The Home Service Expert Podcast - Focusing on Standard Operating Procedures And KPIs To Boost Business Efficiency

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $150 million-plus home service business with over 500 employees in 16 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy answers your biggest questions about human resource management, documentation, lead conversion and lead generation, pricing, business expansion...

You know, right now for my reviews, what I do is I put it on the scorecard and this is how guys get the motions or not. I know a lot of guys that give their people $10 for reviews. Here's a secret. You know, we were on another meeting yesterday and I said. I had a server and I put it on my personal Facebook and she said, hey, listen, I want to win the prize. The boss has given us a bottle, or I don't know what he was giving, like a bottle of wine, if I win the contest. She was a nice lady. She was elderly. And she said, could you guys leave me a review real quick?

And here's what I like to do. Give something meaningful that means a lot to the technicians. Hey, listen, the boss has taken us out bowling. He doesn't really go out all the time. He's taken just four of us. And it would really mean a lot to me if you left me a review. People want to hear a reason why to leave a review and a purpose, and they want to do it for the person they're doing it for. 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. It's another great Q&A, December 2022. Let's go through a few things. If you haven't bought the book, it's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. If you haven't got the course, it's course.homeservicemillionaire.com. And if you have not entered into the Home Service Expert Facebook group, it's a free Facebook group, and it's somewhere you can go to ask questions.

Al Levy's always posting there. We've got a lot of other great content posters. We're doubling down on that. We're going to really try to bring amazing content. So join that group. Ask questions. We take them. We put them here.

Another thing you need to check out is if you have questions, I want you to write this down. Go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. Just forward them to there. Homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. And if you want takeaways, go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash bonus. You'll get some amazing takeaways. And then if you want to pre-order the book, it's www.book.elevateandwin.com. Best work yet. Working on two other books after this next book

release. First book is going to be called The Power of ADHD, something along the lines of that. The next book that I'm going to be working on will be a, something along the lines of that. The next book that I'm going to be working on will be a short one, The Ability to Ask, because I think that's the greatest ability in the world is being able to ask for help. I was just watching Steve Jobs' little Facebook earlier, and he was like, dude, I used to ask when I was 12 years old, back in the white pages, I found the guy that owned IBM. He was still in there. And when I was 12 years old, back in the white pages, I found the guy that owned IBM. He was still in there. And when I was 12 years old, I called him and he let me come work for him. Great story. What's going on here? Day one, we're getting ready for Christmas.

Things are moving and shaking. Very, very exciting times. Bought a company yesterday, did a close another one last week, and lots of companies in motion. What's hard right now is to secure a loan. It's called a delayed draw term loan. And how these loans work, very interesting concept, is you get to add the EBITDA. So EBITDA is like profit. You add the profit as you keep buying. So let's say you get a line of four times EBITDA and you're buying companies. If you buy a million

dollars, let's say you're a $5 million EBITDA company, you got a line of 20 million because it's four times. Then you buy a million. Now you've got 24 times. So depending on the multiples, it could be a very powerful thing. Let's see. John Hartle said, hi, Tommy. With the holidays approaching, what do you do for a holiday party and holiday gifts for your staff? It's a great question. So we decided to do a holiday party a little bit after Christmas this year, because quite frankly, a lot of us are very, very busy. And we just thought January would

be better for a holiday party. There's a lot of things that you could do. Number one is places are booked out for Christmas like crazy. It opens up a lot of opportunities. Number two is you want to have a lot of cool stuff there. We're involved in different barter groups. They're called barter organizations. There's things like iTechs. And the way that you make money in these things is you do a lot of things as a service. So you don't do a lot of things for parts like new doors, but I'll do all kinds of service work. And I might have a couple hundred grand in there. And then I order a bunch of gift cards. We figure out how much we're going to spend per employee. And then we have different parties across the country.

And for those people that are not attending, because some people are not local to any major market because the CSRs work from abroad, we give them money. Just straight give them gift cards or whatever. But one of the things I would recommend doing is if you've got huge vendors and you spent a lot of money with them, see if they're going to give you anything. Say, listen, anybody you do marketing with, anybody you buy vehicles from, any CRMs you work with, everywhere you think of, you should have a list of all this stuff in a database. And when you need help for stuff, you ask them to pick up specifically, can you pick up the catering? Specifically, can you pick up, can you send us 10 of these? Can you do this? Hey, it would really help out sometimes making a video, appreciative video for them. I would see what they're willing to help you with because

it's a give and take relationship. They want to help you. You want to help them. So you're helping them by spending a lot of money with them. So I don't love the idea. I know barter groups work, but at the size we're getting, I don't know if that's what I'm going to do. But when I was a small company, it got us through a lot of stuff because I might not have had a ton of money in my account, but I always had a lot of money in that account to be able to do cool things. We've gotten catering done. There's a lot of cool stuff that people do via barter.

You still got to pay taxes, but here's how you make money in a barter group. When you could sell service and use the money for goods. My dad used to do this when he owned a transmission shop. He used to go buy cowboy boots. So he'd fix the transmission for like three grand, even though his total hard cost for 800. And then he'd buy like five pair of cowboy boots. Phenomenal what you could do but john i think the concept is here sometimes it might not be best to have a holiday

party on christmas maybe you want to do something i'd mix it up a little bit try to not always have your holiday the same month and i've probably probably received that. I'm not complaining, but I've received 25 cards and I've received a lot of gifts, a lot of amazing, cool things. But when I'm gifting, I'd rather gift not around Christmas. When I tell a client, listen, I know you got a ton of stuff for Christmas. I was thinking about you at a different time than Christmas. So you might not be getting a Christmas present this year, but I wanted to give you something even better, not for Christmas, because you want to get different, right? Be different.

And that's something I'd recommend is trying to get different. DJ Newman, what is the most effective way to scale the process documentation process and implement them in my organization? My job as a leader is to get everybody aligned and make it easy for my team to succeed. I've been overwhelmingly overwhelmed trying to get it all down on paper. I'm taking a 42-year-old company that, believe it or not, never had standard operating procedures. Well, I started from a framework under Al Levy, which helped me out a lot. But I would pick either Asana or Monday. And I know some people

still use things like Basecamp and Trello boards. Pick one you love that's easy for your company to use. And the first thing I would document is the SOP process. What do you do? How do you do it? But things like Asana and Monday could hold accountability. I talked to a company that all they do is they fix people's project management and they tell you how to document everything. There's so much time wasted in email. So they use Slack. And one of the problems we have with certain people we hire is they don't even know how to open two windows at once, or they don't know what Control-V means. Control-V means paste.

So we start asking these questions. Do you know what paste means? Do you know what this button does? Do you understand how to do this? If you want to zoom in on something, you hit Control-Plus. A lot of people don't know these little things, and I'm not even a badass when it comes to this stuff, but these are like, you know,

I've got four different monitors here. I'm looking at this one, but you want to get somebody pretty savvy that's going to be able to do these things. What I find when I get somebody that's not very affluent in technology, I'll have somebody like an assistant for that person because they're so good on the phone or whatever it might be, but their time's wasted doing data entries, so just be careful. But when you document things, you should have a project manager, if you are like my brain, who comes up with, because I read so much, because I'm visiting so many shops,

I'm involved on so many things online. I'm speaking at all these events. There's great ideas that got to make it somewhere. And Jim Leslie helps me document the stuff. And then what we're working on is it's going to go one of three ways. Once it's documented properly with a standard operating procedure of documentation, it's either going to go to get outsourced, number one, and that's a whole process in itself, Upwork, Fiverr, lots of places for outsourcing. Number two, it's going to be in-house. Or number three, hopefully you got a really strong HR team or to go to an HR person,

and they should draft up a document that says this is what's expected. And that's a process in itself is how you put job ads out there. They're called RECs, how you put RECs out. So it's important to make sure you've got the process dialed in on all three of these. And then there should be expectations, and this is the eight steps of delegation that we talk about. All right.

So starting somewhere, getting it documented, making it organized. What I do to cheat the system is I've got an executive assistant. I'm going to have three executive assistants in January, February. And what we're going to do is get everybody on the same exact system. Right now, everybody's using the Monday board. That's a great start. But the next thing you got to do is make sure they're walking and talking and handling email and meetings the same way. And it's something that it's always a work in motion. It's progress, not perfection. So let's see. I've been running a handyman business in California, but looking to start a garage door company. I have a licensed partner so I started in the business,

I would have been a multi-multi-billionaire five years ago. So you go out, there's a form on there. We'll show you the right software to use, how to get the price book set up. If you're not part of that, I mean, we're going to be hiring another dozen people the first quarter of next year. We've got about 30 partners. We've got another 20 coming on. And the way a buyer's group works is you should be able to get a rebate that covers your cost to be part of it. But the rebate helps everybody out. That's how buyer's group works.

So that's what I would say. And the garage door business is great in California. It's not as easy. You got to have all your ducks in a row in any business in California. Tommy, I hope you're doing well. What are some key pieces of advice for someone like us who are getting ready to jump into PPC?

It's a lot higher budget than we have for LSAs. We want to make sure everything is being as effective as possible. Well, my process for pay-per-click is, I don't want to cap it out because it's the most expensive lead source. And before you do a lot of PPC, the best advice I could give you on pay-per-click is bid on your own keywords. You're going to have the highest quality score. It's going to be a fraction of the cost for anybody else to bid. If I bid on someone else's keywords, it's still way more expensive for me to do so.

So bid on your own keywords. That's where I'd start. The other things I could tell you is there's a couple of things you could automate on there. I would make sure you're A-B testing first place versus second place. I start out with long-tailed keywords, meaning four or more keywords. And then I would find out what's the most expensive keyword. You can see this data and your goal should be to make sure all your key performance indicators are very great. We're over 20% on pay-per-click. That's how much of revenue. So it's an expensive

marketing source for us. I'd say that's the last thing you want to do. What you use pay-per-click for is capacity planning, but you always want to do what you use pay-per-click for is capacity planning But you always want to make sure you're bidding on your own keywords. So what I mean by capacity planning Maybe you need two jobs today. You're going to just bid up A really quick and easy way to win is make sure you're bidding nights and weekends on emergency service Make sure you're doing things that no one else is I talk about this all the time, but if you're not bidding On keywords when there's nobody else but if you're not bidding on keywords when there's nobody else bidding, then you're losing big time. Another thing I would do is

just look at other things that you could possibly bid on to get you into whatever service you are. I'll give you a good example. If I wanted to go after hot water heaters, I might go after somewhere along the lines of garbage disposal or toilet leaks or runny toilet. And then I'd get into there and say, hey, the hot water heater is put in at the same time. I'm going to look for different ways to get in there. So pay-per-click, that's some advice I'd give. How much will a top- tier cover consultant make yearly? Gross sales of 2.8 million. So 2.8 million is gross.

It depends on your cost of goods. I'd say the cost of goods are somewhere along the lines of 30%. So that's about a million. So for me, someone along the lines of that, let's just say 2 million left over, you'd be making about 140K, somewhere along the lines of that. But I know Comfort Advisor is doing 6, 7 million. So it's a good start. It depends on if you're selling anything else and what else you're selling.

Good Comfort Advisor is know how to sell other things as well, other than just HVAC units. What did you say to Service Titan to get them to work with you? I believe that we could be a great asset to them both as a client and a success story if given an opportunity. I can't get a call back or reply even after reaching out to them over and over. Well, I had to personally get ahold of the CEO. This was a long time ago. So he was in as busy as he is today. But you could also reach out to me and I could find out if it's a viable space for them. Sometimes when a company gets too big, the left hand doesn't talk to the right. Not saying that that's service tightened, but you're probably getting ahold of the wrong person.

But what I told him is, would you rather have a huge client that's able to get a couple of hundred more, or was you just like a bunch of mom and pops right now, what you have for A-Track? This is before a lot of roll-ups were happening. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, I'll get you 500 technicians in the next five years, just day one. And I'll get you 2,000 in the next seven years. And he goes, you really believe you could do that?

I said, it's not even a question to me. I said, I'll put my money on it. And he thought about it for a night. He called me back. He said, I'm going to take a gamble on you. And he did. And I think it served our Envahe well, because we were their first company outside of HVAC plumbing electrical. And they're very happy they made that decision. I know every home service industry is not perfect for service Titan. But for the most part, if you get the right architect, which Adam was at the time, we're talking six years ago, Adam was able to really, really, really spend time, full time, making the connections, making the phone calls, working with the development team, learning the price book, asking for more. We've always been the ones asking to push them to the next level. Get all those sticky notes taken care

of. All I do is I've got sticky notes and I've also got other things I do. But what I'm going to be doing in January and the rest of the month is we're going to be working on new ways that I do things because I'm having three assistants and I can go into detail on that, but note-taking, follow-up, short, concise meetings, being in a meeting for me, getting to the solution faster, putting in systems, getting the OKRs, outcome and key results, lined up. I'm planning on 10 times my efficiency in the first quarter. Oh, let's see here. When is a lead dead to you, Tommy? I believe unless the customer says, do not contact me again, the lead is still alive and active. It just needs to be nurtured and harvested. Yeah, I agree with that too. I think what you should do, and this is what we're working on,

is red, yellow, green. Green means the lead is pretty good. It's a whole different nurture sequence. Yellow means they were on the fence. It's 50-50. And red means I'm just not interested right now. You're probably not going to want to be reaching out to that person as much. So just be careful because being annoying might make them never want to use you again. So understanding, and then you got to use the right copy. So for instance, I might say, hey, listen, I'll give you a good example. If they're green, they were ready to buy. The owner just had a meeting with us this morning.

And because we still have inventory left and we've got a new cycle of inventory coming in January 1st, we've got some things that we need to work with here. It comes with the same warranty. It's not bad. We're just trying to clear everything out for the new arrival. I wanted to see if I could spend five minutes with you to go over a couple opportunities, and then you got to build value. And then what I would do with that type of lead is I would have them book a calendar because they want to pick a time that's good for their calendar. Then I'd have something different for the yellow, the medium one is I'd say, listen, I really wanted to talk to you, but I'd want to make sure that there's a

reason why. Why are they a yellow? They couldn't afford it. They weren't sure they were going to be out of town for the holiday. And this is how you got to have segmented databases and campaigns for different ones. And I think if you did it right, and you had somebody like me making the phone calls to build the process, you'd be like, oh my gosh, I think I could call anybody on this podcast right now and I can make it work. I don't want to say make a deal, but I'd say, listen, what are your needs? What are your expectations? Guys, do me a favor. I just thought of this. If you're not following me on TikTok or you're not following me on Instagram, please go to official Tommy Mello. That's official Tommy Mello, T-O-M-M-Y-M-E-L-L-O

and follow me there. I put out a lot of great content. Even if they are not ready now because they kept and called them back a month or two because of that you could end up being the biggest customer you ever had do you agree yep and i think you just got to nurture those leads amy smith said unfortunately after 32 years we are finding it necessary to change our name the last two years we've had to fill 30 to 70 calls a week from the customers belonging to another similarly named company. Sadly, these calls don't come from our area or I've capitalized on this. Calls come from other states as far away across the country. These customers tend to be irate and fighting mad.

This situation has resulted in not only wasting time, but also lots of one-star Google reviews nearly dipping us below four stars. Consumerfusion.com forward slash pro. That's where you need to go to get rid of those reviews. Google is no help, nor having everyone we know report the reviews. So we have admitted defeat and are ready to make a change. How do you go about this? I think I do have a name idea, but the.com isn't available for the sale, but is available for sale for 5,000. How important is the name of the URL? So I've got a1gross.com. You need to buy the.com, whatever you come up with. You need to trademark the name. You need to do a search with the trademark and copyright.

You got to get a lawyer for this and you got to make sure you're securing the name before you think about it. Then all you would do is send out an email, a text message, a voicemail drop, a letter and tell everybody the reason you've changed names. And I'd go through the whole process and say, we're still bringing you the five-star service. We're still the same company. There's ownership still in place. We found it better because we want it to be a little bit different than everybody else. Communicate the message, keep the old website up. And then the new website, I do a 301 redirect.

And the old website, I put a very big banner that you can remove after six months once everybody got used to the name. Just saying you've changed names. Let's see. I'm looking to build my SOPs and KPIs. This is a monster to tackle. Where would you recommend starting? Standard operating procedures. That's manuals. I mean, I'd start with the

7powercontractor.com forward slash HSM because I sat in a room for months with Al Levy and he gave us the framework to build our own. Yes, he was there to hold us accountable, but we were able to just build these things. And it was the foundation. I will say, as you get bigger, there's more SOPs that need to be put in place. You need SOPs to build SOPs. For KPIs, you need to start with these main four. Conversion rate, average ticket, booking rate, and cost per acquisition.

And then those stem up into different things. And then you need a great accounting finance department. That's where I would start. What do you feel has been your greatest lead source in the home service business? Well, Google is good, but there's been a lot of spam lately. The best lead source, ultimately, for a small home service company is just go out and meet the people. I mean, you need to show up at all of the events. You need to be donating your time. You need to have teammates donating their time. You need to get your parents donating time.

You need to show up in an A1 shirt. I show up in this shirt. I've got 25 of these shirts. Everybody knows of A1 Garage for Service. You know, I'm getting ready to do something pretty special. I'll tell you guys, you'd better not steal my idea before I do it, but this is going to be the coolest thing of mankind. And I probably should have waited till it comes out, But Richard Rawling with Fast and Loud Cars, I'm going to be working with him. My father's favorite car is a 67 Chevelle. I'm going to be calling my pops up, and I'm going to be telling them we're going to be building the baddest-ass 67 Chevelle of all time, A1 garage style.

I'm talking everything. It's going to be freaking madness. It's going to be so much fun. And there's going to be a lot of PR built up around it. And everywhere I go, there's going to be this truck or this car. And every car show, every time I go out to eat, it's going to be a five speed. And that alone just causes so much PR. I was just literally volunteered for Shop with a Cop. We gave $2,500 for presents. And, you know, I was there at the Kohl's.

And here's some stuff I'm learning. So I said, I'm here 2022 Shop with a Cop with the Phoenix PD. Right. I got the selfie camera. And I said, it's so amazing that Kohl's gave up their parking lot and they let the helicopter land in here. We're going to have the helicopter edit that video a little bit. And I've got a little tour of Santa Claus with Kohl's in the background and how cool Kohl's is. Twitter, when I put this out, Twitter's going to pick it up. They're going to put it on all their social media where they spend millions of dollars a year.

So there was about 20 opportunities there. And I taught one of my guys how to do this stuff. But you got to be able to teach people how to do these things. But the gift that keeps giving our relationships, spending time with people, build the dream 100. And that's going to be your best marketing ever. Ria, that's the best. How much do you pay for your reviews?

You know, right now for my reviews, what I do is I put it on the scorecard and this is how guys get the motions or not. I know a lot of guys that give their people $10 for reviews. Here's the secret. You know, we were on another meeting yesterday and I said, I had a server and I put it on my personal Facebook. And she said, hey, listen, I want to win the prize. The boss has given us a bottle or I don't know what he was giving, like a bottle of wine.

If I win the contest, she was a nice lady. She was elderly. And she said, could you guys leave me a review real quick? And here's what I like to do. Give something meaningful that means a lot to the technicians. Hey, listen, the boss has taken us out bowling. He doesn't really go out all the time. He's taken just four of us. And it would really mean a lot to me if you left me a review. People want to hear a reason why to leave a review and a purpose, and they want to do it for the person they're doing it for So if you can tell a quick story like hey, man I need to leave a review because of this I've got a video coming out every thursday morning. I'm going to add this to it, but

They want to know the reason why Hey, dude, the boss is going fishing And he's bringing us out on his boat. He's only bringing two of us They don't even have to be expensive stuff. It just needs to be like an experience dude, the boss is going fishing and he's bringing us out on his boat. He's only bringing two of us. They don't even have to be expensive stuff. It just needs to be like an experience. Could be a $200 football ticket that you're going with them. It could be a manager's going with them. But what I recommend is just there's a reason behind it for the customer and they see the technician light up when they're asking. It needs to be something everybody wants. I think if you gamify it, that's the secret sauce. If you need more office space desk workstations,

would you add another location and have a small team there? Or does it take away from the team spirit and morale? So here's what's funny. One of my buddies at Moxie, Austin and Travis, they went to this very big location after being in a really, really tiny one. And then two years later, they went back to a really, really small one. They literally boxed the people in. And I don't know what it does to the morale because it's so tight there, but apparently they get way better. They were way more efficient with their space. And if you look up Parkinson's law, it explains as you get more space, you're just going to use up more room. So I would see if your current space, you can be more efficient and maybe smaller workstations, depending on the roles that are doing those. Some people need privacy, but

there's an advantage of having two locations because then you have two Google My Business pages and they're real. So depending on your overall outcome, I'd like to dig in more to that. Steve Huffman said, hello, Tommy, I'm searching for a marketing agency to help me drive more qualified leads for my plumbing and HVAC company in Hawaii. We currently use Scorpion. We are looking for a new partnership with a marketing agency. Do you have any recommendations to help with LSA, GMB, SEO, organic PPC, website, email, and text, as well as geofence recruitment? One SEO, Lance and Bill Russell, have been very good with everybody I've recommended. Cristiano does a great job too. There's a

couple of people on here that use him. I will tell you from my personal experience is certain things. There's just people that do one thing, whether that's just an LSA or GMB optimization. I don't necessarily know that I've ever had one company say I do. LinkedIn, PPC, LSA, I'll optimize your YouTube. I'll do all your programmatic. I'll do your digital. I'll do all your display ads. I mean, what I find is that a certain size company, you're looking to beat everybody. And if you came to me and you said, Tommy, I'm an HVAC plumbing, roofing, windows, counter, painter, carpet. We do custom decks. I'd be like, okay, so you're a contractor and you go get the subs. Sometimes for someone like me, I like to get the subs myself.

I mean, maybe there is an agency out there maybe it's one seo i couldn't tell you that does everything great but i like these guys a lot and what i would tell you is you've got to have metrics on everything you do it can't be you've got to have a way to prove that how many leads did you get on the source and what kind of money did it turn into? This is such an important lesson. How many leads per source? And it's got to be factual, not, hey, I got you ranking on this many things. I need to know how much of a percentage that I spend and make on every avenue of the market. Because if you don't have any idea and you grow, there's ways you can still grow easily. But what a lot of these agencies do is they'll do well on

like LSA and GMB, and then they'll spend a fortune on PPC and overall the stats will still look good and that's where they make all their money. So just be careful. You've got to understand exactly what source and what's working. So important. Kevin Dyer said, what is the fastest, most effective way to restore your company's good name? Let's say you went through a tough time, didn't give a shit about customers or anyone. As a result, they gave you shitty service and allowed your technicians to do the same. But now you're like, whoa, that's not cool. Let's get the ship back on track. I have a podcast coming out.

You go to homeserviceexpert.com. It's with Consumer Fusion. They can help you with your reputation. And then what I would do is I would make sure to gamify with your technicians, them getting great reviews from happy customers. And then another thing I would do is I'd start doing some press releases. to gamify with your technicians, them getting great reviews from happy customers. And then another thing I would do is I'd start doing some press releases. And I think it starts in-house. So make sure your employees feel like it's a good place. The way you do that is by giving more and listening and having two ears and one mouth and paying attention when people

are talking. I think that sometimes the company gets really, really big and you need other people underneath you to help do those. I think I have a lot of people that care here. We have an open ear, but you're not ever going to get your customers that think you care if your employees don't think you care. So Kevin, that's the best advice I could give. I have a painting business, 3M. At what point should I start looking

to buy my first home service business? When you've got a team, and I'm talking a big team of great people, if you're planning on doing everything on your own, I see people struggling in one market and decide to get into another home service business or another career and then really shit the bed or go to another market and say,

hey, I suck here. Maybe I'll suck even more in another city. Like if you can't make it work with all your neighbors, your family, your church, your kids, where you grew up, what makes you think you're going to be able to expand and just kill it? If you guys think it's been easy for what I've done, it's not. I work a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. I put everything I have into this business and there's still so much shit that goes wrong. So if you just think, oh my God, I'm just going to expand and I'm just going to, you know, humping hard and we're really working. You got another thing coming.

If you're not the best of the best of your current industry in your own market, then you still got a lot of work to do. If it's not all operationally sound with systems and standard operating procedures and expectations of understanding the OKRs, the outcome and key results, then you got to focus on what you have because growing is never going to help. That's like saying, hey, I got two kids and I'm a really shitty parent. I'm going to have 10 more. Do you think those two, now are you a better parent for those two? Because you're the parent for all these people that are at this company that they don't really like because you're not a good parent to them. And that's the same thing as a business. Know your numbers for sure. Did you name the company A1 because Yellow Page is alphabetically sorted?

So you would be at the top? Yes. If I go back in time, it wouldn't be A1 Garage Door Service. Luckily, A1 not only first in all the directories, but A1 means something pretty cool. Hey, man, that's A1. That's good stuff. That's top notch. And I went down a road. dan tried to convince me to change

it and i'm like there's no way like i said copyright and trademarks use a lawyer get an uncontestable trademark on your name that's the best advice i could give i'm not changing it now but i'll tell you the name of the company just needs to be catchy. A1 from day one. I mean, the lady that cut my hair last night is like, dude, my daughter tells me to turn up the music every time you come on. And I'm like, you're lying. She's like, no, I swear. It's like her favorite jingle of all time. So, you know, come up with a good jingle, make sure you're marketing it right. Come up with something that's memorable stories storytelling helps so every time like one of the things i'm working on is getting my mom on the radio and tv with me and just having us tell stories man about when i was a kid or whatever

you know how important it is for me to make sure her door is okay she could say you know i go on a few doctor's appointments every month and to made sure my daughter's working good. And I know one thing. He'll take care of you like he takes care of his mom because he loves his mom. And he's my favorite little boy, I hope she says, because I'm her only son. Tim Gold said, I've heard you mentioned before that you don't do interviews. You do a personality test. Mind sharing the process or way you created

this. Well, it's Jonathan Wissman is the CEO. It's called Perception Predict. And what they do is they test all of your employees and they find commonalities of what great success looks like. And then they're able to build a confidence interval based on regression testing that says the 74% that this person will be good. Now you're never going to get a hundred. The more tests you take, the more you get the data. And it's never going to be an easy test. This test takes 15 minutes of a test. And we are working on gamifying it. So I can put it onto all of the social media. I get to have people take the test, say, we'll find out what you'll make an A1 garage door service. And the people that test really well, I could go after them. Bria said, when purchasing an existing home service business,

what's your advice on making a smooth transition and keeping employees and operations running to keep cash flows coming in? Well, when we buy a business, we just, first of all, it's an integration team and the integration team has got to let them know what's going to happen. The worst thing that you could do is say, listen, we're not sure what we're going to do. Some of you might stay on. Some of you might not. You say, here's our plan and transition for everything. We're not coming and making a lot of changes. We've got a six-month plan. We know we do marketing very, very good. We're going to make some improvements there.

We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to let you know about this. We're going to get you retrained this way. You've got to make sure you don't rock the boat too hard. We do a big party. Right now, there's one going on in another market. There's actually a party going on right now

where you meet all the friends and family of the employees, the significant other, the kids. And we meet everybody and we say, hey, this is a good thing. I make a video introducing myself because I'm not able to be at a lot of these. And you got to say, this is a good thing, that your insurance is going to get better. We're going to bring on a 401k in six months. We're going to get better. We're going to bring on a 401k in six months. We're going to do this. We're going to give you a better pay structure.

We're going to go to weekly pay instead of biweekly pay. We're going to be going on a trip once. We try to take the best of the best from every industry and build the best company and make it so that no matter what company we go to, it's always going to be better. It's always going to be better for them. Tommy, what trade shows can people catch you at? Menace Con in Phoenix. Breakthrough Academy, I'm going to be speaking at.

Augusta Lawn Care, where is that at? In Washington. And then I'm going to have my event. So Vertical Track, May 10th, 11th, and 12th. Then I'm having a new event that's for everybody. It's a little bit different. It's called the Freedom Event, October 4th, 5th, and 6th. And then there'll probably be 20 other events that I don't know about yet. Brian said, you said you work a lot, a lot, a lot. Would you quantify an average week for us? Does a typical weekday at the office look for you? Well, I'm usually at work around eight, but I'm up a lot

before then. I don't go through any emails during the day. So I'm up for an hour at night doing emails. But a typical day, I'll just give you guys an example. I had an appointment at 8 a.m. I had another appointment from 9 to 9.30. I was discussing vertical track and the freedom at 9.30 to 10. I had an equity meeting at 10 to 11. I had a schedule engine from 11 to 11.45. I had videos with Xavier from 12 to 12.30. I had an introduction to a CMO at a billion-dollar company for the next half an hour. I worked out from 130 to 230. I was on the phone with a recruiter from 230 to three o'clock. I'm with a Q&A from three to four, which I'm on right now. At 430, I've got to talk to Joe Crisaro about this

True Grit event. And then I've got a meeting tonight from 6.30 to 7.30 about investments. And then after that, I'm going to be looking at all my email that came in today. So it takes years of hard work to get success. I mean, the way you bypass the way I work is to delegate more. But with as much as I got going on, I mean, you can't have events, speaking, doing the social media, becoming an influencer, having a podcast. When I say focus, I'm saying focus your 40 hours. If you're going to work 120, then you can do three things. John Dean said, I had a great time at Vertical Track. You and different experts have suggested getting away from 800 numbers to more sound more local. But I'm in a tri-state area, so I serve in three states, four different area codes.

Would you recommend staying with the 800 number situation? 800 maybe, not 844, not 877. Local numbers work the best. You could do programmatic everything to the local people. I guarantee you if you tested one area, take your 800 number out. What I would do is A, B, test it. Pick one area, come with a local number, try to get a vanity number. I own 480-898-DOOR. It's a local number try to get a vanity number like i own 480898 door it's a local number here in phoenix but try to get something catchy uh josh kelly did 8 6 7 5 3 0 9 he bought that number and they basically take a really good number you know what i might do i might get a rapper to come up with a really cool song and come up with a rap for the name of the phone number in

there. And then I would just license out that number to anybody I wanted in the area. But that's where my brain goes. I just think of shit. But I would AB test that. I would pick your largest area, do a local number, continue to test it and see what gets the most calls. They got to remember it. But remember, people would rather deal with a local company than an 800 number. I feel like if I'm going to call an 800 number, I'm calling the Cox Communications for internet and TV. I'm not calling my local home service company that I want to support locally. Tim Brown, not enough roofers know about Tommy Mello. We got to spread the word. I'm actually speaking

at When the Storm March 15th through the 17th I'll be on the main stage. There's another event. We added these two years ago with our garage door company. Will you consider and add lifestyle screens to your install?

I'll tell you what. I can do rollers in under 10 minutes. I pay a couple bucks a roller, whatever it is. We sell them for 25. If I have something that I can make serious money on and not have a really long time for install, I would consider doing it. And it depends on who's doing the marketing. Like a guy came up to me and said, can you sell these lights on a garage door? He said, it's an hour install. You make a hundred dollars profit. I'm like, that's not really, you got to think a few things when you're doing these things. Do your employees like to do it? If you come from the point of view from you, the employee, that's the most important thing.

So you need to get there by it. Number two, what is it costing you an opportunity cost to install something that takes a long time? You might think you're profiting like crazy, but if I looked into your books and I was to hover over your shoulder, I bet you don't know exactly what you're making on it. You'll say, well, we buy it for 200 and sell them for 1,000. Okay. Have there been any problems? What's your burden rate? Has there been any mistakes in ordering? What kind of complaints have you had? Is there any burden rate? Has there been any mistakes in ordering? What kind of complaints have you had? Is there any warranty calls? And most people, they don't have a CFO to figure any of these things out. They're actually losing money. So I'm not sure if I

would do that or not. I'd have to look at what my guys think of it. We've done a couple of them, but it didn't really have the best. I'm not against them. I just said it didn't work out the best. Besides Google, I'll say, what'd you recommend to get the phone ringing on a tight budget? Well, I'd optimize my GMB. I mean, I get citation sites done. And if you look up on Fiverr, citation sites for a GMB, you could have just someone building all of them for you. There's like White Spark, I think it is that does that.

And then I make sure I'm getting reviews all the time and posting onto my GMB twice a week. Interesting content. But I know there's a lot of fake stuff going on around LSA. I don't know who's behind it, but you know, hopefully people are starting to report this stuff. I think the news has got to pick it up because it's rampant.

It's rampant in certain industries. I'm not sure what to do about it because I think the news has got to pick it up because it's rampant. It's rampant in certain industries. I'm not sure what to do about it because I think there's hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars being stolen a month by just someone inside of LSA. Something's fishy. I don't know what it is, but hopefully somebody comes up with a way to start getting in front of this crap because it's stealing from good people that don't deserve to get stolen from that are doing things the right way. Hey, Tommy, 22 year old here. I've been watching your channel recently and have been awestruck by you. You're a huge inspiration to me. Awesome work you're doing. Thank you.

I appreciate that very much. One question for you. Do you have a list of your guests' book recommendations, aka the one you ask at the end of the podcast? Do I have a list of books? I know I do. If you go to Tommy'sRolodex.com Tommy's

Rolodex, there's books and there's companies on there and there's companies on there. And there's companies that I have worked with that I like. There's some really good books on there. Dave, what's up, brother? Does your pricing change based on your local market or is it standardized nationwide? So Florida is a weird one because hurricane doors change, but it's interesting because we like to save price everywhere, no matter what. What I will do, I'm trying to think here if I do anything special. I'm getting ready to build a new price book for realtors and certain people that use us all the time or big clients that we can still make

money on. But we standardize our pricing across the board. And I think that's the best way to do it. I think when you start going into a price book based on what that does is every time I take my top guys from Phoenix or Milwaukee or Vegas or Tucson, and we send them to one of these areas, it turns out it's not the pricing at all. It's always the technician mindset. And if you give them a reason to think the pricing needs to be lower, then they're going to say,

I'm just in a bad market. That's why our price looks different. Brian, thank you, Tommy. I was just mentioning to my bride this morning that you're a mentor from afar. Thank you for all that you do. I hope to visit your operations sometime in the future. I look forward to it, Brian. Thanks for the compliment. Nick said, what questions should I be asking a $2.5 million landscape maintenance

company? And do you have any strategies to become more profitable? $2.5 million, number one, who's your biggest client? How much do they represent? If they represent more than 20% of the company, that's a huge liability. Number two is I would take 10% of those clients and see if you could raise the price by 10% and say, we've had some pricing adjustments and find out if they drop out or not. Make sure they're not the best clients, but not the worst. You kind of want to hit the center if they were to rate them. So I find out how acceptable would they be for a price increase. And then I find out, can I do something more for them? There's three things you could do. I always talk about this. Charge more money, keep your customers coming back more

often, or get new customers. What else would I do? I'd look into the highest and battery-powered landscape equipment. I don't know how well these are because I used to use them 10 years ago and they weren't that good. But if you had that you were charging three batteries at a time and switching them out while you were driving and they work good, and I think some of them probably do, I just have to look at the useful life. But if you could get rid of the gas bill, I'm not sure if that makes sense, but then you could start advertising you're the green landscape company.

And that would appeal to a lot of people. But I'd also say you bring on your neighbors. One of the things I would ask them is if they could bring on somebody for you, give them a free month, depending on the price that they're paying. If they're like a huge company paying 10 grand, I wouldn't do that.

But the one thing in landscaping is the closer you get the people, the better. I'd make sure to try to get your guys to give them an incentive to get the HOA president's number. And then we talk to that HOA president. I would talk about other things I could offer. Hey, listen, in the winter, we're going to winterize your hose. And what opportunities do you have to charge your customers more? Do they have any ideas? And why haven't they implemented them yet? One of the other things is you got to understand how all the equipment is. They have capital leases on the equipment.

You know, that's something I would look at. You know, if you guys have some stuff, what I'm trying to do is get more efficient. So if I could get a few of you guys on the phone and we could have some chats, it makes it easier for me. Same thing's happening when I do shop tours. It's just been really hard to do it one-offs because I try to spend a couple hours. And just one of the things that I try to do is get back because people took the time for me.

So this is my way of giving back. Do you think AI phone booking is worthwhile or does it lose the customer relationship connection? You know, I'm just a big fan of A-B testing everything. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I think there's certain things that work well. I'll tell you what, I don't like to be the guinea pig of anything. What I found is networking, calling companies.

I'll give you an example. I got a text message yesterday. I've got a house we just flipped. It just went on the market. And I'm going to read this text message to you. And this is just how my brain works. And hopefully you guys get something out of this. Hi, this is Jason with Arizona Mini Movers, your local moving company. Congrats on listing your house for sale. If you need to make any moving services soon, we specialize in local and long-distance moving.

We have 30% discount available for you. Call us anytime. We can definitely assist. And he's got the number. Reply with stop for opt-out. And I said, this is crazy. I want to have these opportunities if it's compliant. So I said, I called him up.

I got a hold of the owner and I got a meeting with him this week. And he's given me his company he's using for that. And a lot of people, you go to these seminars and you just wait for people to do stuff for you. I make shit happen. Just that's the best example that I've got a meeting with this guy. The day it happened, I didn't wait. I didn't put it on my agenda. I make time to get shit done. And there's a lot of people that are just like, I just need to find help. You need to help yourself and prioritize and get shit done

is the problem. I mean, let's just call it like it is. Call it spade a spade. So I answered a lot of questions. So you guys understand if you've got more questions, go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. That's homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. And if you want to see some cool takeaways, go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash bonus. Get the book. If you haven't already, I'm probably going to sell out of them. There's a lot of people that want to order hundreds. It's book.elevateandwin.com, book.elevateandwin.com. And if you pre-order a book, you'll get a free chapter. Do that if you got a chance. And I absolutely love these things. Keep the questions coming.

I'm going to try to get some of these. If you get a chance, record your question, think about it, put it into a loom and give me the link to the loom in the question that I just said. You'll send it to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. I might be able to pull your questions live into the show. I think that'll be amazing. Thank you guys for asking so many questions. We'll keep bringing the heat. I'm going to keep bringing you guys. I'm going to have a whole team, not just Gianni and Hannah. I'm going to have a massive team helping to make these things more impactful. I'm going to bring on the experts. It's going to be better and better,

so get ready for it. I appreciate you guys, and have a fantastic week. It's an amazing week and thankful to be alive. Thankful to be healthy. Thankful to have time to spend with you guys. We'll see you guys later. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor leave a quick review it really helps us out

when you like the podcast and you leave a review make it four or five sentences tell us how we're doing and i just wanted to mention real quick we started a membership it's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club you get a ton of inside look at what we're gonna do to become a billion dollar company and uh we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making

any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.