The Home Service Expert Podcast - Focusing Your Resources on Marketing And Hiring to Set Your Business for Success

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

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 hiring and retention, training, marketing, payment systems...

You just don't hire because you need somebody. You hire when they're the right fit, but you're always hiring. When someone comes in that fits and you're not hiring, you find a position for them. But like Al would say, you make sure they fit in a box. Don't build a position for a person. Put them in a spot they could win at

and build a manual around it. But if you find the perfect person and you say, sorry, we're not hiring, you're stupid. 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. Hey guys, welcome to today's show. It's a Q&A podcast on the Home Service Expert.

I absolutely love doing these things. I just got out the phone with Alan Rohr. Amazing lady. I love this woman. She came up with this quote 10 years ago. I'll give you their price when they give you our service. And I just absolutely love that. She said, oh, I forgot even saying that. And she wrote it back down because she said, I probably sold that from somebody else. Hopefully you guys have heard of the book. I just got off the phone with the guy earlier that listened to it 10 times. 12 co-authors, the Home Service Millionaire. I've got a course out. It's a little bit older course. We're working on an amazing new course. This course we shot in San Francisco. Jim was there and Bree was there. And this course is going to be absolutely just everything I've learned, how to build a team, the training center,

how to delegate your time. I'm putting everything in there. And then we're going to be bringing in some really cool things, shop tours, and some of the questions from the legends like Ken Goodrich. And obviously, if you're not part of the Home Service Expert Group, you should be. It's free. You can drop questions in there. We're starting to spend a lot more time just giving information. So things are moving and shaking. Dan Antonelli is going to be here signing books, kick charge, such an amazing group. It's somebody you need to know if you're in the home service space. Super, super exciting time. Lots of things going to be. My plan is that you leave this event at Wild Horse Pass. It's a phenomenal venue. It's a great vacation spot.

They've got water parks and golf courses. They've got the best sides of the casino if you'd like to play the slots or like me, play blackjack. It's going to be a fantastic time if you want to bring your family. It's the perfect time of year. It's nice enough to go swimming. It's just a great time. Bring your golf clubs if you're a golfer. We'll just jump into it.

Things are moving and shaking here so Jeremy Griffin said give a little background on how you pay your CSRs and dispatch performance pay give as much as you feel comfortable with so Al Evey talks about the triangle of communication CSRs dispatchers and, and how to get them rowing in the same direction. So what's in it for me to do the best behavior? And I want to talk about a few things here. So number one, CSR's job is to book phone calls, is to show empathy on the phone, is to make sure they get the right information, and it's to really make sure they're set up for success, the technicians and the dispatchers. So we pay on booking rate is the number one thing. If they're over 90%, they're making the maximum.

We listen to 10% of the calls for empathy, so that's on their scorecard. Did they sound like they were interested? Did they listen attentively? Just voice clarity. Did they feel like they were smiling on the phone? And then we really try to, we do a round robin in the VoIP system to give

people that are booking more phone calls, the better opportunities to book more. And so they're motivated. I think it's like $8 per book phone call if they hit everything right on the scorecard. So they can book three phone calls an hour, one per 20 minutes. We got plenty of volume. That's 24 bucks an hour. If they can book four, that's 32. And the best CSRs that book in calls five, six, seven minutes. A lot of people are like, I just need somebody out here. We're fast, efficient. We get the information. We show some empathy. Dispatcher's job is to figure out the right technician for the right job, not to get cancellation. So make sure priority level. If I can't get out of my garage is a big question. So if it's an emergency and then they

got to become experts at communicating with the client, giving the technician enough time to maximize the job he's at and be that information loop. So we try to make sure that the customer is communicated with, lease cancellations. And I'd have to have Dustin on here because he's the pioneer over there in the dispatch center. But we changed our pay several months ago and we've been updating it ever since. And it's amazing to see what happens when the dispatcher CSRs and technicians and installers are all motivated to run in the same path. We started giving extra

money for installers to do same day. We give them, I think we just passed $80 to go do it the same day. So they get an extra 80 bucks to do it. We got them doing Saturdays and Sundays if they want to make a bunch of extra money. It's kind of nice if you pick up an extra shift. If you want to do three doors, you can make an extra $240 on top of your pay. So they're all motivated to do the things that help the company. And we're motivated by what they do and what's in it for them. How do we get them motivated to get the outcomes we want? So one of the things I figured out as I'm coaching a lot of people here is a lot of people have a plan on their day-to-day, but they don't have a clear outcome. They don't really know what is it

that you're trying to get to? What's the big task? What's the outcome? And if you can clearly define that, you can work backwards on what needs to get done and then celebrate the wins. I'm reading a book right now and I posted about it, but it's an absolutely fabulous book and it kind of describes my life. Someone recommended it on one of the groups that I'm part of and it's called The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. And the gap is when you're always living in the gap. I want to do $10 million this year, and you do eight. So you're living in that gap of that $2 million failure. But you went from $5 million to $8 million. That's the gain. And if you can start living

in the gain, the way your life is increased, the more quality time with friends and family, the big wins, and start enjoying the ride. I was talking to Amanda Holmes, Chet Holmes' daughter earlier, who wrote The Ultimate Sales Machine. It's on my shelf. And she's coming out with a new version. And she said, when my dad was on his deathbed with cancer, he said, all the money in the world can't help me now. Steve Jobs said the same thing. He said something along the lines of, you'll take your food as medicine or you'll be taking medicine as your food. And it's pretty impactful because I think I got a lot of tread on these tires, but enjoying the time here is very, very important. So I know I'm kind of going off on a tangent here, but it's what I do. Let's see here. Yeah, I'll be at Service Rocket as well. You know, it's a great event. I

don't have Joe Montana coming to Vertical Track, but we got some pretty special things. My show is more about walking away. You're not going to meet a bunch of celebrities. Mike Tyson won't be there, but you will meet people that'll change your life and you'll find some things you could implement. I want freedom for you guys. And I hope you understand what freedom is. It's what you want to do with who you want to do when you want to do it. It's getting more efficient with your time and enjoying your life and living in the now. And that's one thing I want you to take because a lot of us are slaves to our businesses. James Bliss, are you dealing with THC in areas that is still not legal as opposed to where it is in your drug testing? You know, marijuana is one of those things that I'm just, you're not allowed to show up to the office or to a client's

office high but anybody could get a card it's not that hard i'll tell you what the companies that are making a big deal about that if a guy goes home and takes a rip of his little pen or whatever if he goes to sleep and helps him sleep or he's got a dysfunction about eating and he does that. Now what I'm finding is a lot of people use it for different things. It was medicinal use. Don't show up to a client's house and then smell anything and feel that you're high on anything. That's not allowed, but I'm not the best to talk about this. This is an HR thing and I've got an HR team that handles that. But to me, I don't like any drugs are showing up drunk or high on marijuana but it's something to where it's almost like a necessary evil if people understand the

conditions and all they need to do is go get a card it's pretty much legal anywhere in the world now daryl concepcion i'm taking over my father's fence business, doing over $25 million a year. What would you recommend when it comes to books or programs? Looking to take it to the next level. Currently, all word of mouth. Well, what I can tell you here is you're only as strong as your team is. Some guys can't function at a $25 million company. When you're finding a players that you're not trying to have learn while they work, there's a lot of people you're going to enjoy with on the ride. But there's certain seed suite level people that know how to get from $25 million to $100

million like this. Now, if they work for a $100 million company, that doesn't mean they know how to get from $25 million to $100 million. There's a lot of things that need to happen in that process. Marketing is one of them, but I would say marketing for people. I just got off the phone with a gal Blair that I use. And I said, one of the things that I find very interesting is a lot of my team right now has a hard time getting the right people. They say, if I get rid of this person, I'm going to be left doing that job.

We're not hunters. And I explained to her in the military and in college sports, what happens? They go out and they hunt. They get their players. They get the military people. They go out and they find them and they convince them and they make sure they're a good match for their group. And how many people are putting an ad on Indeed waiting for, as Al would say, lightning in a bottle to land on their doorstep? I would tell you, go out there and you find the people you need.

And there's an art to hunting. Tony Robbins said it the best. He said, I don't want people learning on the job that I hired to take me to a certain place. Steve Jobs says, I'm going to hire the people, tell them the outcome I want. They'll help me get there. You know what Steve Jobs did great is the first Macintosh took two minutes to load. He said, I need this load in under 30 seconds. They said, that's impossible. He says, no, it's not. Figure out how to get it there. And these guys worked their asses off to get it to two minute load time. Well, they went back there and they had to do some serious, serious development and they figured out how to get had to do some serious, serious development and

they figured out how to get it to 30 seconds. And with the right team running in the same direction, you could build that. So you got to figure out how to turn on lead gen, first of all, get the leads coming in. And there's three ways to make money, three ways only. Number one, get more customers. Number two, charge your customers more money by adding services or raising prices. Number three, frequency, get them coming out more often. And so I would focus on all three of those for any industry, because this is a general industry that we're talking to every home service company. I really can't. For garage stores, you get them on a service agreement, you add things like storage, and you make sure you get the phone to ring off

the hook. Let's see here. Skinny Penny, what's the best way to hire for a skill-based business such as barbering? Being that most barbers are usually egotistical and want the world. So Skinny Penny, what I would say is there's a great amount of people that are very humble coming out of the school that want to get that next level. And you find the cool people that you mesh with and you show them an opportunity for a career that they're going to work in an amazing setting. The fact that I'm out there all the time podcasting on podcasts, writing books, building courses, having events, I'm big on social media. A lot of people tend to find me.

That's one of the nice things of putting myself out there. The bad thing about putting myself out there is now everybody and their brother wants to get in the garage door industry, which I don't mind. The more the merrier. I don't really care. I don't look at competition like a bad thing. The number one franchise owner at Precision, the largest franchise, called me today. We talked for 30 minutes. I invited him

to Vertical Track. I told him, come out and visit me anytime. I'll open my doors to you. You're family here. He said, my gosh, I didn't expect that from you. I said, listen, man, we're increasing this industry. You're a great owner. You do great things for your people. You've got an amazing market. I want you to come out here. Listen, let's collaborate together. I'm not against you. I'm for the trades, brother. And that's the difference. So you just let people know what you're looking for. Put it out there in the world, skinny penny, and things will come to you. Mike said, very true. Lost my little brother in a plumbing truck

20 years ago. You never know when it's your last day. You never know. 9-11 just passed. And I listened to that guy on the plane. He called his wife and said, he got the voicemail. I said, I love you. The plane's been hijacked. I just want you to do good. Live the best life. tell my parents i love them it's pretty emotional but it's crazy you never know you never know about a car accident you know there's 30 000 deaths a year for aneurysms which nobody that comes out of nowhere it's a blood vessel that pops in your brain lav said all about scaling the right way, which is Tommy is speaking here. So Facebook user, my wife and I are looking to start on an HVAC business. We are thinking we should start with

75 to a hundred thousand. We have been looking at many marketing platforms to advertise on. Which one do you believe gives the most bang for the buck? We only plan on using one platform until we reach a million in sales? Well, it's a pretty simple formula. Number one, you don't cheap out on your brand. So I'll tell you, I got the Rolodex now. So you don't need to reinvent the wheel. You get the brand dialed in first. And it's that cheap. And the problem is Dan's backed up. I mean, I reach out to him first. And you build the brand up. I was on a podcast earlier with Josh Kelly.

He does Clover Marketing, really smart guy. And you got to know your unique selling proposition. And one of the gals came on there and said, for the people, mother approved. And I like that. What's your unique selling proposition? So understand that. And if you're going to pick one medium, I mean, it's setting up your Google My Business, going to friends and family, getting user-generated content, which is reviews, and then doing local service ads. So it's 100% Google. And the cheapest two things to do,

you got to start working on your organic, which takes it's the same thing as this podcast it's every week you got to be working on organic all the time and that's why if you look at ah refs r-e-f-s and look at your website they've got a website kind of tool that tells you how good your ranking is and i can't find anybody that outranks us there's two companies in north amer America that outrank us because I've been consistent at it. But getting reviews, posting on your Google page, getting the hours dialed in, adding different items to it, it will make a big difference.

So focus on Google because that's where people are going to find you. And here's the best tip I could give is it's about meeting the people. When you read The Ultimate Sales Machine, he's going to talk about the Dream 100. And there's a book called The Dream 100. And you identify and write down your top 100 clients that keep giving. It could be a custom builder. It could be a designer. It could be a realtor. There's certain people that spend millions of dollars with me a year, one

group. And if I found 100 of them that spend $2 million a year, number one, think about this, $2 million. Generally, you say you can spend 10% to acquire a customer. 10% of 2 million is 200,000. I'm not going to spend 200,000, but what can I do for that client? John Rulon wrote a book, Giftology. He talks about finding these people, building a warm connection and staying top of mind. And all of us kind of, we spray and pray. We hope for the right client. But if you were deliberate and you hunt, just like we're doing with people, building a team to win, recruiting winners, and recruiting winning clients that don't mind spending the money because they're paying for the service. Once again, Alan Rohr said it the best.

I'll give you their price when they give you our service. Billy Klein says, what are the KPIs that you personally monitor as an operator on a daily or weekly level? There's the ones that I always talk about, your booking rate, your conversion rate, and your average ticket. And now we're starting to look a lot more at how many jobs are financed. It's a behavior and a habit we're trying to build. And a lot of times we'll fluctuate our scorecard. We don't try to do it every month, but every quarter we'll make things that are important. We'll have a lot of gamification. For me, I built the company that I fit into. If I walked into most businesses, I wouldn't fit because I'm a dreamer. I'm a visionary. I work around a lot of people that take my dreams and my vision and they help to create a reality.

What I'll do is I'll set them up. I'll call a person like Alan Rohrer or Al Levy and I'll say, we need to get this person in here, but you need to help me make it happen. When Al came out here, we worked with three people tirelessly to build our manuals. And it's something to where we spent a lot of time, effort, and energy. And if I had to do that alone, I don't think I could have got it done. But I had Adam. He was writing it all down. Brian was in there helping us get it done. And I got to tell you guys, I know all my weaknesses.

So when you're building up KPIs, I don't focus on the small things. I focus on the big things. And I look for holes in the company. Right now, a huge KPI is how much time does it take to get supplies? Supply chain is one of our biggest issues right now. It's where I can put the biggest dent in the company. But really what my goals are today is figuring out what this team needs to look like in six months. To be able to get to a billion, I'm going to go right past a billion. I think we'll do 2 billion here in four years. But what does a team need to look like? The outcome and reverse engineer it.

And then you can start to realize what I find is there's a lot of waste. There's a lot of wasted marketing campaigns. There's a lot of calls that are not booked or calls that are not really opportunities coming from a marketing source that we get rid of. I find that the conversion rate's not where it needs to be in certain markets and there should be training going on there. We bring them back to Phoenix where we have them do a lot of ride-alongs. It's kind of a talent to be able to ask the right questions and be able to look into those and get the reports on things. So my analogy is I'm living on Mars, looking at earth, looking for volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, you name it. I'm looking for the biggest issues and trying to solve those problems. At one time it was recruiting people.

That's where my head went for two months. How do we get technicians, CSRs and dispatchers? Another time it could be supply chain. Another time it could be financing. So luckily, I built a team so far. The team is still in the fetal stages of what I'm trying to build. I mean, if I talked to Elon Musk, he'd say, your team is like this. It's nothing. Elon Musk has got a team of team builders, massive team of team builders and that's my vision is to how do i create all the top people to become team builders to be able to go out there and hunt and to be open to the idea that

this person might be better than them because we're hiring for their talent and we're making sure they mesh well what would you do if your home service industry isn't supported by ServiceTitan? Should I build my own system or try to convince them like you did? I'm in the fence installation service. You know, you really got to get somebody that knows what they're doing when it comes to CRMs. ServiceTitan doesn't do everything I need it to do. So I had to get some other services to bolt onto them. I would tell you ServiceTitan, until you've got a big company with a lot of technicians, it's really hard. You got to have a dedicated, I have an Adam Cronenberg that figured out service tight

for me. And he got to spend time, energy, and effort on service tight every day. And then Luke learned how to use it well. And Ulysses learned how to use it well. And now these guys are experts. I don't know how to do a report in service Titan. I don't go in there. I don't spend any time. People always ask me, when are you going to learn more about service Titan? I'm like, why? You already know. I've got plenty of backups.

We've got a depth chart. Why would I become an expert at running reports in service Titan? I know how to use it to get what I need out of it. I don't open up my own mail. I don't open up my own Amazon shit half the time. I don't open up my own email. I looked at it once today. Bree's going to have them printed out when I get home. I don't open up anything. You know, there's a cleaning lady that works for us now.

Gym building an app that there's going to be all the food choices I want for breakfast, lunch, and dinner tomorrow is going to be cooked for me. I'm not going to pack any of my own clothes here soon. I'm not going to do anything that I don't want to. I'm going to enjoy every minute and not do the things. I don't want to have to pick out my clothes. I wear the same black shirt every day. I'm going to have somebody picking out what I'm wearing that fit right. I'm going to make sure my diet's right.

I'm going to make sure that all these vitamins, vitamin D3, all this good stuff is sitting on breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If somebody hands it to me, they tell me how much water to drink. Why? Because I can. Because I built this life. I'm not trying to gloat. I'm not trying to say I'm better than anybody because that's the furthest from the truth. I'm trying to tell you I'm setting up the life I want to live. So Bryce said, who do you recommend for a business sell? SF and H partners are really great. Cowan, Eric Van Dam's on my board. Those are the two companies I'd recommend. Brian, actually, Brian Cohen wrote in the Home Service Millionaire book, the bonus chapter. And there's a lot of things that need to happen. And a lot of people say, I'm just going to sell my own business. So they get a stupid ass broker and they don't know what they're doing and they end up losing money. So Eric Van Dam called me

the other day. He worked with a company that I referred him to. They were going to get 12 times. They got 20 times. They got an extra a hundred million or something. And that's just because they got the right contact. So make sure you get the right person, interview a lot of them, negotiate with them. John McDonald, I find myself investing an insane amount of time and energy in hiring and onboarding an employee. And if they don't make the cut, it's extremely tolling to do the firing, even after implementing a 90-day probationary period. We need a more efficient process. As a small company that's growing, how and when do you delegate this critical process to a manager?

And how do you input to actually allow yourself to have on who gets hired and fired? So it's very interesting. I put out an ad and I got lucky. They fell into my lap. Adam had found the number one person to train. And Brian found the number one person. I was in Vegas closing a deal that we bought, I don't know, probably a couple of years ago now. And Brian got his person on the phone first for me to talk to.

And Adam was there with me. We put her on speakerphone and he goes, that's the woman. She's better than mine. And we found somebody that was super talented. She came from the casino industry. She was a trainer. She was just everything we were looking for. And she said to me, I won't sleep at night unless my job's done.

I care. I'm deliberate with my actions and I will work my butt off for you. And you just don't hire because you need somebody. You hire when they're the right fit, but you're always hiring. When someone comes in that fits and you're not hiring, you find a position for them. But like I always say, you make sure they fit in a box. Don't build a position for a person. Put them in a spot they could win at and build a manual around it.

But if you find the perfect person and you say, sorry, we're not hiring, you're stupid. You know, I talked to a guy earlier. He came from Vertical Track Garage, your owner. And he said, I'm still a one-man show. I'm still doing all this stuff myself. He said, what would you do if you were me? I said, I'd get one amazing person. And I spent a month finding this person,

someone probably 25, 30, somebody that you could feed your soul into, somebody that you could really be passionate with. And I said, I want you to find the person that tells a great story, that smiles all the time, that respects you, that's coachable with the right tone, that believes in themselves. And then I would pour my heart and soul into them. And I would build a training manual as

I'm coaching them for the next 90 days. So it's 120-day process. And I'd give them something amazing. I'd pay them really great. I'd tell them they're going to be a leader. I'd make sure to pick the right person. And I'd pay them extra because the biggest goal at this point is you getting out of the truck. I worked from 2007 to 2014 in the truck. And then when I found Adam and we started building processes, that's when I owned a company. There's what's called an entrepreneur, which I am today, but there was an intrapreneur. That's kind of when I worked in the business all the time. They work in the business. They still got the entrepreneurial mindset. But they don't have to take on all the struggles of payroll.

They don't have to worry about taxes and benefits and hiring and firing. Some people do exist to work inside of a company. And they make more money by selling. It sets their life free. They get real PTO. They get to go on real vacations, not strapped to their cell phone and they get freedom. And I want people to really understand that that's not giving up. If you're stuck and your life's horrible and your relationships are miserable.

And you can make a couple hundred grand working for somebody and still get paid for what your company's worth today. I'm not telling you to do that, but I'm telling you it takes a toll on people. I see people that are 40 that look like they're 60 that don't sleep and their lives just don't seem, they're not getting anywhere. And the fact that you're listening to this podcast, the fact that you may be coming to Vertical Track, you're investing in yourself, you're reading books, you're going to get through it. I'm not saying to spike the ball at the end zone if you're right there at a breakthrough moment, but certain people know they don't belong in business, but they don't know any other way. And they'd be very valuable at another company. So just

be careful on how you approach that. Ray Greaves, I have a new tech who's crushing it way more than any other tech in sales right now out of the gates. I feel like he'd make a great sales manager, but I just promoted one of my best techs to field supervisor and I'm concerned about the dynamic between the two. Can you describe the dynamic between the two in your company? Number one, your top sales guy is never going to be, very rarely is he the best coach. My top guys, every time I moved them into management, they switched back. They make more money out in the field. So you study those people. You call them every day and you help your field supervisor understand the training. There's ride along forms.

You see, a field supervisor is going to be much more organized. They're going to be much better coaches. They're going to have better personalities for that trait. And they're going to make not as much money as the top guy. If you make your top guy, very rarely have I seen it work that the top sales guy becomes a field supervisor. I'll feel free to chime in here. But ultimately, what I would tell you is you want somebody that's patient, that listens, that's able to compliment people as much as possible, that's willing to take the things from the top guy, ride with him, shut the hell up, implement a process around what he does, what he says, his tonality, when he backs up, when he bends down, when he's smiling, and create a process around that and implement it through the company. But your top guy, I very much doubt that he even knows what he's doing. If it's not systematized

and there's not certain scripts and there's not a lot of EQ and there's not a lot of things that he's taught, like we learned personality profiling. I've got a whole list of bullets that I came up with. Smile, how to ask, opera coffee on the way, use their first or last name, whatever they prefer, 15 times in the garage, knock, don't ring the doorbell, strangers, ring the doorbell. I got like 20 of them. And I built a call for Thursday.

And I said to my technicians, if you follow these bullets, you remind yourself, you read these out every time before you go to a job. And I'm building this for them. It's going to be a QR code in their truck. System, system, go over these, zip up yourself before you go in. Don't bring your home life into it. Smile, cheer up, get the past behind, focus on the now, don't be rushed. They read these out every time they go to a job. They're going to win. All they got to do is implement them. Other questions. How do you manage your marketing budget these days? Well, that's a kind of complex question. I try to stick between eight and 10%.

I go above that because if I'm not buying a company, buying a company costs a lot of money. If I'm buying a company, it lowers my marketing fee because they've got existing clients calling in. Some companies, 30 calls per day. So I expect the marketing to be at 5% if I'm buying an existing company. So you're going to spend 20% of revenue to grow a market from zero. You've got to double down on your marketing efforts. But if you're buying an existing company, you reactivate their list. You get it all segmented the proper way. You start making their Google better. You run less jobs per tech. You maximize the conversion rate and booking rate. Your marketing should be 5%. So I manage it in different ways, but I do a lot of things. We've got a percentage of what

we're going to spend on certain things and newer markets cost more. You encourage business owners to raise their prices. If I raise my prices, what do I tell my customers and manage the optics of choice like that when people feel like the economy is in a rough place and their wallets are tight? Well, if you make it a rough price, let me ask you a question. What's a lot of money? You might say $1,000. Another customer might say $10,000.

Another customer might say $2 million. They don't know what it should cost. Now, you raise your prices based on your value. If you don't believe you're a great price for what you're offering, I carry trademark parts, max life spring, 80,000 powder coated. I've got stainless steel cables, 10,000 cycle, 100,000 cycle rollers, Z-bearing. I carry the best. I got the best vans. I show up on weekends. I show up on nights. I'll come out there on a holiday if you have an issue. That's value. We are a bargain. We are cheap for our price, but we charge more because we have nice things. We have the best tablets. We communicate with our clients.

We've got the best dispatchers. Unless you feel like you're a premium company, then don't charge a premium price. I know I'm the best. I get out there the same day. I get parts when nobody else does. I got trucks, 300 trucks this year coming, 300 more, 300 vans and 200 trucks. So 500 before January. We make shit happen. And customers know that. They're sick of calling their garage guy out every eight months. They call us when they want it fixed. They call us when they want us to treat us like mom. We treat every customer like our mother. And the reason why is we don't always go with the most expensive. Well, sometimes we'll go for a bandaid repair. We call it a bandaid repair. We'll do what's best for the client. And until you believe that you're the very best and you

deserve more, it's in here. If you can't believe it, your texts are not going to believe it. Your employees are not going to believe it. The customers won't believe it. If you can't believe it, your techs are not going to believe it. Your employees are not going to believe it. The customers won't believe it. If you make it about price and you be the Walmart, it's a death spiral. Do you feel like there's a natural ceiling to how big A1 can get? Would you ever consider moving into another industry? Of course, I'm going to go into other industries. I've learned how to do it in any industry. I could be a barber. I could be lens crafters. I could be in dentistry. I could go into any industry you choose and dominate. Of course, I'm going to go into other industries. I still got work to do here. There's no natural ceiling. The market cap, according to our study, is around 13 to 14 billion. With our prices and our conversion rates, it's more like 25 billion. I see a cap at

around a couple billion dollars for A1. But I'm getting more resourceful and resilient. I'll tell you, there's not a day that goes by that I don't come up with an amazing idea that'll change the marketplace. I need to have integrators and people that implement around me. And I've got to find the best of the best people to help me get these things done. I've got coaches coming out of the yin-yang. I pay a lot of people for a lot of help. I'm the dumbest guy in the room. Trust me. There's nothing I want to do. One of my marketing guys came in here a few weeks ago, probably a month ago now, and said, hey, we're doing some stuff

in HubSpot. He said, it's probably going to take three months. I said, I want it done in two weeks. He said, well, that's going to cost a lot of money. He came back. He said, it's 40 grand. I'm like, spend a hundred. I don't give two shits. Get it done. The guy that built our training center said, this is going to take six months, Tommy. I said, I need it done in six weeks. He said, dude, that's not possible. I said, how much does it cost? I know there's a way to pull permits through a master builder that could sign off. He goes, yeah, that's pricey. I said, I don't give two shits. Get it done. It got done in six weeks. We called the best of the best. He's got contractors that were a lot more money, but they got it done and they got it done right. And it's all by code

and it looks amazing. And guess what? I'm making way more money with that being done right, with getting every inspector to pass it than I would have waited six months for a piece of shit. Should I be pulling out loans as a small business? We hear Dave Ramsey say you shouldn't have that thought. The average American should not have what you call compound interest debt, a credit card at 18%. Absolutely not. Now, if you get a small business loan and you know where you're going to spend the money and you could prove on paper that that money will scale you fast. Absolutely. If you're trying to buy new trucks and you can't afford them and you need to take on debt to get trucks and you can put a guy in a truck to do $500,000 a year, it's an opportunity cost. If you could prove to me that the money being spent at a low interest rate

like an sba loan is an opportunity cost and you could five times that money and you're very good with money you have a financial quick check meeting you got a good controller and cfo in place and you've got a plan to spend it but if you're going to spray and pray and think you're going to do something with that money hell no dave ramsey's right dave ramsey's program works for 99 call donald trump I know some of you love him. Some of you hate him. I don't give two shits. I'm talking about him as a businessman. Do you think Donald Trump uses leverage? Do you think I bought this building with leverage? Do you think I bought the building next door? Do you think I bought the other building I had? Do you

think I bought my apartments? I just bought 12 more units. Do you think I use leverage? Do you think I own seven houses outright? That's the dumbest thing in the world to not use leverage at low-ass interest rates. Listen, I can make 10% of my money by farting. I could get a loan at 4%. That's 6% yield. So if you got a plan for the money and you could tell me you're going to maximize it, you could do a cost segregation study on a building and save a fortune in taxes. You could depreciate vehicles.

First of all, see a tax strategist, understand what's out there, and hell yes, borrow money if you know what you're going to do with it. All right. I have a question. What are the key metrics on a P&L to pay attention to? P&L, you're looking at your cost of goods. How much does it cost you to run a job? You want to get more fixed costs in place. Marketing, your cost of goods are two big numbers that I want you to pay attention to. If you get a chance to read this book, it's by Bob Pfeiffer, Double Your Profits in Six Months or Less. What I'd recommend also is Michael Michalowicz, Profit First. Get control over your money. Understand your money. Understand these. The best thing I could tell you is focus on the money,

making sure money's hitting your bank account and don't spend it. Get control over yourself. Don't go out to Filet Mignon every night. Don't go buy the newest Harley. Don't go trade in your car that's two years old. Get your personal finances order first. There's a lot of things I look at the P&L

that I could affect. I can't affect the three-year triple net lease. So I don't really focus on things I can't affect. I look at things that look out of place. Because I'm in 30 markets, I could take the best of the best, and then I could kind of learn, study the top. And then how do you take the other ones and bring them up? I'm in a very fortunate position, but there's a lot of people that are better than me. Alan Rohr teaches this. Megan Lykes teaches this, but you'll learn the things that you can affect, the variable costs. You can't really change the fixed costs. So you want as many things to turn into fixed costs. I know if I slow down, my technicians

and my CSRs and dispatchers will make less money. If the economy goes like this, so does their pay. Hourly doesn't change. If you're not on performance pay, you're shit out of luck when the economy takes a poop. You're out there cutting marketing, which is the stupidest thing you can do. Cash flow sucks. Line of credit tapped out. Thoughts?

I've been in some very, very interesting times where I barely made it. And I've got this fight or flight in me. I've had to loan my company money. I was signing checks when L.E.V. met me for 40, 50 grand, putting back into our account. I didn't have somebody good in the finance department. And my biggest mistake, I go back to the basics. I look for booking rate. I look to see how my marketing's doing, my cost per acquisition. I get my prices right. I focus and I get resilient. I try to figure out how to use my customer list to drive more, to borrow more money money when your credit line's tapped out and the cash flow sucks, you got to reevaluate what's going wrong. Borrowing money does not help to weather the storm. Fixing things and thinking outside of the box. Grant Cardone wrote a book called 10X,

and this doesn't apply to this situation, but if I was going to go 10 times next year, what would need to happen? Your brain has to shift and you get into fight or flight mode. And that's when you're going to be your best. That's when you come in on the weekends and you figure shit out and you start getting rid of the worst performers and you start tightening things up and you might move into a smaller building. The deal is you say, what can I afford today? What needs to happen?

And I can't tell you the answer, but if I was to look deep into your business, I could probably give you 10 pieces of advice. But what I would do is take a serious reflection at what's taking place. What you're doing today is not working, Rebecca. I'm not trying to insult you by any means, but you got to figure some stuff out.

I downsize right now. I get rid of the bottom performers. I shrink a little bit. I get rid of the bottom performers in marketing and the company as people. I would praise the people, make sure you're not losing anybody that is good. You need to top grade as fast as possible, raise your price a little bit, start delivering more value, training more, double down on training. I'll leave. He said, if they come up from an apprentice to junior tech and then the junior tech to senior tech, and then the senior tech, the field supervisor, they should never pass the qualify. Compete and train if they can improve the sales teams, operational and technical performance. So he's saying field supervisor is rarely appointed. It's earned. And that's something to think about. You don't just say, listen,

I grandfather you in now because I think you'll be good. They've learned the process. They've gone through the motions. Now you might say, I don't have anybody here long enough. And that's when you double down. You've got to find the personality that fits. You know what's so nice about all? I've got virtual product specialists. I've got some different terms here. I've taken L's and I've expanded upon it. But his basics are what works for every company. They do work.

But these people that I have want to see other people do better. The worst case scenario is when you have a guy that's saying, I'm not going to train this guy to beat me. My guys want to see everybody win. When somebody, Scott Cole's an amazing guy he just bought a brand new car where everybody celebrated these guys were out in all their trucks there was like 10 of them this weekend they were sending me photos listen the best people in the company they want others to win they want to see their teammates they want to see them have kids and buy their vehicles and own houses. They don't get jealous. We've got this doctrine here of lifting each other up. And you'll find people hate that.

And it comes from the owner, Jim Crenitty, the stories that Alan and Al Levy have told me. And he said it to me, you know, he hated his employees. It was a disgusting dynamic they had. And now he loves them and cherishes them. And I talk about this stuff quite a bit, but if they're not in the right environment and you're not coaching them and you're not a good owner, you're always the problem. The worst man in the world you got to deal with is in the mirror or a woman. Would you invest in sales training or marketing with a 30% close rate? So it's interesting. I talked to a guy that we call the GOAT, the greatest of all time. And he asked me, would you rather have a higher closing percentage

of turnovers or would you rather every turnover make it to our team? He goes, because if you put a bunch of things on there as a perfect turnover, you'll get way less, but you'll have a way higher conversion rate. He goes, but what you'll find is even at a 40, 50% conversion rate, you're going to be turning over less things. You see what I look at, Billy Klein asked the question, is I'd look at percentage of close rate per lead source. And I would really try to trigger down, maybe I'm not advertising to the right avatar for my pricing. I know that you've doubled your pricing after vertical track and your closing rate suffered, but do you know your closing rate per marketing source? Because that's the first stat I'd be

looking at. And then I doubled down on my higher closing rate, but I look at my cost per lead. You're going to find a lot of golden gems there. I guarantee you that. Secondly, hell yes. Hell yeah. I'm going to invest in sales training. Forget marketing. If you're at 30%, why the hell would you want to feed that funnel? You're losing seven out of 10 clients. Think about that. You're just going to turn out more. First of all, find the marketing that's working. Like I said, double down on that and hell yeah, double down on coaching. You find out what the top closing rate is and you study, you study, you study, and you need to build more programs in the business and figure out what you can do to get that. That should be 60, 70% or your marketing. You're not

hitting the right avatar. If you're hitting people that you can't advertise for Walmart, if you're target, because if your target advertise those low prices, that's not their business. They don't make money. If you're the highest price and you're doing the lowest, you're not advertising to the right people. So you need to find out what the advertising is working at converting double down on that. Hopefully that hits home. Currently a 5% marketing rate.

If you need more leads, then fine. I just got to tell you, I don't mind if you spend 10%, but you need to increase your conversion rate. The best way to do that is in the home. That's why I got a living room and a kitchen in my training center, because I want to be in your house. I want to be at your kitchen table. I'm one of the few companies that's making it to the kitchen table. Hopefully you offer me a nice cold iced tea. I get to play with the dog and I get to smile, listen to your needs, ask questions. The doctor, we ask questions as a doctor, don't we? What kind of food are you taking and how much alcohol are you smoking? Cigarettes?

What's your anxiety and stress level? How's work going? How's the family? What kind of exercise are we doing? Are you getting your cardio in? What vitamins are you on? They accumulate data. Is there someone that's sleeping upstairs? Is your garage door noisy? Does it waken them up? What Joe Casar recommends is finding out what's important to the person and taking the top out of one out of six plans. He recommends six plans. The sixth one, the best plan. He says, this is to keep little Tommy sleeping in the morning when you take out for work. Because I know that that's important to you. This is keep Tommy safe and quiet, you know, sleeping. Imagine if you did that little things that put what the customers needs into the bid, you call it the one that they need. You don't know what's important to them.

You don't know what's best for them. They do let the customer tell you what kind of customer they are and what they're looking for. They qualify, then compete, and the winners train. Systems that are documented and trained on makes this double and doable and very profitable. That's from Al Levy. Ashton said, if I'm understanding you correctly, Al Levy, you're saying that the competition with your sales room show you who your leaders are. Do I have that correct? They compete for the job. The best thing to tell you is they've proven they could do it out in the

field. They don't learn on your watch. They don't learn in the customer's house. They don't learn in the garage for my team. They've proven they have a success pattern of happy customers leaving five-star reviews. The net promoter score is a nine or 10. They'd use you again. They've got a system down. They're taking pictures in service time for me. They're calling on the way they're offering coffee. All these things my data integrity team could agree on. We make sure that they're leaving the stickers in the right spot. They've learned the tonality. They learn how to personally profile. They do the role play. They eye contact. We do 45 minutes of role play for them to even graduate next door.

They're taking their test today. It's an hour and a half long exam. Then they got to do a practical where they do role play. We will not pass somebody that can't role play their way out of this room. So if you're not practicing over and over and over and over in the training center, good luck. I get pretty passionate about this stuff. I'll leave you said Ashton, they qualify by what they're doing in ethical quality sales, operational behaviors, and technical by callback ratio. What happens if you peel your skin off? It's a good one. I guess if you go suntanning enough, it just falls off. Ashton said, I see. 10% for farting. Yep, that's right. Then I need your banker. What you need is

a good CFO, and you need to get a good controller. Read the book by Bob Pfeiffer. When you really go through your expenses, Rebecca, you're going to find some bullshit that you're not going to like. I can tell you some of the mistakes by not paying attention to how much you're spending. Read that book today. You owe it to yourself. How to Double Your Profits in Six Months or Less by Bob Pfeiffer.

I promise you, Rebecca, it'll change your life. I'm fired up. Talk about your calendar as a CEO. You know, I just got off the phone with Ken Goodrich earlier. I've been on the phone a lot. I've been doing a lot of things today. Lots of podcasts. I had a great one with Josh Kelly. My days are still pretty packed. Me and Ken agree on is I'm probably going to be taking two days off come January. I'm going to call those my free days. I'm not going to have my schedule lined up like crazy. There's a billionaire CEO.

I was reading a book this weekend. And he explained that he doesn't give anybody more than 30 minutes. When you give a timeline of get to the point, I don't have time to just dilly dally around. I want to be focused on this. What you'll find is you start becoming more important as people will respect your time more and they'll get to the point. The more you could have a guard on your time and you could have an executive assistant come say, listen, I gave you 15 minutes. Let's talk about what we're going to go over. I want to make sure we don't stutter. We get through the points. We want to hit high

level things. Then I'll make sure that we get it accomplished and we've got some good takeaways and we know the conclusion of what we're going for. El's habits of the seven powers of delegation I've used. I added one, an eighth one. But obviously learning how to delegate your time is so important. The way that my schedule works is there's some leadership meetings. I spend a lot of time in marketing. I spend most of the time with Jim Leslie. He's like my COO of all the things I'm working on. He's a really big influencer in vertical track and home service expert and home service freedom. And he understands the course. He was with me when we recorded it. He knows everything going on at A1. He knows

everything going on with all my investments. He knows what's going on in my real estate. He is my ultimate integrator. Now, I still got amazing integrators all around me. What happens in this integrator visionary is Adam was the main guy and he still is one of the main guys, but I think it's important to understand that you've got to have more people as you grow. When I'm out meeting people, touring facilities, keynote speaking at events, or maybe just attending an event, my brain is going. The problem is you can't implement as many things as I'm thinking. So look right here. I've got just from Josh's podcast, I've got notes and I've literally thrown 10 of them out because I've already got them done. I've delegated them. I've sent an email out and I sent a date

to follow up with that. Now, are there things that I fail to implement and integrate? Absolutely. It's because I don't hold my staff accountable enough. And because they're busy too, respecting their time is hard for me because I always say, a lot of times I'll barge in a meeting and it's not right. It's not fair to them. Right now, everybody's working extra, extra, extra. We are in the biggest growth mode I've ever seen possible. So I'd say a lot of my time is spent really developing ideas and ways to be more efficient and systematize the business with standard operating procedures, checklists. Software is a monster for me. Anytime I can automate something rather than getting humans

involved, man, build it into an SOP, make a checklist and service tight and have the data integrity team see that it gets through. It's amazing what happens. Janelle, after increasing hourly rates by over 50% in one year, team members still don't feel like they're paid what they're worth. What are your thoughts on performance pay and how do you implement it? What do you do? Just give tenure? Every year you get a couple dollars raised because you've been here forever. What I'd write down is the three most important things you want out of a person.

Listen, 1A equals 3B. If I give my person, I was booking 90% of the calls and they can book four calls per hour, 36 calls in a day in a nine shift hour, eight shift hour, 32. And I pay them $30 an hour. And then you got another person booking at 60%, making 18. I'm making way more money giving that person 30 bucks an hour because they're handling more calls and they're booking them. The empathy is perfect.

They have a stake in the outcome. Think about the key attributes you need in their behavior and what their goals need to be and then pay them accordingly. And what I want you to do is set up two separate things in an Excel sheet. Say how much you pay now and then say how much your performance would pay. Say what behaviors

you want. And you can pay people a lot more money when they're motivated to do the right things, because now they've got a different goal. Now they realize there's no untapped. You got to make sure to run this against the old pay. When we switched to performance pay in the CSR role, we saved money. But now all a sudden, we top graded. All of a sudden, our booking rate went through the roof 87%. And it's just amazing when you've got a company full of performance pay, they have a stake in the outcome. Can you kindly give us an example of your performance pay per tech?

So my guys, they're rated on a, it's basically a report card. And we look at their callback ratio. We look at how many jobs they financed. We look at their driving score. We don't tolerate bad driving. You just won't work here. We didn't put that on the scorecard because that's just a necessity. If you're a shitty driver, we can't put you in a truck. If you're always looking down, we got cameras to know you're looking down and texting. Here are a lot of few warnings and then we just can't afford to keep you on the road because you're a liability. So you got to ask your question, your performance pays. If you don't get any facial tattoos, you get a higher percentage. No, if you get a facial tattoo of a big facial tattoo, you're not going to work here. It's in our handbooks. It's in our manuals

that I'll leave you to help create. So figure out what you must do and then figure out what you can motivate them with. I'm fine with paying a percentage of the job, but one of the things we look for is don't take advantage of grandma. Treat everybody like mom. You need to have consistency. And then the other one is how many five-star reviews are you getting? Advice for a new leader stepping into a leadership position at a company. Best practices for what the first month looked like for the person. Well, number one, first day, they felt welcome. You're taking them to breakfast, lunch, dinner. You're getting to know their family. You're giving them a tour of the facility. You're getting them to meet the people. Then you should

have an orientation where you're telling them everything. You should have a manual for them to teach them how to win the game, what their role is, how they go about asking questions, who they're going to be delegating to. They should get to know their team. There should be a lot of occurrences that first month of when they meet the team. You should clearly define the outcomes and what their goals are. You should make sure their pay, is there's a stake in the outcome for their pay? Make sure they understand what your mission, vision, and core values are, and that they fully adapt those. I've had several roles in the last year of amazing people that just didn't fit our culture that we've had to part with.

One of the things I'm going to do with C-suite level people from here on out is bring them on a six-month contract as a consultant. And I'm going to make sure it's all buttoned up by the lawyers and they're not going to have to come into a consultant. And I want to make sure it's all buttoned up by the lawyers, and they're not going to have to come into work if they don't want to. They're going to be straight consultant basis. And if they mesh well, they prove out the six-month. We agree what needs to happen in six months. They do an amazing job.

They prove everything they said they would. They mesh well. They get along with the staff. They fit. Then I'm going to offer them a position. That's the best advice I could give for a person at the company. What's a good point for a controller or a CFO? So they've got fractional CFOs. They've got people that could come in. There's certain systems like billpay.com. There's an understanding of how to use credit cards to maximize them. There's ways

to pay people in certain ways to save a lot of money and negotiate new terms with your vendors. You can't afford not to have one. It's an advanced bookkeeper, but I get a fractional person that's an ace in the hole. You'll pay 60, 70 grand and they'll get a piece of their time, but they already know how to win. So I'd say there's really no time that you're just, I don't really know the numbers. I'm just kind of flying by the seat of my pants. I'm not really sure if I have enough money to win. So I'd say there's really no time that you're just, I don't really know the numbers. I'm just kind of flying by the seat of my pants. I'm not really sure if I have enough money to grow.

Should I be spending more on marketing? People know the answer to these questions. The home service, the balance sheet and income statement and P&Ls don't look much different. You look at an industry average of a winning company, they'll tell you where they need to be. And I'd hire a consultant. I want to bring out a full-time employee. There's 1099 amazing contractors that could come in and show you exactly what you need. And they'll invest the time and money that's front-loaded, and then they'll just be checking and making sure you're keeping track of it. Like L.A.V. checks in on me from time to time. How do you manage your consumable parts cost with such a volatile supply chain?

By diversifying suppliers or doubling down with your existing suppliers. That's an interesting question. I've learned a lot about supply chain. Obviously, being in 30 markets is completely different. If you're in one market, you need to start to build relationships with the vendors. By visiting other shops and learning what they do with Goodman and Train and Linux and all these different things, I've learned a lot. There was a point where David Geiger had parts 30% below everybody in the HVAC industry. There was a time where Leland was beating everybody by 20%. I can't go to the 10 stories. You got to find out what's in it for them. Just like you do with

employees, find out how you can help them. Could you help bring other people in? Could you start a mastermind and talk about how to be successful? One of the things I asked my vendors is, how do you guys make more money? They showed me my product mix. And they said, if you sell more of these, we make way more money. I said, all right, can you guys come train us? I want you guys in here every week. I said, but what I ask from you is I'm going to need more co-op. I'm going to need you guys to sponsor a couple of parties. I need you guys to feed our best guys, have some competitions. I want you to pay for part of our raps.

I want you to donate to the home shows we do. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll move the needle if you help move my needle. Let's win this together. Everybody wins. That's my new book. Everybody's got to win. SOS Garage Door Service. Hey, Tommy, I enjoyed your TikTok about traps of being a watchpreneur. You think there's a place in the home service industry for a solopreneur?

You know, I met a lot of people that just say, I don't enjoy managing people. It gives them hair loss. It gives them anxiety and heartburn. If you're comfortable and you're making 200 grand a year and you're coasting and you could feel fine on a vacation and you're living the lifestyle you want, I mean, yeah, why not? You'll decide if that's for you. If you're strapped to your cell phone and your relationships are suffering, I'd say become an entrepreneur. Take your skills and bring them to a company. You can sell your company, build it enough to make it worth... I'm not going after your company, don't get me wrong, but if you got 500 reviews and you focused on reviews

and you put a few things into place and you have have a huge customer list, and you already adopted a CRM, and you got a nice facility with a good Google My Business, that's worth a lot of money to a guy like me. And then you could come have unlimited PTO, build your dream job. And a lot of entrepreneurs, they want guys that are like you. So it just depends on what you want. The thing that sucks is about a solopreneur as you call it is you're stuck you get bad service you're not going to work every day of the week you can't work on christmas you can't not take no vacations you can't go every night you can't have a family like that so i find it tough consultants do amazing look at l l took his whole training

and put it online and he's got clients galore. He takes care of his people. He takes phone calls still. He's a solopreneur. It just depends. Look, I've got an e-commerce site. We don't have any employees. So, yeah, there's a lot of opportunities there.

I joined my dad's remodeling company doing $2 million a year. I'm struggling in getting that lead flow since the sales process is so long. I want to shift into a more demand like plumbing HVAC. Yeah, I can see wanting that. I mean, look, there's a lot of people that say they want demand work. I'd love to have a $50,000 ticket and stick to four basic things. I'm going to be able to do drywall, kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, whatever it is. To me, $2 million is not cutting it. I'm not trying to put you down. Here's the deal. You got to go out and meet the people. You got to go out and get referrals. You got to talk to designers. You got to talk to architects. You got to talk to builders. You need to go meet realtors. You need to meet the people and you need to put it

into a system. L.E.V.'s trained a lot of builders on how to do this. And you know, the stupid thing is people ask me, am I right for L.E.V. today? If I would have had L in 2010, I mean, shit, my life would be a lot different today. I got fortunate enough to meet him. I was one of his last students. You guys know I talk a lot about him because i give credit where it's due i give alan roar a lot of credit and her her sister gail i give jonathan wistman credit i give everybody that's come to service titan and ara by hey tom howard i'll put it all back to them but you got to get the manual straight and you got to get referrals and you got to ask for them. And if you get this right, you go join a BNI group. Look,

switching industries is not going to help. Everybody's like, you know what they told me about the garage industry? They said, you'll never be worth anything. There's several people that told me to give up. They said, you're ludicrous. You're stupid. Go into an industry like roofing and air conditioning. Where are you going to get a big ticket? Well, look at me now, mom. We are the big ticket. Everybody wants to get in our industry. We made that. We made that happen. Our team, our amazing leadership team, people that consulted us, our vendors, our amazing group of people that work here made that possible. We built this industry. I mean, there's lots of great companies

that help it come up too. But don't think you're going to make, I just need to go in the right industry. I need to go into the right market. I need to be under the right president. You know, I need the right weather. When you join HVAC or plumbing, you're going to be praying for hot days and you're going to be saying, Lord, please let it be hot today and let the humidity go up. If you're not content in your industry, there's no right industry. You got to make it work is my best advice. How do you deal with a GMB when they're giving you a problem with scaling your locations? You hire a consultant that knows better about GMBs than anybody.

You can talk to one SEO. You get there. Look, there's a lot of people out there. I work with a lot of different people on this, but it's hard. You got to maximize your current GMBs. If you're not in the number one in your Google listing,

number one, two, then don't focus on other GMBs. Maximize the one you have is the advice and find somebody that can help you. Because if you start talking and putting it out there, there are people that specialize in doing that, that have connections and they're verified. They're like Google partners. We design and build decks, porches, and additions. Love it. I completely agree. I sold my e-commerce business last year. I'm 24 years old. I want to build a home service company to sell the company and retire my parents. That's what I'm noticing

in the remodeling. That's very, very nice. My parents are gold, you know, but when you retire, you die. I will tell people, you got to keep your brain ticking. Alivi's still coaching. He's still golfing. He's still having fun with his brothers. Look, for me, I don't think there's such a thing as retiring. I think I'll work less. But really, what is work? I want to read a quote for you guys.

This one I posted on my team. I've got an A1 family Facebook page. And there's a lot of posts on here. Everybody posts all kinds of stuff. We have a really good time. They post their new cars and their vacations and the family time and graduations. And it's really something special. And there's so much that's posted on here, so much positivity and just quotes by people and books they're reading and just great experiences with clients. So I got to scroll here for a minute.

So many great things on here. But I posted this on there and I think it really hits home. The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play. His mind and his body. His information and his recreation. His love and his religion. his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.

Ooh, I got goosebumps. I love that. I have so much fun. I built the life that I've always wanted. I do what I choose to do. And I'm just in the fetal stages of getting started. You know, I meet a lot of people and they say, I think I've reached the pinnacle. I'm happy. I'm ready to sell. I'm done. This is as big as I could get. My ceiling is my imagination. I don't have a ceiling. All I know is the best I've ever been and the worst I'll ever be today. Remember that. That's a quote by me. I'm the best I've ever been and the worst I'll ever be because tomorrow I'm going to be better. We design and build decks, porches, and additions. We're looking at revamping our commission structure. We had a consultant convince us that we should pay 25 to 30K base plus 15% of our gross profit on the job, no minimum GP percentage, gross profit. We're dealing with jobs that don't cover our nut, but are still expected to pay commissions.

Where can we find some guidelines to get this set up right you know my dad was a mechanic he's a master mechanic he owned transmission shops and they do a performance pay that pays on hours if a transmission takes eight hours to rebuild they pay eight hours if you finish in four you win your pricing model needs to match your pay grade so if you could build your cost fixed based on the price and it's automatically, you know what you're going to make, you know, your supply costs, hopefully you put in a five margin of error, 10% margin of error, you know, your fixed costs, because it's not variable anymore. It's not time on job. They get commissioned based on a fixed cost. All of a sudden, you can start making a lot of assumptions. You can start really understanding GP and margin. So I would

rethink the way you look at this and start thinking on quoting the jobs based on all your expenses and building a buffer and then letting the sales rep take a percentage based on GP, so gross profit. So that's the best advice I could give is you need to reimagine how you're thinking. Your pricing needs to be modeled on your pay structure. Thank you for taking the time and talking with us. Boom, do you think new construction is the main focus of a garage door business? Hell no. New construction is the absolute

worst thing to be involved in. It fluctuates with the economy. Talk to any PE group in North America or the hemisphere. Or northern-southern hemisphere for that case. New construction has its good times. It's okay. I hate it.

I'm retrofit all day long. I believe in my own demand sources. I believe in word of mouth. Referrals are the best. Google's a second best. New construction. It's a bad word for a lot of people. Right now, people are making a lot of money in new construction because of supply chain issues. But I'll tell you what, if you cut a builder's cost by 2%, he's going on to the next guy. You got to fight to be the cheapest in new construction. Nobody likes new construction that's an investor because too much of your business relies on being a good price. Some people might say, yeah, I'll pay you for quality. So they find the quality

that you're giving and get a better price. If they could cut anything, they will because they've got a fiduciary responsibility to their investors to cut costs to make more money. Do you chair commission plans for sales jobs rarely ever benefit the salesperson? Precision used to do a rolling scale. And I like to get somebody on a fixed roll that they could earn their way up to the highest commission. One of the things that Al says is you got to be able to convince your significant other in a few sentences how you get paid. So what I'd recommend is don't make your pay grades complicated. I just like the fixed cost.

They know what they're going to get paid and they figure it out pretty quick. How did you come up with the name of your company? Well, it came first in the phone book. It was a mistake. I was talking to Dan Antonelli. I would definitely file a trademark and follow copyrights on everything you do. Work on a national trademark. I got too deep. Couldn't change it, but I'm buying companies and keeping their name because my rules apply to every

business. I could fix any business. Branding correctly, optimizing the levers I could pull. I don't need national branding. I'll win in any market I go to. But here's the coolest thing. For me to win, you don't need to lose. When A1 comes into your market or a company powered by A1, every garage or a company will do better because of us. You will be able to charge more. You'll have happier customers, just like the Starbucks effect. For me to win, you don't need to lose. You guys have a fantastic day. Go out there, delegate properly, build your team, invest in yourself. I love this. I appreciate you guys.

It's always fun. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor leave a quick review it really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review make it four or five sentences tell us how we're doing and i just wanted to mention real quick we started a membership it's homeservicemillionaire.com

forward slash club you get a ton of inside look at what we're gonna do to become a billion dollar company and uh we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, 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 lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.