The Home Service Expert Podcast - Delivering The Amazon Experience To Earn More Loyal Customers

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

David Giannetto is the Chief Executive Officer of WorkWave, and the author of 3 books: Big Social Mobile, The Performance Power Grid, and The Decoy Artist. He has spent almost two decades leading and managing international organizations focused on the deployment and usage of enterprise-level technology, across a wide range of service-oriented industries. A frequent writer for national magazines, he also shares his expertise to various audiences as a keynote speaker. In this episode, we talked about management consulting, strategy, business intelligence, technology, business operations...

We really look at it like there's two parts of what an owner or an executive of these companies has to do. And one is make sure that service is good. And that's typically where these owners or executives came up. They came up into their industry because they liked the type of services that they were coming to do. And they built the company because they enjoyed going out and not being in the office or whether it's lawn or landscape or HVAC, they like fixing things or troubleshooting things. That's the work of field service. But running their business is a very different thing. And a good percentage of middle market and below owners or executives really aren't as much of an expert in running and growing a business and competing digitally, let's say,

as they are at making sure their company gives good service to a customer. So we're trying to help them really run the business and focus on the things they need to be doing to grow the business, to service customers, and do everything that wraps around it because a lot of the interactions today are digital. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Sector.

My name's Tommy Mello, and today I have a very special guest visiting from Ringo's, New Jersey. And he doesn't have the accent, so you guys are safe. He's an expert in management, consulting, strategy, business intelligence, technology, and business operations. He's the CEO at WorkWave. He started that in 2019. Before that, he was at Astia International. He was a COO from 2017 to 2019. He was chairman of the board at Spina Bifida Resource Network.

He worked at Salient Corporation, the SVP of Performance Management from 2012 to 2015. And he was at Telos Group LLC, was a CEO from 2008 to 2012. He serves as a Chief Executive Officer of WorkWave, where he leads all aspects of sales, marketing, customer service, and success, product design, and engineering, development, and technical operations. He has nearly 20 years of experience leading and managing international organizations focused on deployment and usage of enterprise-level

technology in a wide range of service-oriented industries. He's the author of three books, Big Social Mobile, The Performance Power Grid, and The decoy artist. He's a frequent writer for national magazines and also is a keynote speaker. Dave, that's the best I could do, man. How are you? Hey, Tommy, it's good to talk with you. It's still quite a laundry list when you read it all out like that, but I appreciate the nice introduction. Thank you. So it seems like you've had a very diverse background and I really want to dive into what you're doing today at WorkWave, but what you've done and really what you're specialized in and where you've been and where you're going. Yeah, sure. It is an interesting

background. I mean, I came up as a service guy myself, a service operator, a manager. It's interesting because I started as a service manager in the U.S. Army, four years as an officer managing the service operation in the U.S. Army. And it's a service operation. I was with the 10th Mountain Division that you have to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. So it added a really unique spin, but it was a great place to start a service career. Then I managed in service for about eight years and moved into business consulting and ended up in technology and field service. So I think my early years as an actual operator helped me now that I'm with WorkWave and

we're bringing together this complicated question of how do field service organizations in a whole variety of industries, how do they grow their business? How do they manage it, service customers, and how do they keep their company healthy by moving money through it? So let's dive a little bit deeper. So talk to me more in depth. So you came up in the home service space. Tell me a little bit about WorkWave and what's your client relationship like and what is your goal? Sure. WorkWave's been around for about 40 years. It would be one of the market leaders in field service, the service industries. We work in a lot of the home verticals. So everything from pest control, HVAC, janitorial and cleaning,

lawn and landscape. In some of those industries, we're clearly a market leader. We'll have 65% of some of those industries. And we really look at it holistically. How do we help our customers run every piece of their business lifecycle? So everything from digital presence, their website, all their Google AdWords, their advertising campaigns, reputation management online, lead management, how they go get new customers either in the physical world or the digital world. And then how they service them, what you think of as the core of field service. And then everything around how money moves to their organization and cash flow and how important that is to any service business. So we try to be the partner that helps our customers have an advantage over every other local competitor who doesn't run on our software. We think it's about providing good technology that helps them run their business, allows them to focus on growing it and servicing customers, and then making sure they can use technology to their best advantage today.

Because even for small businesses, it's really technology that's helping them compete. So let's take a deep dive into that. I talk about this all the time. I mean, I'm running way more automation than 99% of even HVAC guys. I was on a podcast yesterday. We were talking about what's the top industry of any home service industry. And we both agreed it was HVAC. They just get it. They learn how to build enterprise value. And I think there's a lot of guys that know how to get to a hundred million in the HVAC industry. And you don't hear that about a lot of other home services, do you?

No, HVAC and a lot of the mechanicals, but HVAC especially is unique. Some of that, I think, though, is that there's so many HVAC assets deployed commercially and in residential situations that the market is huge. You might have a couple of different pieces of HVAC equipment in the average home, but you can probably only get one company to cut its grass, one company to do pest control, one company to service any of the other things. That's part of what makes HVAC somewhat of a unique industry. So you guys take everything from soup to nuts, all the marketing, the media buys everything? Yeah, we do.

We have about 7,000 customers across all of those verticals. And I think one of the things that's unique about our customer base, it's predominantly middle market and below. But we do have some companies that are, I think our largest is about a $2 billion companies, our largest customer. And we really look at it like there's two parts of what an owner or an executive of these companies has to do. And one is make sure that service is good. And that's typically where these owners or executives came up. They came up into their industry because they liked the type of services that they were coming to do. And they built the company because they enjoyed

going out and not being in the office or whether it's lawn or landscape or HVAC, they liked fixing things or troubleshooting things. That's the work of field service. But running their business is a very different thing. And a good percentage of middle market and below owners or executives really aren't as much of an expert in running and growing a business and competing digitally, let's say, as they are at making sure their company gives good service to a customer. So we're trying to help them really run the business and focus on the things they need to be doing to grow the business, to service customers, and do everything that wraps around it because a lot of the interactions today are digital. You're winning customers that you never talk to online, your

online reputation. And some companies like yours has that skill set, is good at it. But most of the middle market and below companies don't understand how to grow a business. And if there's one thing a new business owner learns in field service, it's that it's not about servicing the customer. Very quickly, you can't sleep at night because you realize you have to grow your business. You have to keep adding new customers. And if you don't, you're slowly dying. And they're not always as good at that as they are about doing the service. Well, yeah, it's the old e-myth. They become a technician. They don't have any idea how to be the manager

or the entrepreneur. And they have a entrepreneurial seizure. And I think one of the skill sets is you sign up because you said, I can install air conditioning. I actually don't own a business. But you don't realize there's culture, there's recruiting, there's taxes, there's financial planning, there's vehicle leases, there's warehousing, inventory, CRMs, holy cow, it's benefits. What are you kidding me?

And you're just like, what? I didn't sign up for this. And it was interesting because I had Gino Wickman, who wrote Rocket Fuel and Traction and all these other books. And he said, a lot of times people don't realize what they get themselves into it. So he created a test that says, if you're on the left, you're really not an entrepreneur. If you're on the right, you are. And he goes through these six things you must be in eight biggest mistakes, like not knowing your numbers or not defining each position in your company. And it's just interesting because you see all these people that really,

and I know people get annoyed by me saying this, but they really have no right owning a company and they do it anyway. And then they wonder, and I'm like, man, you work 80 hours a week for a hundred thousand dollars a year and your company makes $0. And so often we get that misconception that no company made a hundred thousand. No, it didn't. That's what you paid thousand dollars a year and your company makes zero dollars. And so often we get that misconception that, no, company made a hundred thousand. No, it didn't. That's what you paid yourself. The company made zero. Do you hear that stuff a lot? I mean, you were with a lot of companies. Yeah. As a business consultant, you know, I came up, I don't know, eight or 10 years and I started a firm called Cone Resnick and they're a super regional and they work with a lot of family owned businesses.

It was one of the specialties they had at the time. So we were working with a lot of founders and they could build a company, but I think that they got their company to a size where it became unmanageable. And then it became a question of whether or not that founder was willing to let go of their control,

to try other things, to bring other people in that could take the business in places that into areas they couldn't themselves. And it became very centered upon success, became very centered upon the personality of that founder. I think that that holds true for any industry software like our industry, just as much as it does for somebody that's growing a home service business or a field service business. And then at WorkWave, we see that if you want to grow to any size, all of a sudden technology becomes the vehicle that allows you to do that. And the owners are going to be either going to be capable of doing it themselves and leading that team and surrounding themselves with experts, or their ego gets in the way and

doesn't let them do that. They can either stay small, but they can't get bigger because once they start getting bigger, they're mixing in with other competitors that are going to be good at that stuff. If you're going to reach any size, you've had to master some of those things that you mentioned that are not core to the business. So they don't feel like they're core to the business. And technology is one of them. It helps WorkWave, my company,

because those owners or operators, they're really looking for a partner like WorkWave that will help them with all of those things. So our belief is that if you can't do it in our technology, then we should have a partnership that helps you achieve that. And we're offering you one or two or three options that we've tested out, that we've proven, that we've integrated into our solution. And the owner, the operator doesn't have to figure out things as

much. They have to trust us. So if they don't know how to compete on the digital space, they can build a website on our technology. If they want to do more sophisticated Google ads, keywords, stuff like that, they can use our agency that we have in-house. So we really try to look at the entire landscape that our customers are competing in and either have a solution ourself or partner with a good company that provides that solution, all in order to make it easier for the company to grow without having to figure out how to do all these secondary things on their own. I mean, you can go out and you can work with a partner to have them call your bad debt. They can buy your bad debt. You can partner with somebody

to get all your training aids, your learning, your certification management. A lot of that stuff is embedded into the software, but we don't actually do it. We just make sure we partner with the right company so that a small business owner up to a mid-market size company has access to the right experts through our technology and partnership. I love that. You might not be a one-size-fits-all, but you've got the context to get it all handled. I mean, I think you have to be a field service company to be a customer of WorkWave. And that means you're either going to be providing service with people in the field, or we would call last mile delivery and pickup. We would call that service as well. And within that space, you could be a very complex HVAC, mechanical focused, middle market company,

or you could be all the way down to just one person with a vehicle. You park it in your driveway at the end of the night, and that's the freedom you enjoy. And it's funny because you kind of hit the nail on the head. So many of these owners, they started their career working somewhere else and they said, well, I could do that. And then they figure they'll go start their own business. They must be able to make more money. That's the American dream. I own my own business. But we see so many of them that think field service is about service, servicing the customer. And they start to realize it's not just about that. And they fight to build a business that can give them back as much money in their salary as they made working for somebody else,

because it really is not about fixing that asset or providing that service in somebody's home. It's everything that wraps around it that you have to have your eye on as an owner. Yeah, yeah. And it's impossible to get this through to people. I have a couple of buddies that work for different businesses of mine. I've got a Christmas light business and I've got a vehicle wrap business. And both these guys, they've got these dreams and aspirations. And I said, guys, forget that.

Listen to me. Focus on this one thing. You know, the one thing. And I explained it to them and they don't get it. So finally, and this is sad. I feel like a parent, but I'm like, I'm going to let them learn it on their own. And I wish I could show them that we could either be the Ruth Crisp of restaurants, or we could be the drive-through cheapest possible. And I feel like when you're

small in business, you take on everything. It's like, you don't do commercial, but you'll do it because you think you can pull it off and it's a big money job, but you made no profit. Revenue is not profit. And I can't stress that enough. Yeah. Yeah. And I worked in business analytics, business intelligence for much, much of my career. It would have been, you know, the books you mentioned, two of the three books are about how to use data and information to drive a business, get tangible results. So it's kind of been a passion of mine. And you and I were talking one other time about just how important it is to understand your business. And what I've learned from all of my career is profit is a very hard thing to understand. For a lot of companies, it's a very

hard thing to measure even. It is really hard to understand how profit is going to change as your business scales. But if you don't understand that, you can find yourself doing so much work, but actually getting very little out of it because $1 of revenue doesn't necessarily mean it's a good dollar of revenue for your company. And successful businesses that are growing don't tend to worry about it because it's all erased by growth. Growth solves many problems.

But as soon as growth slows down or you get into a period of uncertainty like we are now with COVID and who knows what will happen in the recovery here, you have to start asking harder questions and understanding what's helping your business run and what isn't. And if you don't understand profit, you can't really make smart choices. And once you start to struggle as a company or you hit a flat period, it's really the wrong time to have to start worrying about those things. We look across our customer base and the impact that this time of uncertainty has had on them. What we see that arches over everything is that well-managed companies, companies that kept themselves in a good financial position, they were not over leveraged, they were not highly in debt,

those companies are doing well now. And if a company was poorly managed before this, they are really doing bad. So the skill of managing the business and knowing what you need to be good at and what you need to be good at internally, understanding profit and knowing what generates the best profit for you out in the market. You know, the whole theory of good to great, understanding what is really the thing that you need to be good at. It spans all times. It's just amplified during bad times or challenging times like we're in right now. Yeah. It's interesting because we've got 40 million people, I guess, unemployed,

and it's just the opposite of what it was this past year after this pandemic. And I'm going to give a secret out and I want to hear your take on it because it's still up to this date here in the last couple of months that I've kind of come through a breakthrough. And that's, I make the phone ring off the hook. Forget about the marketing side of it because theoretically he who can pay more per lead wins. So I want to go back to the technician out in the field. I go to McDonald's when I'm in China. I've been in South America.

I've been in Thailand. I've been in Canada. I've been in Mexico. I don't love McDonald's, but I love that I know what I'm getting. And after you eat in China, you'll understand why I go to McDonald's. But the point is, it's the same way, the Big Mac's the Big Mac. So when you come up with a standard operating procedure, it checks and balances with technology and a hiring system with an LMS and a training and an apprentice program to move up. Marketing is really supposed to be a derivative of revenue. I mean, at least we talk about it as I'm 8%, I'm 12%, I'm 15% in a growing market, I'm 5%. If you double your revenue, you cut that percentage in half or you could double the amount you pay per lead and

obvious technology and click through rates and and using not static numbers but more dynamic numbers that are changing and giving you feedback on what you're paying per keyword and very deep analytics but the best way to sum it up is and i feel like most companies fail at this and they don't understand if you hired better technicians that knew how to sell service agreements and had a platform to make sure your conversion rate's high and you're not leaving anything on the table and your follow-up systems are better, you can win. You know, here's something interesting.

80% of all sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact. Now, this came out of a book called How to Be a Great Salesperson by Monday Morning. It's loaded with tips. But I ask people, how much did you spend on marketing? They're like, 100 grand last month. I'm like, how much did you spend on hiring? Well, Craigslist is $35.

I did five ads, so 175 bucks. I'm like, so you spent 100,000 working on a new client, but your internal customers, you spent $175. Tell me your take on that. Yeah. There's so much in there. We could talk for hours and hours and hours. So companies that do it really well, when I wrote my third book, Big Social Mobile, the focus of that book was really, how are the best digital operators doing it? What are they doing that make them so much better than everyone else? I just worked with a lot of companies. That was consulting work I was doing at the time. And then I condensed it into, look, this is what great digital operators do.

So the heart of it is that people that do it well, that manage the customer experience well, they understand they're in control of giving the customer the experience they choose to give it, the customer. They choose to give the customer. And they take it one extra step. What they say is, I'm going to give the customer the best experience. And that best experience is not just what satisfies their need. It is also what best benefits my company. So how do you turn a one-time service into a recurrent service contract? And that is challenging in home services and field service because at the heart of it, service is about a technician. Let's just call that field person

a technician. Standing in a consumer's home or even in a place of business and giving a service and an experience beginning to end that the owner and the management team has almost no control over. So a lot of the purpose of technology, like the WorkWave technology, is to really control that experience and make sure that we're keeping the technician in the parameters that are in the best interest of the company that that technician works for and also satisfies the need that that technician went there to solve and on the first time. And that means that you have to have controls embedded in the mobile app that that technician use when they pull up. They know exactly what they're there to do. All the services are there, what's paid, what's not paid. They take credit card payments very easy, multiple

types of payments to make that payment experience smooth. But it is also able to prompt them with the information they need to upsell, cross-sell, or resell. And that is a very different thing because when the technician earns trust, the technician becomes your best salesperson. But they also probably got into services because they didn't want to sell. But today, I believe that sales has fundamentally changed. If you are in a consumer's home and you earn their trust by doing a good job, being courteous, being on time, they got a text message that the technician's on their way, they showed up, they called if they needed to on the phone because the mobile technology made that easy to do.

That person is now a trusted advisor. Any other problem that that consumer has, they will look to that technician and trust their advice. And that doesn't mean there has to be something else broken right then that day. If the technician knows enough to give good advice to say, look, this ongoing service contract is really in your best interest for this reason, then you have that consumer at a very vulnerable moment because they're trusting you and they inherently need help. We did a survey, and it's going to sound like I'm changing subjects, but I'll come back, I promise. We did a survey and we asked, what is the number one way you're generating business? It was a combination of questions. And in service industries, word of mouth is still the number one way they generate business. So that really supports the technician on site has to give a good experience. But the number two is online, all the things that you mentioned and talked about. But then we have to ask a question. Well, is online number two because

it's really secondhand to word of mouth? Or is it because so many service companies just are not good enough at competing online for business? And I believe word of mouth is very influential. It can trump anything else. But buying behavior is changing. Online is becoming so important. But I do think it's only second because very few service companies really understand how to compete digitally. Yeah, yeah, it's true. So tell me about the technology. Digital, you know, I say 70% of all services are found online.

70% of that is Google. And people go, well, how do you figure? And I'm like, even if you hear about a company from a neighbor or a friend, usually you go to their Yelp or their Google or their Facebook page or do a little research on what they're selling and what they carry or if there's a coupon. But I think you're right. The technology stack, like we use service as our CRM and I have 4,300 call tracking numbers. And I'm not bragging about that. It's just I'm an analytical freak.

It's almost to the point that it's annoying. But I believe technology, we use greenhouse for recruiting. I probably use, and this is not joking, between plugins and rank trackers and things that speed up the site that puts things in zip files. I probably run 50 softwares and I'm a garage door company. People don't understand that. I mean, we've got Basecamp for certain project management. We've got Zoho. We use Apparatus. We use

Scipio for text messaging. We've got APIs. I can't even tell you how many tools we use, but how much does technology play a role in today's efficiency? If you're anything other than a very small company that can afford to operate on paper, it's everything, really. And then what you're finding is that even if you compete on paper, if you run your company on paper, you really just don't have access to the majority of the market because you can't get to them. You might earn enough to just give yourself enough income to keep your truck and to keep your business afloat, but you can't compete on any scale. Just think of what people now call the Amazon experience. So our technology, for example, not only is it taking the service order

and creating a service order and scheduling and dispatch and putting it on the technician's mobile device, it's, of course, worrying about billing and invoicing, credit cards, processing, all that on the back end, but it's also managing the customer experience. So you can decide how frequently or what points you want to notify the customer that you're coming. Are you going to do that by email, by SMS? That's what consumers have learned to expect from Amazon, and now they expect it from all service providers.

Hey, we don't need to debate when you're going to show up. Just send me a text that morning. Tell me the time. Send me a text when you're on your way or when you know your ETA. I'll be ready for you to come and do whatever you need to do at my home. And if you are running on paper, you can't afford to spend that kind of time texting and messaging and trying to email. You just can't give the consumer the experience that any company with even baseline technology can give. And you might be able to get that customer's business one time, and sometimes you'll be able to keep them because they like you as a technician. But you can't scale your business at all without technology. And you really can't drive your efficiency because, again, service is sending

technicians out. They have no supervision. So without technology, you don't know that they're doing the most efficient thing. You don't know that they're not doing in a work that's convenient for them personally versus what's better for your company. You just have no way to manage the technicians and to manage the relationship in an ongoing way with the customer, let alone looking at your business and saying, well, what customers did I do business with last month or last six months or last year that I'm not doing business with now? How do I hit them up with a digital incentive that reminds them I'm here, that in the moment of emergency, they should think of me and not go out and Google some new company? Those are the more sophisticated things you can do to drive revenue over time and improve recurrent revenue versus one-time revenue.

Because word of mouth works in an emergency, in a crisis. Who did you use? Did they do a good job? Okay, I'm calling them. But if anyone's doing any sort of research, like you said, they're going online. Now you need to worry about your digital reputation. You need to worry about how many positive reviews you had. Are those positive reviews driving to a website that's well-structured and designed? If you're not getting your traffic from reviews, then you need to know how to rank your website or your ads in Google or Facebook or wherever you're driving, wherever you're getting your leads from. So very quickly, it gets way outside of somebody's ability to control growing a business and

even managing it if you're not using technology today. Yeah, it's crazy because we've got GPSs on our vans. And the other day I said, I want to keep our distribution centers accountable to load the doors and I want priority. So because we've got these things plugged into the OB2 sensor, we built a geo fence around the manufacturer with an auto report that generates how long those trucks were there. And then we compile that data with an equation in Excel, but we're using complicated. It's more of like a domo, but basically it's a report that is tracking KPIs.

We don't have to do anything. We're using the technology. And it's just crazy because sometimes I talk to people and they're like, dude, you speak English. Would you say? And I'm like, this stuff is not that complicated. You don't need to worry about APIs or what Twilio is or, or any of this stuff. What you need to do is hire people and understand that a COO, in my opinion, is now the CTO. My brother-in-law is a vice president at General Electric and there's a million vice presidents there, so it's not really that big of a deal. But he said, Tommy, the technology now runs the operations, and it's about efficiency, it's about automation, and it's about accountability, right? Yeah.

You know, Tommy, when you talk, you're a pretty sophisticated business, and your business is at such a size where you have those things. And I think for the listeners, I would really call out that distinction because there's only a certain number of service companies out there that can even think about the things that you just said. You talked about 50 technologists and that. I would really say that most companies are better with what I would call simpler architectures. You need fewer technology partners. You need fewer integrations. A small-ish business, middle market and below, and don't forget, a middle market business, 100 million is a middle market company by a common definition. So these companies, and the smaller you get, the more and more and more they struggle with these things. Our belief at WorkWave is the customer shouldn't have to go figure out things. Yes, they can write

reports. They can write any number of custom reports in our software, and almost all of them do. But the technology should be automating as much of your business as possible. And it should know to tell you that, hey, these customers haven't paid you. Hey, these are unscheduled. You could set up an alert that says this person is not in the place that you think they are, or they weren't at that address when they said they logged and started business, right? That's a check and balance that we use. We're just trying to make it, all that stuff easier for our customers so that they don't have to worry about as much

because it gets overwhelming to them. And every overhead position you have cuts into your profitability. And a lot of our customers are not highly, highly profitable to begin with. So they're worrying about every dollar that they spend. And I agree with you wholeheartedly. If you can find someone like yourself, that's a great solution. You don't want to do what I do. And people always ask me, especially ad agencies, they're like, why would you want to do all that? And I'm like, well, I'm getting to a billion

within five years. And I think I can do it in three. And to do that, I enjoy it. Marketing and sales are my passion. Those are the things that as I started plucking away, as I built my organizational chart of what I would be, I'm left with these two categories for myself because I actually enjoy it. And there's a good song that goes, every single day I'm on vacation because I love my occupation.

And I don't feel like it's even work. So the people that listen to me regularly, no, I'm not the norm. and I don't feel like it's even work. So the people that listen to me regularly, no, I'm not the norm. And I don't even want them to try. Find somebody that's at least pretty good at this stuff because they're going to be better than you could ever do it yourself. And find specialists. The one thing I can't tell you enough, and Dave, this is something that I tell my management, especially my upper level manager. There's five of us. And I say, guys, your job roles that you're doing still don't have one core thing.

It needs to have one main job. So a specialist with at most five KPIs wrapped around it. Why do you always have to wrap three other things into this job? They're not going to be good at it. They're going to be okay at everything. I'm like, let's get somebody that's just going to do this little thing and do it amazing. Now I'm fortunate because as we're getting into several hundred employees, you can find specialists. And you know, if you're like me, you probably wore 20 hats at one point, but ultimately the goal is to get you out of the business. Because I told this to somebody

earlier. I'm like, man, I sit down with business owners and I'm like, can you just leave for two weeks? Because the business will run so much smoother without your ideas every day and this, that, and the other. You suck at meetings. You're not a good delegator. You're always getting in the way because you built the business. You did a great job, but now it's time to stand back a little bit and let the people that you hired really help and hold them accountable. You're the cheerleader now. I mean, where do you see most of these, whether it's a mid-market or a small market, where do you see most of them kind of hit that? There's always peaks and valleys, but let's talk about the valleys and where. I think it has a lot to do with too many direct reports, but what is your take on that? What we see is that right around 15 million is

where a lot of companies run by the founder will start to struggle because that's the point where very, very clearly you need to start thinking about how do you systematize and how do you create processes through your company? How are you going to scale? Oftentimes that's when a business starts to get too large for the original owner to manage themselves. And you're starting to rely on skill sets that they just inherently, they might not have and might not have the same interest in learning that, you know, that you have when you talk about those. So they're going to struggle somewhere around 15. It could be 10, it could be 20. And then it really depends on whether or not

that founder can let go because you can take a $15 million business and run it at 25 million, but it's going to start to crumble. And to get beyond that, you have to do things that are fundamentally different. And it might sound like a little bit too much theory for a conversation like this, but you have leaders that are generally either behavioralists or structuralists. When you're talking about the ability of an individual and how they can manage their five things, don't try to focus them. That's the language of the behavioralists. Most companies, as they grow and they scale, especially the size you are and heading towards a billion, they're starting to look at the structure. How do you put a good structure in place, process, definition, and discipline, which today is done by technology?

Then you're kind of creating the bumpers on the side of the road. This is where we're going. This is your lane. You own anything in that lane, but don't go outside of it. Just focus on this. And it allows people to operate well in small areas and yet stay coordinated. And technology with a good web of information that points you towards problems and allows you to take action really makes all of that work and allows you to scale. For a lot of service companies, I think it's that if they're growing. And if they're not growing, remember that this is an owner that they're working endless hours every day. A lot of them, if they have help managing, it's their spouse, their significant other. They can't go

on vacation because they're too married to the business. They have to manage it. And those are the situations where we try to look at our technology and say, okay, this person worked their whole life to build this service business. Now they've got a manager that can manage for them. How do we let them run their business sitting on the beach in Florida? They want to be a, what do they call it, a snowbird. How do we give them technology that allows them to live that dream as well as the dream of running their own business? And I think we've tried to define the role of our technology much more broadly because the companies that run on work-weight technology have trusted their business to us. They literally can't run their business without us,

any aspect of it, because they've become so reliant on it. It's mission critical for them. So we see a lot of different types of business and we try to create a framework for each of them that works. And then they get to use the pieces of it that really reflect how they want to run their business and what they want their individual value proposition to be. That's a good point. The technology side of it, it's so complicated. I enjoy reading. I think I'm up to 862 books on Audible.

If you saw my bookshelves, it's ridiculous. And the podcast and the live events, the people I go study and I fly out of town. And I pride myself that my business does better when I'm not here because operationally, I don't love it. I live in this world of the visionary. And I'm the connection driver. And I'm figuring out how I'm going to get the best multiple one day. And everybody's going to love me because we're going to get 15 times our profit. And I was wondering, as we were talking is, what do you think is a healthy profit? Because I think we're going to disagree here and it's circumstantial, but I think with the technology

stacks that we're using, you can start approaching 30%. And I never believed that until now. We have the most complicated payroll you've ever seen. And it takes us a half an hour every biweekly before we used to have four people doing it weekly. Well, I think it's a complicated answer, like you said, because when you choose a strategy as a business, it inherently affects your top line and your bottom lines. And a lot of the models that are used today, the models are trying to balance, well, what is your growth and what is your profitability? Because it's okay to not be profitable. There's absolutely nothing wrong with not being profitable, as long as you're not over leveraged

and you're not putting the company at great risk. If you hit a time of uncertainty, like we're in right now, and it's okay not to be profitable. If you're doubling down on growing to get to an important benchmark and overall size, and then you believe when you hit that point, you are going to start creating more breathing room, which is kind of how we think of profit. So we would look at what is your growth plus what is your profit? And those two things, you have to add them up in percentage and you have to be 20 to 30. You're probably not healthy if the combination of those things isn't at least 20 to 30. Because if you're not that, then what you are is you are just running a very steady, stable business and you should be

looking at improved efficiency to start spinning off profitability, spinning out profit because you're not growing. That's kind of the way to look at the business, in my opinion. Because we, you know, we work in industries, our customers are in industries that are very acquisition-oriented often. And you have to have a strategy if you're going to sell. You're going to get that 15 multiple. Then they're looking at you going, this is a company that has this act together and this is where it's going. It's reliable, it's steady, stable revenue or profit, and therefore it's worth 15 times. You have to have that story of what your company is. And some of our business owners,

some of our customers, they just want to keep a steady, stable business. They want the freedom that their own business affords and the food that it puts on the table. Others want to grow to be a name brand in their town or in their surrounding area. Some want to be just the highest quality providers. Others want to grow regional. Others want to be national. Some just want to grow big enough to get acquired, take the money, and go do something else. So we say that our goal at WorkWave is to help our customers reach their full potential. And the reason why we adopted that as our mission is because the goals of business owners in service is so varied. They just are motivated

by different things inherent in their personality or the combination of owners. So it's not a one answer fits all. 30 is a great number that you'll hear a lot, 30% profitability, and that's awesome. But if you're doing high-end services, really super custom work, well, you should be higher than that even, right? And if you're just going out and fixing air conditioners, I don't know. I don't know if you're getting to 30. Depends. I've heard healthy is 15. I've heard a lot of people like Jamie DiDimonaco. He says, if you're doing more than 15, you're probably not taking care of your customer. But I say, he's missing the fact of my cost per acquisition is low. My booking rate is 86%.

My face-to-face conversion rate is 89% on service, over 60% in sales. There's things that never been thought of in this industry, like turnovers, over 60% in sales. There's things that never been thought of in this industry, like turnovers, which is big in HVAC, but why would you fix an old crappy door? We get it working and then we apply that towards a really nice new door, better quality. And then you look at your average ticket

and some people hate the word sales. And I'm like, guys, when you met your wife or you met your husband, you were sales. When you made your first friend, you the word sales. And I'm like, guys, when you met your wife or you met your husband, you were sales. When you made your first friend, you were in sales. Sales are not a bad thing. Why does everybody connotate sales as it's an evil word? I don't get it. Well, I think sales has changed.

You know, whenever you see it in the movies, you know, we have work. We always joke about the Alex Baldwin movie. Yeah, it's a copies for closers, right? There you go. Yeah, but you know, that's the old type of selling. If you're selling today, it doesn't matter if it's garage doors and any type of home service, especially. It's not about that. It's about adapting to the customer's idea, living by their schedule, being there when they want you there, being easy to do business with, coming across as knowledgeable. And if you do those things, you'll sell as a byproduct a good majority of the time. It is not about selling. It is just

about showing the value of what your firm does and why you do it the way you do and showing that you can consistently make customers happy, which is easy to do today because you have online reviews. And if you have good online reviews, then you're coming across like you inherently do good work. And then it's about that interaction. And your technician needs to know enough to point the consumer towards, hey, look, don't take my word for it.

Check out our Google reviews. We have 50 five-star reviews from the last 30 days alone. Boom. And you've made your case there. So the talk track is a little bit different, but I think it's a little bit more focused on meeting customer expectations during the sales cycle and just showing your value. And showing your value is being able to talk to the consumer about what their need is and the best way to solve it. It's not selling like it is on TV or like it was in the old days, in my opinion. Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right. And here's the biggest thing.

I got this book that I have on my desk. It's called Give Customers a Reason to Choose You Over Your Competitors. It's called Creating a competitive advantage. And here's what it says. Competitive advantage is objective, not subjective. Don't say you're the best and you work nights and weekends. Everybody does. It's quantifiable, not arbitrary.

It isn't claimed by the competition. It's not a cliche. So it needs to be, we've showed up out of our last 987 installs, 984 of them showed up exactly on time. And the other three were, the problem was solved within two business days. And that's something that actually makes sense. And it sounds like, wow, that's interesting. That's a fact.

I sit down with companies all the time and I'm like, what's your unique selling position, the proposition? And they'll say, well, we work nights, weekends. We do drug tests, background checks. And I'm like, ah, that sucks. Tell me a good story, though. Like, what do you mean? I'm like, I'll tell you a story.

My mom bought a house a year ago. First thing I did is look at the builder's work. I took the springs apart. I threw the brand new ones out. I replaced the opener. I added a strut. I added an operator bracket. And I changed out the rollers.

Why? Because I carry the best parts, the highest cycle life, and I want my mom to be taken care of. I tell customers that story and I say with conviction and passion, they believe me and they understand that I'm going to do the same thing for you that I would do for my own mother, like I've done in the past. And I say, tell me a story like that. And they say, well, I don't have a story. And I'm like, then don't be a business. Let's work on this. Let's go back to ground zero. But it's just interesting listening to some business owners. And look, I agree with you that they work in these countless amount of hours. And the thing is, they shouldn't do what I'm doing. And they should focus on what they do working on the business.

And I think what I do is on the business. But I don't have a family. I'm not married. I don't have kids. So I enjoy this. I'm crazy that I get on the phone at night to talk to my technicians or my managers, and I actually enjoy it. So don't be like me, the listeners out there, ever insinuating to try to be as nuts as I

am, but at least start to work on the business, the old e-myth cliche that Michael Gerber coined, instead of working in it all the time. And the technology stack, I tell my managers, I tell my competitors, I tell my friends, I tell some people I consult is the ultimate advantage is your technology stack. And it sounds like you guys got this down to a T, right? Well, you know, we've been doing it for 40 years and we're an industry leader. So I think so. And we're a technology provider. We would like to say a partner. And the way you run your business is awesome. And there's other people that want to run their business in a different way. So what we're trying to bring to the table is a portfolio of products that can meet your need as well as that very small business

owner's need. At the top end, a lot of the listeners might not be familiar with it, but you will. We have Microsoft Power Business Intelligence embedded in our software. You can analyze your performance in a million different ways, either stock the way we've measured businesses out of the box, or you can build your own. And all the way down for a small business, we have a much different view of how to manage business, which is, look, when you wake up, you look at a dashboard. That dashboard tells you, schedule these appointments, because if you don't schedule them, you can't do the work, you can't get paid. Call these people. They're overdue 30 days. You're not calling them. You're not getting paid. Send them another email. Call these people or send them an automated message that says, we will be there today. Confirm that appointment because that

increases your on-road utilization. We're very directed in the way we give that very small business owner information on how to run their business. All the way up at the top end where your type company is, we're giving them tools that allow them to look across and analyze and pull apart very complex business equations. So for us, it's not one size fits all. It's about putting tools in the market that fit the needs of a whole variety of customers, which are unified by this desire to give good service to customers in need. So just for the listeners, Power BI is a tool by

Microsoft to go into your SQL database and pull out combinations that makes a pivot table on Excel. It's like a TI-83 versus a basic calculator. But the point is, how good do you use this data? I'll give you 10 ways, but I'll tell you the main way I use it. I could tell the parts that make us the most profit and who's selling it. And I can match up the guys that are selling the least with a simple bar chart with the guys that are selling the most and have them work together for a day and learn. And here's the secret part. They're not selling it. They're doing the best thing for our clients. They're giving the clients the reassurance that we're going to give you the best parts to make sure you don't have to deal with this because don't give me a deal if it's

going to break again in a year. I just don't want to worry about my garage door, so fix it right. Another way we could use Power BI, this is a thing called multiple regression testing, where you can take your database and dump it and find out, is it male or female? What's the average age? Equifax, there's certain API pools we could find out what their average credit scores are. We could find out their move-in dates. Let's talk about big data because this kind of stuff, this stuff excites me because I love big data companies. I know there's three main data companies and we could pull some crazy data. I mean, we skip trace customers, we take LLCs and we figure out stuff backwards into them. And big data is worth more than crude oil at this point. It's nuts how much data is worth. And once you understand how to use data, I think it changes the game. And it sounds like you guys

have a really good foundation on data. Am I right? Yeah, I think we do. Not only because I come from that industry originally and maybe place a lot of value on it, but because it's inherent to how you have to manage today. I think the question is, you know, there's really two types of information. One is operational information. What needs to be done? Where are your opportunities to capitalize on something? How do you prevent failure before it happens? All this sort of operational understanding of your business, and every company needs that. And then there's a question of, as you grow, you need what we call intelligence about the business, directional things, so that you can make larger strategic plays with the business and uncover and seize

larger opportunities. The question is, where is the management team on the scale of operational versus, let's say, strategic information? And how do you give them information that's impactful? But remember, at least in my opinion, information, data, especially big data, it's inherently worthless. And in fact, it's a huge expenditure for every company. So it's a detractor right off the bat. There is no value in it. There is only value when you pull it out and use it to make a decision that you would not have otherwise made. Hopefully it's fact-based. Hopefully it's beneficial. You get the outcomes you want that are valuable. But it is only in the use of information to change behavior that you get value. And it ties back to

where we talked earlier, that the best companies understand what the right experience for their customer is for the customer and for them. How do they create a set of practices and processes that drive the best total law revenue and profit and the best customer value? And it has to boil down to very fundamental things at the end of the day. And I give you a very simple example. If you've ever had a pest control company come to your house and treat like a bee's nest, wasp's nest in your attic or somewhere in the home, probably someplace you can't get to as a person or you might. So you're never going to see it. What you will find is that if you go up there, you kill the nest, the nest is dead. It's never going to have bees again.

And you can leave it hanging in your house the rest of its existence, as long as your house stands. But if you take a picture of that and you bring it down to the homeowner and you say, hey, I want to let you know I killed this. It's dead. You never have to worry about it again. But just be aware, this is hanging in your attic. You'll probably never see it. But I don't know if you want that there.

If you want, I can get rid of it. Really? That's in my attic? That disgusting thing? Yeah, I can get rid of it if you want. Sure, yeah, get rid of it. Okay, $49.99 is the add-on service. I'll go out, bag it, tag it, get rid of it.

Just sign here on my little mobile device. I'm going to add it to your credit card. Is that good? Yep. Sign off. Boom. Takes them 10 minutes, go up, bags, it takes it to the truck. That's how you use good information to turn a technician into a salesperson and get them to do it, whether or not they want to do it. Because you can embed into the mobile application the functionality that forces them to take a picture and get signed off by the owner. And the owner can say, no, I don't want that brought down. Just leave it, hang, no problem. But a majority of the time, they'll want that thing out of their house. That is how you turn all the theory that we're talking about into something that's at the point of the spear with a technician alone in somebody's house that adds more money to a company.

That's what you're trying to figure out as the magic bullet. And then you just do it over and over and over and over and over. And the way you do that is you train. And when you're done training, you train again and you role play and you train again and train again. It's all about the delivery listen i'm going to give you an experience when i give you my presentation you're going to go i don't give a shit if you got six more garage doors coming the way that i talk i take you out to my truck i show you a thermal camera about the insulation on your garage door and where

the last installer screwed up i literally take take you through powder-coated parts, trademark parts. And I say, listen, sir, apples to apples, we're going to be the best value. We're going to be on time, on budget, and we're going to do a great job. But we don't sell apples. We sell oranges.

So ask the other companies to do this stuff, and I guarantee you they can't. Because we're playing chess when they're playing checkers. So you get 102% ROI on your garage doors. The only thing, Remodel Magazine came out with this. It wasn't a garage door company. It's 40% of your curb appeal. It's the smile of your home. What do we need to do to earn your business? When you tell a customer that and you're happy and you're smiling and you're sitting down at the kitchen table and you smell

good and you're not smoking cigarettes and you don't have your pants pulled down to your waist, you're going to win every time. And this is what you said earlier is most companies can't even do that. And it's like, it's crazy because we hire out when we're desperate, we don't get the right people. And most people are trying to steal their competitors' garbage. I believe in making technicians from scratch. An interesting point, because I forget, there's a huge shortage of technicians. Technicians are increasingly valuable. The turnover of technicians in any company is a real hardship for that company. It's one of the worst things for them. So how do you take this age, let's say an aging technician who is just violently opposed to selling in any capacity, never had to worry about talk tracks and the things that you're talking about.

You can train them and train them and train them. They will adopt a certain percentage, but they won't adopt at all. But they're good enough that you don't want to fire them. You don't want to let them go. How do you get that technician when you're not supervising to do the job? And now we're a technology provider, so where field service technology has come to the aid of the owner is that we can add a layer in the mobile device that that technician uses, which forces them to acknowledge certain things that they had to do. So you talked about thermal scanning of the garage door, right? You can see the power of that.

That's using technology in the sales. It sounds very powerful, certainly going to convince a lot of people. You can visualize waste, a loss of money. All those things are awesome. How do you make sure the technician did that? Well, in the mobile device that we provide, you force them to take that picture, to attach it to the service order, and acknowledge that they signed it, they showed it to the customer. Technology, our technology, is providing an overlay on top of technician behavior to get a company greater adherence to whatever that company has defined as part of the buying process, the selling process, the customer experience. Technology is controlling, influencing behavior in a way it never was before. And as more, as a greater number of technicians are less experienced and assets

are becoming more complex, just the nature of home assets today, you need technology to do those sort of things because it's making up for the gaps the technician might have in their soft skills or their learning. So that's an alternate view to the traditional train, train, train, train. No, I agree with you wholeheartedly that a checklist is the best thing ever. But the difference is, is I believe there's three things I focused on eye contact, body language and tonality and delivering that message with the technology. If you've got a checklist and we've got a whole data integrity team to make sure this stuff's filled out correctly. The stickers that we used to take pictures of used to be able to upload. So we got rid of that feature because people would take one,

it'd take 10 pictures and then just upload them for the rest of the time. And my goal as the owner is I always try to beat the system. I poke holes in it because I've never seen technicians do so many things. They make up email addresses to verify, but there's just so many ways. And I'm like, you got to kind of inspect what you expect is what I think. And technology allows us to do that. And having a good LMS and these different things, I could not be multi-state right now if I didn't have a good technology stack. I mean, it's pretty easy to become a big, in your own backyard, you can pay attention to things. You got your eye on your own inventory.

If you're the only one pulling it, it's really easy to do. But when you go multi-states and, and you start hiring and recruiting from 2000 miles away, you got to depend on technology. And I do a hundred percent agree with you that, that most people don't even understand how to use. They're going to take the numbers. I ask people all the time,

and this is kind of funny because I said, what's your call booking, right? And they're like, well, it's gotta be around. I don't know, 90% at least.

And I go, well, is it 90.2%? Is it 89.7? And they go, we're booking most of the calls. And I'm like, well, that's a feeling. That's your perception. Where's the facts? Well, we don't really track that.

And I'm like, and I don't know why I got a Texan accent with that. I'm a southerner to listeners. And I'm like, here's the thing all these things technology could track and i don't know what to fix if i don't know your call booking rate your address ticket your call per acquisition your conversion rate those are just the basics i don't want to be able to click into that and i want to find out for example we use a voice over internet protocol void and why not do a round robin, a weighted average that your best call booking rate when she's available or he's available, they get the call first and then

pay a performance pay to make sure they're making great money. So instead now, you're going to love this, Dave. I say our average CSR makes $25 an hour. When everybody else says we're starting at 13, I say, they say, how could you afford $25 an hour? I say, well, here's where we started. And I pay minimum wage or your bonus structure. It's based on, you got to have a 90% booking or better to get this much. You got to have your tardiness. We look at quality controls. We look at your empathy. So we've got a whole system. We test one out of 10. And it's amazing how easy it is to recruit when you see our average CSR makes $25 an hour. And they earn it.

You can only afford to do that when you know that you have a system program in place to understand that you're going to make money off that because a great salesperson is well worth it if they're selling. It's all the measurement, the understanding of giving them all the tools to make them effective that makes it possible to pay that much money. Yeah. And you know what? If I told people, here's the big mistake is they pay their CSRs $14 an hour, but they pay their tax 100 grand a year.

And I go like this, okay, let's just say for sake of numbers, 20 calls in a day, you got one at 70%, one at 90%. So one's booking 18, one's booking 14. Four call variants. You got that four calls, okay? Your average ticket's $600. That CSR is costing you $2,400 a day in revenue. If you're at 20%, that's $480 a day because you cheaped out to give an extra few bucks an hour, which that would have been $24 an hour to make an extra 500 bucks. What are you thinking? So it's interesting that I talked to these people and they're like, well, you know, we just can't afford that. I'm like, you can't afford not to do it. You need to start having, you're excellence. Cause right now, why spend money on advertising when you can't book the calls that are coming in? And it just bugs me. But, you know, I wanted to ask you big social

mobile. Tell me about the book. Well, it probably would be right up your alley. So it takes its name from big data, social media, and mobile technology. And, you know, the best companies today are really treating those three things as if they're one, and they understand how to pull information out of it, out of big data, you know, social media, mobile technology, to understand a lot about their own operation and their customer, and then interact with the customer in a way that gives the customer what they need, adds value to their life, but also gives that company the results that they need in order to continue to grow and to be profitable. So what it does is provide a methodology,

kind of a step-by-step blueprint that you can follow and compare back to yourself and say, well, am I doing this? I'm not doing that. Well, okay, what do I need to do to do that? Here, go gather this information, answer these questions about your business. Then you use it this way. When you get to that level, you take the next step and then ask the question, are you doing this, this, and this? No, go get this information, analyze it this way. This results do this. So it's a very step-by-step approach. And that's the type of work that I was known for back when I was a business consultant. My group that you mentioned, the Telos group, we were really the first group that was

combining big data with traditional financial information and operational information to get a broader picture of how the company is operating and interacting with consumers. Because for me, I love the theory. I taught in Rutgers University's EMBA program, which is a really great program, highly ranked in the world. And the theory discussions were all amazing. But in business, we have to figure out how to take that complex theory and apply it down to something that creates a tangible return. Like you and I were just talking about training versus structure versus technology, all these big things. And a lot of listeners might not have a takeaway from that. So like the takeaway for me there is take a minute over dinner. And if you're managing your business with your partner, have a conversation with your partner and say, when we talk about making our business better, are we usually talking about how to make it more

efficient and cut expense? Or are we talking about how to grow revenue in ways that we never did? Because when you talk, Tommy, you're talking about growing revenue. And most service managers think 90% of the time about reducing expense and getting more efficient. When they adopt our technology, they're always doing it out of this need to become more efficient. And we say, look, we can make you more efficient. But the best service companies are thinking about the customer experience and driving revenue and driving profit. Let's get you that baseline of improved efficiency. But WorkWave is here to help you look down the road towards revenue growth and profit growth.

And to me, that's a more meaningful conversation to have with the owners that we're talking to because it convinces them that we're the right partner for them to work with to help grow their business year after year after year. They're never going to plateau with us. We're always going to help them get where they need to grow. And I think it's times like that where you can sit with whoever you trust to talk to about your business and ask a basic question like that. Let me do some self-reflection. Am I always thinking about expense? Have I really put the time and effort in to grow my business in a way that I never grew up before to be more profitable? I think most of the listeners out there will find that they're thinking about expense. They're managing expense and not growth.

But when you talk, you're talking about growth. And that's where they need to get to. Where do I find this book? I just tried to Amazon and Audible. Maybe I missed it. Where's the best spot to buy it? Amazon, for sure. Okay. I must have missed it. Okay. Thank you for being patient. I'm going over our time here.

But what are three books that you'd recommend? Could be fiction, could be the Bible, could be Audible and Friends and Influence People. Three books that you really enjoy that kind of shaped you and helped you along the way. Well, for me, I think my career, it started with a book that a lot of people know and read called The Tipping Point, you know, Malcolm Gladwell. And I think the reason that book was so impactful to me was because at the end of it, for whatever strange reason, I asked myself a different question. You know, I appreciate the dynamics of a tipping point, what makes that happen, why, but because I was writing a lot at the time, and I was talking, and I was working in theory, and applying that theory in customers, I just asked myself a different question. And the question was, could we manufacture a tipping point? Can you just do enough things to manufacture one and therefore make whatever you're tipping

gain traction that it would not otherwise gain? And it really shaped a lot of my thinking and understanding about marketing, which led me into big data to try to understand how do you figure out consumer behavior, consumer personality? How do you use those things and leverage those things in a business so that you get better results? That's really where a lot of it started for me. I think Good to Great is a good book because it forces you to double down on this concept of understand what you're good at or what you need to be good at. Understand what's really driving the success of your business. That's a theme that you would find through a lot of my work. And even at WorkWave, we're trying to embed that concept

into the technology all the time. And then I probably would grab one of my books as a third book. I love it. I love it. And if someone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to get a hold of you? The easiest place to reach me professionally is through LinkedIn. You can always reach out to us at WorkWave. It's easy to find us at WorkWave. We're on all the social platforms, Facebook. A lot of our small business customers connect with us there.

WorkWave's even on Instagram, certainly. Or just drop me an email over at WorkWave. It's first initial, last name, dgnetto at WorkWave.com. And we're always happy to talk to service providers. Perfect. And finally, we talked about a lot of stuff. And usually I'm more kind of just talking about drive and waking up in the morning and having a goal. And I like Michael Michalowicz book. I just read it, fix this next and prioritizing

and essentialism. And the one thing by Gary Keller and just learning to focus your energy and time on what the biggest thing that can move the fastest. That's one thing I'd give as advice. I wanted to ask you, ultimately, if you had to give the listeners who's mostly home service, one solid piece of advice, it could be something they could do today. It could be something they should strive to be or a level of excellence. What would be the last piece of gold to leave them to munch on? I think I'm a little bit old school in my thinking about service, believe it or not, even though I work mostly in progressive technology companies, WorkWave is certainly one of the most progressive in the industry. I still believe

service is about a person standing in somebody else's living room or their front lawn or maybe even the place where they do business and that personal connection, that sometimes gets lost because the buying cycle is so complicated. You mentioned five or seven is the average touchpoint. So without technology, you really can't manage through those five or seven touchpoints anymore. And when you start to look at technology, it's easy to get overwhelmed. So take a step back and just think through the process that you use to go get a new customer. You're driving past a house. How do you get that person to be a customer? You're coming across somebody on Facebook platform. How do you get them to be a customer? What are the steps? One, two, three, four, five. I need to do these things to convince them.

Technology will help with some of it, but some of it isn't about technology. It's about that person standing in somebody's living room. Map out that process and then the process that you use to perform service, a service call, and then the process that you use to get paid, to move money through your company. If you map those three things out, it's the starting point and the foundation that every single service company works on. Might be super complex, might be very simple, but those things never change. The more time you spend laying them out very clearly, training them, managing to them, understanding them, the better your business will run. And without that understanding,

you can never really grow and scale systematically. And I love that. Systems, listen to this. I love that. If there is something wrong with your business, remember, a bad system will ruin 10 amazing people. A good system can fix 100 bad people. That's what I love.

The system. How do you think McDonald's hires people at minimum wage and does such an amazing job? I love Ray Kroc's story. But the system will dictate the output. And if you guys start thinking that, what failed in my system? And here's what I love the most is get your people to listen to ask them a lot of questions and have them come up with the answers because then they're excited to participate in the new structure of the system when they had input and finding the solution so Dave I gotta tell you I

just I love podcasts man I just this stuff gets me off it's like literally it's just this is what I live for I learned so much and I really appreciate you coming on today. Yeah, always happy to talk with you. Thank you, Tommy. I appreciate it. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me and I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast.

Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you

like the podcast and you leave a review make it four or five sentences tell us how we're doing and I just wanted to mention real quick we started a membership it's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club you get a ton of inside look at what we're gonna do to become a billion dollar company and uh 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, 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.