The Home Service Expert Podcast - Enhancing Your Company’s Client Retention Efforts through Remarketing and Service Agreements

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $200 million-plus home service business with over 700 employees in 19 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy answers your biggest questions about customer retention, business strategies, task delegation…

you got to ask great questions. You got to be, you know, here's the deal about IQ versus EQ. IQ is like, I could do a math problem and I could write a perfect sentence and put the commas in the right place. And when I say you're a good guy, it's Y-O-U apostrophe R-E versus Y-O-U-R. That's not going to get you anywhere in life. Unfortunately, high IQs very rarely have great businesses. It's high EQs. How do they make people feel? How do they know when to ask another question? When do they know what to smile? How do they understand when somebody is not feeling great? You look at the people that some of you guys have seen the bar scenes when you were younger, maybe you're today,

and guys are talking to girls. You could just see the person that has the confidence. They know when to smile. Oh, geez. They're telling great stories. If you don't have that, you're sitting there in the corner afraid to start anything. Most people, Dan Pena, the billion-dollar guy, whatever his name, Dan Pena, he's like, people with low IQs are more successful because they don't have to think so hard about shit. They don't have to try so hard to get started. 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.

Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked my team to take the notes notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, go check it out. I'm going to share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now, let's get into the interview. All right, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. You guys know my name's Tommy. Today is the Q&A podcast for May. I think it got kicked out

because I've been traveling like a madman. If you haven't got the book, Home Service Millionaire, I don't know where you've been living. Go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. If you got the HSM course, it's a good course. It's a little bit older, but it's got stuff that I use to grow the business dramatically. It's course.homeservicemillionaire.com. I also have some cool things that we just put out. You guys have probably heard of my new book called Elevate, Build a Business Where Everybody Wins. Finish the Audible. It's going to be coming out soon, finally. So look for that. It should be in the next two weeks. It's completely done,

edited, ready to be released. What else could I tell you guys? Built a new course for the book Elevate. Once again, it's all about building a business where everybody wins. Got done with Vertical Track. What an amazing show, amazing speakers. So many takeaways. The coolest part was hearing people that have been involved, my competitors, who have just made a ton of profit. They grew their revenue. They got on the same systems. They got Dan Antonelli to give them the brand kick charge. They've got Al Levy's manuals. They got the right vendors. They've got the right training. When you add it all up, we had companies go from six or 700,000 bottom line to 3 million.

And it works. It's a simple formula. I've made all the mistakes. Why not just don't reinvent the wheel? Don't recreate the tire, right? Recreate the tire. I don't know. So if you're not on the Facebook group, Home Service Expert, you're crazy. It's free. And I promise you all the content go right now. If you get a chance, I just made some awesome videos. If you like this Q and a you'll love what I put out on Tik TOK, Instagram, YouTube, official Tommy Mello, Instagram's blowing up. Tik TOK's great. I'm doing YouTube. We're on LinkedIn, Tommy Mello. Find me if you like LinkedIn, if you love Facebook, go to home service expert. We're doing some, Tommy Mello. Find me if you like LinkedIn. If you love Facebook, go to Home Service Expert.

We're doing some big stuff on Twitter. There's nothing better than investing in your own brand. And you guys know I'm authentic. I'm real. I'm still in the fight every day. You know, this weekend was tough because Bree's grandfather died. Probably one of the hardest things, guaranteed, she's ever had to deal with. It was just tough watching her because I

lost my grandma about a decade ago. And that was very, very difficult. And it was really, it's tough because there's a lot of regrets. And the pastor that had married Bree's grandma and grandpa 22 years ago was the one that did the funeral. And he started quoting scriptures and said, not to have any regrets, no regrets. He said, you have time with your other loved ones. And this is a hard message because we all know we're trying to work to put food on the table. We're really focused on seeing our kids grow up and have the stuff that we might've not had. You're off balance on purpose, but the message is spend time, quality time with the people around you. Make a phone call every now and then.

I know it's so hard to do. I struggle with this and I live and die and breathe by the calendar. So I'm just, I got a new assistant. She's helping Bree. Bree's helping her. The next thing is a personal assistant. There's a great book called Buy Back Your Time. And I'm living it right now. I'm buying my time back. And I'm just in the beginning. I'm barely getting started. I'm buying back all my time. I will 10x my efficiencies, buying it all back, everything. Whether it comes to travel, the people that we're setting up, the systems we're putting in place, it's incredible. It's not easy. But the biggest thing for me is getting healthy. I'm very healthy. I mean, you guys don't worry, I'm not sick, but getting really healthy, getting next level. So I'm hooking up the Peloton tonight, going to pay for the subscription. I've got it at the house.

I'm not going to hit it too hard. 30 minutes. I've got the elliptical. I've got this, this other machine that goes up and down. I've got the, the rope puller thing. I, you know, I can't remember all the names of the exercise. It got the elliptical treadmill. So I figure I could spend 10 minutes on each. That would give me over an hour. But let's jump into some questions you guys asked me. First, I'm going to ask some of the questions I prepared. David D. Camp said, I own a locksmith security company in the Boston region, and I'm looking to find out how you went out and first got your high quality C-suite

teammate. What avenues did you use to find this person? I would easily assume, but all these people are currently employed. Well, what I can tell you is the best ones are employed. If you find a really good C-suite recruiter, they don't go on Indeed and post an ad. They don't go on Glassdoor and a million other sites. They don't go on Craigslist don't go on Indeed and post an ad. They don't go on Glassdoor and a million other sites. They don't go on Craigslist. They go on LinkedIn and they find somebody that fits. So first things first, define exactly who you need, what kind of experience, what you're looking for, how you're going to pay. And you should go find somebody that's already got a job, already got the experience. Why are these people all looking, especially in a C-suite? The best C-suite recruiters in the world, they go after people already that have a job.

They're not even looking, but the status, 83% of people are willing to leave their current employer. 83% of people are willing to leave their current employer. I said that twice. So define what you want. I use the girl Blair Miller. I talked about this in my last Q&A. If you need to get a hold of her, just message me. Question, just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions and ask for Blair Miller's number if you need it. I gave it last time. But you want somebody exactly what I did when I found Dan Miller. I sat down with Blair for two days, several hours each, and we decided who we needed. And I got lucky. I'm not going to lie.

I mean, I've been very, very fortunate. But the question is, how well do you work with this person? So typically with a C-suite level employee, I think you should do at least a three-month trial to make sure you get along well. You might have the top CFO in the world, but if you don't work well together, and I'll tell you this, they're going to have a harder time working with you. Dan is what he calls, he calls me entrepreneurial. He says, I want things done yesterday. He says a lot of things that aren't quite flattering, but he also says a lot of flattering

things. And he knows that he probably couldn't build this. He knows what type of personality I am. I'm a hunter, right? I go out, I want things done. And most people are farmers. They kind of like safety. They like to sit there. They like to watch things go slowly. I like to go get it, eat what I kill. All right. So I'm going to go back and forth here. Pi and B. Hey, Tommy, I almost got a position working with your content team. I've been following you since and love what I'm seeing from it all. Keep it coming. Thanks, brother. Keep applying. Listen, I'm always we're hiring more and more people for that. You know, I'm not Gary Vaynerchuk. I'm not going to pretend to be.

I think he's got 26 people, but I've got about five. I'm probably going to be doubling that to 10 here in the next three months. The more the merrier, right? You know, the podcast just got its millionth download. Thanks to you guys. One million downloads. And people say, man, how do you build a podcast like that? How did you make that so great? Well, I've been doing it for seven years. People, they always want stuff to happen next month, next quarter. Maybe this year we can hit this number. No one, think about the five-year plan. Think about seven years. That's how long it's been for the podcast. I think it was at the end of 2017. So you do the math, maybe six years, but it takes time and the content's going to get better, and I hope it'll change your life because I have text messages, emails, Facebook messages

about people that actually are getting stuff, and that's what I hope to deliver is value. It's got to be valuable. It's got to be something you guys take away and you guys use and you guys apply it. And this is not how I make my money, I promise you. I'll just say this because I like to put things out in the world. A1 is going to make me a billionaire, period. It's what's

happening. I mean, that's what the power of a great business will do. I don't need to make a lot of money speaking. I don't need to make a lot of money. I don't make any money on book sales. My events lose money. But I'll tell you what my personal brand does. I'll tell you what coming out with a book does. I just gave a shop tour earlier and learned a lot. And when I coach, I learn a lot. And when I have people come through here, I wrote down a whole page of notes for myself as I was answering questions for these guys. And now I'm following up with all this stuff. So this stuff makes me stronger. I'll walk away from this Q and a, and I'll be stronger for this podcast. Tommy, I got your book elevate. Haven't finished it yet,

but it's good so far. I hope it's good. Some of the stuff might be redundant. When I read books, I go through them fairly quickly. I don't fly through them. But if there's an 80-20 rule, the Pareto rule, I kind of skip that part. I like reading stories. I like reading equations and certain things. But if somebody's going to tell me a two-hour story about how they grew up, I can't guarantee I'll always read that. If it's on Audible, I'll speed through it. But I'm trying to get to the meat.

There's a lot of books that should have been an essay. So I'd like to read the Cliff Notes. I think my book, what you'll like about it is there's a lot of stories and I had some coauthors. I like to mix it up. So I just try to really make sure that if you apply the principles in that book, there's a lot more gratitude you'll have out of your business when you help other people around you, when everybody gets to win. Vinny had a question. Hey, Tommy, I'm 18. I own a garage door company. Started from the ground out of high school over the past year. I do well over five figures a month, and I'm having trouble scaling it from here. Is there any advice to grow to a million dollars a year? Oh, you know what? I'm sorry. Vinny said, how will AI help with smaller businesses

as what task will AI be competing? So let me go back to Vinny said, how will AI help with smaller businesses? As what task will AI be competing? So let me go back to Vinny's question. So AI can write content. AI can help with sentiment on the phone calls. AI can help with auto messaging on your online chat. AI can work for LSA recently, which we started yesterday, responding to customers' questions, giving us a higher quality score on local service ads.

It will actually be able to do a lot more than that. I think it'll help. Bree and my buddy Chad got in a car the other day. It was a self-driving car. No human beings got delivered. What if I could have parts get delivered? That has to do with AI. It'll help with inventory. It'll help with advertising. It'll help with social media. It'll help figure out things. It's a master monster computer. It does computing at a different level. So you could ask it complex questions in the next few years and it will be able to figure it out. It'll be able to take data now, depending on how much they release and what they use it for. But it's really going to, what I think is going to happen is you look at the first McDonald's just recently, there's no human beings in the McDonald's, no human beings. You heard that

right. So it's going to make things good and bad. I mean, it's going to take away some jobs, but for my company, it's not going to take away any jobs. It's just going to make it so we don't have to hire a lot more people. We're going to get more efficiencies. We're going to get economies of scale. Some people think AI is is going to change everything over the next year. I know some people that went to Warren Buffett's event, and he said nothing's going to replace humans in the near future. A lot of people said Bitcoin was going to go off in 2010. Unfortunately, human beings can't keep up with the speed of technology.

I mean, people can barely keep up with the pandemic. Every place shut down, they shut down the schools. Turns out there wasn't a whole lot there, right? We all knew it mutated into a gene, you know, and Fauci said the mask wouldn't work. I'm not a political commentary, but we ran out of toilet paper, for God's sakes. So I don't think AI is going to move as quick as it could move. I just don't think humans are ready for it. Hey, Tommy, I'm 18. I own a garage door company. You know, you're doing five figures a month.

You want to figure out how to do a million. Well, when I was at the funeral, I met Bree's cousin. If you join the Facebook group, you'll see the video. He just texted me. First, I told him to build an Excel sheet. I want to know, he's got a landscape company. He doesn't have an EIN number, doesn't have an LLC. So we're going to get them set up. We got to build a brand. We got to get them all of his four things. We got to get them a website, LSA, GMB, PPC account set up. I'm going to build

this business and I'm going to document everything. We're going to teach them how to do door to door, how to do social media. We're going to show them how to do performance pay. We're going to get them on a CRM. All this is a day's work. It's going to be crazy what you can see I can do in a day because I had a landscape company. This stuff's easy. And then I'm going to show him how to ask every one of his customers for testimonials, reviews, and yard signs. We're going to figure out his cost per acquisition. This is just simple stuff. Dan Antonelli said it'll help with the brand. So he's got his graveyard of brands. And trust me, Dan is worth way more than he charges, but he's willing to pay it forward for a kid like this to learn from. And I wish I could do this

with every kid with a dream, but unfortunately I'm doing this to help a lot of people, including yourself. So you'll learn how to make a business from scratch and learn all the things you might have not done. But it comes to marketing and sales and being priced right. And then knowing your numbers. You know, I've doubled down on knowing my numbers. And I'm telling you guys this, and this is going to sound really cocky, I think. But I feel like we're playing a whole

new game. I feel like we've already beat people at chess a hundred times. They say the five next moves in chess. I feel like now I'm on to like brain surgery more than chess. The numbers, the details, the facts that I'm pulling out of the company. But here's what the most important thing that AI and everybody leaves out is the people, the amazing coworkers I have in the business, these amazing technicians and installers and kick-ass dispatchers and my amazing call center and the way it all works together in harmony

and the people that are being just come out of the training center and the vision and the people buying houses. You know, you could probably beat me at a lot of the things one off. Like there's companies that are listening now that are probably, you know, whether they're buying better, maybe they're better at Facebook ads, or they might be able to do GMB optimization better, but they haven't put it all together. They haven't put in the culture with the hiring, with the training, with the, you know, we don't have a lot of fall off. They, you know, they don't have a

pinnacle club. They don't do gamification and they don't teach personal financing and how to build a personal budget. And, you know, when it all comes together, it starts building into this, this fast machine. That's just hard to keep up with. I'm having a blast. I am having an absolute blast. I mean, things are busy, but you know, some people get around, they talk about football, baseball, basketball, football, soccer, whatever. And they talk about their kids and it's great. And I love that. And they talk about this. You know, what I love the most is talking about business. I mean, this 17 year old kids talking to me, we're in the front yard and I'm just like, dude, come with me.

I say, I need a couple. I grabbed an old school pencil and I started writing in my hands. We're moving faster than my brain could write. And I'm going to do it. I'm asking him questions. I'm writing a business plan. That's what I enjoy. So I don't ever go to work.

It's fun for me. If I hang out with people that like to talk about business, this is fun for me. This is not work. Let's see here. Bria said, I was wondering if you have a company that vet your reviews. Yeah, I told you I use Consumer Fusion. I use Mark at Consumer Fusion, and he was at the event. He's able to remove all the fake reviews that are one star, that are lies, or an ex-employee. If it doesn't follow the guidelines, let's assume refusing Mark Spencer. He's been at my house. We've created a lot of

memories. He's a down to earth, bad-ass dude. And then I have my own team internally. So yeah, that's a game changer. All right. Let's go to this question by Williams Electric. I'm almost done rebranding and setting up my brand new electric company. Got off the phone with Paychex 401k service. Do you offer a 401k? Who do you go through? Yeah, we offer a 401k. I don't think you should start out with a 401k. You ask your employees what matters more, a new truck, PTO, insurance, a 401k. Every one of these things costs a chunk of money. So it's important not to offer everything off the get-go unless you got a million dollars to invest. They all help. I have it all. I have all those things. Believe it or not, weekly payroll is really important to a person that's

starting out that doesn't have a lot of money saved. Continued training costs money. Building infrastructure within the recruiting and training team costs money. Brand new iPads cost money. Paying for the tools, four grand per set now. That's a lot of money to invest. So what I would say is make the whole list of all the things I just said, replay this, and find out what the most important things are. Because if you're going to start with all of them, you might be broke before you get going.

I don't deal with the insurance. That's something I'm not interested in. Of course, I want great insurance so we get the best policies in the 401k. But personally, we use Paylocity. And I don't know who we go through for the 401k, but go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. It's homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions is the questions page. You just fill out the form if you want to know something about specifics.

Let's see here. Rachel. Hi, Tommy. Love your podcast and appreciate your business wisdom. As a painting and drywall business over 10 years with around 50 employees,

I feel we dominate our market, but know our tech systems can be better. What advice for AR and estimates if we are currently using task-based system with send deliver to me and I answer send via QuickBooks Gmail? Needs to be simple enough to be written by others, approved and sent by me. So, you know, a good CRM, like, for example, what Service Titan did, and Housecall Pro does a lot of this stuff, and I know Sarah's doing some cool stuff. These are CRMs. First of all, there's a matching principle that everything gets reconciled. So you don't leave that person doing reconciliation. When you've got Service Titan, and it works directly with paybooks,

and we use Intact. So reconciliation goes out the window. You don't have to deal with that, which we had to do before service type. Another quick thing that it does is they built into the credit card processing. And as you grow in credit card processing dollars, they give you better points are called bips. So you're able to negotiate a little bit on that. We've been able to do a lot because we're spending a fortune a month on credit card processing. So that's automatic. So I think really what you need to start looking for, Rachel, is API integration to the accounting team from the CRM. We've started training them and they're in Armenia and they got master's degrees in business and finance and accounting.

And my buddy, Tom Howard uses some of their people. So they're much more affordable. They work hard and they work when we're sleeping. So you get the results the next day. And when I work on my standard operating procedures, make it so easy, a 10 year old B student could understand it. So write down the things, make videos, put directions, put exactly what you want. I did a software in 2012 and the guy didn't build a login page to

forget the password because I didn't ask for it. So you got to make it so simple. Pretend that somebody that barely speaks English could understand it. And I guarantee you a 10-year-old with a B average will understand it. So I'd work on the SOPs, and you'd be surprised what we could get outsourced. And I'll say, how much do you sell home warranty for? Does it work? What's the renewal rate? How much do you sell? I don't sell home warranties.

I sell service agreements. And it's $12.95 a month. And yeah, we have $27,500 and renewal rates through the roof because we offer 151 point tune-up. It's part of the fee. We go out there every year, we lubricate adjust, tighten, perform our 151 point tune-up. And it's not supposed to be a revenue generator, even though it is. What it's supposed to do, Alan, is build a fence around the customer. so they like us, know us, trust us, get to build a relationship with us. And eventually, they will replace their door. It might not be two years. It might not be eight years. But those will all turn into money because they like us. They might move into a new house. They

might get a rental home. They're going to use us. So that's why service agreements work so well, is we build trust with the customer. We're not out to rip them off and ding them every time we see them. You never send a salesperson to a service agreement. You send a maintenance tech that's just supposed to do the job. Yes, there's opportunities for bottom rubbers and other things sometimes, but the goal isn't to go sell a bunch of stuff. You can't send a lion into a kitten, right? That's a bad analogy, but my point is go easy on these jobs. You don't try to sell. You just, you're making enough money on it. And then your goal of service agreements is to get them close to one another. And of course, there's going to be some turnovers. It's an old door.

It's wore out. We've already spent good money on this door. It's dented. You know, people crash into their doors of service agreements. People decide they don't want the wood doors. There's all kinds of opportunities. People make a bonus. they get their credit card money back or tax money, and they decide they want to upgrade. So there's all kinds of times where the service agreements will turn into money next year. Can you suggest any top-notch HVAC sales training courses? We're going to get my team trained up. You know, Joe Crisara does a fantastic job. I've invested a lot with Joe Crisara. I've recently invested in Andy Elliott. I invest in both of them. I invest in so much book, so much training, so much consulting. I don't think one sales coach could necessarily get with every mindset because

people have personality types and it's hard to emulate just one coach. Some guys are like, rip your head off, go in. Some other guys are funny. Some other guys are really assertive. It really depends on what your team is. And you might say, all my guys are the same, but they're not. And the five ways of appreciation in the workplace. So there's different types of coaching methods. If you read the book, The Coaching Effect, it talks about, and this is another thing, is I'm willing to spend all this money to continue the coaching. And people are not willing to spend five grand on a coaching. People are not willing to spend really anything. It's amazing. The answers are right in front of you. But I will say this, don't go out and spend all this money on this, then this, then this,

then this, if you don't have the money. you need to spend your money on the first things first. I leave, he talks about your top five list, your top 30 list, and then your top hundred list and be sure you can't go out and just spend all the money on all the coaching and all the wrap trucks and all the designs and, and all, you know, every consultant out there, you got to figure out what's going to move the needle and make profit first. Hey, Tommy, thanks for what you do. I'm in the flooring industry for 17 years. What's something that you could share that I might not think of that I can try with those I coach? Something I may not have thought of. You know, first of all, I'm really, really big on the other 50% of business, the culture, the hiring the right person. And the ideal team player is hungry, humble, and smart, right?

So many people worry about lead gen, but think about the variance between your top guy and your bottom guy. What if you could get your bottom five guys if you got a 15-person company in the top 80 percentile? Well, you do that by hiring the right people and people do better when it's competition. You've got to display your numbers so everybody can see them and go over them in front of everybody and then on your one-on-ones. Think harder about marketing to the right employees. And if you get the right avatar with the right tonality, with the right eye contact, with the right body language, I promise you it'll be way more successful. Some of the other things, if you read the, you know, I've said this a lot on this, but the ultimate sales machine.

Start to come up with a case study about your business. So for flooring, you know, especially with carpet, carpet actually holds germs inside. In fact, people with carpet in their office actually have a healthier workplace. And they've proven this. They've done case studies that it holds the germs in and people get less sick and you put the right air filters in and it'll keep the people healthy. But guess what? After six months, if you're going to not clean the carpet and it's holding all those germs for over six months, it's going to be an unhealthy environment and you might as well go hard floors and get it mopped all the time. So knowing this, the guy got the carpet cleaned every two

years. The businesses, when they figured out this case study, they got four times the frequency. Remember this and write this down. Three ways to make money. Get more customers. That's what all you guys are crying for, calling all your marketing. I need more customers. We're slow. I'm trying to keep the mouth shut for all my technicians. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you were spoiled for the last four years. Sorry. I know every business is slow. Every company's slower because we were spoiled. So you got to get better. I'm sorry. But write these three things out. So get more customers, charge your current customers more, or have them come in more frequently. Those are the only three ways to make money. Yes, you could cut costs, you could get higher booking rates, blah, blah, blah, but higher

booking rates mean more customers. Higher average ticket debt means charge more and more frequent emails means self-service agreements. What else could you do on conversion rate? You could start selling financing. You know, I think that's important to understand really how all that works. You get a 40% higher ticket by offering promotions, which is financing. Ryan Old said, could you talk about remarketing to existing clients to keep them coming back and funnels automation to systematize this? Newsletters, monthly newsletters, emails, opt-in for SMS, an SMS every three months, having a really good educational piece

with an offer at the end. Direct mail works great. Consistency is amazing. Always use something like Schedule Engine, something where they can schedule it themselves, their existing client. Give them a reason to schedule something. Like Garage Door is a free deco hardware kit.

If you're a plumber, give them a free scent things for the toilet that you'll go load up or a free flush for the hot water heater, but give them something to call you and then book them on days that you're slow. Make sure it's convenient for you. If you're in a seasonal type business, you never want to create business that doesn't make a lot of money. You know, repeat business, you're not going to get the same tickets that you would have a demand type service. So just be sure you're not marketing to these people when you're already in season, which that's a whole discussion of itself. So hope that helped, Brian. Let's see here. Hey, Tommy, concrete contractor here. What is working right now in advertising? Facebook ads versus Google ads. What's your thoughts on YouTube

ads? So interestingly enough, they all work. Google's God for demand-like services. Google's the most important by like 10. Facebook's more for wants, Google's for needs. YouTube ads work, but understanding your avatar first and understanding where they go when they have a problem. And then there's a great book by Dan Kennedy called Marketing to the Affluent. You know, we just had a job come in the other day for 145 grand. It was a commercial job from a company we bought in Nashville. But after I saw that job come in, I'm like, man, I can use more of these. So I've got a few tricks up my sleeve to get more of those tickets coming in. But those are relationship-based and commercial, but it's something we can handle like commercial. So I'm going to keep those coming in because if

I could get one of those coming in per day, there's no reason why I can't have a million dollar day coming in on average. Million dollar days by the end of this year. So I've got a whole plan. And if you were to look at my whiteboard, it's full. I've had about 15 one-on-ones in the last five days. And I've got a full plate on everybody's shoulders of things they need to do. And I'm not one of those guys that just say, you know, let's just do one thing at a time. Because I've got a staff to handle a lot more than one. So I've delegated properly. Remember, my steps to delegation that I learned

from Al. I modified it, but here's what needs to get done. Here's why it needs to get done. Here's what you have available to get it done. Here's the priority assigned to it. Here's when it needs to get done by a deadline. Here's the meeting schedule for checking up on the progress being made. Here's the consequences or rewards if done properly or not done properly. Does the task get done when you want it? What's the opportunity for feedback? So they fill all that out and then they sign right there at the bottom. So, okay.

Jason said, we, a 50-year company, and starting to acquire existing businesses. When you started going through acquisitions, how did you find the companies you bought? The first thing you should do is go to your vendors. They know the guys. They know the ages. They know the wives and the husbands. They know the kids.

They know the next of kin. They understand the business. They know how much volume they're going through. There's nothing better than vendors, number one. Number two, marketing companies, they've got relationships with these people. So whether it's ValPak or Clipper or maybe a Google advertiser. Number three, you could just talk to a brokerage. Brokers that know you're acquiring, if you tell them your avatar and tell them what you're looking for, they'll do all the work for you because they get a transaction fee. Now the fee might be two

or 3%, but who gives a shit? They'll do all the work for you. They'll send out all the mailers. They'll make all the phone calls. They'll act as that third party. So brokerages will help find companies too. I think going to events that are in your trades, a hundred percent way to go. Sending mail being top of mind. You say, explain who you are. Tell a great story. Tell them how their employees are going to be okay when you buy the company. Tell them how you're going to leave their legacy intact. Tell them all the reasons why to take some chips off the table, whatever it might be. But it's got to be compelling. Show them why.

Hopefully there's proof in the pudding. If you've already done acquisitions, there's a lot of reasons why somebody would sell to you and you should have results. Let's say here's what happened and everybody got paid. Get testimonials from the people that already done the acquisitions from you. All right. Referring to great sellers know how to win with their prospects by talking to them like patients video. This was such a great video. Thank you. Can you give me an example of the sales process on this? Well, I think what you're talking about is when I dressed up like a

doctor, like tomorrow's orientation. And what I mean by that is I'll say, how long do you want to live in the home? Tell me a little bit about your family. Tell me who sleeps above the garage upstairs. Tell me, when's the last time you guys used the snowmobiles? How often are you going in and out? Do you got a door on the farmhouse out there that you go in and out? Do you like to know what somebody's in there? Because it's literally diagnosing the person before the problem. Amstark on IG, that's who this is. So you got to ask great questions. You got to be, you know, here's the deal about IQ versus EQ.

IQ is like, I could do a math problem and I could write a perfect sentence and put the commas in the right place. And when I say, you're a good guy, it's Y-O-U apostrophe R-E versus Y-O-U-R. That's not going to get you anywhere in life. Unfortunately, high IQs very rarely have great businesses. It's high EQs. How do they make people feel? How do they know when to ask another question?

When do they know what to smile? How do they understand when somebody's not feeling great? You look at the people that some of you guys seen the bar scenes when you were younger, maybe you're today and guys are talking to girls. You could just see the person that has the confidence. They know when to smile. Oh, geez, they're telling great stories.

If you don't have that, you're sitting there in the corner afraid to start anything. You know, most people, Dan Pena, the billion dollar guy, whatever his name, Dan Pena, he's like people with low IQs are more successful because they don't have to think so hard about shit. They don't have to try so hard to get started. So many people are like, yeah, we're just not ready yet. We're not ready to get going.

You know, it's not perfect yet. You know, we really should work on this first. They got every excuse to overthink rather than just start. I think that's one of the things that I go figure out what to do. Someone says it in a book or on a podcast or an event, or I go visit a shop and they say it. I'm doing it before I get back home. Other people are like, yeah, well, you know, it's a great idea. It's easy for him to say, bullshit. I could do this all day. I don't need money to start an idea. They're trying to wait for the perfect day.

You know, at Vertical Track, one of the coolest parts is Andy Elliott was there. And he made this comment that really popped for me. He goes, you know why nobody trusts a lot of you? It's because you look in the mirror and you tell yourself you're going to do something. You lie to yourself in the mirror. You lie to yourself every day. You say you're going to get in shape. You say you're going to spend more time with family. You say you're going to do this. You say you're going to do that. Why would anybody respect you? Why would your kids respect you if you can't even be honest to yourself? Think about

that. If you look in the mirror and you lie to yourself, you say, I'm going to quit doing this, or I'm going to start doing this more, or I'm not going to buy the bad food, and you cave into yourself and you don't have any discipline, why would anybody else take you seriously? I mean, it's not easy. You can't live the perfect life. You're not Jesus of Nazareth. Of Nazareth. That's a hard word for me to say. But my point is, you've got to quit lying to yourself.

Have read Elevate, reading the Home Service Millionaire now. I own an HHC company outside of the USA. Can you share more details on how you remunerate your installers? How do you structure the performance-based benefits? I think you're talking about how do I pay the installer. So here's how it works. We have 10 installers go out with the same job. And we look at their skill set. And we've got three levels of tech. The more skilled you are, the harder door you could install. And then we come up with an hourly.

So just like a mechanic, if you go in the Kelly Blue Book of how long it takes a mechanic to fix, you know, let's just say it's a 350 engine, you know, whatever. It might say eight hours to do this job. Well, every mechanic knows you charge by the hours it takes in this book. But the best mechanic shops say, listen, if there's no warranties on this call, you get paid eight hours no matter what. If you do it in five, I can't punish you for being more efficient, having your tools organized, and having the experience to do it. So that's what we do. We basically say, this is how many hours it takes. Now we add in, we got to reframe it. That's an extra hour. We pay for an extra hour. If you got to run to the store because we didn't supply you

right, we'll add a time. And we've got really, really really smart people we got this gal named leanne she's a fpna that's her title fpna planning forecasting and budgeting i knew what it was and she basically she worked atx. She worked there for like 15 years. She works under the CFO, gives us reports that are so freaking badass. She single-handedly is helping us bring extra points to the bottom line. What you measure gets managed. And if you're not measuring certain things, she's given us another look at things and helped us understand if we sell this and we raise the price of this and we lower the service call, what does this do to this?

All these and ifs scenarios. And it's just game changer for us. I think it's something you guys need to look into as you grow your business. Just getting out the truck. What's the next best move? Only doing 175. Depends on the industry. I mean, 175,000. You know, somebody asked me how I built this thing. And luckily I was pretty darn good at sales. I wasn't like the best guy is today, but you're talking about going through, you got to think I started the business 2006, seven, when everybody was losing their houses. If I could get a $700 average service ticket, nobody was doing that. So you got to look at the times I was doing it in. And I didn't know what I know now.

So that was enough money for me to make it. But I had to go through a lot of struggles. Look, I had three jobs the first four years of business. I wasn't just in my garage door business. I would work nights, weekends. I'd go paint garage doors. I was flipping cars, flipping ball flexes. I was serving tables.

I was bartending. I got a master's program while I was doing all this. Look, it wasn't easy. If you think you're just going to make all this money and create a big business. I was talking to this guy today, him and his director of marketing. He goes, you know what the problem is with small businesses? And I said, what? He goes, they make a hundred thousand and the guy and his wife make $100,000 the first year. The company makes zero. Then they go to $200,000 and they might go to $300,000.

But their lifestyle goes up. They buy the car. They buy the house payment, the car payments, the Harleys. They put their kids in nicer schools and start out to go to nicer school that they pay for and put the winter, summer shopping. And so there's no way for them to hire other people. So they get stuck in a rut because they go, I just don't have the money to build a training center. I can't afford a CFO right now. I'm not big enough. I'm not like you. I could always afford to hire people. There were tough years, but people that don't have

the opportunity to save the money because their lifestyle is so expensive. If you can't live off a 60 grand, I had 10 million in the account. I still live in a thousand square foot apartment. So I don't want to hear the excuses, unfortunately, and I'm not trying to be a dick, but you don't have the ability to buy things for your company and get the right people because you've overextended yourself. That's on you. That's a hundred percent on you. I don't know what to tell you because you decided to live this lifestyle and you and your significant other decided to go out and buy all these things. My best advice, pay off the highest interest rate debt, move into a smaller house with your parents or in-laws, go out there and actually focus for a few years on the business and reinvest. Get rid of all your

stupid debt because you guys are living above your means and you're going to continue to live up your means and keep up with the Joneses. And your company is going to suffer for it. Your employees are going to suffer for it. Your vendors are going to suffer for it. Everybody suffers because of your decisions you've made in the past. So get down to the nitty gritty,

pay off your debt, move into a smaller house, let your kids go to public school, a good one, move into a good school zone and start living the right amount of what your means will bring in. Because right now, if your company's not bringing in 20%, you're not paying yourself $150,000 a year, then you got issues.

You're not reinvesting in the company to grow. Issues. Period. Done. Said it. That's 100% reality. Hi, Tom. I'm a sales rep in the home service, service improvement industry, making over $250,000 per year, thinking about going on it on my own. What are the words of wisdom? I'm 61 years old. Great energy, lifelong learner. Robert, here's number one is, I don't care how old you are, 61 years young, you still got this. Just realize, you know, Colonel Sanders was at 65 before he started making money in KFC. But, you know, what do you want your life? Here's what I would do.

I'm 61. What does my life look like at 65? I'm collecting social security. What does my life look like at 70? How much time do I want? How much do I want to fish? How much do I want to golf? Do I have grandkids? Do I have kids? Do I have a wife? Start figuring out how much time. Hopefully you have at least 500 grand to put into the business because there's two ways to really do this. You could invest money, which equals time, or you can invest time, which slowly will equal money. But investing money saves time. And I think if you stayed on this podcast and asked me questions every month and I could help out, we could skip a lot of years. But you gotta know what your life looks like, man.

So important. Don't make every mistake. Read all the books I tell you to read. If you go to Tommy's Rolodex and go to the books section, it'll tell you the books. There's about a dozen books you should start out by reading. I can give you another hundred.

Read all the right books. Listen to this podcast. Ask great questions. Have a lump sum of money to invest. I'll show you how to get an SBA loan, clean up your credit, what Don's and Bradstreet is. We can go through this, but have a very detailed plan because why would you leave $250,000?

If you could make your bills on 70 grand, which is a lot of freaking money, unless you're wasting it all. Sorry, Robert. That gives you 180,000. Okay. So let's run through some math here. Let's just say that you're 61, you want to go nine more years. That gives you, let's see, 900 plus nine times eight is 72. So that gives you 1.620. $1.6 million, not to mention at age 65, you're collecting social security. So if you went just nine more years at 70,

you'd have about $2 million. Now the rule of seven says at 10%, you're going to double that. Hopefully you have a 401k or a Roth IRA or an IRA. Hopefully there's an opportunity, but what is your plan of starting your own business? Because if you don't think you're going to have to sacrifice relationships, time, effort, and energy, and you're not going to be having your down days. You're not going to want to quit half the time. The odds are against us, just like marriage. We know majority of businesses fail. And you're already in a good spot, and I'm not trying to dissuade you.

I'm really not. I'm just trying to show you your options. A good mentor shows you your options. And if you're 100% on this, I will help you in any way I can. What are your thoughts on getting garage door service companies to adopt innovative solution? Garage door ventilation system. Listen, here's what I found.

Clopay started selling front doors. No luck. I just was out there. Everybody, there's a light system for a garage door. There's Deco hardware. There's garage door guys, just like HVAC guys. HVAC guys can't figure out how to sell home air solutions. The best of the best do for air quality.

You go look at all these things. If garage door guys can barely sell rollers and springs, they won't sell bottom rubber. None of them sell operator reinforcement brackets. There's no way to get garage door companies or any other company. I try to get painters to sell garage doors because why would they paint an old funky garage door that's not insulated? Zero door sales. No one's going to sell something unless you invest hours and hours. And here's what you'd have to do to get your product. You'd have to give it free to the

owners or at cost for the first year. And then you'd have to come in and train at every meeting, talk about gamification and what you're going to do to sell it. And the owner is going to say, hey, listen, I don't make as much on this. So I don't want you coming in unless it was super profitable. I need my guys. Do you know what owners are saying right now? They're going, I can barely get my guys to show up sober and drive okay and sell the basic things that keep payroll done. They're not interested I can barely get my guys to show up sober and drive okay and sell the basic things

that keep payroll done. They're not interested in selling other things most of the time. You bring it to me and it's profitable, I will sell those bad boys like hotcakes. Be like flipping Nikes out of my trunk, like filled night. But you you know everybody wants me to sell their products and my cost of goods on service is 12 that's my cost of my materials so that means i'm able to 9x a little under between 8 and 9x so if i can't 9x your product cost and be very low on labor and be able to pay my guys great money on it it just doesn't make sense i'm just being honest with you that jbt is great for summarizing books and identifying key takeaways i agree but sometimes it's too generic sometimes it doesn't tell stories but there's a lot of good stuff out there all it does is scour the internet and pulls the best the best it understands uh

domain ranking and it understands the best content it goes goes to the FAQs of Google. But remember, it only went to 2021, so you're missing two years of data on that. Scheduling is a huge difference benefit. Communication tools are great. Justin said scheduling will be a huge benefit of AI. Agreed. Hey, Tommy, I attended Vertical Track last year with my dad, which was great. Right now, we are a family business, dad, son, and an uncle. Right now, I don't know where to start. I'm learning sales from Service MVP, bought manuals from Al Levy, and I also bought your online content, ad through Elevate website. They are great, but I don't know where to concentrate and focus on.

Our business doesn't pass $600 revenue last year. You know, here's the deal, Jonathan. What I can tell you is you got to go back to the basics. You got to find out what's going to work, man. You got to figure out, you need two things, marketing, you need the phone to ring, but here's what I promise you, Jonathan. Read this book tomorrow. How much should I charge? You might say, well, we can't get that kind of money in my market, Tommy. You don't know. You don't understand that people don't spend that much money. Oh, that's bullshit. You might say, well, we can't get to the phones 24-7. BS. You could say, I can't get great technicians. This economy, nobody wants to work. All excuses, and I'm not coming down on you, Jonathan.

I'm talking to the crowd here. Kills me. Listen, great technicians are everywhere around you. There's a great busboy. There's a great guy at a gas station. There's a great Amazon person. There's everybody's great around you. Number two, price right.

It's all in your head. It's a huge facade. Oh, well, that's not what we charge in my market. My market's different. Your market, you must not be in charge in my market. My market's different. Your market, you must not be in the United States if you can't get... I'm in 36 markets. Just bought a company in Columbus. Just bought a company in Nashville. Took their average ticket right to A1s. First week out. Doesn't matter what market. Matters about training. Matters about motivation. It matters about mindset and

abundant mindset. Everything that I hear out there, every excuse, so many excuses, so much crap. It's amazing how many people just convince themselves. If you believe you won't, you won't. If you believe you will, you will. But you got to really believe that from the bottom of your heart. You get the KPIs. I'll show you how I fix your business. It's very simple. You need to do 2 million next year because 600,000 is not cutting it. And then I'm going to ask your average ticket, your conversion rate face-to-face, and then I'm going to ask you your booking rate. And everybody's heard me do this, but if you haven't, here you go. Then I'm going to ask you your CPA, cost per acquisition. I'm going to simply divide 2 million

by your average ticket, divide that by your conversion rate, divide that by your booking rate, and multiply that by your CPA. If the total comes to more than 10%, so meaning that if 2 million comes up for more than 200,000, then your KPIs are broken. Guarantee your booking rate is effed. Guarantee your conversion rate's crap. And I know for a damn sure your average ticket is horrible. And you might say, well, we're not getting those good customers because you're advertising in the wrong areas.

So it goes back to the fundamentals. Understand your KPIs, know your KPIs. See, what Al Levy helped me understand was how to build a business with technicians. Well, what home service expert and elevate talk about is when your company grows to more than 10 people. If you're doing 600,000, I don't know what your industry is,

but I've got technicians. I've got technicians that do four times what you do in a year. One guy, because we know how to breed them. We know how to motivate them. We know how to get them in the right mindset. We know how to get them help from home. We know how to remind them why they started.

We figured out what's important to them. You know, on my wall, I have your dream house, your dream car, your dream vacation, pictures of your family, yourself and your best. I'm building pictures for people. I'm putting in your best. I'm building pictures for people. I'm putting in their goals. I'm building this for every employee. It'll be out in a couple of months. But listen, this is stuff coming every day to me. But I want to remind them why they're doing this. They're not doing it. It doesn't say

set a record for A1 so Tommy sleeps better. It says, give what you want. This is a career. Make the money. Have delayed gratification. So, Justin, so what phone systems are you using that allows you to analyze your calls? Well, Dialpad does. I mean, every phone system out there on a VoIP system should be putting the sediment in there. How accurate is it? You know, a lot of them train. And I don't love AI because it could transcribe everything.

I'm just not a huge believer. And for what I could pay somebody in another country to listen to all my calls and grade them right using something like ScoreBuddy, I know for a fact that top companies in the country do not use AI on their call monitoring because it's so hard to learn your particular business on what you consider an opportunity and train during your exact business. So until you set an SOP for exactly what the call should be and exactly the formula should be in exactly what minute should happen. Guess what? No AI is going to fix crap ever. Won't not possible. Well, show me when you take the address, what you're asking for first,

when you talk about, have a, we'll call it a magic moment like Joe Cristara talks about. When that happens on the phone, show me when you're supposed to be smiling on the phone, when I'm supposed to grade that. Until you thought of every little thing on that phone call, I promise you, I promise you, no AI is going to fix that, Justin.

Tell me my main squeeze. In one of your podcasts, you mentioned over the next two years, everyone in the garage industry will have no choice but to partner up with A1. Curious why you said this, and are you going to make this a reality? Well, Sean, I believe in myself more than anybody. I walk into a room confident, and because I'm the most vulnerable person ever, I ask for help all the time. And I'm the most vulnerable person ever, I ask for help all the time. And I'm the first one to ask for help. And here's the problem. You've done the math

inside out. Economies of scale. There's no platforms out there. I have most faith in the world that people are going to get to 20 million of EBITDA. But by that time, we'll be at 250 million of EBITDA. If they want to get the best valuation for their company, we're the best source. If they want the best place for their employees, you know, somebody's just looking to make a buck and they don't want the top valuation and they just hate me for some reason because some people hate me, but they never met me. I think it's something with somebody else. I don't really care. I just have faith in what we're doing. We're hiring the smartest people, the best of the best. And yes, there could be other competitors,

but wait till you see what I'm working on for next year. All I got to say is people better look out because I'm coming in and I don't need a lot of sleep. I mean, I still sleep in plenty of hours, but I don't know but if you guys were in this mind you'd probably be like what the hell's going on it's crazy but i'm working on quite a few things and i got guys like jim and adrian and dan miller and just you know now i got bill rassell working on a bunch of stuff and i got i I can keep going. And I just, every person I find, I got another assistant. I'm getting a personal assistant. Like I don't want a 10 X anymore. I want a hundred X my efficiency. And I got the technology. I got so many big things happening.

So many huge hires. By the time people find out who I hired, they're already two years in. And like I said, I share everything with you guys. So it's not a big secret. It's just, how could you afford all these people? I mean, 700 employees be 7,000 in three years. You nail it and scale it, right? So that's where I'm at with that. Let's see. Big issue in my company, HVAC in Florida.

How do you handle the rejection of a customer saying, I have to get my wife when she's home? It's called a one-legged lead. We call it mellow the customer. When we're getting to know the client, we're asking about, oh, I saw some pictures of your beautiful wife. What does she do for work? You have to get out of who the decision makers are in the initial conversations. And then you just need to say, listen, I'd love to talk to your wife when she gets back. I'd like to come out here.

You don't want to even set up the presentation until the both people are home on an HVAC cell. You want to get double-legged and you want to say, listen, I'll come back before I go through everything. Let me just come back here when she's home. And your dispatchers and your CSRs

need to make sure that when it's an opportunity more than 10 years old in HVAC that you're having both decision makers there. CSRs need to make sure that when it's an opportunity more than 10 years old in HVAC, that you're having both decision makers there. I'm chucking a truck home inspections and I need to really get going on growth and marketing. I came up in sales during my real estate career and I'm having trouble getting energized to do the work. So where would you send me to start leveraging that out until I bring in another Chuck on so I can focus more on time? Well, here's what I would tell you. If you're not motivated to do the work

and you feel like you're chucking a truck, I think you better switch careers. I know that sounds really bad and I don't have your name here. It just says Facebook user, but if you don't love what you do and you're not challenged and you're not having fun anymore, do yourself a favor, go find something you enjoy. Number one. Number two is start taking vitamins, man.

Start getting some walks in, slow down the drinking, drink more water, try to get your energy back, try to get your thought process coming smoothly. You know, maybe a one a day multivitamin, whatever you need to do to get your stuff together, maybe ginkgo biloba, but you can't be a Chuck in the truck. You gotta be something different. You gotta offer something different. You gotta be better.

You gotta offer something better than the rest. You know, it might be an offer. It might be, you might add something to your bill. You know, what you do as a handyman. I mean, I'm sorry as an inspector, but you got to do something to get your confidence and just have fun and get passionate again. Mark Hunter, my man, agree. Nobody put it all together the way that you do, spot on. Mark's a really amazing guy. If you haven't read his books, he's amazing at sales. Rachel said, I love that you are so complimentary of your team. Culture is so essential. You can have the best business in the world, and if your culture sucks, no one will stay. Absolutely. Hey, Tommy, in the process of trying to buy a garage door business,

two months still waiting on the owner to get the final books to finish the sale. Selling seems low priority and suggestions to get this moving. You fly out there and you get it done with them. You take a person and you say, listen, let's just do this together. We've had. You take a person and you say, listen, let's just do this together. We've had to do it three times. You say, listen, we know the market's not getting any better. He's got to have a reason to hurry up.

So what I would say is, first of all, do not email or call garage door people or home service people. You got to text them and figure out what's good for them and then fly out there, do whatever you have to do. Sit down with them and say, listen, I want to help you get this done. And just ask them point blank. Is there a reason why you don't want to do this? This is where having a dinner and having a straight one-on-one conversation, it says, are you worried about something? Is there any questions I could answer?

I just want you to level with me. I don't want to be a pest, but let's figure out a way. If you want to get this done, we'll get it done. If not, I'll give you some time. You need a couple months, but let's have him stop wasting your time. I've gone through the Alan Rohrer financial programs. Can you recommend someone that we can hire to coach through our numbers and how to price our work and build maintenance programs? I mean, you said you do service MVP. I think you're having a marketing issue, honestly. I think, Jonathan, you need to work on getting the right leads. But if you can't close big tickets, there's no reason to market to the affluent. It sounds like you've got a lot

of coaching. You've hired Alan Rohr. You've got Al Levy. You went through my program. You went through Joe. I don't think it's any more programs. I think me and you should jump on another call. Just go through, this is the site, homeservicenexpert.com forward slash questions. We'll have a chat, but if you come, tell me the CRM, tell me your average rating. I need your website. I want to understand your GMB. I want to understand all your reviews. I want to know your conversion rate, your average ticket, your booking rate. I want to know how much you used with financing. I want to know your average avatar, what they look like, what they like to do on their spare time. I want to know your cost to acquire a customer. I want to see your whole CRM inside and out. And I could care less about,

I don't want any of your data. I just want to know what you need to fix. I can't tell you what to do unless I get the whole equation. What's your opinion on using temps? Temps are great for less than a week's worth of stuff, but I'd like to know with what. Why would you need temps and for how long? Because temps are okay. They want you to hire them, but there's a reason they're a temporary employee.

They're not the best. Some great people went to temp agencies. I've got one that's lasted for me for a long time, but still highly don't recommend. Just got some billboards going. I know you mentioned billboards are long-term to work. Have you tried any call to actions on billboards though? Well, just remember you can only read six words. No call to actions are going to work on a billboard. Very rare. Billboards are not for call to actions. Radio and TV would be called to actions. Billboards are more, almost a pure branding play. Remember seven words, very max, usually five words. So I don't think a call to action on a

billboard call today for your, you're already running out of words. If you got your business name on there, how do you get integrity integrity with marketing when a lot of the people just google the number to even call well they found you on yelp or a mailer for example i'm finding people will say google for an easier answer attribution call tracking numbers you go sign up with suzy boiter at call cap which if you email, I can get you a special price, homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. Your number has to be going,

they got to get ported over to someone else and then you get attribution. Now Google is going to get credit for a lot of stuff. But to not have those numbers, yes, people lie. They say, I got you on the mailer. I saw you on the ValPak thingy, even though it was Clipper or MoneyMailer or Savvy Shop or whatever.

Having attribution by number tracking is the only way to go. I've got 6,000 call tracking numbers. Yes, Josh Boyd posted this. Probably about the CFO. How much should you charge? Megan likes amazing. I just wanted to say I'm a big fan and I'm excited to read your new book, Elevate. Actually, I just applied for the position in Boise. Well, let's go. Message me on the podcast. Let me know your name and I get that expedited. Asking for advice.

Just taking over a graduate company six months ago that has been around for 53 years. Would you keep the same brand or do you think rebranding would be a better option? And so how do you approach this? Number one, I say this. How's the marketing leads coming in? How many leads are coming in per day and are they coming from marketing channels? If you're getting 50 calls per day from the old brand and you see that people are loyal to it, they love the old brand. It's been around. The kids grew up together. It's a whole different ballgame. Now, if all the leads are coming through marketing dollars, then rebranding won't hurt. And then what I would do is, you guys know, I like Kick Charge. I like Dan Antonelli. He's going to ask you what city you're in, what the brands are out there. He's going to look at HVAC versus, he doesn't want people getting confused on the brand.

He's going to ask you what's important to you in the brand. If you plan on growing the company, you got to get a trademark on the brand. There's all kinds of copyright things you should do, but is it a brand that you can put on the walls? Is it a brand that you can put on the carpets? You can build core values. Does it tell you a story?

If not, rebrand. I've got a mid seven figure business in Canada and currently working on systems to scale to eight without franchising. So thank you for showing me that it's possible. I want to start networking with other people ahead of me in the trades that I can learn from. Even events, would you recommend I fly out to?

What events? Well, there's a new event. It's not publicly known yet, but you guys are the first ones I'm going to tell. It's called freedom event.com. It's November 1st, second,

and third. It's going to be in Orlando. Come to that event. You want to see a game changer? This is it. This is history. November 1st, second, and third 3rd, freedomevent.com. I don't even know if the website's up yet,

but you're going to start seeing it like crazy this month and all summer. In your opinion on starting a home service company in the field that you don't have experience in? I'm going to start so many things in the next five years that I don't have any experience in. You don't need to be a technician to start a business. You don't need to be a cook to start a restaurant. You don't need to be a cook to start a restaurant. You don't need to be a locksmith to start. I'm just saying, not having any experience is actually a good thing. Can you walk me through

an example of what a boarding session looks like? So I will. I'm making a bunch of videos on this about how I'm going to be delegating everything in the house. How I like my towels, how I like my boxers folded, how I like socks put together. Every single detail, how often I want my sheets changed, where I want the waters, where I want the swifts, how I'm going to test to see if things were clean to my liking. I'm getting boards built of the entire house and shading in the areas that I've used so the cleaning lady knows. Checks and balances, you can see it all. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be giving a lot of samples. I got a new recording studio. Actually, two.

I got one next door and one at the house. Dan, that's a lot of MAs. Mine are $26 per month, but the techs have not mentioned kickback price. Should offer a lower price MA. We're just really getting started on some momentum on them. That's a lot of MAs. I don't know what the MA is. Minor at 26 per month.

Market agreements. Oh, yeah. So I call mine service agreements. Whatever, yours, MAs. 26 per month, but my techs have not mentioned kickback on price. Should I offer a lower price? No, but what's your conversion rate? And listen, I'm just mentioning this because I want more questions and I love it, but homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. I didn't know your conversion rate on your MAs or service agreements. I can't tell you if it's too high of a price.

I don't know what your conversion rate is. Rachel said, what strategies have you implemented to effectively manage the impact of supply chain disruptions and fluctuations in raw material pricing, ensuring consistent production and delivering high quality garage doors to your customers while also optimize optimizing costs and maintaining profitability. Sounds like it's from Billy Madison. This is my cousin.

So what I have done is I got secondary and third suppliers because my best suppliers told me they would not fulfill my needs. And we ordered larger quantities. So what's happening right now is most of your manufacturers are having the worst year ever because people overordered last year. So they're running through supplies, so their Q1 sucked. I can promise you that. And garage doors, it was the worst. You might say, you don't know my industry, but when you saw every new house being built by Pulte Homes and Shea Homes and all these, the only thing they didn't finish was the garage door.

Garages got hit the worst. You could talk to any builder out there. So we've realized now our buying volume is the highest in the industry by far in the tune of $30 million a year. So we love our vendors, but we expect as we continue to spend more money and play ball, you can't treat us like a $2 million spend company. I won't say we're too big to fail, but we've got options. We've got people. What happens if you look at a supply and demand chart, you'll see, especially in a free market like ours, you'll see the price, our prices start coming down.

So one of the notes I have from earlier today was get with all the suppliers, including the marketing companies, and just finding out what you need us to hit and holding them accountable to give us a price break. I want my suppliers to make money, but it's just not about money and supply chain. It's about us getting quickly out of the distribution center, right? It's about them doing things for us. For example, most of my supply ops will give me an incentive on one thing I ask for per month, and then I'll get my guys used to selling it. And typically, it's going to be a higher margin thing from them, and I can pay them a spiff on it, and we make more money, and my guys get used to selling it. Thank you, Tommy. I agree with you so much on the hiring. Humble, hungry, smart.

Love Patrick Licione and his books. Me too. Love both your books. You inspired me to build a tech to owner program for our employees. Incense building a large network of exterior cleaning companies like AC Lockyer did, but a more like a franchise. As the employee progressed in training and experience, they're working towards owning their own location

in any available market. We're going to take the cleaning industry by storm. However, I struggle with keeping on task. I haven't finished putting the plan together. Do you have any time? I've always got time. I mean, look, the best thing to do is come here I do two site tours

Where we go through the whole place And spend a couple hours Twice a month And usually there's three or four different companies I don't care if there's ten I don't care if there's one But I make time every month for that And then we can spend a little bit more time together

I love the franchise idea I love it a lot In fact, you'll be hearing more about that next year. Not for gosh, for us though. Hey, Tommy, just finished your book, Elevate. I got a lot out of it. Question for you. If you can think back to when you were on the $10 million company, what can you think of that time that really catapulted A1 to the next level? P.S. Still got a lot of play. Yes. Ping pong. Sean. So $10 million company. The hardest thing was me delegating and letting go. We were firefighters. We were

reactive versus proactive. We didn't have a financial known check. We didn't know exactly where we were each week, each month. We weren't good at reading balance sheet and income statement. We didn't have the right controller or CFO in place. We were jacks of all trades, master of nuns. We didn't have a great training center. We weren't great at recruiting A players. At 10 million, it's pure grit. I can get to 10 million in my industry.

I got there with eight technicians. And there was a couple of sales guys out there selling a shit ton of doors. But that was a lot of money back then. But still, I wasn't keeping a lot of it. So if you look at profit first, the biggest thing is pay yourself well. Be top grading. At that stage, you need to top grade. You can't settle on B players. I know a lot of companies struggle to do one or two million, but 10 million is still, I feel like, just getting started, is a B player will hold you down. And the other thing is I'd always be working on my leadership skills, giving back to my team first. I think that's super important. Guys, I hate to do this, but I've got two video guys,

Xavier and Giuseppe, at the house. And I'm sure they're probably watching this going, dude, finish. We finish wreck your house waiting so we're gonna go produce some more content this is great what i'll do is i'm gonna take the rest of the questions to terrace hvac llc so you guys are amazing take these things use them comment on them share this podcast if you like it. Let me know how I'm doing. Leave me a review if you get a chance on the podcast. It really helps out. We just got a million downloads.

You know what? The more people that hear about this, it just feels like the more I'm blessed, the more people I get to reach out and help, and the more it comes back full circle. Just remember this. You can have everything in life you want if you just help enough people get what they want. You guys have a fantastic night. Appreciate all the great questions.

I'll be sure to answer the rest. Thank you, guys. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone

looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.