The Home Service Expert Podcast - Firing Clients That Are Not A Good Fit For Your Business

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

Keith Kalfas is the host of the Untrapped podcast and a social media influencer in the landscaping & window cleaning markets. He is also the owner of Kalfas Services, where he grew the business from zero to a six figure-income in just five years. In this episode, we talked about video marketing, pricing, mindset...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert Podcast. I'm here today with Keith Kelfast, and he is the

social media guru. I mean, he's got 62,210 followers on YouTube. He's got 11,000 on LinkedIn. He's got over 6,000 on Twitter. The guy's been doing everything there is to do with landscape and window cleaning. He's a huge influencer. He wrote the two books, How to Start a Landscaping Business and the Window Cleaning Blueprint. And I'm really excited to have you on, Keith. How are you doing today? What's going on, Tommy? Hey, I'm a busy guy, but I love that you jumped on today. I know that things are hectic. You're in Michigan, right? Absolutely, yep.

I grew up in Sterling Heights. Damn. So we're kindred spirits, man. Sterling Heights. What part of town are you in? Well, my office is right in Lakeside Circle by Lakeside Mall. And I moved from Canal and Shaner. Now I'm across the border in Shelby Township. So right there by Lakeside Mall, Sterling Heights. Right on, man.

I went to Sterling. I have a bunch of friends out there. Elliot Osek, I think he's still doing landscaping here and there. Jimmy O'Regan, he works at a landscaping spot. Anyways, you're the biggest social influencer in those industries. You've written two books. Tell me a little bit about the way you came up and how you became such a big influencer in those markets. Yeah. I was the guy with no mentors and nobody to look up to when I was younger from Sterling Heights to actually living in Southeast Detroit and some pretty poverty ridden areas, you know, poor on food stamps, things like that. And I grew up just landscaping and cutting lawns.

And I noticed that the people around me had no bigger ideas of doing anything. And this was before, you know, social media blew up before YouTube and everything that the way it is now where you could just get information at your fingertips. I found myself going to old bookstores every time I got paid. And I would buy books by Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, Brian Tracy. And then when the iPod came out, oh. So that's how I kind of grew up was cutting lawns and listening to motivational stuff. But by the time I was 25, I had already read like 200 or 250 books. And I was like, why am I so obsessed with this stuff while my friends are listening to, say, rap music or the other guys at the company would be listening to?

And there's nothing wrong with that. And I just had dreams of one day of myself being... I saw me sharing my message of inspiration and hope with other people and writing books myself. And I didn't know at the time how I would even ever get there. But when my life fell apart by 2010 and just having a job that wasn't working, I was forced into starting my own business, just bootstrapping, running around, knocking on doors, broke. And I was able to get the whole business off the ground and up to six figures with literally within the first year just by working myself to death. And everything hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized once I had jumped on the other side of the fence, oh, my God, like I stuck in a dead-end job, reading all these books,

thinking it was impossible to start my own business. And the epiphany, the light bulb went off and I realized it's not that bad. It's not as hard or impossible as you might think when you're in a nine to five because you're rooted, you're anchored in your psychology. So I started just putting all these crazy videos out there on YouTube and wrote a couple books about my journey of going from one mindset to another. And it really caught on YouTube and wrote a couple books about my journey of going from one mindset to another. And it really caught on and sparked like a wildfire on the internet. And so that's my mission is sharing and kind of flying that torch or handing that off to people who are stuck in a dead end job and want to get their own thing going. So I'm the startup guy.

And I think my life experience is the perfect case study because I was the guy who came from nothing and had all the self-limiting beliefs. And I still have a ton of them now. But it's really amazing how far you can come in just a few years if you get totally committed. Yeah, you got to be dedicated. And I think that I agree with you wholeheartedly that a nine to five, for some people, a dead end road, but at the same time, you're going to lose sleep, you're going to lose relationships, you're not going to eat some days running a business. So it's not the solution for everybody. I mean, you've talked about some of the challenges you faced when you were growing your business. For you, what are some of the biggest challenges

and how did you overcome them as you started to progress through your business? To tell you the truth, the biggest challenges in the beginning were not even understanding what relative overhead is and how much you need to charge. So I was very, very lucky to have some mentors that scared the shit out of me by telling me like, listen, you have to put away 30% for taxes. You have to have insurance. You have to do these things or you end up up Schitt's Creek without a pedal. You think it's hard now? And one of the huge struggles was taking on clients that knowing what they're doing, taking advantage of me and me not having the self-esteem to draw my line in the sand and charge what I was worth. And I spent the first three years letting my clients walk all over me when I

started getting employees, letting them walk all over me to the point where it just crushed me. So I think that getting through it was literally just getting around other entrepreneurs and going to live events and meeting people that are in the same industry as myself would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Because we're crushing it over here. I'd be like, What? How are you doing this? How are you doing that? Like I said, I still have a ton of my own stuff I'm working through now.

But I started to learn that other people had figured out how to get through that stuff. And that I could too. They just had a roadmap that I didn't have access to. So that's some of the biggest things I was getting through. Literally firing clients that I couldn't raise the price on and learning how to do marketing. Oh my God. And attracting the type of customers that I wanted to work with and just raising the price or getting rid of the customers that I didn't. So that's been a long process, but it's totally worth it. Last year, I started a Christmas light business. I kind of fell into it. I won't go into the story, but this year we fired half of the clients and we jacked the prices up to double.

And every client, we start to give them a benefit analysis of using us. We're insured. We come in a wrapped truck. We got all these things we give. My main business is garage doors, but there's so much truth to that. And you're a dedicated learner.

You learn to do copywriting, marketing, public speaking. Tell me a little bit about that because so many times we say the price game. Hey, I got to be cheaper. I'm not going to get the call. And I got to tell you, I think everybody out there that's listening, we've got a lot of people listening. I think we're up to 15,000 people. So these are business owners. Tell us a little bit about the price and how you're able to get over that because I think that's a huge obstacle because so many times we charge what it is for us to make a paycheck, but we don't charge enough to run a successful business. How are you able to attract those customers? And tell me a little bit about firing the ones that just were not cutting it for you. So I really like the theory of expand the top as you dissolve the bottom.

Dissolve the bottom as you expand the top. I found a program called Piranha Marketing by Joe Polish, who was like a carpet cleaner and then was able to do this whole process. And I dove into that. Dan Kennedy, who's a master copywriter. And then I started thinking, this is impossible. I can't just jack the price up 30% on all my clients. I'm going to lose them. And so I learned about split tests.

I said, wait a second. I can start to raise the price on all new clients and split tests. So this one's going to be literally double the price. This one will be 10% more. Going back to my old clients and finding out, hey, we're going to raise the price on you. We're going to grandfather you in. It's not going to be the full amount. We're still going to give you a discount,

but we've got to raise the price. It was very uncomfortable to do that. I mean, I might have literally 10 clients left out of 420 that I've gotten rid of in the last 36 months. 10 left out of that many clients. And we got new clients coming in all the time. But it was learning something called the customer avatar, which is, do you look at the data, look at the demographic, the psychographic, look at the amount of money, your favorite customer, let's say your perfect customer that lives in the perfect neighborhood.

They're super cool. They pay you whatever you ask. It's good. You get in, you do the service. They write the check every time. They always... What is that customer? If you draw out all the qualities of what that customer has, and you start to look at the opposite of that, the reciprocal or the customer that you don't want

and that you can't stand working for, there is a better life out there in your business. You can get rid of all the customers that you don't want by attracting the customers that you do want, but you do that through marketing. I got a hold of a program because I knew none of this stuff before. I was totally confused and frustrated up to my eyeballs. I found a program called Get Altitude by a guy named Evan Pagan. It costs a couple thousand bucks, but it's an an 80 hour long seminar.

And so I spent an entire winter watching this stuff, taking notes. And I started to learn that you can learn how to do your own marketing, advertising, copywriting, how to write ads, where to advertise, how much percentage of your gross annual revenue should you be putting back into your marketing? And how do you segment that out? Yeah. So the avatar is the perfect customer. What I do is database analysis all the time on my garage door business. We're serving right around 6,000 customers a month. And we diagnose our database all the time to find out

where is the most margin tickets. We find out where garage doors are breaking. And our avatar means it's a married couple with a 3,000 square foot with a three car garage. It's some stuff we're able to get a hold of really, really easily. That's great advice. So I think a lot of this is finding the right people. So how much of your business has been just lining up the right guys who show up every day, they bust their butts, and you take care of them. Can you talk to me a little bit about your hiring process and retention? So actually, that's my weak point is leadership and hiring and retention. I've gotten stuck in the past of hiring out of desperation.

We get really, really swamped. And so what do I do? I've got all these customers I got to take care of. And then so I would hire the wrong people and then it wouldn't work out. So I was just listening to a podcast this morning, which I learned about you on, Michael Dahlke and Joshua Latimer on the Quick Talk podcast, talking about their recruiting and hiring process and retaining the right people, especially with all the baby boomers that are retiring,

the labor shortage and all that. So that's my own battle right now. I happen to be really good at marketing and customer service, but building the labor team is my weak point. And I think that it goes back to looking at the data of the average ticket price and figuring out where all the metrics in the business so you can see what's going on. So you can pull the trigger and make that happen. So what you have is, in my opinion, is I call my employees internal customers.

And so many business owners, they post an ad on Craigslist, they post an ad on a couple other places, they put a little post on Facebook, they spend 30 bucks every two weeks, but yet they'll spend $100,000 that month to get new customers. Well, I can tell you, if you increase your average ticket, if you are able to get to two more jobs that day with a better technician if you're able

to do a little bit more upsells you'll double the amount of revenue you make so my only advice to everybody out there and possibly even you keith is take the time you're you're a master marketer spend more time figuring out your perfect avatar of an employee and start to build a group of A players of employee of the month. Every single guy that works for you or gal will be an employee of the month. And what will happen is your job will be easier. You're not in the field, the old cliche. You're working on the business, not in the business. We'll start happening more.

But I'm not here to lecture you or teach you anything you might not know. I would just say that you're a great marketer. And a lot of times, it's all about recruiting. There's a difference between interviewing and hiring and letting them come to you and actually going out and getting them. And I'd say it's not easy. People say I always be closing. I say I always be recruiting. Everywhere you go, ask questions. If you go see a nice elderly couple, say, do you have a grandson or somebody, somebody young, willing, and able that might be interested in helping me out, maybe part-time,

and potentially we could maybe form a career around it. But that's what I do. I mean, I hand out 10 business cards a day. But what advice can you give to somebody that just hasn't learned the crucial skills of growing their business because so often we find ourselves every day overwhelmed and they go, that's all good and great, Tommy. This sounds like a nice dream for what you're doing, but I'm too busy busting my butt every day out in the field. I have a hard time training. I don't have time to look at my advertising. I'm barely paying my taxes right now.

What's the next step? Because I find that everybody gets frozen in that area and it's really hard to get out of that. At some point when the frustration is at peak, you have to actually sit down and say, okay, this is going to keep going this way unless I take a change. And a lot of times change comes with making the decision and then pulling the trigger to do something that costs you money. So if it's an expense you're not used to spending, you have to turn it to looking at as an investment and become detached at the possibility that it might not work out.

I have a team of seven. And a huge breakthrough for me was hiring freelancers, Upwork.com. So people to help with the marketing and syndicate the content, write blog posts and create marketing for the businesses. So people that would write blog post articles, like a well-worded SEO-rich blog post article with backlinks to your website and share it on social media, stuff like that to market your business. If you're trying to do all that stuff yourself at night,

it's going to cut into your family time. It's going to cut into your personal life. It's going to cut into your personal life. It'll cut into the time that maybe you need to be looking at the numbers in your business. Whatever it is, I was trying to do it all to the point where I was so burned out that I was ending up sick in bed. And then it just wasn't working. So I think I have one, two, three, four. One's not working out. Four people, four different virtual assistants all over the world working on Upwork.com all the time. And you don't have to hire them full time and put them on payroll and all that. You can literally hire them for 5, 10, 15, 20 hours a week to do that for you. a secretary, even though I have an office, hiring a secretary who is a freelancer, has took a ton off my plate. I communicate with her on Voxer. So it literally came down to, okay, I'm hiring this person right now. And back when I did that and I got committed, see, when you are committed, that's when other people take you seriously. And that's when the right people show up. If you're just like-hearted it doesn't work so when i was 100 committed it worked and now the sales and marketing in my business is at

the point where semi-automated by next year it'll be fully automated and i think that by getting around the right people who have already done that and finding out what systems they use then realizing that you don't have to do that yourself and it's not going to cost you a full-time... It's not going to cost you $2,000 or more per month per employee. You can hire freelancers to help you. And you can get all these amazing things done in your business and take all this weight off your shoulders. So I think that's the biggest thing that you can overcome is that right there. Go on Upwork.com and And you can hire a virtual assistant who's a specialist at doing QuickBooks reconciliation. My QuickBooks look like a nightmare. And if anybody's listening right now, how organized are all of your books?

So you can hire somebody for $20 an hour to get in a few hours a week and organize all your books. You can hire someone to send out invoices to clients, customer follow-up, five-star reviews. You can hire somebody to go on sendjim.com and send brownies to all your best customers. You don't have to do that yourself anymore, which frees you up to make more money. So it actually just pays for itself. Once I got my head around that, that changed everything over the past two years. Yeah, I had Send Jim on my podcast. I used to go see Joe Polish all the time. He used to give a free seminar in Tempe, Arizona. He's amazing at what he does. He's got a work week. It explains how to hire VAs. Upwork is great. If you want little gigs done, you can go to Fiverr. You got to be really careful when you enter into a contract with somebody. Don't always get the cheapest.

You got to learn how to interview them and how to hire a virtual assistant, which we call VAs. I mean, just my company alone, we have 19 VAs, but I would highly recommend you get a specialist and don't always hire the $4 an hour person. You might want to spend a little more money. Make sure they speak English. Don't you agree? Yeah. I hired a, uh, a project manager for 50 bucks an hour, 50 bucks an hour. But I said, you know what? It's going to be worth it. And then she

helped me identify from looking from the outside all the the low-hanging fruit and what was going on in the business because i was very confused it's like being inside of an aquarium and she was able to scan through it all and all i needed for was about a month month and a half and then it was perfect and i was ah, a whole new resource here. Other people's eyeballs are hiring people that are smarter than you who are really, really good at doing one specific thing. Like, why would you sit there and try to do your own graphic design for a brochure and sit on Photoshop for 20 hours when you can hire somebody for $300, $400 to make one way better, who understands that better than you do. And then they might

make a revision or two and you're done. That thing is off to the market that's making you money. Yeah, I agree. I had one of the guys that works for me, I talked to him pretty seriously last week. And he said, Tommy, this is becoming too much to manage. Clipper, Money Mailer, ValPak, you and your home, welcome home in 19 markets. And I said, what do you mean? He said, I'm just trying to keep up with all the graphics. We got to make tweaks here and there. I said, we pay these companies. They have graphic designers. Are you kidding me? Why are you doing any of it? So I basically had a big discussion about delegation and the ways to properly delegate. But most importantly, we need a flyer made. I just spent this month $80,000 on ValPak. So if I ask them to do me

a favor and design something, they're doing it for free. So a lot of the things I do is called leverage. I leverage my relationships and I ask for favors. And in return, I send my customers all the time. In return, they send me... I had a money mailer, the guy that owns it. He sent his brother-in-law. The guy just sent me 10 doors this week. So we take care of each other. And VAs are great, getting some good help internally. I see when you got a small company, you wear a lot of hats, which is good. But you need to find out what hats you love to wear.

Me, I love marketing. I love sales. Those are what I'm passionate about. I don't love operations. I hate accounting. I hate finances, but I understand them. And I use my CRM to make decisions. It's black and white. You are like a social media genius. You're really figuring out steps that I think a lot of people miss.

You hear those cliches, make 10 FAQ videos. And the reason why is you want to become the expert. Tell me some ways how to go viral and how to get that message across. Now you've reached out to a lot of people that want to learn about your business. What's a good way to become the industry leader and a good way to become get in front of the customer? Yeah. One way to become an industry leader is first to decide that that's what you're going to do. And that's what you're going to be. The program, Get Altitude, I told you about four or five years ago, he said, go look in the mirror and say, in 24 months, my name is going to be the number one name in the world synonymous with this search term.

So for me, I said, I'm going to be the number one name in the world synonymous with the word landscaping in 24 months. And then I set out a plan to do that and then it happened. But I also saw that it was Wild West. It was wide open. I was like, wait a second. This isn't capitalized done yet. I was like, oh my God, this is a wide open opportunity. So I just went crazy at it and dominated the search term, but also uploaded over 1200 videos. So you have to make it a habit. Creating content becomes a habit, just like doing anything else. If you get your coffee every single morning, anything becomes a habit. But the next, if you want to dominate a niche

that's already taken, say on an international level, you can dominate your local niche area for your business or your service. According to keyword and local search terms, you could become the number one guy in your city or tri-city area or even state for whatever you do for a living in as little as a year by putting out the most organic, quality, rich content as possible. And then if that's already taken, you can create in your entirely and invent, you can literally invent a brand new category that's never existed before. So let's just say if a doctor, say a plastic surgeon, for example, and I'm not saying anybody on here is a plastic surgeon. It's just a good example because you can picture it. Well, how many plastic surgeons specialize specifically just the nose, say rhinoplasty? They say, I'm going to become the best guy in the world

at that or in my entire state. So it's kind of like if somebody wants to go to a heart doctor, and this is just old marketing rhetoric, but in this application, do they want to go to a general doctor if they need to have stints put in their heart? Or do they want to go to the best Beaumont heart doctor there is who specializes specifically in putting stints in hearts and has done over like 20,000 of them or something like that. So you want to go to somebody who's a specialist. So if you start putting that information out there that let's say you are a landscaper

and you specialize in doing water features and doing koi fish ponds, you can literally coin yourself as the number one koi fish pond guy in the entire state where you live by putting that information out there consistently and repeatedly in that higher level than more anybody else is and dominating by literally putting those keyword search terms in instead of just being a generalist. Now, when I said creating a category, what I mean by that is, what is something special that you do that you're passionate about in your business or a way that you do it that another service company or general service companies don't do? So you can be a service company that specializes in, like you with garage doors, you own A1 garage door company, something about the way you guys do it that's different than anybody else. So you now become a specialist. When you market yourself as a specialist on the internet,

all those customer avatars or people that are looking for that will gravitate towards you and they'll want to pay you more money or they'll pay more attention to you because you are a specialist. So if everybody is your customer, nobody is your customer. Well, you can 100 times that on the internet. It's like going on the internet saying that you're just like some handyman and you do all services that might work if you specialize in being like the top handyman. But usually, that's not going to work. landscaping business. Perfect case study is I wasn't some millionaire landscaper talking to you from an office. I was really out in the field actually doing it, sharing my actual experience. So imagine if you're going through, and this is the perfect example, and I will get to how to market your actual local service. But imagine if you're going through bankruptcy and you're terrified. It's just a good example. And you go on the internet and you see a guy in a suit and tie, an attorney, giving you advice. You might listen to him. But what if you find an average Joe or a guy like you who is like, listen, I literally am coming out of the back end of my bankruptcy and it was scary, but I want to tell you something. It wasn't as expensive as I thought it would be. And I actually got some relief and I got to share my story with you. So if you hear a guy talking

about who's actually gone through this experience, it's called the anti-guru effect. So that means that that guy's going to get a lot more views and people are going to pay more attention to him because he has actual boots on the ground experience. Instead of some guy just on a high level advising you, You can get real-world information you can sink your teeth into right now. So that's good stuff. Now switching to the other foot, if you want to market your local service business, I don't think going and telling your mistakes and things to your customers is a good idea. But if you put out consistent content in the form of videos and blog posts,

obviously updating your website, having a mobile-friendly website, doing all the new things, and you're getting Google guaranteed, and staying on the latest cutting trends of marketing, and then putting out more content and having a strategy for doing that than any of your other local competition, you mean, you're going to crush them and dominate them just by literally at the end of the year, put out a plan, a 12-month marketing plan, say the last 12 months, this is what we did or didn't do. This is what we're going to do in the next 12 months. These are the quarters. These are the seasons. These are the months.

And this is how I'm going to market my business. This is the content that I'm going to make. So once a week, we're going to do a video for the business. And we're going to showcase before and after pictures of what we did here. We're going to get client testimonials. We're going to put them on the website. If you just do 10% of that stuff, you're going to crush everybody else because people aren't doing that. They're so busy in the business and running it that they think, Oh, I don't got time to do that. I don't got time to make a video. But I guarantee you, if you plan it in your day, and you make time to do it, when you look back and that video

is getting you leads and customers are calling you, they're coming into your sales funnel, or you have people saying they watched your videos and it inspired them to make a difference or a change, you're going to be like, you know what? I was on a job site that day two years ago and said, this video has 100,000 views now. But two years ago, I didn't feel like making that video because we were busy and we had to make it to the next job or we had to make the next sales call. But I took out that 10 minutes to make that video and send it to my editor to edit. You don't have to edit the videos yourself. And now that video has 100,000 views or it's made me $100,000 in revenue. That's the quantified leverage of what we have our hands on right now.

So when you understand that, how much leverage is there, that's what will give you the reason to say, you know what, I'm going to start doing this. Because now you understand why you're doing it. Does that make sense? 100%. I love this stuff. I'm taking notes. I like the idea of becoming a specialist. I call it, you could be a jack of all trades or a master of one. I'd rather have a rifle shot than a shotgun approach. And as you grow, you get more of a rifle and you put people accountable. So what I've done is I've started to automate

a lot of these things. I got a full-time video guy. He works, well, three days a week. And I just actually gave him a contract because he comes in all the time. But when you think about making videos, the videos are great. Testimonials are great. Infographics are great.

The Christmas light business, actually what I'm doing is I'm putting something together brought to you by stayofftheroof.com. And it's pick your month, put your first name and pick your birth date. And this is your funny elf name. Because those are things that go viral. And it cost me $5 on Fiverr. I just got to write it all out. Those are things that you could do that go viral. So I think there's got to be a content strategy. But once you get it down, you could use tools like Hootsuite that'll post to all your social media. And there's a lot of things you can do like geotag pictures

and having an RSS feed that goes directly onto your website, making sure the click-through rate and the load time is fast. There's a UR certificate that you want to make sure that it's a safe website or Google will end up de-indexing it. I mean, I don't want to confuse people, but I do want to say that if you could just create one video a week and start to send it to your clients and make it useful. So if I do garage tours, I don't talk about garage tours all the time. I talk about how to winterize your home. And I actually do partnership marketing. But I love the idea. Become a specialist. Have a content strategy. I'll go toe-to-toe. I love the fact that you kind of inspired me to make a lot more

things that I actually give a lot back because I think I have a better close ratio I have a higher conversion rate I have a better average ticket I think I have a much higher customer satisfaction rating but I'm not afraid to give all that stuff away that's why I do this podcast I've got guys that are better than me at almost everything and I surround myself with them last weekend I was with a guy that does 45 million bucks a year and he's in the fetal stages of his business. And that's HVAC in Florida. I mean, his name is Keegan. Amazing guy. Spent the whole weekend with me. I'm flying out to Florida to see him. I'm starting to hang out with these guys. You ever hear you are who you hang around with? You want to fly with the peoples. So tell me a little bit

about your content strategy. You said, I'm going to become the number one guy. So we're just going to use landscaping. Tell me what the strategy was when you said, I'm going to go make 1200 videos. How did you get that adoption? I mean, how did people, first of all, let me add one thing I think that you did is you did some keyword research. You do it through Google analytics and you define it, what people are searching for. And those are the title tags. Those are the things you want to put in your video. Am I right? Oh, yeah. So then let's go ahead and talk and discuss how you really pick out the strategy and the content. Okay. I'm going to narrow this. This could be like a four-hour talk and I'm going to try to

get it down to a couple of minutes. How about that? So a lot of the exercises that I went through in studying marketing, which I believe you have to be obsessed with to do stuff like this. You have to be excited about it. You have to force yourself. It'll be like, I don't know, trying to push a donkey or something uphill. I don't know. It's very hard to do if you don't love it. You don't know why. But a lot of it is psychology actually. So there's been tons of programs that are sold and created on keyword tips and how to dominate and rank this keyword and make

your video go viral. But that's only one modality of that. The most important part is the actual content and connection, the human being connection itself. What I'm talking about is looking in the camera as though you're looking into the eyes of your prospect, as though they were a friend. So some people, if they were to make a video,

you'd act like you're on stage speaking to an audience. So now what if you look at your cell phone and you see some guy looking at the phone, totally disconnected. He's looking at the camera and he's acting like he's speaking to a big audience. Like, well, it's just me sitting here by myself looking at my phone. Like this guy's, there's a disconnect.

So when you actually believe in your mind, the truth that you're looking into a camera lens and you're connecting with that one person on the other side and you're creating value for them right here, right now, and you're being present with them. When you feel that and you're actually giving them real value, they're going to receive it that way. Okay, so there's a framework. If you hang your content, so your video, the way you create your video, the things you say on a framework, it's going to catch more. It's going to be more shareable. It can go, say, more viral. So a framework example would be before and after.

Past, present, future. Then and now. High and low. You can tell a story of the hero's journey when everything fell apart and you had to go on a quest to overcome some major obstacle in your business or your life. And then damn it, you did it. And it worked out perfectly. And you had tears in your eyes because this thing, you overcame it. When you tell a story like that, people get hooked. If you tell a story of maybe a client case study of a customer that you served on a very high level and it was a difficult challenge, but everything worked out fine and they became a raving fan, that's another customer.

So when you begin to study Hollywood script writing, I know this is kind of deep and a little bit of acting stuff here and there, You find out, how do I communicate in a way that catches other people? So therefore, they will listen to the podcast, watch the videos, and they would want to share it. How do you do that? That's where the psychology comes into play. The next step is you have to do it all the time. So your first 100 videos are going to suck. Make them anyways and upload them anyways.

So you're going to start uploading videos. The best way is right off the cuff. I'm into energy. So there's the river and then there's the riverbanks. The riverbanks is the structure and the framework. The river is just the flow. If you make a bunch of videos where you're just blabbing on and on, talking about something you're feeling in the moment, that can't get a lot of traction, but it's helping you get traction by getting the damn videos out there. Once you get enough videos out there like that, you say, okay, I'm used to speaking on the camera now. I'm getting good at this, right? I'm not afraid to upload the video. I'm not afraid of

how stupid I look or that nobody's watching the video. Now I can start to implement a little bit this framework and structure that I've been hearing about. Now let's make a real video where I talk about past, present, future. Maybe I have props. Maybe I'm showing slides on a screen. So you get a little bit more and more complex as you get more comfortable until now you've built an entire framework for your videos, like a content marketing calendar. So now a guy named Dan Kennedy said, be careful what you open up, like a Pandora's box, because you can't close that door. So what do I want to talk about on these videos?

Okay, I'm going to talk about business related things, finance related things, and I'm never ever going to talk about my family or my kids, right? Maybe I just don't want to share that stuff. But I will mix a little bit of cockiness and a little bit of my humor humor because I'm funny, right? And then you rotate those things. So if you're going to make, say, two to three videos a week, one video is a how-to video. The next video, it's a practical video about this subject.

And then the next video is you just being funny and silly and being yourself, like a vlog, right? And you just keep rotating those three things over and over and over and over and over and over. And then you can become successful with that. If you start all of a sudden, because now you're building a character, and that's what people expect from you. If you act funny and silly in your vlogs and you're a comical person, but you don't ever show that. And then one day down the road, you have an audience and you start acting that way,

it's going to throw them off guard because you never showed that before. So that means you need to totally be yourself if you're like that. For me, my videos started getting a lot of views when I started putting my family in there and sharing my deepest, most personal things and sharing the realness. But there's a lot of stuff that I don't talk about ever whatsoever at all.

I just don't go there. So decide what you want to talk about and then start rotating those subjects kind of on a calendar. Does that make sense? Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I think that this is important for all social media, no matter what, is to build a character. And even with your own business, is to let customers know what separates you. I think when you read the book, The Raving Fans,

it really talks about the customer experience being so amazing. I was at a real estate meeting and I was upstage talking for two and a half hours, two days ago. And I said, how many people here have had an amazing experience at a restaurant lately? And the guy raises his hand. He goes, Tommy, I went to Red Lobster the other day. And he goes, I want to tell you from the minute I walked into the minute I left, I know it's not a fancy restaurant. He goes, you know what I did afterwards? I left a Yelp review. I was like, dude, you stole my thunder. Because I was like, people are,

they feel obligated to go and do something good afterwards. And you got to ask them, you got to ask for referrals. But I also like to get in front of unhappy customers because those unhappy customers could become ride or die for your business. I just love the idea of the content strategy because you decide... Same thing with your blogs. One of them might be an FAQ. The next one might be a word of the day or a common phrase or a quote that you love. But once you get it, you just rotate them all in and you make it fun for the reader because

you want them to look at your blog. You want them to look and open up your emails. And I got to tell you, I subscribe to Dan Kennedy, Jeff Walker, Ryan Dice, Perry Belcher, Frank Kern. I mean, you name the internet marketers, I buy all their stuff. I go through their funnels. I mean, this is what I do. I've got Dan Kennedy. That's about direct marketing. Wait, wait, tell me, have you ever seen the famous Frank Kern video where he talks about perception as reality and he shows how he got the American Express black card? Have you seen that?

I've heard about it. I don't think I've seen that one. I see the one with his wife all over getting in and out of the car that he uses as a thumbnail. But tell that story. I'll make it quick. But I mean, it's a 15-minute video, but it's the most amazing marketing lesson ever.

So Frank Kern, it was like 8, 10 years ago, but you have to see this video. It's a classic. He's standing there and he talks about how he finally got his American Express black card because he spent over a quarter million and it cost him like $2,500 a year to have it. And it's a big waste of money just so you can have this cool, stupid titanium black card. And then he started saying on the video, now, why did I even want this stupid black card? Oh, so I can lord it over my friend, John Reese, who got a Ferrari before me so I could be cool in front of my friends. He goes, now, snapshot, this is a perfect look into buyer psychology. Why would somebody who's affluent want

a black card so they can lord it over their friends so he goes through this whole thing and he shows you this this black case that the card comes in with this velvety cloth and then this like perfect leather wallet to store your card in and then they give them like 18 pieces of information almost like you're opening an iphone case or something for one stupid card and he he says that all these things are beautiful packaging to create the perception that I'm getting this amazing thing. And it's all just disguised as more ways to give them money. He talks about controlling the perception of your customers through putting things in beautiful packaging, when really it's just... I'm not

saying it's bad or anything, but perception is reality it's an amazing video it's a must watch but I love it hey look there's a lot of gold nuggets here man I love this stuff you don't even know you say you're really big into the river and the energy levels well this is like serious therapy for me when I get on this podcast I just get so into

it so social media is one thing I think I tell people this you know there's a lot of baby boomers out there. Last year was the first year millennials bought more houses than baby boomers. The buying decision is changing. There's a lot of people out there that say, I got a lot of stickers. I got enough business from word of mouth. But the fact is, you don't have any plan to sell your business. And so many people don't have an exit kid. They don't have a retirement plan. So they go, you know, Keith, at the end of the day, I can give a shit about your website. I don't care what you say about Google. I don't care about this stupid YouTube

stuff and Facebook live and all this. And I say to those people out there listening, you need to start thinking about a plan about what you're going to do. Never build a business that you can't sell. I'm not saying you have to sell it. I've never owned a car. I've never owned a house that I couldn't sell. I don't get emotionally attached. I don't want to sell the house I have in Scottsdale because I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it. But if I got the right offer, I mean, I love my neighbors too. So that would be tough. I'd have to move them somewhere. But the fact is that I would sell that house that I know in my heart, I wouldn't, you know,

a lot of people's businesses is their baby and they don't know what they do without it. They're like, this has been my life for so long. What do I do? But you got to start planning and you got to start building these resources and starting to build a service agreement to keep customers coming back. You have to have great employees that could run when you're not there. Otherwise, your multiplier in your business is crap. They're buying your customer base and that's it.

And you're not going to get a lot of money for that. So I have the perfect question for you. Growing up, did you think you were going to own a garage door company? Like, why would you get excited about garage doors? No, I was pre-dental, brother. I went to organic chemistry, biochemistry. I was going to be an orthodontist. I was going to make a lot of money. And then I went and interned with a dentist. And he goes, think twice before you become a

dentist. He goes, you're going to be in debt for the next 10 years. He goes, you're going to have four to six years more of this. And on top of that, you're going to come out and not know crap about business. And at the time, I had a landscaping company. And he goes, if I were you, I'd go back to school and get a business degree. So I ended up doing that. I ended up getting a master's degree in business. And I tell people this all the time. I don't care what I fell into, if it was roofs, if it was any type of home service. I don't care if I was an accountant, which is definitely not me. But the fact that I learned how to market and get new business is half the battle. Now, it's taken me years to understand.

I'm really good at bringing in the money. The problem was I was just as good at spending the money. And you're right. But I'll tell you what. There was a question on Facebook or something I saw on YouTube the other day or somebody texted me. I don't remember exactly what it was, but they said, if you could go back to your younger self, what would you do to your 16 year old self? And I wrote back, I tell them to get in the grocery business as quick as possible.

Wow. I learned a lot, man. I love the business. It's something that you've never encountered before, but I'll tell you what, it reminded me again who I was yesterday. I went into the office and I said, look, I told the three gals there, I said, I'm not as involved in the operations at all. And I said, I need to sit down with all three of you guys. We need to have a heart to heart.

I said, the longest a conversation could be is 10 minutes. And they said, Tommy, you don't understand. And then all of a sudden, excuse, excuse, excuse, excuse. I said, here's what we're going to do. Two things. Number one, when you get a phone, the minute you take a phone call, call a customer back about a bid or talk about some of the work we did, you say to them right now, it's 1224 PM. I got another call at 1233. So I got about nine minutes. You give that

expectation up front. You should never go longer than nine to 10 minutes. First of all, that's it. And you set that at precedence up front. Number two is I made an online drive on Google. It took me 10 minutes. I said, I want to know in two hour increments, every person you talk to, every text message you put out and everything that stopped you from doing your job. And I want this journal filled out from each of you every single day, because the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over. And I said, we're going to identify the problems. We're going to get in front of them and this is not going to happen anymore. And I'm going to hold you accountable. And I want you to hold me accountable. Are we in agreeance? Do you understand? The three of them were like,

holy cow, he's pretty serious. And I mean, I got back on the phone at seven at night. I touched base with one of them at 830 and I said, this is not going to happen anymore. This shouldn't be more than two people. We got three. The biggest thing I found, Keith, is that accountability changes everything. It's really hard when you're running around like a crazy man with your head cut off, but they don't have an excuse

anymore. I think they were goofing off some of them. I think they were milking the clock. I think they were playing video games on their phone and they were Facebooking it on Pinterest or the Snapchat. So they're all over the place. I don't know. There's a nugget I just took from you. You said that you freely offered. You said that you had your employees create the systems for you and you paid them the time to do it by documenting the process, right? Yeah. But one of the things was is all three of them were in charge of everything. So I said, number one, you're in charge of calling back all the old estimates.

Now I put a leader in each of them. So I said, I'm going to hold you accountable for this. So I want the systems documented. I want to know what's stopping you from doing your job. I just flew 17 managers out two weeks ago, and I made them do the same thing. The point is, now I have accountability. You were the one that accepted this role. You repeated back to me that you accepted the role. You told me exactly what was expected of you and what's even better yet. And I didn't do this

because they weren't there after I created the guide. But getting a signature, accepting the new role that I gave them and saying, you are accountable. When this doesn't get done, today's Wednesday. At the end of Wednesday night, if it's not done, we understand that tomorrow we're both going to agree that I have to document this and say, you didn't get your job done. Do we agree? And that's so important that they actually take ownership

of that activity. And they should be able to have a free reign to get it done because you're holding them accountable. But getting it done and making sure it's done satisfactory are two different things. So one of the things you need to know is if they said they text messaged three customers, you better be damn sure tonight I'm going to be calling one of those customers and saying, did you get a text message from Amy or Ashley or whoever?

The point is, people do what you expect, not what you expect. A lot of people hate that line, but it's a fact. And you got to hold people accountable or nothing's going to get done. But regardless of that, I went off on a little tangent. We're already going through here an hour up. Let me ask you this. What's one outside of the box way that owners can transform their employees into high performing A players? Ooh, I don't think I'm a good person to ask that because I come from the perception that an A player is an A player. Maybe a B player can become an A player, but if they're not at least a B player, I don't think it's going to

happen. It could take light years. And besides for finding out what they really want and what inspires them, it might not be more money. It might be the feeling that they're part of something or that there's a future in this business. If they feel like there's a future here, then they can be. But if they don't feel like there's any future, why would they even try? They're just drudging through the days. So, you know, I just have a book off my shelf, Keith, it's called the five love languages. And they mean the five love languages for the workplace. And what it means is you need to find out what type of people you're working with and find out what motivates them. Some's money. Some is recognition.

Some is just to know you care. There's some of them that just like, like a hug every now and then, I don't know, those are touch, but I think that sometimes it's finding out what motivates people. And I look with 240 employees. Now it's hard to spend five minutes with each person because that would bring me to Thursday every day. If I spent five minutes with every person, I'd be going into Wednesday or Thursday going, okay, I spent five minutes with everybody.

So I have the problem of always saying hi and got a minute to talk to people. And I was thinking about this yesterday. Imagine if I spent an organized 15 minutes with certain people every single week and spent 10 minutes with every employee once a quarter, how much more effective it would be than to be, Hey, I'll go talk to this person right now. Cause I like to walk around. I like to get on my phone. I like to say hi. I think more of myself as a cheerleader and a motivator now than, than actually going into day-to-day and making all the decisions because we've got a great team. But you're right. I've talked to some people that could actually mold C players, but they have to have the will to want to do more.

So I think it's more of a leadership and it's a culture thing, but it's not easy. So you got a lot of great stuff here. So you've got to come up with a content strategy. You've got to become a specialist. You've got to read. I can tell you, Keith, it's really refreshing to hear how much you read. I think podcasts are important to listen to.

I think you should be a big part of Audible. You should download Audible and listen to as much as you can. I read the book Mowing Lawns in Roseville, Michigan. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus through a cassette player. I don't know why I just remembered that, but it was crazy. I don't know why I was listening to that book either, but I guess I just had a troubled childhood or something. So listen to that. Anyways, what's some other books that you'd recommend? I mean, give me your top three that really inspired you. You got the altitude you talked about. You talked about the anti-guru effect

to act like you're speaking to a friend when. You talked about the anti-guru effect. Act like you're speaking to a friend when you're talking into the camera. So I've got a lot of great notes here. Tell me what really moved you. The best books out right now, according to what we're talking about, Grant Cardone's Seller Be Sold is an amazing classic. It's an amazing book.

Gary Vaynerchuk's recent book, Crushing It. You've got to read that. The Power Broke by Damon John. That's an amazing book. Another book is Good to Great by Jim Collins. Why some companies take the leap and others don't.

Another book is Top Grading by Brad Smart. And then audible.com. Get a membership to audible.com. It's like 22 bucks a month and just always any minute that you're not talking to another human being have an audiobook playing in your car and your headphones in your ear and just listen to books and you can learn from the top people in the world of jay abraham look up jay abraham it's amazing but you can listen to

the top people in the world who have gone through all types of struggles and successes. It's like standing on the shoulders of giants. And you can listen to them for 15 bucks by buying their book. I mean, Tony Robbins, all of his books. So that's what I think. And then one thing to not to do is a huge mistake that I've made, and I've really overcome a lot this year. And I do predict by 2019, those who can quarantine and eliminate information, like only very strict and clear and specific about the information that you let into your car, into your headphones, into your brain, because there's so much fucking information out there that people are actually becoming depressed over it. So get very clear about that.

What do people do if they want to get a hold of you? Just go to KeithKelfis.com or check on my podcast, The Untrapped Podcast. But on KeithKelfis.com, you can get access to everything. I'll give my name anywhere on the internet. Ladies and gentlemen, we hit a dead zone, but Keith had a lot of great things to say. You can follow him at Keith Kelpas.

That's K-A-L-F-A-S dot com. So you can find him anywhere. I got him back on the line, but we'll go ahead, get him, type in his name into YouTube. You can see all of his videos. He's done an amazing job. If you've got any questions, just literally get right into his website. But we're going to put a lot of ways to get ahold of them on the website. So just Keith Kelpis, appreciate you being on today.

And I hope everybody got out what I got out of it. Thank you for being on and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you, brother. Hey guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I want to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12

contributors. Everybody from the COO at HomeAdvisor to the CEO of Valpak and of course, Ara, the CEO of Service Titan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation. Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling, where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples and it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep

the score you should have your financial check every week you should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account you should know when to cut advertising that's not working and more than anything you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.