The Home Service Expert Podcast - Cultivating a Top-Notch Customer Experience by Hiring the Right Employees

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $100 million-plus home service business with over 400 employees in 16 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, host and A1 Garage Doors owner Tommy Mello answers your biggest questions about sales negotiation, advertising, training & recruitment…

If you look at statistics and understand significant data, and you ask the right questions, and you've got behavioral questions that are lined up throughout the test to see if they're lying, it's amazing what you can figure out about a human being. There's no right or wrong answer, which I love. It just throws you in a different quadrant, and it says you'd be best off in this job.

I think there's a rule for everybody in this company, for every quadrant. It's just depending on what you want to be. Some managers would never be the best techs, but they're the best sales trainers we have. 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. We are live. All righty then. So if you haven't bought my book, Home Service Millionaire, you're crazy. Go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. And I'm writing the second book, which is going to be nutty and amazing and change your guys' life. If you haven't got the Home Service Millionaire course, you're crazy.

Go to course.homeservicemillionaire.com. And if you haven't joined our free Facebook group, Home Service Expert, go there right now, homeserviceexpert.com and join. So many things going on. We got a new CFO. We got a new CMO coming on. Training Center is badass. That'll be done in two weeks. You guys want to see a training center? Come see this shit. This is going to be unlike anything anybody's ever seen before. It'll handle 100 technicians per month. I've got a lot of questions going here. It's going to be a great day today. So we're doing some awesome things here. What we decided to do is go heavy in the recruiting side. We're working on internal promoters. Internal promoters. What does that mean? Each employee

turns into a promoter and they make $1,500. But what I'm going to do is when I get them in certain programs that I pay for, or whether I pay for the baseball team that there's a coach or hosting a huge real estate event for one of my guy's wife's who's a realtor. And I'll give them a thousand, but I'll spend the 500 per employee to do other things. So there's a lot of opportunities. This is just getting easier and easier. It's crazy. We got LOIs going out. We got three going out right now. We're pacing still at 151 million with our growth rate, but there's anything three going out right now. We're pacing still at 151 million with our growth rate. If there's anything that's difficult right now, I'd say we're getting the right numbers to manage what goes on week to week. You can't wait month to month. It's becoming easier.

The networking is becoming stronger. I put myself out there with you guys right now, and it's working. People like me and they want to tell me their secrets because I tell everybody mine. And you don't have to keep secrets. You got to share. You got to learn your own industry and get out there and meet the people. You guys hopefully seen what I was doing last week in Philly. It was badass. Let's just go to Home Service Expert. And I know there was a couple things on here that I wanted to get to first. So let's see. Bill Russell was the best host ever.

Thank you. Lance was amazing. Oh, yeah, Ken had a question. So let me read this question out. My sales team and I are discussing duplicating the sales price book so we can be competitive on sales calls that we bid against others and charge higher for the demand calls as it's an emergency. My question to them was, how do we make sure that we don't quote their neighbor on a higher

referral as to what was quoted to the original buyer to the emergency price book. They said, put a tag on referral service on the job that we quoted out of the price book instead of the sales price book that is more competitive. So we stopped losing jobs. The sales guys are also taking a cut of commission because the company is taking a cut in profit. This is mostly the slow season of January through March. What is your thought on having a separate price book for this? The whole thing is that we would rather get 5% of $250,000 in sales or reducing the price. I never worked in a seasonality business, Ken, but I'll tell you what I believe. I believe in different discounts. If I go to Walmart,

they will match anybody's prices. So rather than effing with a bunch of different crap like that, I would say the best thing that I would do in that circumstance is to say, we've got an out of season discount promotion going right now. And that way you can never get in trouble and say, we got two price books. You know, it doesn't make sense to me why anybody would have two price books, other than if you're in a really depressed market maybe, but in my opinion, I would say we've got a great promotion going on, and here's why.

Your neighbor comes a month later, you say, hey, we're in season now, that promotion doesn't exist. They go, oh, okay, that makes sense. You guys are still doing an amazing service, but that's bullshit number one. I don't want 5% of anything. 5% is crap. Yeah. I'd rather have 5% of 250 grand, but I'd rather have 15% of a lot more money than that. And I think it's salesmanship. It's eye contact. It's body language. It's tonality. It's advertising the right clients. You're right. I'm not in your business, so I don't know, but I'll tell you this. If any one

of my guys came to me and said, we'd rather have 5%, I'd say, yeah, go keep your 5% because you got another job working for a competitor. Just my point of view. How much should I spend on Google ads as a brand new business? Well, if you draw a little circle here on your sheet of paper, I want you to put in here the customer journey. Advertising, and then I want you to put CSR answering the call. Then I want you to put dispatch. Then I want you to put tech. Then I want you to put clothes. You end up with a big, nice circle.

If your CSRs are answering 100 answering 100 of the calls no abandonment rate if your dispatchers are dispatching the best technician to the right guy at the right time if your technicians are trained eye contact body language high closing rate and their closing rate is high and their average tickets high i say advertise 10 in a new market i'd even save up to 15 but i wouldn't do it all on Google Ads. There's four algorithms on Google. I would do my GMB and I'd optimize the shit out of it. There are so many things that you could do to optimize your GMB. First thing is respond to every review.

Put keyword-rich content in there. And make sure you're posting to your Google My Business page every day. Make sure your citation sites. There's a thing called NAP, name, address, phone number on all the citation sites need to match. A lot of things go into GMB. Optimize your GMB first, turn on LSA ads, local service ads, Google guarantee, blah, blah, blah. You should know what that is. If you don't, don't even think about doing pay-per-click.

When you do PPC, make sure your quality score is at the best it could be, and make sure you're taking advantage of Google Analytics because you can tell what your quality score is, your click-through rate. And as your quality score goes up, which takes time, your cost goes down and your conversion rate goes up. So easy things. But I'll tell you what, if your CSRs aren't answering the calls, you're not available on weekends. You're not available for nights. Don't spend shit on PPC. Congrats to the new CFO. Thank you, Ken Walls. What's up, brother? Oh, how about a book, Ken? Ken Walls, I think you'll appreciate it. Giant Success by Doug Wing is your homeboy. I think I've got a lot of questions here. So let's dig in Ashton. I've heard you recommend Google my business quite a bit. What Google based

marketing services would you recommend for a young business just starting out? You know, I don't want to recommend anybody. I've done this too many times. And the problem is, and I got a lot of guys I recommend, but I'll just tell you, I think Forrest does an amazing job on PPC. I think Search Kings does an amazing job on LSA ads. There's certain guys that optimize GMBs. There's other guys who are organic. Obviously, one SEO is probably the best for SEO that I've seen that you want to spend a couple grand a month with them because it takes six months to nine months to make that work. It's a consistency thing. And what I like what Bill does is he puts tracking cookies on a lot of the

stuff and he understands attribution. If anybody tells you you're making money with me, trust me, and they don't show you conversion tracking and actually real freaking phone calls tell them to go to hell so i asked you no matter who you choose say i need to see the facts and i want opt out within 30 days watch your contract because they're going to try to tie you in a 90 and here's the problem is if i told you a company they're really freaking great today the minute i tell you them and hundreds well the 30 40 000 people that might listen to this unless the company's like me and able to handle 100 technician ramp up a month with vehicles and have the right suppliers you know what happens is there's talented in this agency i think one seo could handle it i think search kings that you know what happens is there's talent in this agency i think one seo could handle it i think

search kings that you know and some people don't have the same experience that i have you know i think certain times i get treated a certain way because they pissed me off i'm going to tell all of you about it so you know i don't like to do this there's certain people i like to say they could handle a lot of load. One SEO is one of them. But a lot of things I want you to do yourself. I want you to come up with great content. If you're not writing your own content, if you're not literally taking the time to just talk into the microphone and then you can transcribe it, you're nuts. You are the expert. So you should be coming up with your own content, interviewing your own people. You should be posting on your GMBs on a daily basis. There's just certain things that are so little effort that you just put into a routine or a Monday board.

Let's go see here. Robin, I'm working on this. There's a lot of great people. I'm telling you, I'm working on it. How to operate profit first in construction where we have daily expenses? You see what profit first is, it's about building the seven different accounts. The difference is, is you want to pay yourself first, right? Yes, there's daily expenses, no matter what. Look, we just had to expand our gas card. We're

going to spend three and a half million dollars in gas this year. That's based on the trend going where it's going. So what's my number one question? How do we optimize the gas card more? And how do we get money back on the gas card? $3.5 million. Let me just tell you something. $3.5 million. If I got 3% back, do you realize that's $105,000000 and all I got to do is ask for it and figure out a way to get it? I mean, that's so cool about these huge numbers that we're doing is boom, there's 105 grand. I just asked my manufacturer for half a percent co-op back. He said, fine. Well, if I spent 20 million, that's an an extra 100 grand half a percent free marketing you know how many of you guys for asked for this stuff i doubt a lot of you are asking for it and i'll tell you what you should be asking for it you should be getting it let's see just read

your book and implementing your google ideas just landed me a $61,000 job today. Bam. Love that. Tommy guns, my man, Cody, Tommy, any tips for new home service HVAC techs? Well, the best tips I would say is read books on body language, understanding the eye contact, understanding you're hiring for personality. I would say when you walk into a job, you're really question-based selling. Oh, really? What makes you say that? Asking tons and tons of questions. I always tell this story.

A guy walks in the best buy, goes, buys. For some reason, he doesn't want an Apple. He wants a Microsoft computer. Says, I'm willing to spend up to 20 grand. Boom. Guy shows him a 20 grand computer. I love it. It has everything I need.

Guy says, does this have Windows 11? He goes, hell yeah. It's got the latest version. He goes, then F off. I hate Windows 11. Should you always ask a question? Does this have the best insulation? Well, it depends on what you're looking for. As far as insulation, we've got several types. You might ask me why you asked a question like that. I got the opportunity to go to Horizon, which is an amazing, huge company. And they were doing their training. Thank you, David Geiger, by the way. They said they were doing question-based selling. So at every question, you have to ask a question.

They were talking about pain funnels and all kinds of cool stuff. Joe Cresares, Colin, some of you guys said hi. What a man. What a man. What a man. Well, you want to know my number one tip to win? You ready for this? Number one tip that every single person needs to listen to right now, slow down.

I want you to go as slow as possible. Don't take out any power tools. Start mirroring the person. If they talk like this, then you should talk like this. And it sounds really unnormal for me because I talk pretty fast. So I want you guys to slow down and try to triple the time you're at the house. Literally, if you're there 45 minutes, I want you there two hours and 15 minutes. I want you guys to double down. If you could, triple down. If you run three jobs a day, you're a fool. You should be running two. If you're running five, you're silly. You're silly. Silly, silly, silly. Slow down. Get to know the person. Ask them a lot of

questions. Get to know what they really want. Diagnose the person before the problem. All right, let's go to the next question here. There are so many social media platforms. I'm an HVAC business. How do I choose which media site to use? It's so confusing. Well, let's just go to the big ones. We're talking social media. Number one, you want to use Google. Here's the deal. You're talking about marketing, recruiting. There's a lot of examples here, but Facebook is still the number one platform for your avatar in HVAC. TikTok's not the one you want to go to. If you're recruiting, TikTok might be the best one or Instagram. YouTube is a whole different animal.

If you're looking to get customers, YouTube could be good. If they're saying how to maintain an HVAC unit or whatever, you just have to have the right content, getting the right searches. So here's what I say. You pick one that you know is getting a lot of action and you stick to it. And if you can't make that one successful, then don't go to another one. Because if you suck, you're going to suck at the next one. So unless you figure out how to talk to the right people, read the right books, ask the right questions, you're never going to be good at any one of these marketing sources.

So I say pick the biggest and best that there's been. Oh, that one's got too many people. Let me just tell you an internet scam. Oh, this one's new. LinkedIn's new. LinkedIn lead gen. They promise you $ dollars a lead fifty dollars a lead guaranteed in-home visit bullshit but if you can't be good at one you're not going

to be good at the next you got to ask a million questions i like to dominate one and then move on to the next one and continue to dominate do you have daily and weekly checklists for each position if so how do you motivate your team to do them there's not a checklist for everything there's certain roles that don't need checklists. There's certain things that do. There's inventory that needs checklists. You know, what I try to figure out is how to prioritize what's going to get the most done. If you go through your day, it's the ability to learn how to think a certain way.

It's the ability to literally work and have accountability partners and focus on what's the biggest thing I need to get done today. And you might know it. Look, after this, I've got five other huge things I got to get done. And I got some monster shit done today. I'm talking monster shit. I'm talking more than most people get done in a month I did today. And I'm just getting going. Listen, Elon Musk has the same amount of the time. Warren Buffett has the same amount of time. They just learn how to use it better, wiser, stronger, faster, make better decisions. Jeff Bezos, better, stronger, faster.

If you guys learn how to figure out how to prioritize the big decisions and allow people to do their jobs and you hire the right people, which most of us suck at, we don't do the interviews right. Read the ideal team player, by the way. So daily checklist, you know, there's a lot of things you want to have, right? We just built an awesome tool, dude, that every one of my employees, managers, supervisors, leads, they can all go into this page and we're building a subdomain that goes into it. And I think we're going to call it Tommy Feedback, I think, or something, or Mellow Feedback. But it's just going to be mellowfeedback.com. And it goes to the site. They fill out this thing. And it's for praise. I think one of them was Mellow Praise. I'll go praise these people, 20 of them, 30 of them, 40 of them a day. And the message might sound like this. Hey, Jimmy, how you been, bro? We haven't talked in a few months. I just wanted

to say congratulations. Your manager Tim's looking out for We haven't talked in a few months. I just wanted to say congratulations. Your manager Tim's looking out for you and I'm looking out for you. I see where you're at. I pull up the service. I do a screen share. Look, I see you here. I noticed you. You're kicking ass. You're in the dream manager program. I appreciate that. I heard you bought a house last week. I just wanted to tell you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. It means a lot to me that you're part of this team. And the fact is, now I'm going back to this podcast. The fact is, it really is.

I'm so proud. I talked to a guy last night. He beat cancer. He's out of Tucson. And I talked to him for a half an hour. You know, I've seen him in training and talked to him like, great job. But, you know, I said, hey, listen, man. It means a lot to me

ask them a lot of questions about it i genuinely care i can't teach you guys to genuinely care but when you do watch what happens how do you motivate your team to do them well there's a simple accountability we've got these forms that l evie kind of pioneered it then i made them into forums but the steps of delegation okay here's what needs to get done here's why it needs to get done here's what you have available to get it done here's the priority assigned to it here's what it needs to be done by here's the meeting schedule here's the consequences and not you know the gifts if you've accomplished it here's an opportunity to look back and then they get a copy. And the biggest important thing is there's a John Hancock by them and me on the bottom. You know, you got to ask yourself, first of all, how do you get data

integrity? We've got a whole team called data integrity. Let the decisions, listen, you cannot manage people in groups. You think your group meetings matter? Maybe they can move a little, a little bit. I want to read you guys something. This was earlier today. Hey, Tommy, this is blank, one of your Phoenix texts. I don't know if this is really your number, but just in case, I really wanted to say I'm sorry. Just had my one-on-one today. And to say the least, I'm mad as hell and completely embarrassed.

I don't want to see other texts and embarrassed to be seen in the shop. I just wanted to say thank you for the opportunity. And I hope today does not repeat itself. And I said, what happened? So the numbers, unfortunately, shows that I'm the 19th worst tech in the company. I truly did not feel I was on that path. There were some errors on the report, but I've never been that kind of employee. On that level, I would expect to be fired, but I'm really enjoying what I do. I know I have a

lot of learning to still do, but I didn't expect to hear that. I thought I've been doing good. I said, gotcha. Let's go get him, buddy. And I'm going to reach out to him later. But do you think these guys care? Do you think they want to win? Do you think they text me for nothing? Do you think that happens on a daily basis? Absolutely all day, every day. I can give you another 10 examples of that. If I scroll through my phone two times, you know, when I told him last night, the guy that beat cancer, I said, you know, what's so cool about you winning is you don't have one person on this earth that wants you to win as bad as I do, because I've made it that way

that when you make a lot of money, I do really well too. So when you kick ass, sometimes even your loved ones say, man, he's changing this and that. I say, I hope you change. I hope you start dressing a little nicer, driving a little cooler, driving a nicer car, kicking back, believing in yourself. There's no bigger fan than me for my people. There's no bigger fan and it's on purpose. We've set it up that way. We worked hard on the performance pay to line up with their success. I think that's super, super important. Let's see here. I'm about to finish community college. I'm moving to the state college campus. I currently have three builders, commercial and residential. Do you suggest selling the builders out to a competitor

or try to find someone to run it while I'm away to school? Whoa, that's a tough question, brother. Here's why. I want to know what you're selling shit at. If you're selling it for piss cheap, no one wants your crap. How much money are you making is first of all, what I would ask. Secondly, do you have the right documentation and ready to even sell it or have somebody else run it and make sure you've got a legitimate lawyer to draw

out the paperwork. They don't steal that account. And then you got to build checklists and then you're going to be interrupted. And then, you know, here's the deal, man. That's a tough one, man. There's so many other questions. What did I say earlier with clients? You got to ask questions with questions. So I'd fire back with you 10 questions. You'd fire back a question for me. And then I'd give you 10 more questions.

And I'd start peeling that onion, peeling it, peeling it, peeling it, peeling it to where you come to the conclusion and you say, oh my gosh, I knew the answer all along. But you got to ask yourself the right questions too. Rebecca, I desperately need to train and recruit door techs. I personally don't have the skills to do the work, let alone train. I've looked into online courses, expensive. Liftmaster has an academy I've enrolled my two guys in, but I need one more. Do you have any advice? Rebecca, the best thing you could do

is get as much time and energy invested into one guy and get some commitments with Al Levy and Emmanuel together and build some standard operating procedures. Then have that one guy becoming your trainer in the field. I had to do that for years. The training that I provide cost now over $25,000 per tech. I've got full-time trainers. I put them up in an apartment complex. I train them for 60 days. We feed them. We love them. We shower them with amazing Vataboys. We give them everything we've got, including our hearts. And so that's where it starts is you got to start somewhere and it's not going to be easy. And I can tell you that I'd love to train your guys, but the minute I train your guys, they don't want to work for you anymore.

I guarantee you they're going to want to come to me. So I am going to put on some clinics for a week that we try not to talk to the guys very much. We make them some pancakes. Don't tell much about A1 because I don't think that's fair to you. And I'm never going to try to steal anybody. And I'll have documentation to protect one of your techs. And I'll teach them how to tech. I'll give them some upper hand sales levels. But ultimately, it takes me eight weeks to train a good tech.

And then they need another month in the field on their own. And then I sent them back to Phoenix for another week, most likely. So you got to think they're going through about 13 weeks actually of training. So I wish it was easy. Problem is you don't have enough money to train. It's because you're not charging enough money. It's kind of a catch 22, the chicken and the egg, right? The cart and the horse.

Which one? How do you do it? It's called sweat equity. You got to put time and energy into it. I had to go train with Wayne Dalton to learn how to do torque masters. I drove out with other techs. In fact, there's probably 10 technicians that are still in the field that helped train me 15 years ago.

I went to manufacturers. I studied different stuff. I went and met the bolt manufacturer. I learned the difference of the threads on self-tappers. I found different tools. You should see our freaking tool bags. Sick shit. You need to come to Vertical Track. I promise you, Rebecca, your mind will be freaking blown by what you're going to learn here May 12th through the 14th. Hey, Tommy, thank you for the help. Do you also have service agreements in the garage door business?

How are they constructed? How would you construct it in the HVAC company? Do you have a monthly charge to the customer? Yes. I think we're the first garage door company that are actually successful with service agreements. You charge a monthly fee. What they get is an initial discount.

That's the way you sell them. So you say, listen, I'll give you up to a hundred dollars off or 15%, whichever is more, whichever is less actually. So at 15%, if they're at 500, they get 75 off. If they pass, I think $700, then they get the hundred. And then that's prorated. So if they cancel within a year, then we prorate whatever that is. We charge about $8.95 a month. We lubricated just everything on their door, lubricated just tight everything on their door once a year. John, one of my trainers and the trainers, Bobby and Travis and all these guys got together and I said, I want to do things like rewire everything because the wiring is brittle over time. I want the craziest thing you can come up with.

So we came up with 151 point tune-up. And that's how we talk them into the service agreement. So service agreements mean shit if you don't know how to turn them over to new equipment. If you're not tracking equipment age, if you're not using service time, if you're not using the right CRM, if you're not booking the call correctly, people always say, hey, Tommy, come show me how to sell. I'm like, well, let me book the phone call. Let me wrap the truck. Let me get my dispatcher to do it.

It all works cumulatively in a circle. And if you think we're just going to go do something because, oh, yeah, come book the phone call and sell it. Shit, I can do that. I'll probably sell it for double what your normal guy would. But if I did it my way, I could sell it for 10 times more. And it all works together. Let's see here. This is from Denise. Hey there, I'm changing my pay structure to base pay and performance pay paid in the form of bonus paid on commission tiers. In order for the

cleaners to understand how much they'll be making, do I need to let them know how much each client is paying? Or is it better to have a minimum required revenue amount posted for each role per day with higher ticket services lawn care carpet cleaning the daily revenue protect could be 1500 plus for example thank you so i think i'm reading this right and okay so i'm doing a base rate plus performance. I like that tier, first of all. Do I need to let them know how much each client is paying? I mean, I'd rather you not. But if you got your paperwork in line correctly, one of the things that scares me is owners that are afraid to let their people know any numbers. They're like, ooh, I can't let anybody see an email.

Ooh, I don't want them to make me. Ooh, I can never invite anybody over to my house because this thing is too big. Everybody always told me you can't have anybody. If you buy a nice big house, I'm like, bullshit, I'm going to have everybody over. I don't want them to invade Bree's personal space. And I want them to treat my dog with respect because he's my son. But other than that, I don't care who comes over. I don't care if anybody knows how much money we make. I don't care anybody from the janitor to anybody. It's no secret and I'll never have it a secret. I could understand reasons for that though. If you're treating your employees like shit and paying them like crap, you're

probably embarrassed to show them how much money you're making. I'm not saying that about you, by the way, Denise. I'm just saying a lot of people like to hide stuff because they treat their employees like shit. They don't give them benefits And they're really sitting off there and they're they're basically have a yacht on the side and they just like to keep their employees paid Bare minimum to get by because they don't care. They got a horrible culture Those are the type of people I like to get as far away from as possible I like to figure out ways for everybody to win I like people to know when they deal with tommy mellow that they're going to win and that the future looks bright and that someone's looking out for them.

And if you guys could create that environment and truly mean it, you're going to have something special. If you got this selfish need inside to say, you didn't take any sacrifice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All my stuff's performance pay. I just teach them how to win. If they win, they did it. They deserve it. They they paid for themselves we've worked it out that way the math is math math is not changing it's just um kind of went off topic there but is it better to have a minimum required revenue amount posted for each role per day i would just say this build an excel sheet there's a lot of smart people out there that can help you go to Fiverr or Upwork and use the reverse. Take all of last month and the months before his data, reverse engineer it into a pivot table, and then understand why changing certain things, what it

does. And you might not be the right person to do this, Denise. So I would say you can find somebody at $75 an hour, probably 10 hours, a $750 investment, which is pennies compared to how much you're going to make or lose and make sure you motivate the right stuff. Then I would take one of your workers and test this out for a month. And then I would say, are you happy? Are you getting the expected result? Are they increasing the behaviors you're trying to get them to increase? If they are, then you go to three employees. Make sure it does all three. Once they say yes, and you make it change a few things, the person building you this pivot table could actually show you future, show you what's going to happen, show you what kind of behaviors you want. You get on a whiteboard. They're not going to build you everything because they don't know what you're trying to get, the behaviors you're trying to get. But there are people that really understand how this is

going to affect the bottom line with gross profit and a lot of other things. So that's the first thing I would do. Steve Barber, pay structure, base pay plus incentives. What percentage of your fee do you give for upsell, five-star review and next door sign up? I like contests for reviews. I like doing contests. I pay the managers for the reviews of their market and how they deal with negative reviews. I use automation to get reviews and I tell my guys what to say. But if I need reviews on Nextdoor or MapQuest, that's a recent one because of the GMB optimization I'm doing, then you have contests and you can keep the contest going all year. But I don't like to make that completely into the pay structure because when you get 5,000 reviews, maybe you need some on a different one. It's hard to get attribution on every single one. So that's my thing. What percentage do you go on upsell? We've got a scorecard that kind of tells you where you're going to land as far as percentage after the material cost. So if you're getting bad reviews,

if you're getting a ton of callbacks and you're putting in all your inventory wrong into the system, chances are you're not only going to get written up and put on a performance plan, but even if you're the top performer in sales, you're going to get fired. I think sometimes people forget, and I've screwed this up a lot, is sometimes I say, we should give them a bonus for good driving? And Adam and a lot of the guys are like, why don't we just fire them if they drive bad and they're putting everybody at a risk? We can't afford to give a bad EMOT score and a bad insurance score. If they're driving bad, we can't afford to keep them. And so certain people forget what's a job in your job description.

And you can gamify certain things, like I said i think that's really really smart we did mike bailey did march madness and you should see i don't want to go into our contest but we're up 57 from the previous month and it's not because it's a secret it's just because there's certain things we do here that i don't always need to throw out there i throw almost everything out joy har, do you have a separate service and install department? If so, can you explain why? Yeah. Service is completely different than install. It's a different setup on the truck. It's a different know-how. Installers typically are more introverts. They like to know what they're getting. If you had to tell them, would you rather make $1,500 a week or have a minimum of a thousand, a maximum of 2,500?

They take the 1,500 all day because they don't want the insecurity. They want to know they're getting 1,500 every month, every week. So six grand a month. They're cut from a different cloth. Installers are way different. Now people go like this. I just bought a company. You guys might know about it. And all the managers say, well, no, I can tell you these guys love doing their own installs. Well, there's one of them that actually wants to do their own installs. And the reason why is because they don't make any money for doing the service call us to do the install. So, of course, they love doing their installs.

So they don't make money. So commission aside, pay structure aside, performance pay, base pay, hourly away, no one that's in service loves to do installs i can just tell you that it doesn't even work in a lot of industries unfortunately in garage doors it could work but i don't really need this i got it anyway look i think it's really stupid to have your service guys waste their time doing installs in any industry service guys better eye contact buddy body language. They understand sales better. They all start willing to take a risk more often. Different type of personality type. They're not your C type. They're not your guys that are going to make sure everything's

perfect. They're not patient. Oh man, I'm learning so much stuff. This podcast isn't enough time, but personality profiling is turning out to be something really special when identifying people. You know, if you look at statistics and understand significant data, if you ask the right questions and you've got behavioral questions that are lined up throughout the test to see if they're lying, it's amazing what you could figure out about a human being. There's no right or wrong answer, which I love. It just throws you into a different quadrant. And it says, you'd be best off in this job. I think there's a role for everybody in this company for every quadrant. It's just depending on what you want to be. Some managers would never be the best techs, but they're the best sales trainers we have. The best sales trainers might be not

great at sales because they hold accountable. They know the KPIs. Let me repeat that. One of your best managers at sales might be horrible at sales, but they understand the attributes. They know how to get the right ride-alongs. They understand what to coach on, who they need to ride with, who they need to talk to, who big brothers should be, who their accountability partners should be. They understand what they need to work on because they're good at computer skills. They're good at communication. They make eye contact. They tell the right things to the right guys. They understand what motivates them, what makes them tick. They know how to get the behavior out of them they need. It sounds counterintuitive, but your best sales guy might be the worst sales manager you've ever had.

They're not good with people. They're not good on computers. They don't like to have one-on-ones. They're great at sales. And that's it. A lot of people take their top guy out, say, I'm going to put you in a manager position. That's what happens. Waylon Smith. I sold my company a few years ago and want to do it again. I'm researching many different home service companies.

Why do you love or not love the garage door industry? If you started over, knowing what you know now, what kind of service company would you start? Well, I can tell you it's pretty easy. Windows, roofing, or HVAC. You throw me in one of those industries, I'd already be at a billion of revenue. I could trip, fall, break my face, and still make more money than most HVAC companies after their 10th year. You go after the largest average ticket. It's pretty simple. Where's your average ticket through the roof? I could go buy a Lennox, a Goodman, a train, a fricking, you name it, a five ton unit and fill my place up right now. And I guarantee you, I can roll with those guys.

So they all know who I am. You know, plumbing is a difficult one. Garage doors. Why do I love it? Because I started it 15 years ago and I became good at it. And I'm so freaking deep down this thing. I would tell you, you can make money in garage doors, sure. But we're the unicorn. Who else is doing what we're doing? There's a couple of franchises that are doing okay. You've got to ask yourself, what is the average owner doing of an industry? You go talk to Tim Dick and Harry and all these other people.

Look at the industry. Go to an HVAC show. Every guy is doing 5, 10, 20, 30 million. Go to a roofing show. Even losers are doing 10 million. Go to a nice. I'm not talking about Joe Schmoe still out on the field knocking on doors, freaking start doing their own shit because they're not really companies. Those are employees of their own businesses.

They don't own a company. They still work out of their house. You know, it's the same thing I did. So I'm not talking down to those people, but that's not a company. I didn't have a company really until 2012. I was working out of a building actually in 2010. So the first three years, I didn't have a business. But here's what you do. I love when people say, oh my gosh, there's so many HVAC companies. You don't think there's a lot of garage door companies? You don't think there's a lot of window washing companies? I love these victims that say that it's always grass is greener on

the other side. I'm like, I'll do good in anything you throw me in. You want me to freaking make a ton of money? I'll go into snow plowing. I'll make a hundred million dollars my first year. I know how to make the phone ring. I know how to train technicians. I know how to recruit. I know how to book call. It doesn't freaking matter. Throw the widget to me. So the question is, how often does this stuff happen? Well, everything happens just as happened in this garage doors. I guarantee you that.

Air conditioners, you get used more often, more opportunity there. Roofing's a huge ticket. Windows are amazing. I can out-market anybody. So if I had to go back, I gave you my three, but there's probably another dozen in front of garage doors. But now I'm so deep, I just want to take over the industry. I want to be the number one in our industry by far. I want to be a legacy. I want to be the Neil Armstrong of

the industry. And I want to do that in about 10 other industries. And hopefully in a couple of years, a lot of people that listen to the podcast, they'll want to join up and they'll want to join forces and they'll want to become multi-multi-millionaires and travel and have fun with me and live the best life ever. That's my plan and I'll prove it. And hold me accountable, get ready because I don't lose.

And when I do lose, I get training and I learn how to beat people. Hence, I'll leave you. So Waylon, yeah, I get training and I learn how to beat people. Hence, Al Levy. So, Waylon, yeah, garage industry can make some money, no doubt. But would I do that again? No. Throw me into HVAC. When I started in 2006, I'd already be a multi-billionaire.

Not quite there yet. Tommy, you mentioned in your course to sell customers what they asked for. Do you do the inspection and offer an upsell before doing what you asked for? Hell no, I don't do an inspection. I don't do an inspection until I do what they asked for. You come tell me to fix your fan and I start looking at your toilet. You're going to kick me out of your house if i'm a handyman You asked me to do an oil change and I start fixing your muffler and charging for it

You're gonna kick my ass and tell me to leave me alone You start the work of what they called you out for this is pretty simple I don't know why people don't even think about this Yeah, i'm gonna give you a 68 point inspection and then i'm gonna come and try to sell you a bunch of crap before you Even said yes to buying from me dumb It's like I mean you can't get any dumber. I got to tell you the guys out there doing inspections before you start stupid, dumb. You might think you got it figured out. You guys might even be a $500 million company. Come see me in two years and

we'll see who's right. I can't keep my mouth shut. I can't help it. I can't help, but let's say these things. And I realized there's a lot of smart business owners out there. They've been successful doing stuff. I'm sorry. This is just the way I feel. And there's a lot of people out here. It literally comes up as Facebook user. What's up, brother? So look at, this is how it comes up. Facebook user. Next time you're in Florida, hit me up thanks for everything you're doing got a run so just so you guys know let's see here damn an employee that actually apologized for their performance that's amazing it goes to the culture that you develop for your tech to accept self-responsibility that's a winner get us some extra training i will cody in 13 weeks you guys are better trained technically versus 99 of of the rest of the trade.

That's not to mention the sales training, which is what really matters. That's correct. Ryan Davis, why should a concrete coating company or other home services come to vertical track in May? Well, I'm really focusing on garage door flooring as the second tier of the garage door freedom, which is home service freedom is the tier above that. I'll tell you why Michael McCullough is going to be there teaching you guys about how to get different in your business. Jonathan Wissman is going to teach you guys how to 10 times your sales. I'm going to be talking to you guys about coaching. Adam's going to be

talking about CRMs, specifically service Titan on how to run that Ferrari in six gear. Cause most people can't get the damn Ferrari started or they're stuck in first gear and they don't know how to use the clutch. We're going to be bringing on some of the best speakers in the world. We're going to make most live events look like they are amateur hour. We're going to be paying for all the food and alcohol. And if you drink a lot, go lightly because I want you to learn something here. You know, this venue is, there's five pools here. There's a golf course. It's one of the most beautiful sites on the planet.

But what I can say is we're going to teach you how to line your business. Al Levy is going to be talking about the stuff he talks about. This one, we're going to prepare and give you guys a lot of stuff to do. And we're going to hold you accountable after it's done. I can just tell you that lives are going to be changed. Your business will never look the same. You guys have all been to good events. This is the event that we're going to hold you accountable and have you get shit done, put it on your calendar and hold you accountable. So what I would say is, Ryan, don't come to this

meeting. Don't come to Vertical Track unless you want to make a lot of money. Please do not come unless you want to be filthy rich and get more time with your family. If you want to make more revenue, more profit, more time with your family, if you want to have a plan, a destination, understand where you're going, hire better, do better interviews, learn how to book the calls, learn to make your technicians badasses, then you might want to come. But if not, stay home. I mean, it's a lot of money. It's about what a shitty service call is for A1, our one call. But you know what? It's probably too expensive for you guys.

Not you, Ryan. But I love guys that say, oh, my God, that's a lot of money. You know what's a lot of money? It's continuing to do the same shit you're doing every day and expecting a different result. That's what the expensive part is. You know what's a lot of money? It's dinner for $57,000 at Vertical Track. Tell us about some speakers at Vertical Track. Well, we got a lot of the guys joining from last year. I just talked about a lot of them. I've got my buddy, Brigham Dickinson

coming. I've got my buddy Lance coming. I think Bill Russell will be there. You're going to learn about marketing. You're going to learn about systems. You're going to learn about everything you need, but there's not a one size fits all. I think the fact is that we're introducing our Rolodex to the next level. And not only that, but we're having breakout sessions this time that specialize on how to do shit. So I'd highly recommend bringing two or three people at the bare minimum so you can get into all the breakout sessions. And then there's going to be panels on stage so you can ask questions. We're going to have a lot of things to take notes and to follow along guides.

I promise you we learned a lot from the first one. It was really wonderful. There was a lot of people crying, saying their lives changed. This one is going to be like pouring gasoline and acid and whatever else you can think of that's flammable and just lighting it on fire. This is going to be like dynamite, but I'm bringing the heat. I'm bringing everything I got. And I want you guys to walk out of here and understand that most of the stuff that I'm doing won't work for you today. So we're going to teach you guys the basics because there's certain things, you know, as Al says, a lot of it's vanilla. You know, one day I'm sitting in

my office and I'm just sitting here kind of pissed off because there's nothing for me to do. I remember I was like, damn it. There's no fires. There's nothing broken. There's nobody to report to me. What the hell am I going to do today? I'm not even needed, but there's so much money. So I had to go, there you grow again. So when you grow like the pace we are, I'll tell you what gets really scary when you're growing over a hundred percent a year is you're only as strong as your weakest link. So if your hiring's not doing their job, if your trucks don't show up on time, if your iPads don't show up on time,

if your uniforms have an issue, but you know what? You roll with the punches, okay? And you got to get through this stuff because what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I don't think people remember that. So what I would say is the speakers are going to be A++. I'm reviewing the content. We're going to be giving a summary of the content afterwards. We are going to be A++. I'm reviewing the content. We're going to

be giving a summary of the content afterwards. We're going to be book signing. There's all kinds of stuff. I'm going to be announcing my next book. I put everything into it. It's all about recruiting and building the right business to attract the right people, the right culture, and how to build amazing employees in a place that it's hard to find anybody. And I'm putting everything I got. So it's going to be straight fire. And I mean, there's going to be keys and stories and lifelong things there that hopefully people could understand that this is going to be a masterpiece. I think I'm cheating again by getting a bunch of smart people in the book.

I don't think I could write anything that the level of what we're putting together without the help of a lot of great people like Jody and Al Levy. But I'm excited to talk about that. But we've got about 22 speakers. Adam's going to be up there again. We're going to have a couple of the guys from A1. We're going to have our trainers be talking. Our training center now, if I could explain to you what this thing is going to be like, we will have people coming in from Antarctica, Australia, China to come look at our training center. And you guys are going to be the first peak at it May 12th. So I can't talk enough about it because literally it's like getting me shaky. I'm so excited about it.

How much do you guys pay for new tech? We want to make sure we fare without employees. We pay hourly plus commissions. We pay them 18 bucks an hour, I believe, to start to train. So it comes out to be somewhere, what is that? It's just under $800. It's not a ton of money. Certain markets will pay a little bit more depending on the cost of living, but you got to understand we're trying to cover meals at the same time. We're taking them out to eat. Here's one thing I'll tell you guys. Most people need about 60 grand to cover their ends. Now you give a guy 80 grand, he'll make his bills 80 grand. You give a guy 120 grand, he'll make his bills 120 grand. But if you look at the basic necessities, anywhere

after 60 to 70 grand people, it's not as always about the money, but if you pay less than that and they can't make ends meet, that's when it becomes all about the money but if you pay less than that and they can't make ends meet that's when it becomes all about the money you know there's certain things you could do to compete with that like let them work from home which is really nice so they're not spending gas and having the commute fees and everything else so new day and age is getting creative but my philosophy is just pay the people as much as possible so i'm creating another program my internal promoter program and that's where they can make fifteen hundred dollars to recruit somebody two people a month equals thirty six thousand dollars because fifteen hundred times two is three thousand times

twelve is thirty six thousand plus i'm teaching my people to go out there and get a ton of work meaning recruit clients to do garage tour work and they'll get paid on every one of those jobs they get. They become a marketing source. Turns into a crazy deal. I ask companies to be my affiliates. For example, Joe Corsaro is coming in, teaching sales training for Garage Door Freedom. He's giving a rebate to the clients that are paying for him. He's coming in at a better rate, giving a rebate on top of it.

They're splitting it with us because we've got full-time staff. We just heard her first full-time gal for a garage, your freedom. She's not cheap. She's not a crazy expensive, but I'll tell you that she's going to be excellent at what she does. And what I can tell you, she's got a lot of experience on how to grow this thing.

She'll give a lot of vertical track experience, but she'll give garage your freedom. We want this to be several hundred people. I think with Ryan Davis's help on the flooring side, we could easily get to probably three to 400 by the end of the year, but that's going to take a big, big push. But all we need is 20 companies to double their company. And if you work with me and I have anything to do with this, we won't lose. Here's what I tell people. And you guys might have heard me say this. I'm going to give you all the workout equipment you need to become a badass.

I'm going to give you the diet. I'm going to tell you exactly the right cardio and what to be eating. But if you don't want to do the work, you're not going to move anywhere. You are not going to get your company in shape and you're going to shit the bed. So I really want the people that actually jump on phone calls. They care. They want to succeed. They actually do the steps. Why would I listen to you, Tommy? Well, why? Success leaves clues. And I've made every freaking mistake in the book and I'm trying to help. And I'll tell you guys what, it's really hard when people can't have tough conversations or really want to sit down and build their goals out and write them down and create a

vision and cast this vision out there that everyone needs to follow because they don't have the balls to do it. One thing I can tell you guys that I can't stand is working with losers. I'm not going to work with a lot of people one-on-one because quite frankly, you know, I'm trying to build an empire here, but do you think I'm going to be giving time? Hell yeah. Most likely they'd be in a group setting. I don't mind helping a person out half an hour here, half an hour there.

But if I spent 20 half an hours a week, that's 10 hours. I can't screw over my internal customers, which are all the amazing people I get to work with. So I'm trying to get creative here. You know, I got some people that are just amazing. The thing that makes us successful is the systems, the processes that we put in motion with Al and a lot of other people. It's the software we use. It's the things that I'm going to give you guys an extra 10 years to do. If you belong to Garage Door of Freedom, you're going to get a 10-year head start. Yes, are you smart enough to do it? Sure. I'm not. Look, definitely not the brightest crayon in the set, but I ask a lot of

questions and I make a lot of mistakes and I don't make the same mistakes twice. Let's see. What's the perfect negotiation strategy in sales by Charlie Jones? The perfect negotiation strategy, number one, is to take price out of the equation through financing. Number two, eye contact. Number three, shut the hell up after you talk. I think too often, and sometimes I do this, we ask a question and we talk over ourselves. Ask the question, shut the hell up. The art of negotiation is, first of all, it's a presentation that pulls out all of the bad ideas. So that gets rid of the price. Number two, let me just say something about following up. Joe Crisero 101 is you book the follow-up call. You book the follow-up call. If you tell them I'm going to follow up with you and you call

them, that's bullshit. You show up to their house. You book another appointment. I mean, dude, I could talk for hours. How to be a great salesperson by Monday morning. The greatest salesperson in the world. I mean, look, there's a lot of books about sales. There's question-based selling. I got Sell Different by Lee Soft. I got a couple of his books here. I think that there's a lot of things about sales. The question is, do you believe in your products? I think there's a lot of things that go into that question. So I hope I answered some of that stuff, Charlie. Garage door is the main interest of your home nowadays. Yeah, it is. Then why does your front door cost 10 grand?

How did you learn all these structures? I'm not sure what that's referring to. Oracle track is going to be amazing. Are you going to talk about service agreements? Yes, I will talk about service agreements. Actually, Bree, make sure we talk about service agreements. We might even make that into a breakout or a panel. We're a handyman franchise. Everything we do is on TNM and give a ballpark estimates over the phone. Charging by the hour has its limits, challenges. I don't

see the business going much over a million. How can I set this up? I think I need a new structure. Why don't you reach out to me at a1leadmanager at gmail.com or hit me up on one of my Facebook pages and we'll do a live. I'll show you on the whiteboard how to come up with a killer pay structure. Don't be average service legend Ryan Davis promoting himself again. Kidding. Thank you for sharing, Tommy. Gotta go do an emergency spring job. Boom, baby! Get her done. Josh Yeager. Do you try to coach a group of

technicians at one time, or would you pick them one-on-one and really focus on training? I coach every day, twice a day. 7.30, 7.45. I do an hour long on Thursdays. And I can tell you this. One-on-ones happen once every month. I do a lot of one-on- Thursdays And I can tell you this One-on-ones happen once every month I do a lot of one-on-one, but I'll tell you this

I will have two one-on-ones per week By the end of the second quarter Two one-on-ones per week, per guy Oh, let's see here What's the name of the podcast? Where do we find it? This is the Home Service Expert Podcast You can look for it on anything And then you'll hear about the Ask Tommy Podcast It's going to be killer find it. This is the Home Service Expert Podcast. You can look for it on anything,

and then you'll hear about the Ask Tommy Podcast. It's going to be, Killa, how did you obtain your first door direct manufacturer? My buddy was working for a company and I went to Cookson. And then I asked every guy outside of there. And then I just went to other garage door companies. Then I started getting invited because I started to grow. Ask a million questions. Guys, I got to run here, but I'll tell you guys, I think video marketing, look at what TikTok's doing. Think about video marketing a lot more. Think about a way to send your internal customers more videos. Think about a way to send your customers more videos. Think about a way to be out there more with videos. Start using these platforms when you get a minute. I've got a full time video guy that follows me around now. We've got two full-time video guys, probably going

to get three. It's a growing sector. I think it's going to murder it. And I will get done in April more than I got done in the last two years. And I got a lot of shit done in the last two years. I can't freaking wait. You guys are a store. I want you guys to pay attention. Watch what goes on online. Follow me on all the stuff You're going to start seeing some crazy shit content and it's going to be amazing And I can't wait i'm hanging out with celebrities We're going to be going out to these crazy things and and it's not because I think i'm cool because i'm with a celebrity It's just they kind of happen to be everywhere we're going

So it's just going to be fun. And do you guys want to go for the ride? I invite you today to do so. And I promise you, I'm only here to help. I'm not taking your businesses. I'm not taking your dog or your car or anything, but I really am here to help. I think we've built an amazing group of people through the podcast and through some of these Q and A's and just really trying to help people. And what I see is it all comes full circle. It really does. That means a lot to me to be able to help people and see their lives grow and see their relationships grow, see their businesses grow. And that's what I want. I want you guys hopefully

one day to come to my funeral and say, I did a good job and I helped you guys. So hopefully that means something and appreciate you guys being a fan and being on the show. You guys have a fantastic week and I appreciate all the questions. So keep coming up with fantastic questions. See you guys later. Thank you. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me.

And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences. Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're

just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.