The Home Service Expert Podcast - Designing a Service Delivery Process that Builds Customer Loyalty

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

Wayne Mullins is the founder and CEO of Ugly Mug Marketing. He has helped scale multiple companies while helping hundreds of entrepreneurs. He influences more than 250,000 entrepreneurs through his training program and books. He is the author of Full Circle Marketing: Transform Your Marketing and Turn Your Customers Into Evangelists. In this episode, we talked about culture, customer avatar, marketing, leadership…

most people listening probably heard of building or creating a customer avatar. And we've all heard about this thing, about this exercise, like we should do this thing. But the reality is most of us never take the time to actually sit down and complete that, work through that. Because we naturally think, oh, well, I understand my customers. I know who they are. I don't need to sit down and jot down their interests, their behaviors, where they shop, all these things, because I know my customers. But if you're undisciplined enough to sit down and do that little exercise, it's going to be a reflection of everything else that takes place in your marketing.

If you don't have the discipline to make yourself do that one painful thing that you don't think you need to do, I can almost guarantee you, your current marketing system that you have in place, whether that's a formalized system or not, you've got a system. And if you're unwilling to do those little disciplines, your big picture system is not going to work well. 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 to the Home Service Expert. I've got Wayne Mullins here. How's your day going, Wayne? It's going well, Tommy. Thank you so much. I'm excited about this chat today. Yeah, this is going to be great. There's nothing that I love more than talking about marketing. So Wayne is an expert in marketing, social media leadership. He's based out of Pineville, Louisiana. His company is Ugly Mug Marketing. Wayne is a husband, father of four, founder, CEO, entrepreneur, and author. He's a generous soul, a risk taker, and an out-of-the-box against grain thinker and leader. The past 20 years, Wayne has scaled multiple companies and helped hundreds of entrepreneurs do the same for their companies. Wayne influences more than 250,000 entrepreneurs annually through his blog, books, and training

programs. He's personally worked with clients in over 100 industries from every corner of the globe. He's the author of Full Circle Marketing, Transform Your Marketing, and Turn Your Customers Into Evangelists. That's awesome, man. I'm really excited about this talk here. Let's get the comments going. Let's get started. So tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got started in the business and a little bit just about your history. Yeah, absolutely. So my background, actually business background, began my junior year of college. And for whatever reason, my parents decided to give me some CDs. Yes, I'm of CD age by this gentleman of the name Zig Ziglar. And Zig Ziglar sold me on the profession of selling. So from that point forward, I knew I wanted to go in sales. So graduated, got a job in sales and was terrible for about a year and a half. Absolutely terrible. But kept learning,

kept studying, kept knocking on doors, and slowly got good at this thing called sales. And then Tommy, I had this dangerous idea or this dangerous thought, which was, I looked at the amount of money that I was making for the company and I looked at my paycheck and I said, huh, I wonder what would happen if I went and sold something for myself. Well, at that point, my list of skills were two things, sales and cutting grass. That was it. The only two skills I had. So much to the dismay of my parents, I left a great corporate sales job and started a lawn and landscape company from scratch.

And then over the course of a three-year period, grew that company. We were one of the largest two in our region. So we're in a smaller area. The region, though, encompasses probably 250,000 people, give or take. And ended up selling that company. It was in the process of that growth, though, that a lot of our actual lawn care companies were coming to me and asking me, what are you doing to grow? What are you doing to scale?

And the answer was just simply marketing. That's it, huh? I had a landscape business too. So how many clients did you say you got to? Well, we actually went down in the number of clients that we had. We went from mostly residential to mostly commercial. And so this would have been early 2000s. I don't even remember the number of clients in total, but sold the company, the gentleman who bought it. I ran into him two years ago. He still had the company and still had a good chunk of the same accounts. Wow. Okay. And let's see here in the past few years, it's been pretty crazy for everybody with this disease going around. And it's just,

I look at marketing a little bit different than most people. I look at it as you market for clients, you market for internal customers, which are employees. And you're also, once you get to a certain size, you try to buy companies. So there's three types of marketing. And I think all three of them play into effect, but it's really hard to recruit employees right now. And I think that it's a lot of people lump it into recruiting, but I think it's marketing for internal customers. What's your thoughts on that? Completely agree. I think it was Warren Buffett who said, it's when the tide goes out, you can see who's

been skinny dipping. So when this pandemic hit, what happened was the pandemic didn't all of a sudden break people's cultures. In other words, the culture at the businesses. What happened was it revealed the truth about the culture. So when this great resignation, as they're calling it, began, what happened was people, cultures became more transparent. How businesses responded to the pandemic, how they treated their team members in the midst of the pandemic revealed so much about the underlying culture. And I completely agree that recruitment

oftentimes is a reflection of the culture that exists. So recruitment and retention go hand in hand, and they're both tied so close to the cultures that we build or we create within our organizations. So, you know, you said all you used to do is marketing to grow the businesses and you wrote a whole book and there's a lot of marketing. Okay. There's a lot of different types of marketing. I'm a big fan of building a brand and it starts with online reputation. Then I say Google is God.

Why? Because they've got organic, pay-per-click, LSA, which is local service ads, and then they've got the Google My Business page, which you can do a sponsored ad as well. That's the location with the reviews. When it comes to marketing, what do you suggest when you're getting started? You've got a five-person company. It's just getting off the ground. What's the best marketing to do? Yeah, I agree with you about Google as well. The other one that's in there as well, they own and control YouTube, which is another huge opportunity and platform that can be utilized as well. When people are first getting started,

the number one thing, and this is going to be a little bit, I guess, higher level, not as tactical, but you have to be crystal clear about who it is you're trying to connect with. In other words, who does your brand message need to resonate with? And so when you get crystal clear about that, it shapes or it helps sculpt every other decision you make about marketing. So most people listening probably heard of building or creating a customer avatar. And we've all heard about this thing, about this exercise, like we should do this thing. But the reality is most of us never take the time to actually sit down and complete that, work through that. Because we naturally think, oh, well, I understand my customers. I know who they are. I don't need to sit down and

jot down their interests, their behaviors, where they shop, all these things, because I know my customers. But if you're undisciplined enough to sit down and do that little exercise, it's going to be a reflection of everything else that takes place in your marketing. If you don't have the discipline to make yourself do that one painful thing that you don't think you need to do, I can almost guarantee you, your current marketing system that you have in place, whether that's a formalized system or not, you've got a system. And if you're unwilling to do those little disciplines, your big picture system is not going to work well.

Yeah. Sorry about that. An alarm's going off outside right now. It just figures here when this podcast starts, it's the time the alarm goes off outside. I've got every single one of my trucks. We've got 80 trucks in Phoenix. We're in 19 markets, 19 states, 30 markets. Yeah, I definitely think identifying your avatar. But what do you say to somebody like I have a garage door company, we repair and fix garage doors. Now I know who my client is. We've actually done studies on the avatar. We've really understood who spends what we want. And believe it or not, it's not only the wealthy and affluent, it's the people that have a dual income of $120,000. They've got a garage door, typically an HOA door is the best because it's in stock. And we can talk about insulation and

better parts on the garage door, but we can get it done quick and fast for the client. What's wrong with saying the landscaper that says everybody with a lawn or anybody with a sprinkler system is my customer? How do you get more granular with it? Because I think a lot of people miss this piece. Yeah. I mean, what you just said, Tommy, is the perfect example. You know your customer, right? You know their income range, you know, homeowner, you know, whatever all those criteria are, you can speak that because you just said you did the research. Most people think... I intuitively know. So I had a lawn care company. I intuitively know if you've got grass, you're a potential customer. Well, the reality is that's the way I started the

business. But over time, what I learned, who we best served in that particular business were the commercial clients. That's who we best serve. And so once we got clear about that avatar, we could then customize the way we approach them, our messaging, and even the way we served. In other words, the way we provided our services got customized based on that particular audience that we were serving. So what's an example of that? On how we would customize that messaging? Yeah. How do you customize a message once you do figure out the avatar? I'm just curious, like a real life scenario. Sure. So if in the lawn care industry, you're going to use words that are different speaking

to residential customers or prospective residential customers, then you are commercial. They care about two different things. So the commercial clients, they're going to care much more about curb appeal. They're going to care much more about curb appeal. They're going to care about curb appeal when it matters to them. In other words, if it's doctor's office, attorney, things like that, they're going to care about it Monday through Friday. In other words, it's got to look great when their clientele are coming in. Restaurants, depending on the restaurant, nights, weekends. So you speak differently. And it goes all the way into though, how you actually market. The way I'm going to market to residential customers is going to be completely different than the way I'm going

to market to commercial. So in lawn care, we use lawn care. In lawn care, I could do residential, I could do postcards, I could do door hangers, I could do knocking on doors if I wanted to. But in commercial, it's a very specific person within an organization, within a business that we were calling on. And so we had to go directly to them. We had to communicate the things that matter to them. In other words, we're going to make sure that your lawn looks perfect Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. You call, we're going to be there within 2 hours if something's wrong. So my drove through the lawn tore up and you've got patients coming in, customers coming in, we will be sense. But we don't spend the time to think, okay,

if I'm going to change my audience, how do I need to change my messaging? How do I need to change the way our crews service those audiences? Yeah. I used to do a lot of commercial and I did with my landscaping business. This is 15 years ago. And I used to do water conservation analysis because they really cared about how can you save them water. And a lot of times I switch a lot of stuff over to drip systems. And we'd also do, we do an add-on service where we checked all your toilets and your basically a little bit of plumbing stuff. Cause we were, I was pretty good at that stuff.

We check all the leaky faucets. And when I walked into them, I said, did you know you have a leaky faucet here? And this is going to cost you this much in a year and this much water waste. But also I said, what are some of the pet peeves? And they said, I hate it. The landscapers always come Tuesday morning at 9am and they're blowing on all the cars and all the people. I said, so would Saturday work better for you guys? And they said, yes, Saturday and Sunday is completely open. There's nobody here. And we talked about just little things that are pet peeves for them. Sometimes language barrier, when there was something wrong, they couldn't get ahold of anybody that, you know, spoke English as a first language. So

there was a lot of things that I learned to go down a pain funnel and help them understand that we had a solution to their biggest pet peeves. And really, I think that people typically, if we go to our innate brain that's millions of years old, we fight pain. Right now, we're very comfortable. So we seek pleasure. But back in the day, it was like, what am I going to eat today? Where am I going to get water from? And how am I going to protect my family? And that's kind of the old fashioned, what are they called? The reptilian brain or something like that. So I think it's pretty interesting when we talk about this stuff, because that brain still exists. A lot of times what we do is we buy stuff based on emotion, then we back it up with logic. And sometimes you wonder, one of my eighth step in my sales process

is make sure to take care of the customer. After you've collected the money, sell it, right? So after you've collected the money, you go over and you open the door three or four times, open and close it, listen to it, explain the safety eyes, put the sticker on, blow out the garage, clean up after yourself, go over the warranty, go over the registration of the opener, program the car. You spend 20 minutes with a customer after we've been paid because that buyer's remorse tends to go away. And I say it's one of the most important steps because all of a sudden they go, this is a good company. This is a good person I bought from. They're not just salespeople. They actually care that everything goes right after I've collected the money. Yeah. So what you're speaking of is the difference between, in my mind, what most people consider

marketing is really just advertising. They don't actually think about what is marketing. And the way we love to define marketing is this. Marketing is your ability to attract, which is mostly advertising, and keep a customer. Now, we don't want to keep a customer just for the sake of, quote unquote, keeping a customer. We want to take a customer and turn them into an evangelist for our company, for our brand, for our product services. And that's exactly what you're doing. So most of us, when I think of marketers, we're so short-sighted. We think like salespeople, and I'm a salesperson, I love selling, but we think like salespeople, we think it's our job to get people to know about us,

to like us, to trust us, to hand us money. And then we run out and try to go find more people that we can do that same thing to again. But we live in this world, Tommy, where every single person just about has this little device that they carry in their pocket or purse called a smartphone. With this device, within a few seconds, they can broadcast to the world, all their friends on social media, all their followers, they can broadcast about their experience with us. And if we're smart, if we're strategic marketers, we will leverage that just like you're talking about going above the baseline expectation. Yeah, you put the door in, the door's the thing they bought, but all those little extra pieces

go such a long way in terms of turning them into evangelists for your company. One of the things we do is we try to be different than the rest. We try to really, the little things that separate us, like I always offer to buy them coffee or something on the way. And a lot of times I say it differently. I say, hey, Wayne, listen, I'm stopping off at 7-Eleven. I'm picking myself up a Coca-Cola or a Slurpee or something. Don't make me surprise you. What would you like? Because otherwise you're going to end up with a green monster or something, you know, and

I make it fun, but there's a lull of reciprocity too, because who else is calling out for him to pick up something on the way? And then also there's little things. Typically when I used to be in the garage, when I was the guy doing all the work, I get to know them a little bit and i'd say hey listen you're in an hoa aren't you i said yeah i said do you happen to know the hoa president and i try to get that phone number now for free service for the hoa president i try to get the paint codes so i knew exactly when we put in a door that we can then we could advertise in their monthly mailer or their quarterly newsletter to their HOA that you want a new garage door we've already got the paint codes we're already approved we'll get that taken care of quick and it's these little things there's

a great book called raving fans and in raving fans they talk about how do you make a customer just like you said an evangelist that goes out of their way and typically I knew if a customer was really happy and I know their personality type and And I didn't just ask for one review. I say, Hey, listen, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I've got an operator reinforcement bracket. It's $70. The search protector is 50 to $120. Let me show you how they work. I want to give that to you for your time. If you're willing to go tell me how I did on Google, Yelp, and Nextdoor. And I'd love to get a quick video of you in front of your new garage, just saying how quiet it is and how much you love it. Would you do that for me? And I tell my employees all the time, you know what the hardest

thing to do is? Is ask. Smile and ask. All you got to do is ask. Most people won't say no, but here's the deal about reviews. I don't want to leave a review for a company, but I'll leave it for a person all day long. If a server comes up to me and says, listen, we get a bottle of wine on Friday for whoever gets the most reviews. Me and my boyfriend or me and my girlfriend are going out this weekend, whatever it is, and we'd love to have this bottle of wine. It's a $100 bottle of wine, and did I give you five out of five service? Awesome. I used to serve tables. I used to bartend. I used to do it all. I don't know why in my mind, sometimes I think of a woman server, even though I was a server because I have a girlfriend. But anyways, what are your thoughts

on that? I love it. I mean, so the book that you talked about, Raving Tanks is somewhere behind me right here on this bookshelf. I can grab it just by turning around, but it's back here. And it's those little things though. It goes back to those little common sense things going above and beyond. This is where I would steer that conversation. I think, Tommy, so often though, we as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we can deceive ourselves in terms of the level of service that we provide. Because it's our baby, right? This is our business. We believe that we're pouring our hearts into it. And we believe that the customer should feel a certain way about it. And Bain & Company did this survey. They surveyed 4,000 business owners across the United

States. And they asked the owners, they said, on a scale of one to five, one being terrible, five being phenomenal, what level of service do you provide for your customers? And 80% of those business owners said, we provide phenomenal service. Well, Bain & Company said, this doesn't add up. There's no way 80% of you provide phenomenal service. So they went back to those business owners and said, we want to now survey your customers and basically ask them the same question. You do business with this company, what level of service do they provide you? And tell me only 8% of the customers said that the company's provided phenomenal service. And so I can tell you from my own experience, I've been guilty of this. We pour ourselves into a project. So whatever that project may be,

and we believe that we have done everything we can, so to speak, to exceed expectations or meet expectations. But oftentimes we forget that whatever the person on the other side is feeling is valid, whether we agree with it or not. And so when it comes to customer expectations and providing remarkable service, if we're not careful, and if we don't think logically about, okay, what are all the points of interaction with our company? So how many times do they expect the phone to ring before we answer? How many days or hours or whatever before we respond to an email? We should go through that list and say, here's what a reasonable customer has the right to expect.

In other words, we're going to answer the phone in three rings. Now, if we're going to exceed expectations, it's got to be two rings, right? You go through your list of every point of interaction and you'd create that list. Here's what they have the right to expect. Here's what exceeding expectations looks like. And then do another column that says, here's what it looks like when we don't even hit expectations. You now have a sheet of paper that is the ultimate litmus test for the service, the level of service that you provide for your customers? You know, what you're talking about is, there's a couple of things here. There's net promoter score, which is the NPS. And if they're fans, if they're promoters, they're a nine or 10.

Seven or eight is neutral. Anything less than a seven is bad. They're not going to go out of their way to tell somebody unless they're a nine or 10. And another thing you're talking about is the customer journey, rings until answer, how long to get stuff installed. And a lot of people keep track of KPIs, booking rates, call booking rates, conversion rates, average tickets, how much it costs to get a lead. So cost per acquisition, CPA. But how many people are keeping track of how many rings to answer? Those are real true competitive advantages. There's a book called Competitive Advantages by Janie Smith. And it's important to monitor those things. Another thing that you should monitor is employees' KPIs. How many people

bought houses this year? How many people have a kid that brought it and a kid into this world and their future looks bright because we've done a lot here to help? How many people got to go on a dream vacation? These are things that I'm looking at really, really seriously creating KPIs for our internal customers. And I think we missed that so many times. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. I love it. As the saying goes, you're preaching to the choir. But I think that's a reflection or your success is a reflection of your mindset. So your mindset is so different than so many entrepreneurs, so many business owners. You are obsessing over the things that most people aren't.

You're looking at how long are we taking to answer the phone? How long are we taking to go give the quote or go look at the site? How long are we taking to actually do the install? All of those things that matter, not necessarily to you as a company, but they matter to the people that we serve. From the company perspective, it doesn't really matter if you enter the phone in five rings or 10 rings, from a company perspective. But from the customer or the prospective customer, that matters a lot. And it immediately... In this world of mediocrity, it immediately differentiates you from all your competitors. I believe service, like providing exceptional, remarkable service

in today's world is such a huge competitive advantage. It's something that's not discussed enough. There's nobody that goes to business school and learns this stuff. That's not talked about enough. You ever heard of Roy Williams? He's called the Wizard of Ads. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

I was in Austin, Texas last month with him for a full day. And he's probably done more media buys than anybody. He's very, very good at creating a story, a brand. He calls it, it's a sitcom. People get to know the characters. He goes, but there's one thing that people really fall short of a lot of the times. He goes, we'll build a brand. We'll find out who you are and we will attract customers and it will go crazy. But then you've got to live up to your end of the bargain when you knock that

door. Are you living up to the brand? And they come to know your character. Imagine Joey from Friends and you come to meet him and he's nothing like his character. It's just, it's out of place. And I think it's so important sometimes when we create this brand, this level of excellence, if that's what it is, that we hold up our end of the bargain. And there's got to be a systematic approach. I love the movie The Founder with Ray Kroc. And he said, how could I figure out a way?

The McDonald's brothers, actually, they were out in this tennis court and they started drawing it with chalk on how to make a perfect burger fast and effective that it's the same every place and i don't care i'd rather have an eight across the board than have a lot of tens and a lot of fives. Because at least it's consistency. And we can find out what's stopping it from being a 10 and change that. But there's got to be, we've got eight steps. It's our sales process, what we call the customer satisfaction process. We've got certain steps that ensure we do things. And I will tell you this, I spend more time with the checks and balances and the data integrity than I do on the process itself. Because we used to do this a lot better and we've got to start again, but we used to do

a lot of secret shoppers. And the results of a secret shopper sometimes are not fun because sometimes you think we've got 250 technicians out there. So you think it's great. You think they mentioned certain things. And so the secret sauce is how do you get a secret shopper every call? And a great way to do that is a dispatcher that's checking in with the customer when they're there. You can call it a customer satisfaction representative,

but there's a lot of things that go into the perfect experience. And I've always considered myself great at marketing. We get thousands of calls a day. But that level of excellence, it's hard to keep that. It's great management. It's picking the right people and it's creating a process. Do you subscribe to any processes that create a level of excellence? So first of all, wizard of ads. More books are sitting right behind me. A couple of his books are literally right behind me. But I think it's so important for people listening or watching this to realize you're a student. Your success is a result of all these other inputs. It's not like you just

arrive here and you're here. But you've been doing this, I would imagine, your entire career path. This didn't just all of a sudden start where you're acquiring all this knowledge, all this studying other people, what they're doing, how they're doing it. So I just think that's so important because we often just look at people who are successful and we think, oh, well, they're lucky they got there by... There's these little things that keep coming up that are clues into what leads somewhere. So inputs always produce outputs. Not happy with the outputs, adjust the inputs coming in. But to answer your question about service excellence, there's a great book by this gentleman of the name Ron Kaufman.

And I forget the exact title of the book. Ron teaches basically there's... I think he teaches there's six levels of service. So the very top is like unbelievable. You drop down, there's... I think he teaches there's six levels of service. So the very top is unbelievable. You drop down, it's close to unbelievable. I don't remember what it is. Remarkable, desired, expected. And you go down to terrible. But he teaches that it's an escalator. And so if you or I were to provide remarkable service to our customers today, that remarkable service, if we keep doing that same thing over and over again, is no longer remarkable. It becomes now expected. And so it's this escalator of expectations that keeps coming down. So number one, I would say is that we have to have these conversations with our team that says this, that just because we do something today that's remarkable, something

that's phenomenal for a customer, if we keep doing that same thing over and over again, it's going to become expected. It's no longer remarkable. And then the second thing I'd say is this, Jeff Bezos in one of his early shareholder letters, he said, the thing I love most about our customers is that they are divinely discontent. They're divinely discontent. And when I first read that, it just blew my mind. Who says I love the fact that our customers, they're always discontent. But that was the fuel for Jeff Bezos. He knew that we as a culture... So when he was starting here in the US before he was global, that we're constantly experiencing something and then that becomes the norm.

And so then we expect something more to be remarkable. And he embraced that fact. He said, we love the fact that they're divinely discontent. So in so many ways, this has to be a mindset that gets pushed into every corner of the organization from the person entering the phone to the janitor coming in, cleaning the office, that mindset that every single thing we do either contributes to the experience that we're creating, or it dilutes, takes away from that experience that we're creating. That's so good. It's profound. Is it called up your service or uplifting service? Yeah. Uplifting service. Uplifting service. Okay. So talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on mirror leadership and what is mirror leadership and why should everybody be practicing it? Yeah. So the most challenging, the most difficult, the most annoying person that I have to lead every day is the person that looks back at me in the mirror.

That is the most challenging person to lead. And I think too often as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we kind of had this American idea of leadership. Like we're at the top and, you know, we have other had this American idea of leadership. We're at the top and we have other people that take care of all these things and we're no longer having to deal with all this stuff. And while there's obviously there's some truth in that, we don't have to do the same things we used to do. You're not out installing doors every day. I'm not directly doing websites or marketing campaigns every day. The reality is that when we truly lead,

that we are actually servants of those around us. You can look at this up, but the word leadership and the word servant actually come from the same word. So they come from the same root word. And so as we are to lead people, we are to serve more people. And if we're going to be effective at that, we must first learn to lead ourselves. We must first learn that if we can't get ourselves to do the things we don't want to do, why should we expect others to do it? If we tell our team members, we expect them to show up on time for meetings, but we don't do it, why would we ever expect them to actually do those things? And I think we give ourselves a pass because we say, well, I'm the founder, I'm the owner, I've earned the right, quote unquote, to not live up to those same expectations.

And that's such hypocrisy on our part. We have one set of expectations for our team members, and yet somehow we always give ourselves a pass. And so for me, it goes back to, I think it was Michael Gerber who said in the e-myth that if you're thinking is sloppy, your business is going to be sloppy. If you're disorganized, your business is going to be disorganized. And so for me, it's a constant reminder that it's not so much about leading my team, although I have to do that, but if I can successfully lead myself, the other will take care of itself. You know, I will say that a lot of times I try, and I don't consider this a shortcut. I consider it a strength of trying to find my weaknesses. I almost cheat in a way that I find people that are very, very organized because I'm not. I find people all around me. And a lot of times people go after things

that are the people that are like them. They try to find people just like them in their company. And then they wonder why, you know, there's this thing called the predictive index. And there's a lot of personality tests, but this is a good one. And it's a scattergram typically of your leadership team. And I talked to a private equity company that's massive. And they said, what we do is we take the leadership team and we put them through the PI test.

And we find out where they're at. And a lot of times they'll fill three of the four quadrants. They got a good little path of each bubble, but they're missing something in the fourth quadrant. And sometimes it's all different, depends on what the company is. And what we do is we find somebody to fill that quadrant and we see massive, massive explosive success. Because now it's a well-rounded company and there's different thought process going on. I'll tell you what kills me is I'm such a visionary. Rocket Fuel, if you read that book, I'm so far over to one side. I'm literally the visionary.

And my vision, it just seems so common sense of how to get there and what my goals are. And yet what I realized is, you know, just like the book talks a lot about Walt Disney Walt Disney had this amazing vision but without Roy his brother to know exactly what was in the bank account we deal with the contractors at Disney World and Disneyland nothing would have been built nothing would have got done so I think it's important to realize who you are and make sure to take these tests and understand who you need around you to succeed. And I'll tell you this, the more and more I build around my weaknesses, the more successful I get. And the first thing I do is look in the mirror and be honest with myself. Instead of trying to

be a well-rounded person to work on all my weaknesses, I try to enhance my strengths faster. And I think that that's a key. A lot of people say, yeah, I just want to be well rounded. I want to understand this, this, this, this. I say, look, my trainer will be here today at 1.30. I have him come to me. The next thing I'm hiring is a chef. And I want to make sure they're cooking for me every time. And listen, I love healthy food if you cook it, you know? So I'm fortunate that I'm able to do these things. I pay him a lot of money to come to me and I don't miss any sessions because he really gives me a bad attitude when I do. I've called him a couple of times because I was sick, but he's a great trainer in that fact. He knows exactly how hard

to push me to where, I mean, I can barely walk today. I mean, that's how hard we did leg days. But what are your thoughts on that? Because I think a lot of times people fail because they hire people that are just like them. And then they don't have the finances dialed in, or they don't have accounting dialed in, or they don't have the call center dialed in. What are your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, I think it was John Maxwell who I heard originally talk about that. If you're on a scale of one to 10, if you're a three in this particular area, best case scenario, you may be able to bring yourself up to a 7 in whatever particular skill or ability that is. But if you're already a 7, like for you, in creating a vision, casting a vision, if you're already a 7, if you invest that same energy and

effort, you could become a 9 or even a 10 in that area. But where it's so tricky or so slippery for so many is when you're in that startup phase, when funds are low and there's not enough money and payrolls coming and all these things, our weaknesses can become such a huge hindrance, such a huge stumbling block that they can literally wipe out the company. And I see it so often where people, they're so unaware, right. They don't have self-awareness that they can't even see their weaknesses. But they keep tripping up over these same things, but they never take the time to step back and say, okay, I'm very weak in organization. I'm very weak in details. So one of two things has to happen. Number one,

I've got to bring it up to a level of sufficiency so that it doesn't strangle. It doesn't kill the company, right? To where we can get to the point where we can hire somebody to take that. Or two, if you've got the funds, immediately hire for those areas of weakness. But I completely agree with that. I've got to the point where I forced myself to do certain things. And the easier you make it, there's this thing called Kaizen foam. And what I love about Kaizen foam is it's foam that's molded to fit in a tool, for example, like a hammer, or you can put a pair of pliers and you could put, it creates order. And the guys, it's a Japanese word, Kaizen, but it's about getting lean, and the guys that get

crazy about it, and I love this idea of having a Kaizen foam for everything in your bathroom, for your shaver, your toothbrush, because there's an order to it. You know when something's missing, you know when it's not, and I got to tell you, there's nothing more important in my life, because my life does not have order, so when there's order, it makes me so much more productive. When the cleaning lady comes, new sheets, everything, my day just goes so much better. I can't even explain it. But I literally, my brain is going 99 million miles an hour all the time. I'm thinking of a million things.

I definitely, probably ADD. And it doesn't turn off ever. You put me in front of a whiteboard. I definitely probably ADD and it doesn't turn off ever. You put me in front of a whiteboard. I can go on for days, but I need to bring sense to it. I need to hit conclusions. It's hard because I can get started with a lot of things, but I can't see the finish line. And so every week, every month, I'm always searching for people to get, to help bring order. And at least I can identify that. A lot of people say they don't have the vision. I've got enough vision for all of us, trust me. It's just interesting, these thoughts that go through my mind

about who I need to have around me and put structure into my life because I've got this guy that I've been sharing some of my ideas with that's basically the CEO of all my companies. And he's like, dude, if we hit just the finish line with one of the 10 things you've told me, it's multi-billions.

He's like, let me make sense of all this for you. And I'm like, please, and give me tasks and I'll do them. You should see my calendar. Without my calendar, I'd probably get nothing done. Yeah, let me just jump in real quick, Tommy. I think what's so important though, because entrepreneurs by default, business owners by default,

I think tend to lean more visionary. Not all of us, but I think we often lean more visionary. But you have developed, and you mentioned several things, you've put systems and processes and people in place to help you in those areas of weakness. So those weaknesses don't continually trip you up. And here's the thing. I'm very similar in terms of personality makeup. You have to be willing to sacrifice in those early days in ways that don't necessarily make sense. In other words, sacrifice in ways to offset those weaknesses. So early on, it may not make sense to have somebody who does operations,

but you may have to hire somebody that is good at operations that could also do something else. So be willing to sacrifice the time, the energy, the money in offsetting those weaknesses. The other just random question for you. Have you read the book, Who Not How? Who Not How? I don't think so. You would love it. Who, not how by Benjamin Hardy. And the whole premise of the book is just that don't focus on how we're going to do all these things instead, figure out the, who, who do I need in my life to make these things happen? Yeah, that's interesting. It's really, really interesting when you think about it because it's so often you have this thing and I've felt it, this anxiety and anxiety

is a really good thing for me because I can handle a lot. I can take the world and put it on my shoulders, but it's not the right thing to do. And a lot of times an owner tends to say, if I don't do it, it won't get done right. And especially in a small business, we are running so fast trying to get everything done ourselves. And we skip the delegation. We skip the steps. We don't hold people accountable. And it's really, really even hard to deal with us sometimes. Listen, I tell people this a lot, but I don't open my own mail. I don't open my own email. I've got a person that handles it all. And they sort it out. I've got certain people that attend meetings for me.

And I've had to put a lot of trust out there. And there's times that I get burned a lot. My mom's cried to me several times when I get burned. And I said, mom, overall, 98% is good. There's been a couple percent of shit that's happened, but that's what's had to happen for me. I'd have to put the trust out there. And I don't know how to go back to the days that I was doing everything because it seems impossible with everything I do. But the things that I could get done in a day, most people can't get done in a month because if you get it organized and you get it slotted right, and you got the people to help you, but still I keep taking on way more and more and more. And a lot of people ask me,

when's enough enough? And I go, I don't know, but we've always got to retool. And some people that bring you here, can't bring you here. That's the crazy thing. You know, they can't bring you to the top and then you're always retooling. And I look at somebody like Elon Musk and man, that guy, he's got a bed at his office. He's got seven kids too. I don't know how good of a father and husband he is, but it's crazy to think about what that guy could get done and how he motivates. I heard a story about one day they were going to hit bankruptcy and he had the janitors making phone calls for him. I mean, it's a great story of success. You know, have you ever read this book called The Coaching Effect?

I've not. It's a pretty cool book. The guy that listened to the podcast got it for me. And it says here, there is a correlation between high-performing teams and managers who create healthy discomfort for those on their team. And I love the notion of that. And he also talks about a few other things in here. It's a fascinating book. He says in here, team members typically,

especially in sales divisions, want to bring more speakers to the monthly meetings. They need more exposure to success stories and ideas sharing within the team. They want to share more best practices. They need more collaboration amongst the peers and they want more time for training and better training. But I love that idea of just

thinking about healthy discomfort is a good thing from a coach. What are your thoughts on that? When we're recording this, it's fairly early on in the year. And a lot of people in the circles that I'm in are talking about, or I've talked about, my word for the year is whatever the word is. And I really, I had no intention of doing my word for the year is, is whatever the word is. And I really, I had no intention of doing a word for the year, but as I kept just thinking about, like all these people were telling me their words for the year, the word for the year that came to mind for me is the word discomfort. You know, at the end of the day that if we're not uncomfortable, we're not growing. I mean, you look at anything in the natural world, if there's not some form of discomfort, there's no growth. And so I completely agree. I think

we have... Age-wise, our staff is fairly young. And one of the things that we do in our weekly team meetings... So everyone sits around a conference table, some people via Zoom. But we sit around on this big TV on the conference room. Every single week, every person has to put their goals and it's all systematized, their goals. Like my goal for the quarter is to hit X dollars in revenue for my department. Here's where I am today.

Here's where I should be today. Here are my three core lead metrics. Here was my commitments from last week. And here are my commitments from this week. And on that screen, you have to highlight in green, yellow, or red for each of your commitments. Did you do it or did you not do it? And so that brings this whole level of self-accountability. It brings peer accountability. And for most, it brings a lot of discomfort. It's not something that most people are used to. Most businesses, most organizations make it so easy to hide. You can hide mediocre

performance for your entire career at most places. But when you're forced to put it up on a big screen in front of all your peers... And then one of the other things that I do is you have to challenge somebody on their commitment or on their goal. In other words, they put it up on the screen. They say, my commitment for this week, for this lead metric is to do this thing. And so the purpose of those lead metrics is to help them reach their goal. So with that in mind, how can I challenge that person to set a better lead metric, a better commitment for this week to help them get there? So it's not done in this way of like, I'm here to point out all your flaws. I'm here to point out how you screwed up or how you didn't do

this. It creates this environment where it says, we're here on a team together. You're aiming for this particular goal. I'm going to point out things to you that you may not see, things that could help you get there quicker, obstacles that you may not see that could trip you up along the way. And so that whole idea of discomfort or the peer pressure in a positive way from others, I would say it is for us, at least, it is the number one thing that has created the culture that we have, which I would call a results-based culture and not in a negative way, not in like a way of where it's like this high pressure, like got to hit your deadline, you know, got to hit your, your quota and all that type of stuff. It's a very positive peer pressure because we're all

in this together and we all want the next person to be a little bit better than they were yesterday. I love that. And I think I need to start doing that because there is mediocrity that flows and it's good to identify that. And I just love that practice. Three big things. One of the things too, that I'm going to do is put a picture on the back of my phone each day. It's like a post-it note of what I got to get done, the big thing. Typically, everybody waits for this big task that never gets done. And it's the most important thing. I've identified the most important thing that needs to get done in marketing. And it's a big task. And I've identified it into five key points today. And we're having a discussion on it. And I'm going to do it. I don't think anybody understands how important Google My my business and LSA

ads are and how many leads they can get if done properly. I think that people are so invested into this bullshit, like, like Craigslist postings and Facebook marketing. And, and they go into Angie and home advisor and they try to get leads from Thumbtack then Yelp ads. And I'm like, dude, if you just own Google, just that, just put all your eggs into that. You know how much money you would have and how many leads you could get? And it's the best customer. It's customers that want it done now. They're not going to Groupon to find you. They're not going to Amazon deals.

And I'm like, man, we miss this so much. And they're so busy finding leads everywhere, except where they need to be. Build a great brand and online reputation to focus on Google. Obviously, wrap your vehicles and make sure your brand is succinct with everything. Your stickers look like your mailers, look like your yard signs, look like your wraps, look like your TV, radio, billboard. Everything's in alignment. And I find that most people, they love their raps, even though their raps look like poop. They're the poopiest raps. They've got stenciling on there,

and people say this. Well, people always mention my rap. They say it looks good. I'm like, yeah, people always mention, my old raps look like shit. They mention them all the time. But they won't spend the money. They won't retool. And literally, it's so hard. It's like they're glutton for punishment. I don't getool. And literally like, it's so hard. It's like they're glutton for punishment. I don't get it. But what would you say as far as getting a

succinct, great plan for marketing? I mean, that's what you do. What are some of the key insights and elements? I want to, I want to ask you a few more questions to close us out. And I want to talk to you about a ugly mug too, is how you came up with the name for that, but I'd really love to tell your biggest secrets of marketing. Yeah. So I would say that number one is you have to understand the difference between a framework, a strategy, and a tactic. So what you just explained in talking about Google and local service listings is this, that it's a strategy. It's a strategic approach to go after one specific thing and execute on it really well. What most people are doing, and you've said it, they're going in 15 different directions because they see competitor A is doing this, so they're going

to try that. Competitor B is doing this other thing, so they're going to do that. And we confuse those three things, the frameworks, strategy, and tactics. We confuse those things. And most people jump from tactic to tactic to tactic. And then they complain that none of them work. So they're doing a little bit of Google. They're doing a little bit of Yelp. They're doing a little bit of this or that. And then they're complaining that none of them work. It's like I use the analogy. It's like if you looked around and you surveyed your favorite types of food, and you grab like, okay, I really love this particular chicken from this particular restaurant. I love this particular thing from this restaurant. You throw it all in the bag

and you shake it up. You're not going to come out with this gourmet meal. You're going to come out with garbage, right? Because you're grabbing bits and pieces from different places and throwing them in something, shaking it up and hoping that it becomes somehow strategic. There was thought process behind this meal you created. And we do the same thing with marketing though. We look around, we see this competitor's doing this. So, oh, let me run, go do that.

That didn't work. So now I'm going to complain that the platform doesn't work or this or that doesn't work. Then we're going to run, go try this. And it doesn't work. And again that doesn't work, then we're going to go try this and it doesn't work. And again, we have no overarching strategy, no framework that we're building upon. So that's number one. And a side note in that same thing is don't confuse the actions of other people with the asset that they're building. So in other words, we see people doing social media, they're all over Facebook.

You have to step back and say, what is the true asset that they're building there? Is it the following that they're building? Is it a community that they're building? What is it that they're actually building? Because for each business, they've got a different strength. So for some businesses, they may be really good and really strong on video, but that's just the action that they're taking. That has nothing to do with the true asset that they're building. So for you, maybe you're better at written word, right? So figure out what is the asset, figure out what your strengths are, build that same asset, utilizing your strengths, ignore the actions of others.

That sort of makes sense. Yeah, no, it does. And I think you're right. You're not going to get a gourmet meal out of all the crap. And I think that people have those issues. So your company does exactly what, how do people find out more about you? What exactly you guys do? Media buys, SEO, everything. What is Ugly Mug? Yeah, we work in three primary buckets, Tommy. We do custom website design. We do traditional marketing. So we're doing everything from television, radio, print, you name it, direct mail, whatever it may be. And then we also have a social media side. And for us, social media, we are far better at Facebook and Instagram than anything else. Those are the two that we've run.

I don't even know the number of campaigns. I mean, it's tens of thousands of campaigns spent. I don't know how much money, a lot of money on Facebook and Instagram. That's our strength. We do a little bit on LinkedIn. Again, we know it and we can do stuff there, but it's not our core strength. What do you think about TikTok? Again, we are platform agnostic.

And I really believe that everyone should be platform agnostic. Meaning when you have a solid strategy and you understand the asset that you're building, the platform doesn't matter, right? There's going to be a new platform tomorrow that comes along. And if you spend all this time learning every single platform, that's all you're going to spend your time doing is learning the new platform.

If instead you spend that same time, energy, and effort building these frameworks, these marketing frameworks, putting solid strategies on top of that, you can quickly interchange the platforms. So TikTok's great for some. Others, we don't necessarily recommend it, but it doesn't matter. You put that on a solid framework, solid strategy,

it's to the right audience, you can win with it. All right. What's the best way to get ahold of you? The simplest place is just our website, uglymugmarketing.com. All our socials are there, email addresses, phone numbers, all that. And the book Full Circle Marketing is on Amazon? It is. Yep. Is that the best place to get it? It is. It's probably the simplest. All right. I will be reading that. I'm sorry I didn't read it before this.

What are three books you recommend? That is such a loaded question, Tommy. I am an avid reader. I just finished reading a book called The Comfort Crisis. Really a fascinating book. I loved it. Not really business directly related. It's more how comfort is really killing us, if you will. That's over-dramatization of it, but great book. Another one that I'm rereading right now, I may be off slightly on the title, but it's something along the lines of straight line leadership.

The whole premise of the book is this, that we don't need more information. We don't need another course. We don't need another book even. We already know what we need to do. And instead of going in circles constantly or zigzagging back and forth, let's just put the point that we want to end up at over here on the chart. Let's put the point over here where we currently are. Let's draw the straight line, identify the steps that are necessary and stop with all the other stuff in between. Another one. Yeah. Simple. What else? So who not how is a great one. I mentioned that one earlier. It's similar to rocket fuel that you mentioned. That's a good one. And then one that I just listened to by that same author is The Gap and the Gain. It may be backwards. It may be The Gain

and the Gap. I don't know if it's backwards, but Benjamin Hardy. And he did that one with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach. What is that again? The Gain and the Gap or The Gap and the Gain. It's one of those two ways I listen to it. So I wouldn't look at it every day. So I don't remember the exact title. Awesome. And why don't you give us a good close out here? I want to hear about Ugly Mug and just maybe some words of wisdom and maybe something that the audience could go out and do today. I'll answer this question, where did the name Ugly Mug come from? And then I'll end with one little thing. So Ugly Mug, actually the name Ugly Mug Marketing comes from a playoff of a quote

or saying by David Ogilvie. So David Ogilvie came over to the United States, I believe it was late 50s. He ended up building the world's largest ad agency from New York City. Ogilvie and Mather was the name of it. They're still in the top 10 in the world today. He passed away, I believe, probably 15-ish years ago now. But he had a saying that was this, I would rather an ad that's ugly, but effective than one that's beautiful that isn't. And so the name Ugly Mug Marketing really is just a constant reminder to us that it's not about winning design awards. It's not about all the shiny, glitzy, glamorous things that we could do. At the end of the day, for most of our clients, it's, did we put more money in their bank account? That's the end result. But the one ending thought that I would leave everybody with is this, that

good advice applied at the wrong time is still bad advice. Good advice applied at the wrong time is still bad advice. And so I think the wrong time is still bad advice. And so I think it's so important for us as entrepreneurs, as business owners, to understand the stage that we are currently in and apply the strategies, the tactics, whatever it may be for that particular stage. Yes, we should be leaning into the future. So we're operating... I'm trying to operate our company as if we're at the next level. Not as if we're a publicly traded company, not as if we're hundreds of millions of dollars, but I'm trying to operate it at that next level. And so I think if we're not careful, though, we'll grab some good advice. That's great advice for a publicly traded company or for

company that's in the process of raising VC funds. And we try to apply that to our startup. And even though it's good advice, if we apply it at the wrong time, it's bad advice. I love that. Yeah. My answer, being the visionary I am, I tend to never say no, but I say yes, but just not now. It's a lot easier to say yes, but I'm just not ready for that. Let's talk in about a year. Then say no, because we think we can do all these things. I'm flipping houses, flipping trucks, flipping this, flipping that. Three companies, 10 companies, holy shit. But listen, this was great stuff. I have a blast on these podcasts, man. Thank you so much, Wayne, for coming on. Thank you, Tommy. I enjoyed it, man. I got some book recommendations from you.

I wrote them down. I got your cell phone. It's the 318, right? That's it. I'll touch base with you this weekend. Sounds good, man. All right. Take it easy, brother.

Thank you. Thanks. 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.

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