expensive. I always agree with customers. You always want to agree. It is expensive. I'm the same way.

You're right. It is expensive. You get what you pay for. You know, that's what my dad always taught me. You want three things done on them fast, right? And cheap. Pick two out of the three. Here's the thing with you as my customer. If you think something's expensive, it's a budget situation for you, which is fine.

And I get that. But what else can be a problem for you? Stress, anxiety, problems, time. How much is your time worth? And if this doesn't go right and you have to spend more time dealing with whoever that is that you went with the cheaper guy with, how much does that cost you?

Is it worth the investment not to have that? Because we're not going to have that. And this is why I've laid it out exactly for you why. Would you agree that what I'm offering you is better than what you've seen otherwise? Well, I got to talk to have that. And this is why I've laid it out exactly for you. Why would you agree that what I'm offering you is better than what you've seen otherwise? Well, I got to talk to my husband. What do you think he's going to say? Well, what is it exactly that you need to talk to your husband about? Yeah. What do you think he's going to say? Well, he's going to say it's expensive. These are the simple things we go through all the time. And I'm like, look, we've got options, but it's my job.

If you come in, what do we do at the doctor's office? We ask a lot of questions. The doctor says, what is your blood pressure? What is your weight? What is your height? Are you smoking? Are you drinking? Are you exercising?

That's before they even get down to the diagnosis. Okay. And then guess what? If you've got a sore throat, you're still going to look at your puffy leg that's blown up just because you you came in for a sore throat doesn't mean they're going to do a full body analysis and make sure everything's good for you and i think that that's something that we miss is we're doctors when we enter into the garage or the roof or whatever and you got to be able to have that aura about you is man when i walk up to that garage i'm asking questions

because you might think, you know, the pen that everybody wants, this pen is beautiful. It'll write underwater. It does everything you could ever think. Well, the way to sell a pen, the way to sell a watch is you ask questions. Jim, let me ask you something. What kind of watch are you looking for? Where are you going to be using your watch? Do you understand how to read a digital watch? Do you need an alarm? And the the pen one so the same guy told me the pen stories he goes tommy he said tell me this pen i said sir what kind of pen are you you're going to be using it for he goes actually i'm in nasa i'm going to be going up on a spaceship so i said so gravity might be an issue because yeah i'm writing upside down. I need it to load up. We think people want this beautiful pen that does all these things, and it's nice, and it's beautiful, it's pretty.

That doesn't matter to the astronaut. So why do we always sell what's in our own head instead of asking the customer what they need? So there's a concept for that. They need to picture what it's going to do when they actually use it, right? This pen, what's that pen actually going to do? And so we have to ask a bunch of questions of what they need a pen to do, number one, and then we got to like close that loop with the picture of what it looks like when they actually use the pen. Can you imagine yourself in space? You're the only guy in the whole world that's in space and you got a pen that freaking writes upside down. That's amazing. Can you picture using this pen doing that?

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's get you one. Well, they picture it, but there's an opportunity cause called thought, fear, uncertainty, and doubt is what's your wife going to think when you can't write to her because you can't? Oh yeah, for sure. And then, you know, what I was talking about is a blue ocean strategy is nobody wants a blender nobody cares about a blender and then it slices and dices and it goes in the dishwasher easy they care about it's going to give them a longer life a happier life more energy better sleep better time with their kids because you're breaking down the nutrients in a certain way that's blue ocean and if we could sell every sense of benefits and features,

for me, I'm looking at a blender and I'm going, you know what about this garage? Your house is worth more money. It's the only thing on your home that'll deliver 102% ROI. You mentioned that your electricity bills are out of control because your garage door's open all day. This new garage door closes itself. Every two minutes, it'll close itself.

It's a beautiful thing. But some people go, i don't give a shit about my electricity bill don't talk to them about that stuff so you're in texas when you're going to be in phoenix next um i do get there fairly often i'm not on the schedule right now but i do get there i'd love to come in and see your operation but just you got. You got to come in here. But, yeah, I'd love – I'm going to be out – I don't know when I'm going to be in Texas next. But where's that near? So do you know where Austin and San Antonio are? Yeah.

Dead in the middle of them. So we just expanded in the – yeah, so I'll be out there probably the next two months. One of the coolest things about being here is it's like a destination location. You got this river that everybody floats in tubes in the summertime. You got the hill country. It's beautiful. Lots of great golf courses, wine breweries, that kind of stuff. Whatever your fancy is there.

We moved here for a reason. You want to hear a good golf joke? Absolutely. So this guy Vern is out with his three golfers he's golfed with for 50 years. You know, they're in their late 80s. And he's a very serious golfer. They buck a hole, they bet. And so he's pretty serious.

And he's over there. The road's over here. And he's eyeing the putt out. And all of a sudden, he's in his back swing. And he sees out of the corner of his eye a hearse. And the hearse, and he stops right there, takes his hat off, and he holds his hat. This is like an hour-long hearse.

And the guys are like, dude, we've never seen you wait in your life. You stopped in the middle of a putt. And he goes, what did you expect? I was married to her for 42 years. Oh, boy. I don't want to get in trouble. My wife is probably like, yep, that's my husband right there. So the questions I ask is, number one, if someone wants to reach out to you, Jim, you had a lot of great stuff.

I think your company could probably help a lot of people. What's the best way to get a hold of you and the company? Contractor Coach Pro, all one word,.com. And we do a free assessment. It doesn't cost you anything. Click free assessment. And it takes word,.com. And we do a free assessment. It doesn't cost you anything. Click free assessment. And it takes 15, 20 minutes. If you can't take 15, 20 minutes to make your business better,

you're probably not a good fit anyway. And take that assessment and we'll do an actual free coaching call with you. We'll sit with you and help you that day and show you what a coaching call is actually like. And it's not a sales pitch. It's truly there to, okay, this is what we see. This is what you've told us. This is what you could do right now to improve your business.

And those go pretty well. We enjoy them. And then if someone wants to just say they just really like you, they want to reach out to you, what's the best avenue to ask you rather than your team? Maybe they want you on a podcast. Who knows? So I don't have a problem with giving out my number.

We cool with that? No, I'm good with it. Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah, I'll give a, text me. 715-808-1542. You can email me at headcoach at contractorcoachpro.com. Best way to get me is text. I coach still. I still help a me is text. I coach still.

I still help a lot of customers. I've grown a business. I'm involved in a lot of different organizations. And so I sit on the board of the Roofing Contractors Association of Texas. I am on the board for the Catalyst Group. So I'm a busy dude. Text me.

I will get back to you. And then I always ask this every single podcast, but if you could give me three books and not the E-Myth, not the Ultimate Sales Machine, I mean three books that really it doesn't have to be about business. It could be fiction. I don't care, but three books that are going to

move the audience. So I'm going to try and give you three they may not have heard before. Good. The Perfect Salesforce. It's by Derek Gatehouse. That book will teach you how to identify talent, ask questions appropriately, figure out who your ideal person is, and do it in a way that the person on the other side of the table,

which they shouldn't be on the other side of the table, is one of the pieces of advice it gives you, doesn't realize what it is that you're trying to figure out. So many people are so poor at interviews and asking somebody if they're a hard worker is like the worst question you could possibly ask. Of course I'm not. You know, right? Nobody's going to say no to that question. So that's one.

Perfect sales force. I'm looking it up right now. Yeah, it's a great book. Great book. The only reason I know about it is because a guy I hired asked me if I had read it. I hired my replacement at AccuLynx and he asked me if I had read it. I said, no, I never read it. I read it and I was like, yeah, that's exactly what I do.

It's been pretty wild. And I was just kind of doing it instinctually. Now it's a little bit more formalized. So number two is The Carpenter. Simple, easy approach to being a great leader. It's called The Carpenter by John Gordon. John Gordon, yeah. Sorry, am I two for two yet with books you haven't heard?

Yes, you're two for two. I'm going to go for three for three. Let's do it. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. Pitch Anything. Ah, Pitch Anything. I got that.

You got that one by Oren Klaff. Okay. It's a great book. So the name of the first book was Perfect Sales Force. The next one was The Carpenter. The next one was Pitch pitch anything there's so much we got to carry on with as a business owner and it's always confusing because you know i had a guy he we do something with a book club and really i have a group of people that i tell them what's

going on in a1 and they can come out and visit and it's fun and stuff. Anyway, I was talking to one of the people that I work with and he said, I listened to Tommy. I got my truck wrapped. I spent 12 grand. I don't have any money. And I felt like it's important to get a truck wrapped. I wouldn't have spent 12 grand. And I don't know if it's the first thing you needed to do.

Seems like Zorro probably wouldn't be the first thing I would do. You know, the deal is I do tell people the first thing you needed to do seems like zero probably wouldn't be the first thing i would do no you know the deal is i do tell people the first thing you should do is invest in a website because google takes a long time you should get your google my business location up you should start getting reviews you can't buy time back from google so there's certain things that it starts order of operations have you ever heard of foil well? No. When you've got parentheses, you go front, outer, inner, last. It's an order of operations, just like multiplication, subtraction. So you built this on the blueprint. So I think there's a lot here. What I'd like to do is just give you the floor.

Maybe you could say, obviously, you need to reach out to thecontractorcoachpro.com. Find out. It'll take the 20 minutes. But also, I'll give you the contractor coach pro.com. Find out, we'll take the 20 minutes, but also I'll give you the floor to talk about anything. You can talk about what they can get started with today. You can talk about the vortex in Sedona. I don't care what it is, but I'll give you the floor to something to close us out with something

really impactful. That'll help them out in their lives. So I'm going to give you a fourth book. Cause I haven't mentioned it yet. I have written a book. I literally went in for two weeks in the middle of nowhere without any distractions, electricity, water, nothing. Slept in a tent on top of my truck, had all my own solar power and the whole bit.

And I wrote a book about this contractor's blueprint, all the different stages of it, and the basics of what you need to do to get those things in place so you can break that million-dollar barrier, which is tough. That book will be coming out in April or May. I brought on a, would have already been out, but I brought on a co-author. A co-author came back to me. You've mentioned this book a couple of times. He came back to me. He goes, dude, this is e-myth on steroids for contractors. I went, oh, well, I didn't really think of it as quite that way. I really haven't read E-Myth. I know it's a book and it's one I should read, but I've

never read it. And he goes, I got some things I'd like to add to it if you're up for it. Because I sent my book to a lot of CEOs and coaches, mentors and stuff like that. And this guy happened to be the chief marketing officer for a very large manufacturer that has retired. I'm like, dude, yeah, absolutely. And so we've teamed up. We're going to write the book together. So if anybody's interested, Contractor's Blueprint coming out and may pay attention, follow our Facebook. You'll see us all over that contractorcoachpro.com Facebook. But if I want to leave anybody with anything here at the end of this, I know we're long, but I had an epiphany moment about 17 years ago where I was dealing with a little bit of what you were dealing with when you said, Hey, I didn't have a good culture, right? And when you first started. And I'm uber competitive. I hate to lose. I'm very aggressive. I'm an A-type personality.

And everybody to me was just a piece of the puzzle or a dollar sign, right? Like, hey, you're either making money for me or you're not. You either provide benefit or you don't. I wasn't really worried too much about them. And that whole thing where the bookkeeper took the money, partnership broke up and all that stuff, that was like while I was sitting there on the front steps of my house and looking at everything I had. I had all the cars, the boats, the big house, the land, the acreage, and all that stuff. And it didn't mean anything, none of it. And I had a bit of a prayerful moment. And all I, like a feeling came over me like, dude, you need to start serving. And so that's what I did, started serving. I went that very next day and said, how can I help you get better? How can I help you get better? What can I do to improve your situation? And the more I've done that over my life, I get back 10 times and I'm not doing it to get anything back.

I don't care if I get anything back. If you can apply that to what you do, you'd be shocked at how many people want to work with you, for you, or be a part of what you do. It is. Serve others. And, you know, we have people come in and they talk about homeownership a few times a year and there's nothing better than when an employee buys a house. I love it. I love it. I've got two doing it right now. I've got two doing it right now. It's an amazing feeling. It's just really good. So I got a piece of advice for you on the contractor's blueprint is do not wait. You do the voice recording on Audible before you on the contractor's blueprint is do not wait you do the voice recording on audible

before you release the print because you're going to find errors and there's going to be things that you're going to be like huh maybe so do the voice recording first it's the opposite of most people do because everybody that i know is more of an audible fan especially in the home service space because we're driving. We don't have time necessarily to always be reading a real book. I love reading real books. So that's one piece of advice I'd tell you is do the recording in a recording studio or just get a good mic. And what you're going to realize is there are certain things maybe you'll be like, and you don't spend a long time on it, but maybe you should expound upon or find a mistake there.

And because you get the book out and then it always takes four or five months to get the audio and everybody's not so that's one piece of advice that i would do differently with my book is i would have done the audio first that's a great piece of advice and we're doing some strategic things with our book that uh you know that's a great piece of advice i had not gotten. So I will certainly put that under consideration. The hard copy is only going to be available through our partners. We've got a lot of vendor partners

and they're going to use that to help their customers with. The Kindle version will be available and now the audio version will be available for general purchase. So yeah, we've got a strategy behind what it is that we're doing. But this book isn't really written or designed to market our business. The book is truthfully like, dude, this book will help you whether you work with us or not.

Go read it. Seriously. Well, I'm getting 50 co-authors in my next book. Hey, I got 12 in my last one, but you know, I'm going to a guy like you and actually you're going to be invited here. I'm going to start it here in March is I'm coming up with 10 core. Well, you got your 12, right? Six and six. I'm coming up with basically right around 10.

It could be 14 and I'm working on it right now. And I want to have amazing stories that were impactful, like crazy, awesome stories. 14 and i'm working on it right now and i want to have amazing stories that were impactful like crazy awesome stories i always talk to this one about a sales rep no one thought their area was good phoenix was the best wherever i sent this guy he set a record in that market and it was about what you learned was it's not because of tax season it's not because it's a different income here america's america the USA, the USA. So we literally foiled every single thing that they've told us that this is not good,

that we're not in a good area or whatever. So that story is really impactful when we talk about sales. And I want one for marketing, recruiting, training, orienting, culture, leadership, all those things. So I want to get all these stories because if you read four impactful stories about it, that might change your life. One of these stories might change your life and you remember stories so i'm basically going to be doing interviews on a zoom call i'm going to say give me three stories about any one of these 10 and i'm you'll probably think about it the day before then i'm just going to transpose all that

stuff put my two cents on it put a couple cool quotes i'm going to have my top 20 mojo calls i do on the back of it of what you should be talking about on a daily basis. And I think it's going to be killer. I got some. That's awesome. I'd be honored. Be honored. Start thinking of some stories.

And this is great, man. I really when I find somebody I just mesh with, I don't really have a I just like kicking it and asking questions and talking. Yeah, I'm glad we just kind of hung out and talked business and what was on your mind. We do a podcast as well. And I found that that actually just goes better than having prepared questions. I like to have a little bit of an idea of what I'm going after. I got you a fourth of them. That's cool, though.

And I think people listening to podcasts want to hear the nitty-gritty stuff, right? Like, that's what they're after. You know, and the deal is we give a summary of the podcast, and some of them are like, dude, I don't know how, but right at that time, that's the message I needed. And then other times you're like, dude, this is the fourth accountant you've had on here. I don't want to listen to another accounting firm. So, but anyways, Jim, I really appreciate it. When you're here, get with me, get with Bree.

And I'd love to take you out to dinner and really appreciate you coming on today. Be awesome, man. Appreciate it. You guys listening, take Jim up on his offer, get a free session. Good company. They're changing lives. So I appreciate you. Promise no hard sales pitch.

Seriously, you're either ready or not. I love it. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next

guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences. Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're telling everybody we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's

homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.