The Home Service Expert Podcast - Creating a Customer-Driven Company Culture

Episode Date: March 14, 2018

Michel is an accomplished advisor on customer experience and employee engagement, with clients including McDonald’s and Verizon Wireless. He currently owns and operates Baro, a $10M/year restaurant with over a hundred members in the team. In this episode, we talked about employee engagement, leadership, as well as customer experience...

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. What a week it's been. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I am so excited today because we're

interviewing a great man. His name's Michelle Falcon. He's out of Canada. And let me just tell you something. This guy knows everything about employee engagement strategies. You know, we get all these questions on a daily basis. How do I get the right employees? Well, listen, it's not always about getting the right employees. It's about the right employees finding you. And why are they finding you? And what do you do for them?

Listen, this guy's worked with McDonald's. He's worked with Verizon Wireless. He's worked with Domino's. He's worked with some of the biggest financial institutions in the world. This guy was making $10 an hour. Now he's doing over $10 million. Well, within 10 years, he's got a whole belief about treating people right. And let me just tell you, he's grown his business fast. He treats his customers like gold. But I think what you're going to get out of this interview is how much he cares about his employees. And listen, if you want to figure out the formula that works every single time, you're going to be shocked. He tells us what he does on their birthdays.

He tells us what he does one year from when they started working at the company. And it is so important because you can build a company that's built to last forever. And I'm so excited to introduce Michelle Falcon. Let's go ahead and get this interview started. All right, I'm here with Michelle Falcon, and we've got a great surprise. We're going to be going over a lot of great things. I've already done quite the introduction for Michelle. Michelle, I'm happy to have you on today.

How's your day going? It's going well. Thank you so much for inviting me on to the podcast. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the audience has already heard quite a bit about you. I just want to jump into the meat and bones here. I mean, you literally started your career in 2007 as a call center agent. You were making $10 an hour hour and now you're advising huge companies companies like mcdonald's verizon hsbc you know i don't see growth this quickly very often i mean that's 10 years how did you grow that fast i had a really clear vision on what

i wanted my career to look like for in my early 20s for five and ten years out. So having that vision was crucial. Being able to see what that kind of looked like. I would literally write down points and think, what do I want my professional life to look and act like ten years out? And then I just kind of reverse engineered it, leveraged some mentors and people that would support me along the way to get there almost faster. So that way I wasn't making the same mistakes that they did. So I've always been really clear on what I wanted with my career. And now there's my next 10 years is kind of outlined for itself as well, too.

So hopefully I'll be on the podcast 10 years from now and then we can discuss those achievements as well, too. Yeah, absolutely. That's incredible. So you've done this. You had a plan the whole time. What are some of those factors that exploded the growth? I mean, it's huge what you've done, and I'm just fascinated by every single piece of it. I mean, these companies are massive that you consult with. So how do you do it? I mean, what were the key elements? Yeah, on the tactical level, it was, you know,

I set out my days to 9 to 5 when I was a frontline employee and then on the manager level, which helped me expedite my career. 9 to 5 was execution mode for me. 5 a.m. to 8.30 and then in the evenings, 8 p.m. to midnight is when I would just read and study, read and study and bring those ideas that I had and the education that I learned into the business that I was working for, which allowed me to kind of make a name for myself

around my topics being customer experience and employee engagement. So that put some feathers in my hat. And content marketing as well, too. When I left the organization that I was working for, getting on the radar of these companies, I would write content on customer experience, employee engagement, and company culture. And that's what really got me on the radar of these companies. But to take a step back, when I was working for the organization, that being 1-800-GODJUNK, it was having a vision, having mentors, but also willing to do more than the bare minimum.

I always told myself 40 hours a week was a minimum, not a maximum, and was just willing to work harder than my peers which would allow me to kind of separate myself from them you know if you look at it whether it's commerce or sports or entertainment I don't think Derek Jeter works the bare minimum I don't think Beyonce works the bare minimum you know they're talented individuals but they're also willing to put in that extra legwork and work when people are sleeping, work when people are partying. Like, I developed my career in my 20s. I should have been at nightclubs every single weekend. But, you

know, there were times where I was like, screw it, I'm going to read these case studies instead. I'm going to kind of eat dirt for now so that I can be successful in my early 30s. So those are some of the tactical things that I can be successful in my early 30s. So those are some of the tactical things that I would do. Just a lot of education, a lot of studying, but not formal education. I'm not an academic. You know, I think I lasted maybe two or three semesters in university. So just kind of grassroots learning would go on LinkedIn, identify people that worked for companies that I thought I could learn from,

and just say, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but, you know, hey, this is who I am. This is the company that I'm working for. I would love to learn from you, really admire the company that you work for. Could you share 15 minutes of your time? And you know what a great tactic is? I would buy $10, $5 Starbucks gift cards at the time, and when I would reach out to these individuals, that was was complete cold intro that I was trying to learn from, text-back my career, I would say, and again, I'm paraphrasing,

Hey, Joe, I really admire your company. I would love to learn from you. I know your time is valuable. I'm going to have this gift card sent to your office so that you know enjoy this cup of coffee while you're speaking to me are you willing to help and you know who's gonna say no to an ambitious professional right you really have to be kind of soulless to say no to that but just hustling and educating yourself and those are some of the tactical things that i did okay so you know there's two things that i know about it they're on your website they're on your LinkedIn. You talk a lot about customer experience, employee engagement. You know, tell me a little bit about that because the people that listen to these calls, we're in the home service area, whether lot of the guys I work with, they struggle to get really good employees and they don't create that culture. And the customer experience is important to them, but they have a hard time recreating that in their employees. So talk to me a little bit about that

and how you're able to do that. Yeah, I read an article about Lululemon, the billion dollar retailer, and they had something called the customer muse. So a customer muse was a description of their targeted customer. And when I read that, I said, that's great, but I've kind of heard of something like that before. What about an employee muse? So this is something I developed a few, several years ago where I would write down the type of team members we were looking for. You know, what companies did they used to work for? You know, what do they do in their spare time?

So if you're going to recruit customer-centric people, individuals you're going to rely on to deliver that exceptional customer experience that you want, you need to first kind of paint a picture of what this person, know how they behave what their experience is like from there you know who you are targeting and then you can start recruiting rather than you know spray and pray recruiting you put up a job description and you go through 100 resumes and you realize like nothing really is impressive here and the reason why that you're doing that is because you're just blindly recruiting.

So if you're trying to look for these customer-centric professionals, you need to first kind of map out how they behave, what your ideal team member, how they operate and what you expect of them. Then you can start recruiting. The next step to that is how are you interviewing right like if you're still asking what are your strengths and weaknesses in an interview like i i can't you know that's a starting point where you need help because the reason why is we've been asking that question for decades and it's obsolete now you have to ask questions in the interview process to identify if these individuals

are actually customer centric so ask a question i usually keep in my back pocket is describe to me what an ideal customer experience is like and what company delivers that type of experience to you as a consumer and see if they're able to really intimately describe what that looks like those are you know three of the things that I would recommend when trying to find customer-centric team members. Design or map out how they behave, targeted recruiting, and a rigorous interview process. My interview process in my business is now,

I'm now in the hospitality space, so I own a restaurant, so I need customer-centric individuals on my team. But it's a six-step process, and we don't even get to skill set. Do you know how to make a cocktail, or do you know how to serve tables? We don't get to that until the fourth step of the interview process. At that point, I don't care if they know how to make a great cocktail. What I care about is, are you a good person? Do you know how to take care of strangers?

Because that's ultimately what you're asking your team to do is take care of a stranger. Absolutely. And, you know, I was in the restaurant industry. I washed dishes when I was 12 years old in Michigan a year before I was actually able legally to work. And I bussed tables. I went all the way up the line to bartending.

I mean, I used to serve, host, all that stuff. And I learned a lot of customer service in the restaurant industry. And I think that's kind of what has given me the upper hand on a lot of other owners is because I understand I can work with any customer. Even if they're not happy people, you've got to learn to deal with that. And it sounds like you've got a huge restaurant going on right now it's uh is it b-a-r-o right it's it's toronto's best new restaurant borrow yeah borrow yeah you got it so tell me a little bit about the process and how it would relate so you're recruiting let's talk about two things so let's say air conditioning and then for you

it would be more of a restaurant-centric focused employee. But I just want to understand, so if I'm looking for, I own a huge air conditioning company, HVAC or plumbing. Tell me a little bit about where these guys hang out. Instead of doing a shotgun approach and putting the ad out there and trying to filter it, can you kind of give me a direction on where I would go? 100%. I can speak to this perfectly because when I was doing more consulting around customer experience and employee engagement, one of my longest standing clients was an HVAC company based in Nevada. And this is exactly what I helped them do. So I can speak to this very, very clearly. So I talked to you about the employee muse. The targeting is I like to do internal versus external recruiting first. So internal.

Before you even place a job post anywhere, go to your existing team members, your highest performers, and ask them, share the job description with them. Ask them, do you know a friend, a family member, or a former colleague that fits this role? You'd be surprised how many individuals, if you just get them to think for 15 minutes, think about somebody on your Facebook, somebody that emailed you recently,

who fits this role? Because high performers also hang out with high performers as well, too. Next, I would ask your best customers as well, too. Ask your best customers. We're recruiting for this customer service position or customer service reposition. Do you happen to know anybody that might fit this role? We would love to welcome them into our organization. So you haven't even started, you haven't even posted the job ad externally just yet. And the third step to that is ask any business partners or vendors that

you might have. Maybe your suppliers or somebody who drops off your office equipment or printing material, your marketing company. Ask them, do you know anybody? You'd be surprised how many qualified leads you're going to get just by asking the people that work within your business or work alongside of you like a vendor or business partner if I was to do external I would do indeed and in some of those job posting ads or websites alongside that I would do faith the target is Facebook ads so I would target a specific region and you know the age

demographic that you're looking for and anybody that has maybe liked any Facebook pages similar to your industry so maybe you know another trades type of company because you know that they're already you know shown interest in that industry or maybe anybody that targeted ads for people that have liked your competitors so that's how I would recruit both internally and externally. I like to operate in a very thrifty manner, and that's a nice way of just pretty much saying I'm very cheap. So I like to recruit in the most lean way possible. And by the internal versus external model is the best way to do so. That's awesome.

Yeah, that's something I always recommend too, is if I'm even at a restaurant and i see somebody working their their tail end off and i just i'm impressed and they're going out of their way you know a lot of times i'll leave them a business card and say you need to call me and even if it's an entry-level job depending on what it is you know the bartenders do pretty well bus boys and things of that nature might not and they'd be great in the warehouse and different things you see them working the best place to recruit is through your internal network, but also through your experiences. So I 100% wholeheartedly agree with that. I think that's great. And it

really kind of hits home for those HVAC guys and some of the other companies in this niche. So one of the things, you know, reading all about you, failures, nobody really likes to talk about failures. I mean, there are times that I talk about it, but it nobody really likes to talk about failures. I mean, there are times that I talk about it, but it kind of brings me down. And I know I've overcome a lot, but you're really, really open and more comfortable than most people about what you've done in the past that hasn't worked as well and what you've done that has worked well. So can you tell us a little bit about a time that you really failed at something,

but it completely changed who you were and really put you back on track to do it better the next time? Yeah, there's a lot of examples, one of which was while I was consulting and really before I started getting the bigger name clients. This is after shortly after I exited the organization that I was working for for six years. I built software with this developer to help realtors gather customer feedback. And long story short, I realized that realtors don't care so much about gathering feedback in that way. So it was a bunch of wasted time and money for naught I think I generated maybe $2,000 of revenue I don't even know how much I would have developed for

time and just my own personal time but what that taught me was that I was not focused on what I really wanted to do I find that a lot of entrepreneurs will do they'll start having some success in one thing, and then they'll rest on their laurels and say, okay, that's fine. I'm good here now. I'm going to try to do something else, and then something else again. And then they start losing focus on what's really securing their livelihood. So what that told me was, okay, that didn't work. I gained a lot of experience.

I know how developers work now. I know a lot about the real estate industry. But the biggest lesson was I got to be hyper focused on what my purpose is and a half but I'm hyper focused on this industry now and nothing will distract me that was one lesson you know I've made bad hires as well too and every single time I make a bad hire I don't beat myself up on it one of the best lessons that I could share with entrepreneurs regardless of what industry they're in you know if you have team members that you rely on to deliver a great service, to sell, or to market, and if they're not doing a good job, you know, maybe it's not their fault. Like, ask yourself, one,

how did this person get through our interview process? Our interview process is supposed to be rigorous to ensure that, you know, we have culture fits and very competent people. So maybe it was our interview process that failed us and next maybe it's a training program that failed them maybe they are qualified and they are a great culture fit but it's our training program that's actually failing them therefore that's failing our company so on a micro level when i make bad hires which may come across as a failure I actually turned it around as a great learning opportunity. Those are some of the failures that I've had. There's more and there will be more. And I just don't understand. I just don't see the value in dwelling on it. Now, granted, if it loses me a million dollars, maybe my tone would be a little different. But let's just hope that doesn't happen.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think that's a great notion to think about is we've all hired mistakes. And I got to tell you, our process has changed significantly. I mean, we do background checks and drug tests just as a pre-qualifier. That doesn't do anything for us, but that at least tells us, it gets a lot of people that wouldn't normally apply to not apply so or would apply that wouldn't apply so we've done a lot of things like that and then we do we have several different people interview the people we definitely go to our roots which is the people that work here typically people are lining up and what we've done is we've got a lot of employee benefits i think the employees know we care about them a lot here. We do a lot of things above and beyond what most other companies do, at least in the garage door industry. Let me ask you this. Obviously, you've done a really, really good job. You've won all kinds of awards because of just the

employees that you have there. You're voted the best workplace to work in Canada. So what is it that you do? You know, how can you market to great employees? How can you make sure when they find out you're hiring that they come to you? Is there anything that we can learn in the home service industry from that? You need to have somebody to market, right? You need to ask yourself, if I was not the entrepreneur or the business owner, would I genuinely like working here? What other than benefits and healthcare, health coverage, and a salary, what else are you doing? So I believe that you need to be doing things with me and my partners for two hours a month,

and we just talk about the current state of the customer experience and employee engagement within the company. Every Monday at 8 a.m., I invite one high performer to breakfast to sit down with me one-on-one, and we don't talk about work. The only thing I'm looking to get out of that session is, what does this person want to do for the next three to five years? It is now our team's responsibility to get them there, whether it's with the company or without the company.

If they said, Michelle, I want to start a restaurant and it's going to compete with you, I would say, great, bring it, right? Let's get there together. Like there's more, enough customers to go around. And in the home services business, you know, who cares if it's a, you know, a moving company, let's say, and you said, I want to learn here and I want to start a moving company of my own. What a great representation of the brand if you're able to breed another generation of entrepreneurs. Some other things that we do as well, too, is our partner promise. All of our partner's cell phone numbers are posted in our team room. And if you feel like your voice is never, isn't being listened to by management, call us directly. Call my cell phone. I want to know.

I want to hear what's going on. So those are some of the things that you need to be able to do to really take it to that next level. From there, how you market that, you don't have to market it. Your team's going to market it for you. They're going to go back to their spouse at dinner with a big grin on their face. And their spouse is going to say, why are you so happy? And they're going to say, I think I've worked for the best company in the city. They're going to tell their friends at their barbecue. Like, that's just internal marketing. And that's your internal advocates, pardon me.

And that's the only thing that we do. Now, there is another thing that helps kind of go quote-unquote viral is we do a culture video. So it's like a two- or three-minute video that interviews employees and why they like being there. And, you know, it's not actors. It's genuine people that work in the business. It just shows the culture. And that really sends a loud message to anybody that sees this video. For us, recruiting is not difficult.

We have people, we recruit every week, we interview every week, even if we're not hiring. And we have people coming with their resumes all the time because they hear that word of mouth in the hospitality industry in Toronto that this is one of the best places to work for. And, you know, our competitors don't really like us that much because a lot of their people end up

coming over to us and you know it's hard to say sorry but yeah sorry no it's i really like what i'm hearing you know at the end of the day if you could get a company to the point where it goes viral you know i once was talking to a company that does bug spraying. And the guy paid minimum wage. He told me, he said, Tommy, I don't need any help hiring CSRs. Because I actually went up to him. He was in the same building as me. I said, it just seems like you're so productive when I come in here. The whole staff, I mean, some of the times they're on their feet and they're just, they're smiling at the customers. And he said, Tommy, I've got 10 people always waiting to come work here. And I go, you pay minimum wage? And he goes, yeah, but I go out of my way.

We have team parties. We have birthday parties. We do all this stuff internally. And what are some of the things that you guys do? And maybe we can learn in the home service industry that you guys do to make people feel good. Like they really stand out and they do feel that way. So I have about 100 people that work for me me and that's going to grow exponentially in the

next year and a half i have every single person's birthday and a one-year anniversary with the company in my calendar in my google calendar so every day i wake up and it's not every day it's probably every other day there's some sort of celebration that we can have that's actually one of our core values as a company is celebration. We're going to celebrate our customers, and we're going to celebrate each other. So, you know, we do the typical birthdays, anniversaries. But let me tell you something that we do in the interview process. We ask two unique questions.

One is, what is an indulgence that you can't live without? Actually, Tom, answer this question for me i want you to pretend like you are somebody that's interviewing with my company so what is an indulgence that you can't live without that costs less than twenty dollars pizza i would die without pizza so yeah so there's food i, there's a lot of places I like to eat, but I would say I'm a big movie fan. I usually see two to three movies a month, and I can live without it, but I don't want to. Okay, that's wild.

Two or three movies a month. Okay, so great. I would write that question down. Tom, what's a life skill set, not related to work, that you want to learn in the next 12 months? For me, it would be, I want to learn, maybe somebody says, I want to skydive. I want to skydive once in the next 12 months. So what would it be for you, Tom?

Great question. I would say that I would like to do, I do a lot of public speaking already, but I think that there's public speakers that are far better than I am. And I would like to maybe not perfect that, but I think I could become more effective. Okay, great. So Tom, your heart, day one of your tenure with the company, we're going to ask you to arrive at 9 a.m. and at 9 a.m. your mentor that we've assigned to you, mentor is actually somebody not in your department. Why? Because I want to bridge the gap between departments on day one. How often do you work for a company and you don't speak to somebody in accounting or marketing for six months right so that's the first thing that we do is we try to bridge the gap between departments but that mentor is also has an envelope with a

handwritten card signed by me and my partners and two prepaid movie tickets in that because now to get to you because you said one of your indulgence a week ago when we did the interview was to you said you like going to movies so we listened to that and we purchased a gift it's always less than twenty dollars but now i have you in a good place as a team member you're in the euphoric state you're like that's why you asked me that question yeah i've heard everything i've heard chocolate i've heard dark chocolate milk chocolate pizza i've heard cotton candy. I've heard everything. So then, Tom, you're very impressed. Maybe Texas's wife says, you know, this company's amazing. And then you go into training, right?

And your engagement's really high. Therefore, your knowledge retention is higher as well, too. And then you become more productive. Now, let's fast forward one year. On your one-year anniversary, your manager is going to sit you down and congratulate you on being with the company for one year and hand you something to be able to get you that one-year gesture. So you said it was, and we have this all documented, and we will have it on your employee file. You said you wanted to learn how to public speak. Be better at that. What I would do is I would get my friend Jason Gagnard, who's a great public speaker here

in Toronto, and I would ask him to coach you for four one-hour sessions, let's say. So we budget for that on our P&L, the $20 gifts, and we budget for every employee up to $500. Now, you can imagine what our controllers thought when I brought up this gift. 100 employees, $500 a piece, we're talking $50,000. And I didn't stop.

One, we're doing this because I'm the owner of this company. And two, what is the cost of having high employee retention or low employee retention? It's much more than $50,000. So end of discussion. Those are some of the things that we do that most companies don't which is why we have you know I this is the method one of the metrics that I own as a partner it's employee retention our employee retention the last time I ran the numbers about 30 days ago is three kinds higher than the industry average

and that's something I'm very proud of it's because of things like that that's incredible you can do that yeah any industry can do that i don't care what you sell bug spray socks pizza or food or wine or whatever anybody can do that and that's how you can you know just to extend when i worked at for ten dollars an hour, I was 21. It's hard to date women earning $10 an hour. You would think, like, why wouldn't you just get a higher-paying job? Like, it was tough. It was hard to go out and socialize earning that little. But the thing, what I advocate is if you hire correctly,

your team members want meaning over money. I knew back then I'm going to make a lot more than $10 an hour but I was working for this company that taught me, gave me education on how to become an entrepreneur because there was a great entrepreneurial story. So I sacrificed short term for the long game right and you can find people like that like you know you can sell them on the culture, sell them on the education, sell them on whatever and you can find people like at our restaurants we have people leaving money on the table all the time and i'm not doing that

to be you know a jerk capitalist i'm doing it because there's other ways that we can serve them and that's their education and things like that the $20 gifts and the one-year gifts and all that i love it i love it that's good stuff man i love talking about it yeah i can see your passion you know i'll tell you in the home service industry you know we talked about this earlier but i've had a couple bad hires and at the time in my mind like it's almost in your industry would be that power bartender that does six or seven thousand dollars in a day in a ring and And I remember when I bartended, those were like incredible days, but it was like, it was a martini bar. It was like $10 a martini

and I could slang out to a minute, but long story short, you know, a lot of times as a business owner in the home service industry, we might have a top producer, but he doesn't fit or she doesn't fit the culture. And I'm sure that you've had a power player but it's so nerve-wracking to think what am I going to do without them and in my experience it's almost godsent when I do let go of them or we do part ways but tell me a little bit about maybe that time that that's happened to you and really what gave you the power and the mental capacity to handle that because you're giving away money while you're doing it, but you're increasing your culture at the same time. Yeah.

So it's nothing, you know, I'm very protective on our culture. You know, ask anybody that knows me. It's the thing, it literally keeps me up at night. It worries me when our team isn't engaged or happy. Whenever I let somebody go, I'm not, whenever I let somebody go that I know should have been gone a long time ago I don't feel any regret the regret that I feel is not letting them go sooner I always you know when I was doing more consulting and we would have this conversation with clients they're like well

we can't let this person go like no they do this and that this I'm, this. And I'm like, yeah, but they're a jerk, right? Like, other people don't like working with them, and they're not productive because of that reason. So I would always ask, okay, Suzanne, what would you do if Jimmy got hit by a car tomorrow? What are the five things you would have to do immediately? And she would say, one two three four five perfect fire jimmy tomorrow and start with number one yeah you have to do it right like you know

you can't be passive about it like this is your livelihood right and and they're you know look i don't believe in sometimes people aren't even cognizant of their behavior. So I don't believe in, you know, firing quickly. You know, they say slow to hire, quick to fire. I kind of agree with that. But sometimes people don't realize the way that they're behaving. So as a leader within the organization, it's your responsibility to bring it to their attention and create an action plan for them and let them know you know we're going to be i'm going to be monitoring this for the next 30 to 45 days and if there's no change in behavior then we're going to have to have another

conversation um you know team members that perform well and serve the business well deserve the opportunity to kind of right the wrong within themselves but look like a jerk is a jerk is a jerk like the reason i told you about that six-step process the phone screen is to identify that you know this person is professional they answer their phone in a professional manner their voicemail sounds professional uh the second interview is the culture interview this is where I'm trying to identify. And Tom, I haven't even looked at their resume in the culture interview. Why? Because I don't want to be jaded by their past experience. So for example, in my world, how I coach our general

manager and our management teams to interview is do not pick up the resume until the third interview, because that's when you're looking for skill set the reason why is because if they worked let's say they were interviewing to be a bartender and their last job was a bartender at the four seasons hotel that sounds interesting to me and if you knew that going to the culture interview you might neglect that this person is actually not going to fit within their culture because you might neglect that this person is actually not going to fit within their culture because you're so enamored with their past experience that's why i train my team don't even look at their resume until the third interview now you may ask like

well how do you know what their name is well you have your assistant or somebody helping you you know your hr coordinator giving you that info but like i i swear by it i do not look at the resume until the third interview yeah that's really really good stuff i mean you the what you're doing is you're building a business it's almost like that there's a book and and what he explains is you get all the right people on the bus and they help determine where the bus is going and i think that's in the same context it's just getting the right people on board and i I got to tell you, there was a time, Michelle, that I didn't like coming into work because there was a couple of bad apples and they ruined it for everybody. And it was it was a culture shock for me. I mean, I've been doing this industry pretty much since you started 2007.

And and it's it's you just don't know. There's an old saying, you know, one bad apple could ruin the whole batch. But it's it's you just don't know there's an old saying you know one bad apple could ruin the whole batch but it's true i mean these people they really make the everybody else's life hard but you're right you got to give people the benefit of the doubt you don't want to leave everything in your bottom drawer and then just fire them and say this this this this you know i work a lot in hr and we document. It's almost annoying how much we document. We've got 160 employees now. But, you know, I don't really want to talk about any more bad employees because I think that you've done a great job at creating a filter.

Your process stops that. What do you do to get these guys and the gals out there that you see just, oh, my gosh, this is who I want for me forever. This person is going to change this company. Tell me a little bit about how you treat them and promote them and move them up quickly through the corporate ladder or in your case, you know, the restaurant ladder. Yeah, we have a program that's actually coming out soon. It's the working title is Fast Track to Management. So it's a monthly session that our general manager management team will host with that next layer of leadership is what we call them so there's

there's that program we also host quarterly learning and development sessions so on the third floor of our building we will host about a hundred person learning development session and one month it will be you know the first quarter quarter we hosted it this year was on digital marketing and how we market the business, how we use digital marketing to the hospitality industry. Next week, I'm actually hosting a Q&A interview with my friend Jason Gagnard on master networking and building your network. So we're just giving them education. We give a certain amount of people within the business a yearly stipend to spend on their education. It's $1,000 a year. Spend it how you like, you know, with your manager's approval, right? We want it to be closely aligned to also open ourselves up. Like, if you want to become an entrepreneur,

if you want to be a better leader, well, like, we think we're pretty good at it. You know, why don't you just ask us for our time? I'm more than willing to sit down and spend hours every week with my team, you know, that next rising star, and answer their questions. I just make time for it.

You know, I've had other entrepreneurs say, well, Michelle, like, I don't have the time for that. I'm like, I don't get that. You don't have the time to support and coach somebody who helps secure your livelihood? I've never understood that. So, and I went back to what I said earlier, you know, you got to put this stuff on your P and L, um, you got to budget for this every year

or else you're, you know, you need the budget to be able to afford these breakfasts and these learning development sessions. Oh, we also have like a mini library in our, on our second floor. It's, it's small, it's's just a little room but we buy books on health and wellness and finance and entrepreneurship and you know sometimes i'll wake up in the morning and buy 25 books and just put it in this little library and we just have an honor system just take it out and just i hope you bring it back yeah so perhaps we need a better system for that because i think some books haven't been returned back maybe they're slow maybe they're slow readers you know um but uh yeah it's education based and it's just willing to be able to grow that next layer of leadership and and you know

i had a lot of people tom i had a lot of people share their time with me when i was in my early 20s shame on me if I didn't do the same. Absolutely. And, you know, people say the same thing about working out, about seeing their kids, about different things. And what I found is there's always time. You can always make time. That's 100%. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

So, you know, you've been able to scale a business. And it sounds like to me that you're a process oriented. There's Marcus Limon, you know, that show that he teaches people. There's people, product and there's process. Tell me a little bit about what your take is on that, because I have my take. I'd love to hear your take. People, process and product. And, you know, you've built a business built on processes.

So I'd love to hear your point of view on that. Yeah, you know, you've built a business built on processes. So I'd love to hear your point of view on that. Yeah, you know, it's very funny. I was just away at a friend's cottage this past weekend because I was really trying to figure out kind of, you know, I have my personal branding going on as well, too. I do all my blogging and so forth on Michelle Falcon dot com. And I was like, what's my tagline? I want a tagline. And you mentioned this Marcus Limonis thing. I had no idea that that was his thing because I came back with three P strategy,

people, process and profit. So I may not have to completely change that, but I am a very framework driven person. I need step by step guidesstep guides within the business you know I think a business needs that as well too because more often than not the entrepreneur knows what they want right and they've maybe deployed that system a couple times but you need that documented so that if you're scaling the business and it's growing other individuals can pick up this playbook and understand exactly how you have it documented. So that way, you reduce your margin of error and you map out exactly how you want it deployed. I believe in investing in people. When I was studying my early 20s, I came across an article on Herb Keller.

He was the co-founder of Southwest Airlines. And he said, we're going to start off an airline. And he was a lawyer. He had no business starting an airline. But he did in Texas. And he said, we're going to be different than every other airline. We're going to start with people first and then customers and then the profit will follow. And up until maybe two years ago,

I think they were profitable 37 quarters in a row or something like that. And doing that in the airline industry is absolutely absurd. And that's what I thought to myself in my early 20s. I was like, I think this guy knows a thing or two. I think I'm going to follow a similar model. So that's how the whole employee engagement customer experience kind of became my thing, was I saw people focusing on sales and marketing. And I said, you know what?

There's enough salesmen and marketers in the world. I'm going to focus on these two things but then I I soon recognized that you know making customers happy and you know making employees happy that's great right if they're all smiling but smiles don't pay the bills all the time so what I recognize is you need to have frameworks in place to make sure that those things actually happen so that customer loyalty increases, employee engagement is high. So I've always been an assistance person. I always need to document things so that my management team can run with it and execute.

I love it. I love it. You know, I'm sitting here. My assistant used to work for the airline. She got a job. Her biggest accomplishment, she said, was going from United to Southwest as a stewardess. And she said, the thing about this industry, Tommy, is if you used to work at another airline, they normally don't want you to come into this.

And she said, you got to always tip them. So yesterday I was coming back from Texas and I gave the lady 20 bucks. And the tear came out her eyes. She came back to me an hour later with a long, I'm looking at her right now. It's a huge paragraph on how she's a single mother and the $20 gesture is a reminder of God's provision. And she really went into detail, but I'm going to tell you, I'm never going to get rid of this napkin. And it really makes me think more about southwest because she works there i mean yeah it's 20 but i just think wow this lady took the time she wrote a personal

letter to me thanking me and you know i don't think that would have happened in a lot of other airlines so it's funny that you mentioned that so that's a good point so if i could interject yeah no that's so did you did you give her the 20 because she provided you a great experience? Yes, of the way. The service wasn't amazing. It wasn't bad. I mean, she just got there. It was the first engagement with her. But the fact is that my assistant told me always do that.

You have no idea how long it goes. And after that, I mean, you should have seen. It wasn't because of the money. It was because of the gratitude from her. She was just like speechless. An engaged employee delivers a great customer experience the customer experience is delivered to the guest or the customer in your case it's you you are now inspired to tell me about that experience that's why people say customer experience is marketing now i'm going to remember your story, Tom, the next time I see Southwest logo

somewhere and that's just branding, right? So that's why when I was doing a lot more advising and now when I speak with my partners, my management team is like, guys, the reason why we have to deliver this customer experience amongst others is it's our greatest form of marketing. Let our competitors spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in traditional. We're going to do this stuff. We're going to do it really well, and we're going to grow organically because of that.

And now you, Tom, are probably going to apply Southwest again and again and again, and that's just customer loyalty driven by customer experience. So there's economics behind this. Absolutely. It's not just people smiling. There's true dollars in this.

Yeah, you know, I got a coach for my CSRs, they're power selling pros, and they teach so much about attitude. And I can tell you that there's certain CSRs, the call center people that I've hired in the past, the last over the last 10 years that if I went out to one of their calls, the customer was like putty in my hands. They were like, wow, you this company must be amazing. They're like that person made my day when I got to talk to him or her. They literally genuinely care. And it goes such a long way.

Customer service is you cannot you cannot fill a void. You need to find the right people. And me for a person to train by time I fly them out here, put them in a hotel or the apartment we just got, you know, I pay them $500, I get them their tools, but there's an opportunity cost on top of all this. And people don't understand it costs me about $12,000 to do a bad hire. So the process keeps getting refined, refined, refined, refined, because a player, and I look at three things. I look at conversion rate.

That means if I booked you an appointment, Michelle, and I said, this is a booked appointment, you need to convert on that. So I look at conversion rate. I look at your average ticket because it's important, like you said. We can't lose money. But most importantly is customer satisfaction. And we've got metrics in place that we don't have to. Automation does everything for us. We don't have to, automation does everything for us. We don't need to call the customer. They get a survey automatically from us. And we know exactly

the guys that improve month to month to month. And we know the CSRs, how they're doing for month to month to month. And I got to say, it's pretty inspiring to hear what you do. And you've given me a lot of great ideas. And if anything, I think I'm so invested in marketing and sales that sometimes I don't take enough time to go to the CSRs. Like I bought a pizza the other day last weekend and little things like that. But it's still the one-on-one time is something that goes a long way. Flowers on Mother's Day for the women that have, you know, that are mothers. The little things, it doesn't always have to be money. It could be time. It could be something as simple as you're doing great or a parking spot for an employee for, you know, employee of the month. And I wanted to ask you, you know, we'll wrap it up here. There's a few other things I wanted to

go through, but you got the right systems. What I used to do at the restaurant is we'd have a team meeting, right? We'd have the manager on duty that day that was walking the tables. He was, you know, actively actively whether he was doing food running or whatever he'd do a shift leader meeting and we talk about what's on special today what the goals were for today we talk about beating the the shift from before right so he made it competitive and it was really fun it was cheesecake factory actually i mean they used to give us free meals if we hit certain things. I mean, it was a great company. I learned a lot from there.

But what do you do? What kind of systems or processes do you do to ensure that employees are motivated and they do great work? Yeah, so let me, I'll talk about, I talk about it a lot, but I'll narrow it down to two. When we have pre-shifts, our managers select one of our five core values. And that is the goal for the day or for the evening so perhaps it you know two of our five core values one is celebration the other one is foresight so you know let's focus on foresight guys you know if you see one of your team members in the weeds and they're struggling have the foresight to go help them and assist them by

clearing a table for them. So that's how we coach them on core values and make sure that they're constantly thinking about our core values. We even went to the extent of having our core values stitched on the inside of our servers and bartenders apron. So the customers can see them, but the team members see them every single day that they put that apron on. So that's one thing. But the next thing is what I developed, and it's called micro-customer experiences. So what a micro-customer experience is, is a small, subtle, memorable, and affordable gesture that you do for customers that resonates with them for years. So I'll give you an example. We have our experience coordinator, and she books all of our reservations that are inbound. And what we train her and our servers and bartenders is listen for instances where we can really do something memorable for our guests.

So, for example, let's say I called into Barrow and I spoke to Laura, our guest experience coordinator. Now, whether it's a guest experience coordinator or a receptionist or a salesperson, whoever, anybody can do this. Book the reservation for Michelle Falkman. Okay, I'm going to do a little what I call social stalking with integrity. I would check out Michelle's social media profile, see what he tweets about. Well, if you saw my Twitter bio, it says that I'm a Rottweiler dad meaning i have a rottweiler if i came into the restaurant and i sat at my table and there was a a dog toy with a handwritten card that would

blow me away right absolutely blow me away i'll give you another example a couple came so are you familiar with tim hortons it's like the u.s is dunkin donuts but yeah in canada yeah very familiar tim hortons has these things called timbits they're little like circular donuts and this couple came in from europe and it was their last meal before they head to the airport and our team member asked them how you know was your was your stay and the couple said it was great and within the conversation they said we never got to go to tim hortons though we really wanted to try timbits so what we have in our business is we have a rule whereas if you learn something about the

guest we don't care how busy it is we're going to do it to complete these to complete these gestures for our guests so for that guest in particular one of our hostesses ran to tim hortons got 20 timbits and we presented to them at time when they received their bill so anybody can do this but to be able to do it right you have to hire correctly have customer-centric people within your business that want to do these things, but you also have to empower them and give them the green light to do these things. Our managers don't need to approve these things. We have a monthly budget that allows us to purchase these small guests, but other than that, everybody's got the green light.

And this is closely aligned with our core values. Again, as I mentioned, our number one core value, the one that is listed first, and not to say that it's more important than the others, but it's to celebrate our guests and to celebrate each other. And that's how I'm able to build a very people-focused business. I love it. So you sound like an avid reader. You've been in Forbes.

You've been in all these different publications, Time Magazine, Inc.com, you know, just Yahoo Finance. Tell me a little bit. I'm a big book reader. I live and die on Audible. I mean, I go through books all the time. I listen to them two and a half times the speed usually. I mean, I really try to crank through them.

I bookmark this stuff. Tell me a little bit about your top three books and try to cater them a little bit towards the home service industry if you could. I know there's everything kind of, as a business owner, we're all the same. We have employees, but

as long as it's just not geared towards the restaurant industry. But tell me a little bit about three great books that you'd recommend and why. Coincidentally, one of them would be start with why uh by simon cynic have you heard of the book yes i have okay so i i like that one it really helped me understand why am i doing this why am i doing any of this yep so i would recommend that one i would recommend one that i actually have in my hand right now. I literally just grabbed it off my desk. It's called Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. And I'm only halfway

through, but the premise of the book is that regardless of how successful you are in whatever you do, don't let your ego get the best of you. And it gives some real life examples dating back to like the 1900s to even you know today so that is the second book that i would recommend the third book i would recommend is shoe dog the autobiography it's the biography rather of phil knight the founder of nike and why i would recommend about that is just perseverance like the amount of failure he he had to and in trials and tribulations that he had to overcome to build that global brand it was i you said i'm a good reader i'm a good online reader i'm not the best like reader of books but i'm trying to get better but i could not put that book down i read it in like a day and a half wow that's saying a lot yeah but um yeah so those are the three books that i would read you know ego is the enemy is the

one that i'm reading right now and i'm really like i'm after this podcast i'm going to hockey and then i'm coming back and i'm gonna crank up this book so i'm looking forward to that that's awesome i love it so we talked about a lot of stuff i think your top your major things that you really focused on is employee engagement and your customer experience. I mean, obviously there's so much more than that, but if you had, you know, as we wrap up here, the people that listen to this, some of them are larger companies. They might have 30, 40, 80 employees. Some of them might only have three. What can you tell you tell us you know from a home service

point of view that maybe we haven't talked about or or it's gone in deep deep discussion about don't view your customers as transactional relationships i don't know how many times your customers might use you let's say you're a moving company and you only, you know, people, I don't know, I don't know what the national average is on how often people move, but, you know, you're not in the quick service restaurant business. You have the luxury of your customers undivided attention for what, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours. use that opportunity to learn things about them and build a genuine connection with them too often i see companies just go in and out of the relationship like i moved recently and i hired a moving company and it was awful like it was like i gave them so

much ammunition to build a relationship with me like i gave them so many like almost intimate details that they could have used to create an experience I had never seen before, but they fail. So that would be my advice is just make sure that your entire organization recognizes that you're not in the transactional business, that you have the opportunity and the luxury to create, that you have the luxury of the customers that have provided attention to create these great, great experiences for them,

which ultimately will increase customer loyalty and increase your referral-based marketing. So you've talked a lot about customer service. You've talked a lot about employees. I want to know one more thing personally. It's not bothering me, but I feel like I just need to know. Sure. So like I said, I do a lot of marketing and a lot of sales. And sales is not a bad thing.

A lot of people think sales is a bad thing. Now, when I worked at a restaurant and I would train people, the first thing I would train is if they said I like a vodka tonic, I'd say, would you like that to be a double tall? And then the next thing I would say is what vodka do you prefer, Kettle One or Sky? Because I give them two options. And then they say, well, is one of those the house? And I said, no, absolutely. We could get you the house. But the point is, it was sales driven.

That's the way that I taught. It was with a smile. It was after I brought out the waters. There was a lot of customer service that went along with that. But we haven't talked a whole lot about sales. Tell a little bit about your perspective because i know one of your three p's is profit so i think we just needed to bring us back into there because everybody listening understands i think what you're trying to do and it's amazing but i want to make sure that we don't lose sight of you're in business to make money yeah so let me you know i am a capitalist i believe in profit i you know

like i love smiling employees and smiling customers but if i'm not profitable then something's not working right so let it be known that i do believe in profit first for sale let's talk about sales for a second i've had a quote that i you know thought of a few years ago and it goes like this and this is I was coaching a Lexus sales people on an engagement and I said you haven't earned the permission to cross or upsell your customers until you've built trust first think about that for a second you haven't earned the permission up cross or upsell your customers until you've earned trust first because when a salesperson tries to upsell and cross sell you all these sorts of products and services more often than not our backs go up against the wall because they're like oh i'm being sold and you go into defense mode

well what if you took a different approach to it you generally try to build a relationship with them get to know them listen to them then them, then their guard starts coming down. And then when you do recommend that double or you recommend that additional service, they're more likely to convert because they trust you and they don't just see you as a salesperson. Now, for the organizations listening, that's up to the leadership of the company, the entrepreneur, the executive management team, to provide the education to the frontline employees to be able to actually do that well. You can't just be like, I'm selling cross-sell more. Go on and do it.

You need to provide them the education first so that they know how to identify different customer personality types, the times to be able to do it. What should I do first before I try to sell? So my team are trained salespeople too. It's a module within our week or 10-day training program. They're selling you. You just don't know you're being sold. I love it.

You know, when you do the DISC assessment, all my managers are designated trainers of DISC, and we teach an eight-step process. And the process starts with building rapport before you get to the home. And then if one of the things we always encourage and we'll, we'll reimburse you is if you want to buy that customer a coffee or, or a soda or ask them on the way, that's an automatic instant rapport builder. Number one, number two is we teach them three questions. This is a home how long have you lived there that's after you handed them a business card and you smile and then we say the second question is this so after you know how long they live there you're

walking through their home you're getting to know their dog you're playing around you you see a lot in a garage door too because in a garage you got your golf clubs your mountain bikes your your hunting equipment but then we say what exactly is going on with the door? And based on that, we say, when is the last time it was looked at? So those could go vice versa to each other. But what you get is you get them start talking a lot more. And then you start talking, find something in common with them. So if somebody's got a Swiss Army watch on at a restaurant

and you own a Swiss Army watch, it's just something, you could build rapport that way. But if they're a D, it's just something it's a, you could build rapport that way. But if they're a D they probably don't want to talk to you about their watch. But if they're an I, which most people are, uh, I believe it's the majority of people are S's and then a lot of people are I's and then C's and then D's only 4%. So it's really interesting to hear just even from a restaurant point of view, it's really about building that rapport up front. And, you know, don't go into sales. Sales come afterwards.

They just do. I mean, what do you guys do if you want them to sell? Do you guys have, like, a contest ever of who could sell the most of, like, I don't know, like Prime Rib? We do gamification a lot. We do this thing called – this is a good question for our general managers and our management team, but the other day I came in the restaurant and they were playing this survivor game where each night you had to sell a certain amount of items on our menu, and if you didn't, you were voted off the island.

So the engagement stuff works, and it drives sales. Is it that week? I think that gamification contributed to us having like our top sales weeks a year a week over a week so you know i like to drive sales i coach our management teams to drive sales through gamification everybody loves it i love that competitive people that is uh it's great stuff listen i don't want to keep you any longer i've learned a lot i definitely want to keep you any longer. I've learned a lot. I definitely want to get you back on here.

I'm excited to go start some of this stuff. I can't wait for my meeting tomorrow morning. But listen, I really appreciate your time, Michelle Falcon. It's been a pleasure. I definitely think people are going to want to hear more from you. And thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. If there's anything else you want to leave on, that'd be great. And really, really, really, like I said, I'm in debt to you for being on here.

And I think I've learned a lot. And I think the listeners are going to get a ton out of it as well. So thank you. And yeah, thank you so much for having me. If anybody has any follow-up questions, you can just find me online at Michelle Falcon, Michelle Falcon, first and last name. All right, sir. Thank you so much.

Again, I appreciate you. All right. your life. All right, sir. Thank you so much. Again, I appreciate you. All right. Take care. All right. Bye-bye. This was the Home Service Expert Podcast. Remember to subscribe to my show so that you're the first one to know when there's a new episode. If you're a subscriber, awesome.

Leave us a review and tell us what you like and, most importantly, what you don't like so we can continue to improve the show. And if you're ready to scale your business like I did, check out my free mini course right now at homeserviceexpert.com forward slash mini course. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week.