The Home Service Expert Podcast - Building A Multi-Million Dollar Business From The Ground Up

Episode Date: July 4, 2018

Jason is the Founder, President, and CEO of Phillips' Painting, Roofing and Gutters, a multi-million dollar business. He was featured in CNBC’s Blue Collar Millionaires in 2017, which cast light on how he built his business 19 years ago with with a bucket of paint, $2 to his name, and unparalleled determination. In this episode, we talked about customer service, hiring, management...

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

Jason Phillips. Obviously, I've already gave you a great introduction into who he is. Jason, thank you so much for being on the show today. How's your day going? It's wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, it is. It's beautiful. It's a Tuesday. We're almost halfway through the week, although I do love Mondays.

I love Fridays more. But tell me a little bit about what you've been doing. I mean, you just had your 20th year anniversary. You won the Inc. 5000 several years in a row. You built a wonderful team that you give a lot of credit to. Tell me how you got in this business because you're doing a lot of things. I want to dive into that. Tell us what you do, where you started from and where you're headed. Great. Well, I was in the home improvement business, specifically in painting for several

years. And I just I noticed some injustices in the market towards customers and towards employees like me, and even towards what I call the people who do the real work, climbing on the ladders. And just after the company I was working for was being bought out and the new owner wasn't running it well, he wasn't paying me. I was six weeks behind on my pay. My wife and I were getting groceries out of my parents' and her parents' pantries. And so, you know, I had to do something. I was looking around. I thought about going to work for my brother who was making a lot of money selling computers. But one day, the original owners of my company came up to me and said, hey, Jason, look, this other guy, he hasn't paid us a penny yet. We think he's

running the company into the ground. And man, we think you can do this on your own. And we just want to bless you, man. If you want to go out and do this on your own, we'll give you our blessing. So honestly, I went home, I thought about it, talked to all the, you know, the important people in my life. And I felt that, felt that's what I needed to do. I felt I could bring something to my industry to raise the level of excellence, really, towards customers and towards employees like me and towards the workers in the field. And so I just felt that I could make a difference and I needed to do that. Just one example, one time I knocked on a lady's door and she opened the door and she had tears streaming down her face. I'm like, oh, my gosh, what's going on?

And she said, the guy that was here just before you, he gave me a quote to paint this and that on the inside of her house. And he handed me the quote. And then I handed him the coupon that he sent me in the mail for 50% off. And he ripped the quote out of my hands, doubled the price, divided by two, and handed it back to me. And that's not ethical. You know, that's the type of stuff. And I'm not judging all companies. I'm just saying that Texas is a state with no licensing for the trades that we do. And so, so anybody with $500 in an LLC can throw some magnetic signs on a truck, and now all of a sudden they're a professional fill-in-the-blank. Yeah, so that's why I made the decision to get into this business was just because the way that people were being treated at every level.

And so, you know, I believe that people and relationships are more valuable than money, whether those people be our customers or our employees or our business partners, vendors and such. You know, ultimately, I'm in the people business. And so I placed that first, taking care of people's needs and wants. I love it. So, you know, you're really passionate about the business. I got to tell you, I started out pretty much the same way. I wasn't necessarily knocking on doors, but I had a partner. We really we did a small ad in ValPak, really struggled the first few years.

I mean, I was working. I was the accounting. I was the advertising. I was the inventory. Tiny business working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It was tough. I got to tell you, I lost relationships. You know, shit hit the fan so many times, it's hard to remember.

But what was the biggest challenges you faced? I mean, 20 years ago, think about you got in the business. You obviously were doing most of the work. You know, how did you overcome some of the challenges and what were those challenges? Well, I'll tell you what, that's a great question. You know, by the way, 12 hours a day would have felt like a vacation for me back then. Yeah. But, you know, it was I was I literally worked, you know, 14 to 18 hours a day for about 18 months.

And because the company was growing and I came to it, I mean, I was beating my brains out and I was succeeding, but I had no life, you know, and my wife wasn't seeing me and I would come home at night and dinner was in the microwave covered up and the kids were already in bed or my daughter, one daughter at the time was already in bed. I missed recitals. I missed games, missed dinners all the time. And that didn't fit well with my values. But I, you know, early on, Hey, I mean, I had to pay the bills. And so I had, I came to this point where I was like, I've got to make a decision. I either need to pull back and, and be okay with, with making less money and running the business a little smaller, or I can build a team.

And I decided to build a team. One of my favorite subjects is the subject of leadership. And so I started building a team. You know, I hired one salesperson, then I hired another one, and then an office, someone answered the phones, you know, because when you're a small business, you have to be a jack of all trades and you have to be pretty good at just about every aspect of your business. Sure. And so I just piece by piece just started cutting a little bit of it off and handing it off to someone that could do a good job with it.

And that allowed me to keep growing the business and not have to work quite as much. Yeah, it's amazing how that works, isn't it? It's hard. The hardest part is giving up the trust because the famous line I hear all the time is, well, they're not going to do it as good as me. And, you know, that to me is just, it's a control freak. They're cocky, usually business owners, and they're going to work hard in their business their whole lives instead of working on their business. So they work hard in it instead of on it. So, you know, listen, you've done really, really well. Lots of millions of dollars in revenue each year. You know, a lot of people think we do, you know, tens and tens of millions of dollars a year as well. And it's we still hit our problems. I mean, I still have problems every day. I can

tell you right now, we're revamping some of our training. We're really starting to do a lot more role playing with our call center. We're working on a new form of recruiting on Facebook that seems to be working really well. We go to job fairs. I mean, it's always a struggle. It's been getting easier every year because we've delegated more, but you've had the same thing. Tell me about one struggle that you're facing right now. I mean, walk us through maybe this last month. Most people would look at you and say, Jason's not dealing with that. There's no way, but it's good to bring you back to reality and say where you're at today. There's still problems, you know? Well, I'll tell you what, as you grow and you delegate things out, the water is always

purest near the source. OK, and so as we grew, so much of our training and knowledge became word of mouth and nothing ever gets passed down 100%. So we kept hitting this revenue, this size ceiling for three years in a row. Okay. And I'm just like, that doesn't cut it with me because that's not the type of guy I am. We're going to keep growing this business. And if there's something we can do, something we can achieve, something untapped, we're going to go after it. If we can be better, we're going to do it.

And so I was going back and reading. I do a lot of reading and going back and reviewing one of the books from John Maxwell, my favorite leadership author and speaker. And he has this book, The 21 Irreputable Laws of Leadership. And one of the laws that he has in that book is something he calls the Law of the Lid. And it basically states this, is that the organization is always going to be limited by the leadership. And he said, you know, many times people come up to me after my conferences and say, you know, hey, how can I grow my business? How can I do this? And he says his answer is pretty much always the same. You have to start with you. If you want your business to be better, you have to be better. And so about three years ago, I'm like, you know what? I need to take my learning to the next level. Because what happens is when you're small and you're doing most of the

work, you know, you're working in the business, right? Well, you know, we hear a lot about people saying, well, you need to start working on your business. Okay. And then you can start working on your business when you start having maybe some management people you can delegate out to, but there's one key element that nobody ever talks about. And that's the third piece, which is working on you. You have to work in your business. You have to work on your business and then you have to work on you because when you work on you, you know better how to work on your business. Right. And so I believe that entrepreneurs need to be lifelong students, period.

You know, I heard a statistic a while back that said after their formal education is complete, most people, like 90% of people, don't ever read another book from cover to cover. That astounded me. And honestly, well, that was a lot of me until a few years ago. And when I decided I'm going to start making, you know, I need to make myself better. You know, when as an entrepreneur, you get successful and you're feeling pretty good, but you have to realize, man, you don't know it all. There's someone that's ahead of you that has experienced this that you can learn from. And so you wanna be able to help others, but you also wanna be able to receive help from people.

And sometimes as entrepreneurs, we're like, man, I'm out in the front. I know best. Nobody's gonna tell me what to do. But that attitude right there will limit you. No one did anything truly great by themselves. Everything great that really, and every company that's great that's been established is because not just one person, but a team of people. Right. And building, you know, and building a team of people is key. And of course, you know, if you read books by Jim Collins,

you know, he talks about the idea of your company's a bus. You need to have certain amount of seats on the bus. And you need to have the right person in the right seat. And so circling back to your original question, what have we been dealing with lately? Well, the first thing I said is, okay, I need to learn. So I started, I mean, devouring, devouring learning and books and connecting with other people that were ahead of me in business and learning new ways of doing things. Well, I came to realize that, one, I needed to document my training program, document all my core processes in the company. And by the way, if any of the listeners are struggling with the same stuff, I would highly recommend they read a book by Gino Wickman called Traction. It's a great

book. It's a short book, but it gives you some really good ABCs on how to do some of this and how to get started. And so documented our training and just systemized, started systemizing everything in the company with a documented process. And one of the things about having processes in your company is they have to be followed by everybody. You can't run multiple operating systems in a company. And so the only way to get everybody doing everything the same way is to kind of document it. Anytime there's a question, here's, you know, what does it say? What does the document say? Let's come back to that. So documenting our processes was one of the biggest things we've been working on lately. But in doing this, and some of the stuff I learned,

Tommy, was about behavioral profiling. And, you know, there's the Myers-Briggs, there's the StrengthsFinder. Well, we settled in on the DISC, you know, D-I-S-C. Yeah. And profiled all my people, did a lot of reading, did a lot of consulting with others on it that knew a lot more than I did. And I started realizing that I had good people on my team that weren't having a lot of success or maybe they were having frustrations either on their end or on my end and they're a good person, but I had them in a role where they just were not going to thrive in. And it's not about IQ. There's a difference between can someone do something and will they do it? And I'm going to give you a perfect example of this. Each morning, we have a little

five-minute standing meeting of my leadership team around in my office, and we're standing in a circle, and the next person in line to talk is my accountant. And basically, the question is, hey, by the end of today, what would you need to have accomplished so that you could say this day was a success. So that, you know, so you get, you know, 30 seconds to speak. And she said, well, today I need to accomplish this and that and this and that in the budgeting spreadsheet. And I'm reworking this and that. So she went into how she's doing much stuff in the spreadsheet. And my sales manager was next in line and he looked over at her and he said, oh my gosh, that sounds awful. And to which she which she responded well that's what I love I couldn't stand doing what you do right and that's the perfect example of

two people that are in the right seat okay and so here's what I did I had people on my sales team my sales team had been forever for 20 years you sold your project and you managed it so So I had some people that were really good at selling, but didn't manage their projects well. And then I had some people that couldn't really sell well, but when they got a customer, man, they took great care of them. And so when I started looking at the disc profiles, the answer was clear. And so what I did is I split it up. I said, okay, we're going to have salespeople that sell only, and we're going to have production people that run the projects only.

So I had some of my sales team, I transferred them to what I call the production or operations department to be project managers. And now they're on cloud nine, what they're doing, our customers are being served better than they've been served since I was personally doing it. And so now I've got sales team who truly knows how to sell. And so what I have is instead of having what I would call a generalist, someone doing sales and project management, I now have specialists, sales specialists and a project management specialist. And so this understanding of behavioral profiling has really been transformational in our culture to help put people in the right seat. And that way you're not just using a gut feel or, hey, let's try this person out over there for a while. Sure. I can look at it and tell them, look, you know, you're

going to find this part of it difficult, or you're going to struggle with this. Top salespeople tend to struggle with getting the details right. And so that's what my project managers are really good at, is getting the details right. And so it's turned out to be a wonderful thing. But however, it's been a huge change in our company. This year year in our 20th year we're experiencing more structural or operational and cultural change than we've experienced in many many years and it's all for good you know but it means i'm means i'm having to work a lot of overtime leadership teams have to work a lot of overtime but you know here's something that's true is if you want to move up sometimes you got to give up to go up. And, you know, it's not just

going to come to us. We're going to have to work smarter. We're going to have to learn. Sometimes we're going to have to put in a few more hours to do the things to get us to the next level. Right. Yeah, I love that concept. You know, we always talk about creating processes and you talk about getting the right people. There's a process behind getting the right people. Now, some of your processes evolve around this. Now, I'm a huge fan of this. I actually train people on this. I'm not a brilliant professor at this, but I know the concept that I use it specifically for sales.

And even in my personal life, it's identifying those behaviors and really understanding. I'm a D. I'm a really high D and I'm cut to the chase. Don't screw around me, but I'm only 4% of the population. So you always got to assume people are S's between 68 and 72% are S's. But I love the concept of that. And I love the concept of processes. And my favorite thing in the world is a whiteboard and a group of people that are going to be creating a process because we whiteboard the crap out of it. We erase it. We think about it. We get the crew involved with it. And then we create that process and it's checks and balances and moving forward. And I love that. Gina Wickman.

Gina Wickman. Yes. Let me mention one other thing, Tommy, about the disc. OK. The disc is not only great in hiring, but you mentioned it about in your other relationships. We also use it for managing. And so, you know, anytime I'm going to, you know, I'm leading people. And one of the big mistakes that leaders and managers make is they want their team to respond the way they would respond. Sure.

But we need to understand, if we're the leaders, we need to understand how to lead these people, and we need to understand how to best lead them and draw them up to the greatness that they could be, and each one of us are created differently. So before we have our annual reviews or even what we call quarterly conversations, we have our managers review the disk profile of each of their reports before that meeting

so that they can better help lead that person. Yep. It's really, really important to understand where people are coming from. And a lot of the people listening to this podcast is you'll go look at three or four tests and try to learn all of them. And you'll be a jack of all of them, a master of none.

And I definitely agree with Jason. You got to pick one. You got to live it. You got to know it. I mean, the funny thing is, before I got on this podcast with you, Jason, I ordered 13 books. And I listened to most of them on Audible,

but I ordered these ones because I wanted a written copy. And what I do is I'll go to certain pages I love, I'll mark it all up, and then I'll put the page number on the back of the book cover. And then I'll go to certain pages I love, I'll mark it all up, and then I'll put the page number on the back of the book cover. And then I'll go through and write my cliff notes because you can't believe how many people they'll read a book and then they'll have the flavor of the week. And Mr. Jones, the CEO of Air Conditioning Express, walks in with a new concept that week. And people go, OK, what book did you read this week? And it's good to really be learning all the time. Talk to people. I was just at the Service Titan Convention. It's

our CRM. And I'm going to lead this into a question. But I mean, I met people and what I've learned probably about eight years ago, I was talking to the CEO of Alpac and he came out and he said, hey, I want to meet some of the people out here. And I was just asking him a bunch of questions. And he said, Tommy, the biggest secret is in sales, in life, when you're talking to a girl going on a date, whatever it might be, is get them talking. Let them do the talking and actively listen. He goes, we used to have bets. We used to walk in to sell customers on ValPak. And he goes, who could be quietest the most? And we had a stopwatch under the table. And he goes, if it was ever 90% the other person and 10% me, it was a guaranteed sell. He goes, because I got them talking and I really listened and I actively listened and I got them talking about what they love. And I'd comment on it and I'd smile at them and I'd agree and I'd nod. So one of the things when I'm with somebody, especially out when I'm networking, is just asking them a lot of questions and asking them questions that I care about, that I want to learn about because I don't want to be fake. But at the same time, I really want to understand where they're coming from, because, listen, like you said, nobody came up with this and did it all on their own. They read books. They talked to people. They made good decisions. And they made a lot of mistakes to get where they're at.

But this goes back. I was talking a little bit about Service Titan. And I'm a huge, huge fan. I mean, if you ever listen, when you start listening to the podcast, I mean, I'm all about CRM. It's your Customer Relationship Management System. Tell me a little bit about, you know, you probably started like me on a notepad on a calendar and then you moved on. Tell me a little bit about what you guys use for your management system for sending technicians out to dispatch, to collecting the invoices, to just the call center bookings. Okay, so what we used and what we're currently using, it's at the end of its life right now.

Okay. And it is a system that I built on Microsoft Access. Okay. It did my contact management, did my letters, did track my marketing, figured commissions, figured quotes, work orders, everything. And so, but we're moving to something that's in the cloud. And so it looks like what we're going to be doing is probably going with MarketSharp. Okay. And we've reviewed it and we feel that it fits our needs very well. Tell me a little bit about that, because I think a lot of people that are listening,

I can't tell you, you talk about having procedures and operations. I mean, the CRM, and I talk about this a lot, there's no such thing coming around. The COO is going away. It's CTO. It's managing through technology. I know exactly how long my guys are at a job. I know exactly what they use on that job in real time. I mean, we're in nine states, so I can manage all these guys. I know the customer satisfaction rate right when they leave because it's as much as the

customer. I mean, so many KPIs that allow me to make really, really strong decisions. Tell me a little bit about the transition and why you guys decided to go that route and why you think it's going to be impactful. And what are you coming to expect with it? Because change is tough. And I'm just curious to hear from your perspective, because i've been through it and it's hard but it's worth it okay so the one thing that i really like about market sharp well there's a few ones it's uh cloud based okay two they've been in business for a long time, more than 20 years. Okay. So they're not just going away, but the flow of, uh, it walks the call center. It walks them through the incoming call script as they book the appointment. Sure. And so it supports appointment slots. And if you're

doing, if you're doing lead management or lead distribution the day of or whatever, it supports that. And it automates the relationship management based on where they are in the sales cycle. You know, it's anything from, you know, a letter a few days later to, you know, when they sign, when you mark it as a contract, It sends them another letter. But you can also say a process can be triggered where you say, let's automatically send this postcard to the 50 most demographically equal homes within a two mile or three block radius. So on all the marketing end, it helps get back into some of the grassroots marketing. As you grow, one of the things that's tough is to maintain that grassroots marketing. You start buying big. And I mean, like we do TV advertising is one of the things we do.

And so we're broadcasting the whole millions of people. And so you can't really target, do the targeted marketing with that. And I call that the grassroots marketing. And so MarketSharp is kind of helping us regain a little piece that we've kind of lost as we've grown, which is that constant contact and maintaining that relationship with them. And they always say it's a lot cheaper to keep a customer than it is to go get a new one. But one of the things that we find, I mean, we've been in business 20 years.

And to this day, we still have homeowners say when we're out at their house, you know, we're finishing up the project. Oh, I didn't know you did such and such because they're standing there and they look at our truck. Sure. And I'm like, and now, you know, we're thinking, well, we've been mailing your house for 20 years and, you know, but they called us for one specific product and one specific need. So we want to make sure that we stay in contact with them and they understand everything that we offer and that we can help them with.

So this is so important, Jason, because you talked about DISC, and you realize there's four types of personality types of DISC. Well, believe it or not, some people love postcards some people love email some people love text message some people love voicemail blast i'm working on a little software project that'll do all four of those because people are different and it basically i'm building a bridge to our crm but you hit the nail on the head i mean those grassroots the marketing i believe you need to inspect everything. You need to do, people do what you inspect, not what you expect. And these KPIs within a CRM, if it's robust enough, and it's not to follow people around

and punish people, it's to make them more efficient. It's to say, hey, listen, I noticed you take an hour and a half on a garage door opener install. I want you to go out with this guy because he averages 40 minutes. I want you to see what tools he uses, what his approach is to taking it out of the car to putting it up. And those type of things make your company so much stronger. So I'm really happy you guys found something you like. I mean, after I get off of this, I'll talk to you about a few other things once we end the podcast. But, you know, I'm all about leading people as well. I'm getting better at it. I think it's tough to realize, you know, right now I think we have 172 employees. We're growing every day. We're

hiring so many people all the time. And it's my job to have meetings and lead these people. Tell me a little bit about something that you strongly believe in that maybe some people don't even realize. The guys listening to the call that might only have 10 employees and really how to get that mindset and really start shifting to a leader. Well, you have to come to your own values. The why are you doing what you're doing? Okay. The why is important. You know, when I started, I needed to put food on my table one way or the other. Sure. Okay. But I got into this particular industry because I felt I needed to make a difference. And so that why has driven me and it was about the people. And I believe, I believe

that if you do it just for the money, that you're not going to find anybody that's really going to follow you for any period of time. And you're going to have limited success. And I believe that take some people with you. You know, you mentioned trust earlier. Well, maybe they can only do it 80% as good as you. Well, maybe when you started, you could only do a 70% as good as you, you know? Right. Give someone a chance in a safe environment where they're going to have some failure. But guess what? Maybe they can grow to be better than you.

You have to give people an opportunity. But when you extend a little trust out there, you may get hurt. But if you don't ever trust, you don't go anywhere. So you have to expose yourself a little bit. And that's the tough thing to do. And in different positions in your company, that may look different. But I would say you need to realize that you can't do it without a team. And let's just say that, you know, you're an entrepreneur and you have 10 employees. If you don't, if you're not starting to get someone in a management position with 10 employees, you're probably stretched too thin and you're probably spending most of your time working in your business and not on your

business and not on you either. And so you have to figure out in your particular business, you know, what are the things that currently only I can do and what's most likely that I could delegate out and have someone run with it like a champion? Yeah. And just start carving pieces off, you know. And at a different time, it might be a different thing. And, you know, however your business runs, it might depend on the staff you have. Maybe you have someone that can do it well. But one of the mistakes that I feel like a lot of small entrepreneurs make

is the warm body syndrome. It is, I, wow, I need someone to do this job. The other person just left or, or I fired them or whatever. I've got too many customers and I need someone. And so we go find someone and we're like, oh man, I think they can do it. I think they can do it. Okay. And that is a horrible place to be in. You need to have people that not can, but you not only can, but they will. And that's part of, that's part of what the dis profile is. But I believe that recruiting is the lifeblood. Recruiting is the lifeblood. You need a champion in every position. You know, I read, uh, Netflix does it kind of like this. If one of your reports or one of your people, if they got an offer to go work down the street at another company, would you fight to in a mutually beneficial manner release them and open up that seat

so you can find someone that you would chase down if they were to try to leave no i love that that is brilliant and so i i took that to heart i'm like man that's awesome because when you get those golden nuggets that are the right people that share your company values that are doing the job that makes them feel good and they shine and you think, oh my gosh, where have you been all my life? And you have that feeling about them. That is a really, really good feeling to have. Yeah. You know, I was talking the other day on the podcast and the guy said, what if you were going to sell your business in two weeks and you were going to have the guy walk in and really meet everybody? Who would you let go of that day and that week? And it's like, it makes you think, wow, man, I'd have to get rid of

this guy. I've been carrying him around just because he started with me or this or that or whatever. And it makes you kind of realize don't run your business. The first thing people cut is advertising when they're going down. And the real thing you need to do is look at personnel and try to keep your A players. And you wonder why there's a lot of people unemployed and they come in. Well, there's a reason they're unemployed. The best thing to do is to steal people. It might not be the same industry, but they're damn good workers and they're go-getters. And, you know, the next question you let into it, because hiring, listen, I've been working with entrepreneurs now a very, very long time and they all have the same question. The first one is where the hell do you find it? I've posted on Indeed. I've put Facebook ads out. I've done everything right. And I know you're not rich, but a top producer can make you so much freaking money. He could change one top producer for a small company. If you pay them higher than the industry average.

Listen, my top producer went to Milwaukee last week. He doubled the best week the top guy there has ever had. He doubled it. And the manager in that market, just because of my guy, made $500 more that week. And you know what? My guy had all five-star ratings, didn't take advantage of anybody, just gave them more options. So tell me about hiring. Tell me about how you're able to grow because this is what these people are here for. This is what they want to hear. Well, I want to tell you guys this, is if you want to hear someone ramble on all day,

they can tell you, as made every mistake, almost it can be made, well, you might as well just come sit across the desk from me, and I can keep you very entertained, okay? So I don't stand here on how Dave Ramsey says it like this, and I feel this way myself. I don't stand here on a mountain of victories. I stand here on top of a mountain of failures rather than under them. And so I think, you know, in business, there's a lot of things you just learn the hard way, you know. But getting smarter helps you not have to learn those things the hard way.

But when it comes to hiring, I believe we need to start here and say this. When an employment relationship doesn't work out, when an employee doesn't work out, we need to own that and take responsibility by saying we either, A, didn't hire the right person, B, we didn't train them right, or three, we didn't lead and manage them right. I believe that we can't blame them. We can't blame them. And we have to start with us. And so defining what are you really looking for? You know, what type of person is going to thrive? And then when you get a, you know, let's just say you find that superstar or someone who has potential to be a superstar. You have to provide an environment where they can soar. And so you have to onboard

them, right? You have to train them, right? You know, and let's just say you're hiring for sales. Well, maybe they've been in home improvement sales, but they haven't been selling the type of home improvements that you do, they need to know the ins and outs. They need to be trained properly on your product. And, you know, one of the mistakes we make in training, Tommy, is we just vomit information on people constantly. I've made this mistake. But information isn't what we need. We want them to have the skills.

So we need to train them to have the skills to do a product presentation or whatever it is. So when we're training someone, we need to ask this question, what are they going to do with this information? Do we just want them to know this or are they going to do something with it? If we can't say they're going to do this with it, then we probably need to cut it out of our training or at least put it on the back burner until they're ready to learn it. Right. Why do you have to go over that? You know, I had an incident last week with an employee that didn't see something they really liked on someone's desk. It was, you know, just a magazine and they didn't appreciate it.

And, you know, you got to go over some things in training. And we live in this world now that it's people suing everybody. So obviously there's certain things you got to cover. And if you walk through my office 11 years ago, I mean, we had, you know, girls on the walls in the back of the warehouse and that the whole concept has changed. And, you know, I was a young kid at the time. I mean, a lot younger than I am now. And it was just not the way to do a business. But when you go about recruiting the right people, it's just amazing what comes into your business. So let me ask you this. Jason Phillips starts from ground zero.

You're back. You sell your business and you decide, hey, I didn't like retirement. You're back in it. You meet up with a guy. You're back in it. You meet up with a guy. You got all the funding you need. What's step one to get these people recruiting? I mean, tell me ABCD. What do you do from ABCD? So number one, you write the applicant, you figure out who you're looking for. We know that. But really, where do you go to get them? And how do you come up with their compensation plans to make them really want to jump aboard and come to you?

Okay, so where do we go to get them? Okay, obviously we do have lead source through Indeed. Okay, and I'll tell you this about Indeed. If you're not paying for your listings, then they're probably never likely to be seen. Okay, and when people respond, you need to get back with them within like 48 hours or they're going to be gone. And a matter of fact, and most people may not want to hear this. Most of your top performers will never see your job posting because they already have another job lined up because they know people that want them. And so a lot of times your best people are going to not come

through those traditional methods, but you need to have different avenues. Okay. So indeed can be one, but you need to pay of course, monster. You know, I guess it depends on what type of position you're looking for. If you're looking for like an accountant, you can consider, uh, you know, uh, someone like Robert half that does, you know, uh, recruiting specifically for accountants. But if you're talking about salespeople, straight up, I want really good workers in the field. Okay.

So for us, for salespeople, you don't have to have experience. We'll train you from the ground up. There is a learning curve, but you know, so you deal with two things on, uh, you either have to train them or you have to deal with their bad habits that

they already had from somewhere else. And you need to try to retrain them on it right and so but we use indeed we use monster we get a lot of them from there and just from our internal networking of people that we know because a lot of people just find us through our website because we're fairly well known in our service area but you can also meet people at trade events. You can meet people. Of course, you can hire your competitors if you want. You can also send out a job posting to your customers.

Say you've got happy customers. Maybe some of them want to come work for you. Yeah, I've done that. You know, so networking events, you need to have several streams of applicants coming in. We've even used before, I believe it's called time to hire.com for salespeople. Okay. We've used that before and that worked out. Okay. Then here's the other way. What about actually going and searching for the people that have what you want. Instead of just putting ads out there and waiting for them to come, how about going to them?

So going to search for their resume, like home improvement sales dash my city in Google. And you never know what kind of resumes you might come up against there. Well, I like the idea of the competition, too, because if you know a company is good and you pay better, you do things better. But these guys just don't know of any other way. I mean, things like LinkedIn and Facebook, they say that they're in the garage door industry. They say the company they work for, and there's nothing wrong in this world we live in, the United States.

We live in a capitalistic world that, hey, if this guy starts falling apart because he's not paying his people right, that's not, I'm not doing anything wrong by paying more and giving better incentives and insurance and paying for their gas and giving them paid time off. I'm doing something better. And I've had competitors get mad at me, but I say, listen, you're more than welcome to pay him more, but this is what we do. And we can specifically target even competitors that are top performers in the air conditioning industry. I get target for grassroots because it's not much different. So I'm a big fan of going and trying to find the top performers at other companies, not even if it's your industry, because, man, you pull one top performer,

they could make, it could make your day. It could change your life. And I just can't understand how people, they say, there's no way I would pay more than $15 an hour for that. And I say, man, it's a mistake. And I'm a big fan of fixed, you know, mostly commission, but kind of an honest way of doing commission to where you can't take advantage of the customer. But I like your ideas. Absolutely.

You said you talk about top performers. Yeah. Do you know how maybe you know this already? The way the container store pays their retail associates on the floor, they pay them double the going rate of what other retail associates are making at other companies. But the owner says this, I pay them double, but they produce triple a typical average employee. And so even though I'm paying them double, I'm still saving. Oh, yeah, yeah.

You cannot believe by the time you think about recruiting, training, the time you invested in the opportunity cost of not having the right person, they say you talk about keeping a customer versus getting a new one. Well, keeping an employee and training them up and leading them is so very important, man. I just I did some math on the whiteboard in front of some of my managers. And I said, guys, I know you're happy with the guys you guys have, but I said, there's no such thing. We always fool ourselves and say, you know, well, this guy's been with me a long time and he'll do anything I ask. And it's like you're settling for mediocrity all the time. And that's the type of business owner you are. If you're OK with mediocre, you're not

trying to grow. You're content. You're like, I'm just a nice guy, then go ahead and you're going to get squashed. Because there's guys like us, you know, me and Jason that are out there that are doing a lot of the right things, absolutely doing some of the wrong things and making mistakes. But the fact is, we know top producers make a huge difference. And to settle for mediocrity is just not the way to grow a business. I mean, what are your thoughts on that? You know, settling for mediocrity is not in my blood, you know?

And so, you know, the last thing you want to do is have someone on your team and you feel like you have to keep them because you don't have someone else to take their place. And that is a bad position to be in. Oh, yeah. When they start using that as leverage. And they know they don't have to perform because, gosh, you're not going to get anybody else to do it. That's a bad place.

And that's why I'm saying that the recruiting is a lifeblood because it puts you in a position of power. Not that you're going to exploit people, but, hey, this is the excellence that this job and our customers deserve. And if you're not going to do it, I'm going to put someone in here who will. And by the way, you mentioned something about gouging customers. I believe in having set prices. Me too. Okay, where the salesperson does not get to determine how much they're going to sell it for. Because they might overcharge the customer.

And then here's what happens on the other end. It's Friday afternoon. They want to get the hell out of there. I haven't closed much this week. Or even worse, I haven't closed much this week, and I need to get a contract. And so I'm going to give them a low price so I can get a sale. Yep.

And so what he's doing is he's just selling your profits away. And so the whole way you price your products and the way you pay commissions is very important as well. Yeah. And I'm not a big fan of hourly. I don't mind hourly with an incentive on top of it. But my biggest problem with hourly is I will do the minimum viable product to make my hours. I'm not going to continue to get better. I'm not going to be efficient. Why would I sell anything that I don't have to, even if the customer needs it? Because I'm just here to fix this little thing. So there's a hybrid. And when I talk to people, I say, what is going to make you get the best people and what's going to incentivize them to get more efficient, faster, stronger, better customer service? And that leads me to the next question. I mean,

customer service, I believe it starts within the organization and creating a culture within the business. And we strive for that. I could always do better. I mean, if you met some of my employees, they'd probably say, I don't really talk to Tommy a whole lot. And I'll tell you what, if I talk to every person for seven minutes a day, it would take two full days of my week. And that's seven minutes a day over to go take two full days of my week. And that's seven minutes a day over to go into the next person, the next person. But we do have outlets that they could talk to each day and it'll come to me. And you can't be everywhere. It's good to know people's names. Today we did a potluck for Halloween. But tell me a little bit about customer service, because it sounds like you've got it figured out. And I want to know, how do you deliver it?

And what do some businesses struggle with? You know, you've seen it. You've done it. Tell me what these people out here that are listening, these business owners, tell me what they're doing wrong, possibly, and what they can do to change it like you've done over the years. Well, customer service is absolutely important.

Let's ask, what do we really want? Okay, we want a smiling customer. And it's not okay for us to just deliver a quality product if we drug the end if they had excellent service and mediocre quality rather than excellent quality and mediocre service. Now, what we speak to do is to give them both. But I see contractors, they don't respect the homeowner's time. Oh, yeah. Homeowners take off work. Okay. they don't respect the homeowner's time. Homeowners take off work, okay? They take off

work or go into work late or rearrange things to meet with guys like us. So not respecting their time is a big one. And hey, our time is valuable also, but really it just comes down to communicating. I think that one of the biggest failures in my company and in other companies that I see in customer service is when we leave the customer in the dark. Most customers are reasonable. By and large, most of them are reasonable. And they understand sometimes materials have an issue. Sometimes vehicles break down. Sometimes people call in sick.

Sometimes there's a weather delay. They understand those things. What they don't understand is how come you didn't call me and let me know when you found out about this instead of me calling you wondering where you're at. Anytime that there's a problem that arises, you know, maybe we break something at their house, whatever. Anytime there's a problem, if we take the problem to them before they bring it to us, it's going to be much better for us. You know, it's going to be at least twice as bad if they have to find it and bring it to us. And so pushing the right information to the customer, I believe, is one of the key things in customer service and customer satisfaction and customer experience.

And so obviously you need quality, but you need to have people that treat them with respect. OK, but I just believe a lot of it is about that communication. And, you know, we all talk about communication. We all have these cell phones. Well, we all can text and email and all that stuff. But we tend not to push the information to people in a timely manner. Yeah, no, that's huge. And I always tell my guys, you know, I respect your time when I call the cable company and

they tell me it's 12 hour window. We're all frustrated with it. But, you know, you're kind of. When I call the cable company and they tell me it's 12 hour window, we're all frustrated with it. But, you know, you're kind of a captive because it's the cable company. There's only a couple of choices. But believe it or not, customers have a million choices for paint, garage, air conditioning, plumbing, you know, electrical. They've got many choices. So don't leave them hanging. That's probably some of the best advice I've heard on here is just respect people's time. That's the one most important thing. So recently you were on CNBC show, the blue collar millionaire,

and it sounds like it was pretty cool and exciting. Tell me how that went. I'm curious. I think this is more fun for everybody out there to hear about it. You know, that was fun. They found me through the Inc. 5000 list and contacted me, and they brought out a film crew for a few days. And basically their show is about people that started with the American dream, blood, sweat, and tears, you know, to make a successful business.

And so they kind of told my story. You know, it only got like, I don't know, seven to 10 minutes of airtime. So they put three people on a show and, but they wanted to see where did we come from? What are we doing? And then they wanted to, you know, show, you know, how do you enjoy your success? You know, how do you spend your time? What do you spend your money on? Things like that. They, they want to, you know, they want to see your house and your cars and all that stuff. And it was, it really was a lot of fun making it. But, uh, I mean, I had a few little reservations just because I don't want to come off as a, you know, as a jerk out there wanting money. Yeah. Yeah. I really, you know, but,

but, but honestly, I don't make any apologies, Tommy, because I've earned it. I've worked hard. I've earned it. I deserve it. And you other entrepreneurs out there, when you're successful, don't be ashamed of it. Share it with your people. Bring people along with you. But when you make some profits, you can do a lot of good things in this world. You can give and give of your time and give of your money to causes and things that you care about.

You can pay your people more and you can help people through hard times. I believe that profits are so important, not just because you want to hoard the money, but because when you have those profits, you can do a lot of good things with them. You know, you said it the best. I couldn't agree more. And, you know, I don't think the government can spend the money better than we can. And we believe in real things that help people. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with the government exists. And I'm not complaining about that. But I'm telling you, with the excess money, I can't tell you enough, you know, whether it's repairing someone's vehicle or putting a set of tires on their car because you know that they're bad and they just don't have the money and they got three kids and they're a single mother.

Or just getting flowers for the women on Valentine's Day or Mother's Day goes such a long way. But, you know, Jason, I got to tell you, I love this stuff. I love having you on. I like to go into a question that I kind of let you tell us. Maybe we didn't hit on something that you're really passionate about and some really good advice that I might have not steered the ship the right way to ask you. I want to get you back on. I always do some research. I'll watch that Blue Collar Millionaire and then I'll read some of these books and then maybe we could do it again in a few months. But tell me a little bit, just maybe something we didn't hit upon that you think is really important for the listener.

Well, the why. There's two things that I would say, find out your why, if you're going to, if you're going to build a team, why are people going to follow you? Why are they going to follow you? Is it just because you're giving them a paycheck? Okay. Or is it because they truly believe that you're doing something important? And I believe, I believe that people have are created with an innate desire and need even to help others. And when you can connect what you're doing to the why of what you're doing it, you're going to get connected with people that feel and believe the way that you do. And so it's not just what we do. It's the why.

For us, it's about people. People and relationships are more valuable than money. And our mission is to enrich the lives of people. And we happen to do that through our painting, carpentry, gutter, and roofing services. That's how we do it. And so for us, it's about that why. And it makes a huge difference. Would your people follow you if you couldn't pay them for a couple of weeks? Maybe they would. Maybe they would be out the door the very next day. So that would be what the first thing I would say

is find your why so you can connect with other people who share that same passion. And then the next one is that one piece I mentioned earlier, work on you. Don't just work in your business and work on your business, but truly work on you so that you can be better at working on and in your business. So educate yourself, learn. And obviously, if you're listening to this podcast, you're already hungry, right? And so I just want to encourage everybody to read.

You know what? I do Audible too. I do Audible, and then I get the Kindle books, and I do all my highlighting and notes in the Kindle app. But I do the same thing. I read and listen at the same time. Certain books, I do them multiple times. I go back and reference them on a regular basis. It's not the flavor of the week, and that's something we all need to avoid.

A lot of times, I'll be in the middle of a a book and I find out something that's so transformational. I say, I have to stop reading. I have to go make changes. I have to work on this. And I need to not read that next chapter and move forward until I have done and accomplished what I just learned that I need to accomplish. And so some books I come back to or I'll put them on pause and I've got to go work on this or that. And I'll make my whole team do it. We'll sit around the conference table and we'll listen to these audio books together as a team and have discussions. So it's

not just Jason coming in, Hey, here's what I learned. It's bringing these people along and helping them understand. And then they get the same passion about it. And my leadership team has the same passion about it. It just flows out through the veins of the organization. Yeah, that's so true. I mean, sometimes you read a book two years later and it hits a different part of your company and you're in a different spot. And it's like, wow, when I read this before, I had no idea. It didn't really hit home. And later it might. But I love the way you pause and you take action because most people that are listening, I wouldn't say most, but I'd say a good majority of people, they're the people that are just they go along with society and what they

give them. And it's not most people that listen are mostly entrepreneurs. So they're the different breed. But when you read something, when you hear an opportunity, do you jump on it or do you let it pass you by? Because so many people, time is one thing we can't take back and you need to jump. You need to jump in head first and take chances. And sometimes those chances don't work out, but I'd rather go through life taking chances and making mistakes than never have taken those chances at all. And it's a different life to live and it's an exciting life and it keeps you looking forward to the next day every day. And I love what you said. This is, I've never heard this before, but I've always wondered, and you know, I do this show all the time and I talk to people and they go back to find your why,

find your why, why, why, why. And I'm not saying anything bad about that, but you said find the reason why they'll follow you, not just your bad about that but you said find the reason why they'll follow you not just your own why of course their own why we want to make money we want to lead people we want to have people live better lives but why will they follow you if you could look at something like that and will will they follow you if you can't make their paycheck for a couple or even a week shit happens and it's an amazing advice because I like that reference so much more than find your own internal why, because we all want to take care of our family. We all want to do nice things for our friends. And, you know, obviously we want to make a difference in a lot of

people's lives, whether it's one garage door at a time, whether it's one house painting at a time. But I think that's absolutely phenomenal advice from A to Z from the minute we started. The last thing I always like to hit on, Jason, is you talked about one book in particular. Well, you talked about several books, Jim Collins and some of the books that we referenced. The other one was it was by Gino Wickman. Traction. Traction. Yeah. If somebody wants to get more of you, is there anywhere other than watching that show,

anything out there that we could get a little bit more information on or just the next month? Well, just come hang out with me for a day. Come hang out. Come hang out with me for a day if you're in the area. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's great. That would really be it.

But I'll tell you some other books if you're a reader that I love. Yeah. I also love one by Patrick Lencioni called The Advantage. I took my team through The Advantage, then we went to Traction by Geno Wickman. Okay, Geno Wickman also has another book called How to Be a Great Boss. And it gives you tools, nuts and bolts,

of how to lead and manage people on a daily and quarterly basis, how to interact with them, how to evaluate them, which is wonderful advice for people that just don't quite have those tools. There's another book, of course, you know, how to win friends and influence people. That's amazing. When I'll tell you, here's another good one for entrepreneurs. It's called Entree Leadership. You take entrepreneur and leadership and you say it's Entree Leadership by Dave Ramsey. That is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book. And there's another one that we

use in hiring. And again, this one's by Patrick Lencioni also. It's called The Ideal Team Player. And he talks about identifying ideal team players that are humble, they're hungry, and they're smart. When he says smart, he means people smart. Humble, hungry, and people smart people are the ideal team players. And so we use what he taught in that book, and we add to that our own values, and that's how we select our ideal team players for our team is through that book right there. So there's so many good to great.

Jim Collins, there's so many good ones right there. So there's so many, you know, good to great, uh, Jim Collins, there's so many good ones out there, you know, and I tell you what, the millionaire next door is another great book. The way you think about money, we run our company on cash and I'm a strong believer in that. I don't believe that you need to go into debt to start or grow your company. I started my company with, well, I guess you could say it was debt. I had like $1,200 left on my credit card at the time. And that's all I had. I spent that instead of buying groceries. And I went out and sold jobs that day. And I started by printing up my business cards on a printer that I got down to Office Depot with the

last few dollars on my credit card. And I printed out flyers and business cards and I went out knocking on doors March of 1997, Saturday, sunny day, I knocked on 300 doors in one day and I made four appointments, came back that evening, sold three of them, sold the fourth one on Monday and I was in business. And so you don't need to go into debt. And so I think the way we think about money is very important. And I know a lot of small companies struggle and large companies to struggle to pay their bills. And I think the way we think about money, if you're dealing with debt and you want to get out from under that, I would recommend reading Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, which is amazing. But he also touches on that in his Entree Leadership book. But, you know, if you read in the other book, The Millionaire Next Door, you'll see how people typically spend their money and the people you think are millionaires probably aren't. And the ones you think aren't probably are, you know.

And so, you know, I've always told my kids this, you know, when they're wanting to have stuff or whatever. I said, would you rather look like you're rich or would you rather be rich? Because you're probably, unless you're one of like the super, super duper rich, you're not going to be both. You're going to have to choose. So which would you rather be? Would you rather have money or look like you have money? We call them a Scottsdale millionaires. They live in an apartment, but they drive a brand new Mercedes. Okay. Okay. So in Texas, it's called all hat, no cattle. I love that. Yeah, that's great advice. I think credit, as long as you pay it off each, I got to tell you, I fly everybody around for the company, free hotels, I'm a platinum at SPG.

I believe in paying off credit to build credit, because if you don't have credit, it could kill you in the long run for growth because people don't even want to lease you buildings. But as long as you're paying it off and, you know, if you can execute it correctly, it could be used for good. But most people, I would say, get rid of a damn credit card, because until you learn how to be responsible with the money, a credit card could get you into a lot of trouble really fast. So it's all about the discipline, isn't it, Tommy? It is. It is. Everything is just about, you know, showing up to work, trying to be the first one in sometimes the last one out, showing your people that you're a leader and that you're still part of this business.

I had three employees and, you know, we'll get ready to end here, but I had three employees that came on from another company and they go, you're here every day. And then a lot of them see me on the weekend too. And I go, yeah. And they go, this is incredible. You run a company this size and you're here all the time. You're not just flying around. And I go, when I am flying around, it's 99% because of business and it's because we're growing and it's not because I'm goofing off, but it means a lot to have leadership responsibility. And I got to tell you, Jason, I wrote all the books down. I think I have three of them. But go through them again.

And love to have you back on in a few months. I'll let you know when this is coming out. And then what I'd like to do is I'll set up a follow-up call with you about some other things I wanted to talk to you about. So if that works, I'll get with you later on today. I'll send an email. And then I really appreciate you being on the show. Wow. It's been my pleasure.

And thank you so much for having me today. All right. Well, Jason, listen, have a great week. We'll be in touch. And, again, I really, really appreciate it. And all the listeners, tune in for the next show. Thank you so much for listening. This was the Home Service Expert podcast.

Now listen up. Do you want to dominate your market, triple the profit you make without working those long 12 hour days, seven days a week? If the answer is yes, my team and I are opening up some new time slots to help you solve your biggest business challenge. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book a free 30-minute call with our team today. I will repeat that, homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book your free call today.