The Home Service Expert Podcast - Getting Ready For The Home Service Gold Rush

Episode Date: November 22, 2018

Joshua Latimer is the CEO of SendJim.com and Founder of Radius Bomb and AutomateGrowSell.com. He is also the founder and host of The Quick Talk Podcast, where he helps entrepreneurs achieve freedom in their business through his valuable business tips and insights. In this episode, we talked about franchising, leadership, management...

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

Latimer. I just want to give you a quick introduction of everything this guy's all about. First of all, he's a CEO at SendJim.com. This is this awesome platform to do direct marketing to your customers and the neighbors of your customers. It does everything from voicemail blasts to sending postcards. It's micro-targeted advertising. You're going to love it. He's the CEO and founder at RadiusBomb.com. He's the founder and host of the Quick Talk podcast, which I was on. It's an amazing podcast. You get so much information from him on this. It's all about home service. He's the founder at automategrowsell.com and the founder at Birds Beware Window Cleaning.

So he did this till 2015 and he made a lot of money in the cleaning business. And that's really what he consults a lot of people is the cleaning of the windows. He grew his business until it was generating over $150,000 a month in revenue and sold it to a national buyer. During the last two years, he's owned his company. He only worked five hours a week on the business, but it grew 35% a year. So Josh, I'm excited to have you on. I've already been on yours. How's your day going? Oh, Tommy, thank you so much. My day's going spectacular, although it's cold and rainy. That's not slowing me down at all. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm really excited you came on, man. This is great. I think you have a lot of great things to offer. You usually deal with what type of clientele on a normal basis? Well, in terms of my podcast and some of the training products we have, our typical small business owner is doing less than a million dollars, probably stuck in the $300,000 to

$600,000 range in revenue. And in terms of my software company that does marketing, it's all over the place. We have a lot of large national franchises. We have lots of little one-man shows and kind of everything in between. All right, great. So tell me a little bit about your history and I want the listeners to get to know you a little bit and where you came from. Sure. Well, my story goes back to a small town near Flint, Michigan, and I had non-entrepreneurial parents, parents that

loved me. They're amazing people. They worked really hard, but you know, the idea that you could be an entrepreneur, have time freedom or all these buzzwords that are out there, that wasn't even on my radar at all. When I was 17 years old, I read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and it changed my life. I didn't ever become a real estate investor, which was kind of a big part of that book. But what I did understand was like, there was a different way of thinking, that there was people out there doing big things. And just the concept of that just kind of shot me down a path. So I was a pizza delivery driver in high school and I played football in high school. We were terrible.

We lost our homecoming 69 to zero, which was not funny at the time, but it's a great story now. And so I was reading these business books and I'd listen to cassette tapes while I'm delivering pizzas and cassette tapes for everybody. They're like these little plastic things

and there's this little thing in there and it plays audio. It's magical. But I just started reading all kinds of stuff. I started my first company on a credit card. I bought 14 candy machines and a credit card when I was still in high school. And it was a total disaster. Half of them got stolen. I didn't make any money and I didn't know what I was doing at all.

I got married young and I went right from pizza delivery guy into starting a cleaning business and living in a trailer park with my wife. And that's kind of where it started to get more serious. I started to settle down and try to focus a little bit more. It was still very difficult for me to kind of like get the belief in place. You know, like it was hard for me to think like, can I really make like $10,000 a month? Is it real that you can make $50,000 a month? In my brain, I had a lot of walls to break down. So gradually over time, I built that company up. I did sell it.

I moved to Costa Rica with my five kids for a while, started the podcast and started working on the software. So that's kind of a high level overview of my background. Yeah, I love the story. A lot of us were thrown into entrepreneurship as a kid, and it sounds like you didn't have that. So what do you think it is that drove you to that direction? Obviously, that's a great book. I recommend it to every young person.

And even if you haven't read it as older, that and, what is it, The Richest Man in Babylon is a great book along with that love that book but yeah what drove you to that next level you know I think it was watching how much my dad hated his job and he worked hard my dad is a kind of guy that was never ever late he's like the perfect employee but he literally was miserable he doesn't didn't like his job he didn't have fun going to his job he wasn't passionate about his job and whether he got a raise or not, he was always complaining about the company and how they're bad and all this stuff. And I just, that negativity, I didn't recognize it as there being another path until after I started like meeting entrepreneurs. And I had a couple mentors early that had some restaurant chains and they would just look at the world

differently. And when you grow up in kind of a stress ball of, you know, money doesn't grow on trees, Josh, that type of thing. And then you contrast that against someone like you or someone who's an entrepreneur who only focuses on the possibilities like, oh, wouldn't it be so cool if we did this? Or what if we created a business that did this and we could make a million dollars? Those conversations were just very attractive to me. And so I went really deep and really been obsessed with entrepreneurship ever since. In fact, now I think entrepreneurs are the only thing in the world that makes the world a better place, really. Because if you think about it, capitalism and entrepreneurship is the reason we have any good thing. It's the reason we have infrastructure and roads and

technology and medical devices and drugs and different treatments. It's the reason we have any good thing. It's the reason we have infrastructure and roads and technology and medical devices and drugs and different treatments. It's the reason we have iPhones and cell phones and clothing and airlines and everything comes from one of those big dreamers that took a risk and started something. So I think it's super important. Not everybody is supposed to be an entrepreneur, but for those that are, I think they're just the most amazing people on the planet. I agree. I never looked at it from that perspective, but for those that are, I think they're just the most amazing people on the planet. I agree. I never looked at it from that perspective, but it's a very great concept to think about is everything good really does. And it's innovation is what breeds the world we live in, which sometimes I wonder if this technology is a good thing or a bad thing,

but definitely allows us to get a lot more done exponentially. Yeah, I think all technology has the potential to be good or bad, just like money. It's not money that's evil. It's the love of money that can turn evil. Making money is amazing. It's a gift to the world. Who's going to build the orphanages? Who's going to create the jobs? It always cracks me up when people hate employers, but they love jobs. How is that supposed to work, right? If you don't have a Tommy Mello building an empire across all these states, you're creating huge amounts of opportunity for everybody in those local communities and the customers you're serving.

It's an amazing thing. But with technology, it could be good. It could be bad. It's just a tool to be leveraged one way or the other. And it's exciting. In the time we live in now with the changes for home service, specifically with technology and the marketplaces and the Amazon marketplace and the Facebook marketplace and Google verified and all this stuff that's happening, there's a tremendous opportunity, in my opinion, is that the next 10 to 15 years is going to be like a gold rush for

home services for a couple reasons. Number one is the baby boomers are turning 65 at 10,000 people per day. So that's still happening and will for a while. But at the same time, we have a shortage of people going into trades. You know, everybody wants to work on the internet and write code or travel and be a 20 year old millennial life coach. And so it's harder and harder to find really good workers to work in your business. And the millennial generation is starting to make some money. They're buying houses and they're not going to do their own home services. They're just not.

Like my grandpa, he wouldn't pay someone to wash his house or to clean his roof or to clean his driveway. But the younger generation will. They don't want to do it. They don't know how to do it. And they're also accustomed to paying monthly subscriptions for things. So I just see this huge, like parabolic shift. I think we're still in the early stages of it. And I think people that get ahead of the curve, listen to shows like this, get ahead of the technology are going to crush it. And I mean that.

Yeah, I got a lot of, I want to jump into that in a little bit. I want to jump into really the meat and bones of the people under a million dollars real quick. So you did no cleaning. And I think that, you know, there's not a lot of barriers to entry to that. I mean, I did a landscaping business, so I know exactly what it's like to work in a business where it's hard to get a big ticket, but you can't, you got the same customers coming back more and more. But I talked to a guy yesterday with a small plumbing company and he said, I'm just always behind the, I'm behind the eight ball in a lot of ways. Like literally, it seems like I don't have enough guys, but when I do have enough guys, I can't keep them busy. And he goes, it's just, I want to run my business successfully. I'm just getting burnt out. And I think a lot of us have been there. And those are the two biggest things. How do I get more jobs or how do I get the right

people? Those are like the yin and yang all the time. Exactly right. It's a teeter-totter. You're either dealing with the people problems or with sales problems or both, but it goes back and forth. So you go sell a bunch of stuff, you backlog your work orders and stuff, and then you have to service the stuff, right? So you're trying to balance your capacity. And every business is a little different. For example, one of my best friends has a plumbing company. That particular business is nuanced in the fact that there is barrier to entry. You know, you want journeyman licensed plumbers. It takes a while to ramp someone up to be competent so they don't screw someone's plumbing up. And at the same time, it's more of a reactionary service. So like it's trickier for a small plumber to create clients on

demand because you can't make someone have a leaky pipe and call you to fix the leaky pipe. Now you could do, you know, construction and you could do roughing in houses and stuff like that, and you can still build that line of business. But with the service call side, depending on, you know, what this guy you're talking about's focus is, it can be a little bit harder, I think, to predict or to future plan out your revenue and your forecasting. And just the fact that most of these small businesses, they pay themselves too much money too quick. And so they don't have the capital to even build out the team that they need or the infrastructure or the right equipment. They basically choke their business dry and people, and I've never asked you this, but I'm assuming because every

person I know that has built a large business lives on beans and rice while they scale their business as fast as they can. I mean, I was paying myself $500 a week and we were doing $100,000 a month and that's normal. Like that's the way to do it. But if you're, if you're doing a couple hundred grand a year and you're taking most of that out of the business and you've got your bass boat and you've got your jet ski, you see what I mean? So there's lots of reasons, but I do still believe the opportunity is there.

So this is kind of funny because this is today, realistically, this morning. So I have a 2012 Titan with 113,000 miles on it. I love it. It's a great vehicle. It's dependable. And the dealer dropped off a 2019 Dodge 1500, all the bells and whistles. And I was driving in today and I almost felt kind of weird about it.

Like I've never owned a new car, never owned a new truck. And I just, I don't know. It was a fine feeling and it's nice to have nice things. I mean, I have a really nice house. I have an apartment complex. I have several businesses, but I always looked at the guys that drove around these nice cars that lived at apartments. I mean, I own an apartment complex. They live there, you know, and I'm not bragging by any means, but I look at guys, these businesses that they're doing good after five years, they got a second home. They've got the ski dues, they've got the boats they've got. And I'm like, holy shit.

You know, at the end of the day, is this really the first thing you need to do in your business? So, so tell me a little bit. I love that concept because I think that's the biggest underlying factor is they do, they pay their wife, they go on vacations and they do all these things in the beginning. And I was kind of filled with guilt saying, I really don't need this, but we'll see. I mean, I liked it, so I don't know yet, but. Well, okay. So I personally think this has everything to do with having a poverty or employee mindset rather than an entrepreneur's mindset.

And what happens for most of the people that go into home services or any kind of trade is they start off as an employee working for the man. And they make X amount of dollars per hour. And at some point in their career, they realize that their employer is charging $60 an hour, but paying them $15 an hour. And they way oversimplify all the moving parts of a business. And they get this bright idea that, well, I'll just do it myself and I'll keep the whole $60 an hour, right? And they're not looking at it at all as like a CEO or from like an entrepreneurial perspective. They're just trying to make more money. And so once they start their little business and they do a $10,000 a month and they have no overhead, they're working out of their house, right? They're using the car that they

already had. What happens is, is they just completely lose control super fast because they have a, well, I deserve it mentality. I deserve it. You know, we got to treat ourself and they're not wrong for doing it. But what's happening is they're not correlating the fact that they're behaving like that, which is a low level thing. You know, broke people spend money and wealthy people invest money. And all the people I know that are wealthy and I'm like, I'm not some gajillionaire. I didn't build a $40 million business, but we have some nice businesses, but I'm still like totally on my journey. But the way I look at things is how do I own assets to produce income for me? How do I get into a situation? How do I, maybe if I'm going to do an equity deal with a, with a business deal

with someone else and they want me to have a piece of equity, how can I convert that into income? And because I'm thinking like that, that is the path to being financially independent and building real wealth, not buying the jet ski. But you have to delay the gratification. One of my favorite quotes is that everyone sees the wine, but no one sees the crushing of the grapes. And I think that's hilarious because I always joke that I've had my grapes crushed a lot. But like when you see the shooter that has the Grant Cardone guy with the Ferrari and the stuff, we're really quick to dismiss how much sacrifice that person had to accomplish what they have accomplished. We just dismiss it like, oh, well, look how lucky that person is. And that's ridiculous. You know, a tiny percentage of wealthy people got lucky.

Some of them did, but not most of them. Most of them got their grapes crushed for decades. They stayed focused. They delayed gratification. They chopped the wood and they put in the work because there's not a shortcut. That's the path. If you don't have capital, you can't grow your business. And if your business makes capital and you buy jet skis, then you can't grow the business. It's pretty simple, really, if you think about it. Yeah, that's interesting because I see these all over Facebook and all over social media, whether you're on Instagram, Snapchat, different things that pop up. But they always have this guy in front of this huge house. And Frank Kern has his beautiful wife getting out of a Mercedes convertible and all

these different people that I've studied and I know, but if I make something, usually I like to make it when I'm at work talking about a successful business, because that's what we're trying to create now automatically. And I know we sell on benefits, not necessarily features. So when you're selling a blender, you talk about how this blender is not, it's going to stay quiet. It's going to crush up all the nutrients. No, this is going to give you an extra long life. This is going to make you, so I understand what they're doing when they talk about the Ninja and they talk about selling or Frank Kern talking about his life is better than how it did. He spends more time with his kids, but you're darn right that these guys have been doing this for years and years. And I've met, I've sat down with like five of these guys in las vegas talked about what i'm doing and uh they said

dude do not change your focus keep going down the road you do not want to be this guy on stage trying to come up with the next best thing to try to convince people to go after it and i feel like a lot of times these people are selling pipe dreams. And yeah, just like when you go to a multi-market, whether it's, I think this thing was called Bogan V, this stuff you drink to live longer. And there's 1% of those people in the multi-marketing deals,

the pyramid schemes that they'll make a lot of money if they get in early enough. But the other people are doing the same thing. They're selling dreams. And the dream of getting into business should be spending 10 hard years reinvesting in yourself. I look at it as a poker game. He who has the most chips has the most dominant hand and I could win. I could bluff people because I could do a lot more things if I've got a great poker hand. And even if I don't have a great poker hand, and I've got all the chips, I could win. And Adam told me when he started here three years ago,

he goes, dude, you just stack your chips up. That's all you do all the time. You're just stacking chips. And he goes, that's how I know I want to be part of this business. And that's so true. I see these people, and I can't tell you enough, they go out, they buy the trailers, they buy all this stuff. And if you're buying things for the business, but then again, how much do you need that machine that you just bought for your business to sometimes, or how much do you need those new trucks? I didn't have new trucks. I actually didn't have any trucks. All my guys drove their own trucks when I first started. And then I bought used trucks and now I'm starting to buy new truck, brand new trucks. But we're talking about what, 12 years in the business. I'm finally getting new vehicles because it's tax incentives for me right now. Because, you know, just the tax laws alone are helping me be able to do this.

But it makes financial sense. Well, your business now, you play by a different set of rules now. And the small guys don't have access to those rules yet. And so they shouldn't worry about it. I never bought a new car personally ever. And we never bought a new car in my business ever because it's crazy. I'd rather reinvest the money in more marketing. And this is another one of the big issues. I know that you are obsessed with sales and marketing. You blew my mind when I interviewed you on my show. And I don't know

if you got a bunch of people reaching out to you, but I got blown up. People are like, dude, that guy's a savage. But the thing is, is that little businesses are super light on sales and marketing. They barely market their business. Uh, who is it? Dan Kennedy said, if you haven't offended someone by noon, you're not marketing hard enough. And like, and I'm guilty of it. And I do way more marketing than the people that I'm helping in, in, in serving. Right. But like they have no problem getting into $20,000 a debt to buy a shiny object, a piece of equipment for the business. And they think that they're going to grow their business because they've increased their capacity or it's more efficient. And they're just doing it all

backwards instead of plowing all that capital into customer acquisition on the front end. So that is like a super, super, super common thing. I promise people listening to this are like nodding their head, like, yes, I'm guilty of that because it's sexy to buy a piece of equipment. It's not as sexy to like build out a year long marketing calendar and execute on it. You know? Yeah. I think that's the number one thing I get out of these talks with people under a million

dollars is I say, how do you acquire customers right now? And I kind of go through these steps. I say, tell me about some of your KPIs, key performance indicators. And I say, they say all the same things like, well, I got a lot of good reviews online. I'm doing some answers. I'm doing some home advisor. I'm paying for Yelp right now. How's that working out? That that can run solely out of word of mouth. Because if you think Yelp, I've got Yelp giving me a lot, but I mean, literally I rank for every keyword on Yelp because of the way I set my Yelp up organically. And we get our user generated content from our customers to match the keywords that we want to rank for, which is a whole other topic. But the point is most of these guys don't even know what user generated content is, and they don't get a lot of calls from that. And I'm going, it's like we talked about earlier. First, let's figure out marketing for great technicians. So that's a marketing in itself, right? Getting great

employees is a marketing attribute. Well, I call employees internal customers and a good friend of mine that had a $20 million carpet cleaning business he built in 10 years, the guy's amazing. He calls his employees internal customers, which is a huge mind bomb if you think about it, because all of us are marketers. You're marketers to your staff, I'm a marketer to my wife on recasting the vision and why I have to work late or why I have to travel, right? To my kids, we're marketing all the time. The problem I see is that what you just described is all these little businesses, they only do what I call reactive marketing. They don't do any proactive marketing. So reactive marketing is great. It's Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, Yelp. The problem with that stuff though, is you can't control the amount of deal flow you get from it. I mean,

you can optimize it and you should, but if you get 12 calls a month from Angie's list, I can't push a button and make it 73 calls a month, right? So the proactive marketing is where people get really nervous or gun shy. They're terrified to spend a few grand on something that doesn't work. So they can figure out a system or what I call a lever where you can put a dollar in the box, pull the lever and $6 comes out the bottom of the box. That's proactive marketing. That's what like, you know, neighbor marketing is, or some of the stuff that SendJim does. If you have that, if you can find a way to get customers on demand, because you understand your metrics and your numbers and how much you can pay, then you really can scale as quickly as you want to. But when it's all reactive, you're just kind of going up and down in the waves of the market. And however many leads Angie's List sends you.

That's a great point. And I do agree that you can make a stronger profile. And every person that works there, this paid commission is going to say you're wrong. And they could turn you up by giving you more impressions and getting you in front of more customers and doing an email blast. But it's never predictable. And there's a point in marketing, what we call diminishing returns. And I'm working on a Facebook campaign. And I talked to my guy and he goes, Tommy,

how much would you be willing to spend? And I said, what if I told you I didn't have a budget? He goes, well, you got to have a budget. I said, no, it's undefined. I said, I'll spend $10 million tomorrow. He goes, how do you figure? I go, if I'm spending a dollar, making a dollar 25, I said, I've got unlimited funds because if I can make, especially on something that I don't have to handle the procurement, if it's drop shipping or, or, or something that's I'm, I'm out of the box, I'm just the middleman. So if I spend a million dollars, I get $1.25 million back. I made $250,000. If I spent 10 million, I get two to 2.5 million back. So people don't understand that, that if you got a good thing, but I'll tell you the biggest point of deception. And this is,

I had a really good talk the other day with a, his name is Jamie Dea to Monaco and he's got 14,000 service agreements. And he goes, Tommy, I pay my plumber $40 an hour, right? My master plumber. He goes, he works a third of the time because he's at the office under meetings. He's picking up his apprentices. He's out there picking up parts. He's drive time. So he's, you know, $120 an hour basically is what I pay him. And then I pay for my acquisition costs, which is a hundred bucks. So I'm at 220. Then I pay $120 for my overhead, which is the building, my managers, my software, which is service type. And I got my CSRs, my dispatchers. He goes, it goes on and on. My warehouse manager, all these different factors go in. So then I'm at 120. So now I'm at 360.

He goes, and then, you know, I like to make a healthy profit. So let's just say I want to make a hundred bucks. So I'm at 440. That's before I even enter into the parts because that's per hour. And he goes, yeah, you got plumbers working on their own, charging less than a hundred bucks. And they're wondering why they can't advertise or wonder why they can't pay their guys enough. They're wondering why all their tools are always broken. They're wondering why there's nightmares constantly. And I said, it just made me smile and go, oh my gosh. And he goes, Tommy, everybody thinks I'm overcharging, but they have no idea what it really costs to run a successful business. If you're not doing all the work yourself out there, tightening up toilet gaskets and, you know, unplugging trains or whatever they do. Well, they're technicians instead of CEOs. It's a mindset thing. And part of the issue is

they need to change their circle of influence. They need to be around people. They don't have to be, you know, unicorn perfection CEOs of billion dollar companies, but you need to change their circle of influence. They need to be around people. They don't have to be unicorn perfection CEOs of billion dollar companies, but you need to be around people who are ahead of where you are and people who can give you competent advice because all opinions aren't created equal. And one thing with Facebook right now that drives me nuts

is there's Facebook groups for everything, for plumbers, for everything, like everything. And you go in there and someone asks a question and then 800 comments go on the thread. And 95% of the advice that these people are getting is bad. It's because they're getting advice from people who are at where they are or behind where they are. And so it's really important to be careful where you get advice from. When you listen to a podcast like this, Tommy's done extraordinary things. He's going to give you competent advice from a place of expertise. And if you go on Facebook where the internet keyboard warriors say stuff, you know,

so it's a mindset has to do with accountability and the group of friends that you hang out with. I hear a lot of excuses. In fact, my good buddy who is a plumber, he really struggles with this. He's got a negative attitude. He's like, oh, you can't find people to work and customers don't want to pay. And he's one of those guys, right? Which is very common in home services. But he doesn't get is that he's screwed before he starts. Like it's impossible for him to succeed unless he completely reverses his paradigm with the whole opportunity. It's mindset. It's 100%. And I tell people so many times, I took this pretty extensive training on human interactive technology.

And I can tell you that I learned a lot about NLP and about how the brain works and about just the power of positive thinking. And I don't spend enough time. Most people spend so much time reflecting and sad and thinking about what happened to them. I have to genuinely try very, very hard to think back. And it's a bad to a fault. I mean, at the end of the day, I should have some reflection, but I'm like so busy living in

the next week of what I got to get done and my next steps. And this is, and I think it's a good balance and I don't have any balance whatsoever where I look backward, but I'm so busy going, if I invest a dollar in this, and if I look backward, but I'm so busy going, if I invest a dollar in this, and if I do this, and if I hire this person, and if tomorrow, if I could get these five things done and make sure I get them completed,

then I'll be successful. And so many people spend so much time moping around and then they go, I'm gonna go home and I'm just gonna rest. And if you wanna be in business, I'm sorry, especially the first five years, there's no such thing as resting. I mean, you got to be excited about it. I mean, passion. The first article I ever wrote, the very first article on Forbes was all about passion. And it

was the number one thing I think that drives entrepreneurs, especially when they're getting into business is that passion. And if you got that fire, it'll really, you can see the people that talk on stage that have been successful, that are making things move. They're movers and shakers and it's all behind. I think the number one thing is passion. What has your been your experience overall with that? Oh dude, I got chills as you're saying that. Like if you don't have a fire in your belly, you will not do what's required to get the outcome you desire. You have to know what you're trying to do and you have to want it really you desire. You have to know what you're trying to

do and you have to want it really bad. But a lot of times people that come from lower income families, they feel guilty for even wanting something. They feel guilty when they make too much money. I struggled with that. I still kind of struggle with that. Like we'll reach a certain level of comfort. A lot of people, not everybody, but for me, where, you know, you feel weird making too much. Cause I, you know, for me, I'm one of the most successful people that I know in real life in this tiny little town that I'm from. And that's what makes me feel weird, but I'm a nothing burger amoeba in the whole marketplace, but there's a lot of mental games you have to play. And I think true entrepreneurs, we do live in the future. I live in the future completely.

I'm obsessed with the future. I can see it in color, what I'm trying to do and where I'm trying to take my family and what I'm trying to build and who I'm trying to serve. And I'm obsessed with it. And it makes my stomach hurt that I want to serve so bad. But other people, they get stuck in the moment. They get, you know, looking, living in the past. I have a good friend named Myron Golden. And if anybody wants their mind to explode with amazingness, I interviewed him on my show. His name is Myron Golden. And if anybody wants their mind to explode with amazingness, I interviewed him on my show. His name is Myron Golden. He's unbelievable. But he talked about anxiety. And anxiety is when you are focusing on an undesirable future outcome. And this is where people get stuck, including me. When you get paralyzed and you don't know what to do next, it's because you're literally playing a movie in your head of an undesirable future outcome that you think could happen or will happen or might happen.

It's not real. It's not real. But because you're focusing on it, you have your present energy. Right now, your energy right now is being expelled and you get exhausted. That's when you get home and you go to bed and you don't even want to think about the future. It's like being in a car in park and slamming on the accelerator and you're not going anywhere, but you're using all your gas, right? But what you want to do is instead of focusing on that, you just focus on the desirable future outcome. And then your anxiety turns into anticipation. And people like you, Tommy, that I meet, most of my friends at this point, they live in a place of anticipation. Doesn't mean it's not hard. Doesn't mean all kinds of crap happens

and throws your day off, but our default is in a place of anticipation of the future, of dreaming about it, thinking about it, strategizing about it, fantasizing about it, and feeling that fire in your belly. Yes, you get ripped to reality when something bad happens and I'll even feel sorry for myself for a minute, but I shift back into my default, which is anticipation. And so the people I work with that are totally paralyzed,

they don't do that at all. They're not even close to that. They live in their circumstance. They can't see the future. They can't even see the next day. They only see an inch in front of them. That is crazy because I feel like there's different levels and there's what's called the valley of death. And that's when there's times levels and there's what's called the valley of death. And that's when there's times in your business where they grow and they're at an in-between stage. So you got your peaks and valleys and the peaks are great. The valleys are bad. And I think it's a mindset.

And that first valley of death is when your mindset goes to that negative feeling. And once you get through that, you're going to hit other downs. And usually that's, like I said, the valley of death. And when you hit those areas, the same things that get you to the next valleys and peaks are not the same as the original ones. And I had a guy tell me, he said, Tommy, the people that got you to 10 million aren't the same necessarily that'll get you to 100 million because it's a mindset and they think differently. And luckily, I think we provided a really strong aptitude for change. So everybody understands that we might walk in and we're going to change everything again because with technology and the way we're moving exponentially in this world,

change is inevitable and people hate change. And so many plumbers that have been working in this world, change is inevitable and people hate change. And so many plumbers that have been working in this industry for 40 years, they didn't get a lot of change from 1970 to 1990. I mean, yeah, it's a completely different time to go around a little bit, but you know, they had 20, 30 years where it was like, I still got my same wrenches. I still use this book and this map to get to the next spot. Don't get me wrong. You. The color TV and there's, you know, the first personal computer and different things of that nature. But now it's like, holy crap, how do I communicate? Which social media do I choose? What? It's like a whole new world and it's only going to get greater, faster than this. And tell me a little bit about why you chose the niche a million dollars or less? Well, it's because of my place of expertise.

You know, I have no problem when I try to help someone. If I don't know the answer to their question, I just say, you know, I don't know, but I can help you find out, right? I haven't built a $10 million business, so I wouldn't add a lot of value to someone who's stuck at 6.2 trying to get to 10. But I know exactly how to help the people that I am serving.

In our software, you know, anybody can use it, trying to get to 10, but I know exactly how to help the people that I am serving. In our software, you know, anybody can use it, but we focus entirely on marketing to these businesses because that's where my people are. That's my tribe. You know, I've built a tribe. I serve, I speak at things to those types of people and I've grown to love them. You know, I call them blue collar entrepreneurs. I just, I want to wake people up to the real opportunity. I want to wake people up to the real opportunity. I want to wake people up to the fact that they can, they can do this quick. It takes massive imperfect action and focus and hard work and all that stuff, but it doesn't have to take 23 years. You know, it breaks my heart when I work with a business owner who's been stuck at a half a million for 22 years of the family

business. They got debt. They're not making that much. It's a disaster. They've lost motivation seven years ago. And if they just shifted like three or four things that they see incorrectly in their business, the thing would triple really fast, right? I love it when people get those aha moments. And I think it's because I relate with them, man. I started in a trailer park, married to my high school sweetheart. We didn't have anything. And our journey was hard. I always joke that I have a bachelor's degree in pain and a master's in suffering. Another good example is Russell Brunson. I told you I'm in a mastermind group that he does. He's the founder of ClickFunnels and built a $100 million business in like three and a half years. And everybody sees someone like him and they look

at the wine, right? They weren't with him when he was working out of his college dorm and had no money. And he was embarrassed because his wife had a job and he was trying to make money online and it didn't work. They weren't with him when he had to fire a hundred people in one day and had a half a million dollars in back taxes or whatever it was with payroll taxes because his accountant screwed something up. They weren't there then as he persevered through that stuff. They're just seeing the wine. And I don't know, I love having a little blue collar entrepreneur have a light bulb go off in their head and then just go to the races. It's the best. You know, you mentioned the fact that you've created this tribe and I was on the phone with the CEO of Service Titan the other day and we were talking

about some stuff he's helping me out with the CRM section of my book. And he said, you know, Tommy, he said, you guys have done a lot for us to introduce new segments that we never thought about, whether it be roofers, they're going heavy into roofers, they're going heavy into gutters, they're going into these new segments. And I said, you know, let me tell you something, you bring us together. And the fact that I've gone out there, I've, I'd say a third of the people I've had on my podcast, I've chosen from the most successful people at Service Titan. And I'm talking guys, like I said, 14,000 service agreements. I've talked to a guy that does 70% of everything he does through finance.

I mean, you want to talk about experts, the best of the best. So basically, he doesn't understand this and I think he does now that I've talked to him, but he's like the Joe Polish of the world that brings all these huge Richard Bransons together. And Joe Polish, as you probably know, he started with cleaning rugs and floor cleaning and basically started being a good guy

to bring people together. And I used to subscribe. I used to go to all of his things. I almost thought about joining his group. I'm just, it's time is the most important thing to me now. And I got to tell you, when you hang around the guy I had on the podcast a few weeks ago told me, he said, and I get so many guys on this podcast. I take nuggets out of everybody, but he said, pick your top five people you hang around, Tommy. He goes, you're going to be within 20% of their income unless, and this is the big unless, you read a lot of books. He goes, because let's say, split up your time 20% a piece. Let's say you spend 40% of your time reading and 60% with your friends. Take 40% of the authors you read and get to know

and learn about and study, take their incomes and now compare it to yours. And that was bold. That was huge for me because I said, I don't hang out with a lot of multimillionaires. I mean, I love my friends and I don't grade them on money. Unfortunately, that's not, not unfortunately at all, but I mean, that's not, when this guy was saying this, I'm like, I'll never grade the people I hang out with on their wealth.

But at the same time, I do understand that concept, eagles fly with eagles. What is your take on that? Oh man, I love this analogy. I think you'll really like this. It has to do with fighter jets and crop dusters. So like entrepreneurs like you and me, we are fighter

jets. We need to be going, you know, Mach one, right? Like a fighter jet is basically a paper weight. If it goes too slow, it will fall out of the sky like a rock. If it flies too slow, it has to go fast. It has to, it's engineered to go really fast, but a crop duster like that, like farmers would use to for pesticides or whatever on their crops, they're designed and engineered to go slow and to fly really low to the ground and they need to go slower. They wouldn't work. Right. But what happens is, is we confuse our entrepreneurial relationships, which a friend of mine and Russell's inner circle calls it the seventh power. So the few, and it can be one or two premium relationships you have with like-minded people.

It doesn't have, we don't have time to have lots of friends, right? We don't have time. We're doing stuff. But those are your seventh power. Those are the people you nerd out with. Like I'm going to be in Arizona at the end of October and I hope I can take you to lunch. And when we talk, we'll nerd out about business stuff the whole time. But there's other important relationships in our life.

And these are non-entrepreneurial people. They, we love them. They love us. They're just different. There's nothing wrong with them. They're not broken. But what happens is businesses,

sometimes business owners get frustrated when their friends and family who are non-entrepreneurial, they're crop, crop duster people, high utility value, super valuable, like just different. They get mad when they don't get the support that they want

for their vision from those people, or they try to get excited and talk about business and everybody's eyes glaze those over because they just don't care, right? Like those are two different types of relationships. You should not be sharing your gems and your big macro, you know, mission for your life and your legacy goals. You don't share all that stuff with everybody. You share it with the seventh power people, the like-minded fighter jet people, people that are going to support you and edify you and build you up and hold you up and hold you accountable, kick you in the butt if you need it, pull you up over the cliff if you need it. That's a very compartmentalized part of our life or should be. And then over here, we have friends, families, neighbors, people we love, cousins, weird uncles, everybody else, the non-entrepreneurial people. And my friend Stacy calls those people muggles. Like they're

just run-of-the-mill average people. Entrepreneurs are weird. And so we shouldn't expect everybody to understand what we're doing and why we do it because they won't. And that's okay. That's how I see it. Yeah, no, I agree. I was, my mom just said hi through the window. It's funny. That's awesome. She just knocked on my door. I didn't even see her. So yeah, I'm at work right now.

This is where I do this stuff, but normally nobody knocks or interrupts. But so it like scared me because I'm looking right at the microphone, but I was like, who the heck? And then I turned back and she just got a big smile. But, you know, I think the other day I was talking to a friend and they said, you know, you talk about money a lot. And I said, I'm not

talking about money. I said, I'm talking about a goal. And I said, usually our goals, the foundation is money because the strongest thing in the world that I know of, and Einstein agrees, is compound interest. And unfortunately, as a kid, we're not taught about credit cards. We're not talking about how to run a checking account. And, you know, I always talk about Parkinson's law. And it's amazing when you learn that concept. It's just so true. So many people, I mean, look, I got guys that are making three grand a week and they don't have a house.

They don't have any money in their bank account. And I'm like, how is that possible? They're like, well, if it's in there, we spend it and our wives spend it. And we go out and we do these nice things and vacations and expensive dinners. And I'm like, but when you don't have it, what do you do? They're like, we strap up. We don't, they didn't say it in those exact terms, but they get into credit card debt because of financing and other things. And it just doesn't make sense to me. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that I have a hard time carrying on a conversation with people like that, not because I don't love them, not because I don't enjoy their time. It's because I don't even get

anything out of the conversations when we do talk about that stuff, because they're like, all you do is you just, you're a dreamer. And you just, I'm like, no, I'm not. I make everything I do happen because I tell myself every day, this is what my mindset is. This is what I believe in. Here's how I'm going to get there. Here's the next step. And then it's just the way of thinking. You called it a paradigm. And I agree with that. The paradigm, the way that my brain works is completely different. It's written in a different code than theirs. And when I spend time with them, I try to make it about whether it be sports, whether it be stories that we've experienced together. But it's very difficult for me to have those deep conversations about what I'm going to do

in the future without somebody else having those conversations. And there's a happy medium of, I always have good things to say when somebody tells me what they're going to do. And a lot of people, I mean, the last two years, especially, they come to me for everything. Like my family, my friends are like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. I'm thinking about starting this. And I love that because now I get to talk to them in the same code I built on. I'm like, yes, come to me. I will help you. But I'm sure you get that all the time as well. Yeah, completely, man. And, you know, I think entrepreneurs, fighter jet people, we struggle with small talk, you know, like I want to talk about stuff that's going to make a dent in the universe. It's going to be big and exciting and there's opportunity.

And like the only thing that gives me energy in regards to conversations is conversations like that, like big stuff, talking about the weather and chit chatting. It's hard. Like it takes massive effort. I get exhausted. You know, we have a family reunion or something and everybody's talking about just a bunch of stuff that frankly doesn't matter at all to me because I'm living in the future in my brain. And, you know, they need to accept that God made me that way on purpose, that I'm not broken. I need to accept that they're not broken and everybody can get along.

But, you know, we all have people watching us. And that's my takeaway from what you just said. People are watching us. You might not know it, but someone looks up to you, whoever's listening to this. And it's really important that you live your full potential out because you're going to inspire other people. Everything starts with inspiration. Robert Kiyosaki didn't take a risk and write a book and go put it out there and then market the crap out of the book and sell a bajillion copies. I wouldn't have read it.

It wouldn't have had an impact on me. He gave me massive value because he took intelligent risk. And I think we all have that same responsibility. No matter how small your company is, I don't care if it's just you, you are the CEO of your company and we need to go for it. Whatever that looks like, we need to go for it and not make excuses or apologies for going for it. I agree. That's a great takeaway from that, that we just talked about. I want to dive into some deep questions. I usually make these about an hour long. So I want to dive into some core questions. Then I'm going to talk to you about your software and they'll get a couple of final thoughts. So probably about 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes. So

first, when you talk to somebody and you talk to guys every day, you know, ladies and gentlemen out there with businesses, what do you find is the top three problems in their business? Employees, not being a marketer to get employees. Here's what happens. People do what I call a dumpster hire. My friend, Dan Plata, just told me that. I thought it was funny because if something bad happens in your business, you say, oh, it's a dumpster fire. Well, people do dumpster hires, right? So you'd throw an ad on Craigslist, but you weren't prepared. You're not recruiting year round. So you have nobody lined up to even potentially interview for the job. Your key guy quits and it's like a cliff. Your business is screwed, right? You're in the middle of busy season, they leave. So then you throw something

on Craigslist, five people email you back. Two of them actually show up for an interview. Both of them are just absolutely terrible. And you pick the best one out of the two bad people. And it's this vicious cycle. And so employees, like if you can't grow your capacity by growing your team, you can't grow your business. You have to have the team. Like I ask people as a trick question all the time, what's more important, your customers or your team? And people argue like that's a great Facebook thing to do just to eat popcorn and watch people argue with each other. The fact is, is that they're both important, but we totally neglect our team. I'm obsessed with culture. Like I have dream boards for my employees. My graphic full-time graphic designer, our creative director for Send Jim wanted to make

more money. So this winter I sat down with her,. She came on with us and said, what are we trying to do, right? And in her wildest dream, she couldn't imagine saving up an extra $10,000. She came from poverty. She never had nothing. She had nothing the day she started working with us. We hire her on and I built a plan for her to do a side hustle to make some money and do some extra things. We implemented it. It was very, very simple. She started making an extra $2,000 to $3,000 a month doing it. Currently, as we talk now, she has over 10 grand in the bank. She's on fire. She goes to war for our company. She goes to war for our customers because I did what to me is a simple thing, which is lay out a framework and a vision for her, let her borrow my certainty so she would execute on it and got her a result.

Our sales director, Cooper, is in his early 20s and he wants to own investment properties. When he hired on, I said, what are we doing to move in that direction? Let's not talk about it. Where are we at? Do you have credit? No, I don't have any credit. Do you have any money? No, I don't have any money. Okay, how much do we need? Well, he needed $20,000 in cash. He needed a 720 credit score. And we worked for 11 months straight on that plan. He has $24,000 in the bank and he has a 720 credit score. Point being, you have to be focused on employees. The next thing is marketing and sales. And maybe these are equal, it's chicken and the egg, but they're not doing any proactive marketing. They don't know any of the numbers, their metrics at all. They don't know what their average ticket is. They don't know what the lifetime value of a customer is. They don't know what their profit

margin is. If you sell something for a thousand bucks and it's a thousand bucks every year and your profit margin is 300 bucks, that means you could spend up to $300 maximum on customer acquisition costs without losing money in year one, right? This is pretty basic stuff that even people that aren't good at math could figure out in less than a couple hours and come really close, but they don't know. And because they don't know, it's just guesswork and pure luck whenever they do try to do paid marketing and it's a disaster. So you ask for three, I think those two by themselves gets every single person listening to a million plus. There can be more complexity after that, but you can have a small competent team. And if

you're generating leads on demand, that's all you need to make a million bucks. Wow. That is deep. That is like the nail on the head. If I studied and try to say that again, I don't think I could say it that well, because I see the same things all the time. And marketing is, it's such, I'm so offensive. I'm a great offense. Defense is tax planning. Defense is making sure how much money is in the bank. And you're very, you're opening up every piece of mail and you're checking every signature with a fine. I'm driving leads, man. I drive so many leads. I take so much market share. People are like, dude, I'm getting a couple. We just found out we're averaging 900 calls a day. And only 52 of those are opportunity I mean we booked a ton of calls when we're in so many new

cities that I don't even have the staff sometimes I need more stuff I have different managers I have 12 market managers and a lot of Phil supervisors now and I have that way is so smart because people do it backwards they have too much capacity and not enough deal flow. The right way to do it is to create a capacity issue because you have too much deal flow. That's where the leverage is. You can control how many jobs you book when you have too many leads by messing with your pricing and sliding it up and down based on what needs to happen.

But most small businesses, they have too much equipment and too many part-time employees that aren't getting the hours and they're not profitable because they don't have enough deal flow coming in. And really, if you just reverse that, I would much rather be stressed out because I'm booked three or four weeks out and customers are getting mad because we can't service them quick enough. And we're trying to recruit and interview and train people. That is the stress I want. That is the stress I have. You would hit the nail on the head. That's the right way. But the little businesses do it exactly backwards. They invest, they buy so much equipment that on day one, they could do $300,000 a year

worth of service. Let's say they're a soft washing company, they're pressure cleaners, or they're a carpet cleaner. They get a truck mount, they spend 70 grand on it. They could do 300 grand in revenue, but guess what? They don't have any customers. They don't have anything, right? So what I would rather do is have the crap. Dude, my first work truck was a Chevy Cavalier with a ladder on the roof. I would hide my car when I did estimates so that customers wouldn't see it. And then once I closed the deal, I'd go back and do the job in this little car. This is the path. Like stop spending all your money on your ego, which is really getting to the core of why people buy shiny, fancy things too quick. It's because they want to impress all the haters that said you'll fail in business. And then they buy a new

truck they can't afford and say, see, see, I didn't fail in business. I'm really smart. And they're screwing themselves. They're screwing themselves. They have fancy equipment. They know the PSI of the thing and they know the throttle valve of the muffler gasket. They know every technical thing you could ever know. They do not know how to get their phone to ring or how to sell stuff to those people for the highest possible price. Absolutely. I mean, they came from a company that had those nice vehicles. They quit a job and they said, I want my nice vehicle. This is what I work in. And they're a worker bee. They're not necessarily an owner. And I see all these guys exactly like you said on these Facebook communities. And they all say the same thing. They're like, oh, I would just, they take a 20 year old opener and they're wondering where to get the part for it rather

than replacing it. And they always say you're ripping people off, but yet they don't have a pot to piss it. It's lonely at the top. You know, but yet they don't have a pot to piss it. It's lonely at the top. It's very, very lonely. You have a red ax on your back. Everybody wants a piece of you. Nobody wants to say good things about you because they're like, this guy comes in, he takes market share. He doesn't play by the same rules as us. He comes in, he spends more money. He pays guys more. He drives nicer trucks. How does he do it? Well, I charge my customers more. A perceived value of the customer minus the cost you charge them is the overcharge. Now, if it's the opposite, if the perceived value is more than the cost, I get 10 reviews

out of it. If it's equal, they're very happy. If it's less than I overcharge them and then they feel bad. Do you know how many times they get complaints? It's less than 1%. But when you're doing 7,000 jobs a month, six to seven on a bad month, 5,000, 1% is still 50 people. Have you ever heard the story? This is like a scientific study and they took some monkeys and they put them in like this cage and they put a ladder

in the middle of the cage and they put bananas at the top of the ladder. And so what would happen was the monkey would run up the ladder to get the banana and they would blast it down with a fire hose, like just smack the thing down. And then the next one would go up, smack it. Next one would go up, smack it. Right before it gets the bananas, they would just smash these monkeys.

This is a horrible thing they did, but the lesson is profound. And what they did is they took one of the monkeys out. So then none of the monkeys would even try. They would not even try because they knew like they're going to get blasted, right? They take one monkey out and put a new monkey in. That monkey would go up to get the bananas because he didn't know that he would get blasted. But guess what would happen? All the other monkeys would grab that one and pull them down. They wouldn't even let them try to get the bananas. And so like in a sea of five foot ten people, if you're six foot two and you stand out like a sore thumb, the question people should

be asking is how do I level up? What is Tommy doing? How can I mirror it? How can I hack some of the things he's doing? How can I learn with him? How can I buy this guy a steak dinner and pick his brain? Cause he would love to nerd out about business. Instead of asking that, they want to pull you back down because it's comfortable where they're at. They don't want to take the risk. And that's what I was picturing in my head as you were saying what you just said. Well, a lot of people in a lot of industries, they have their, look, there's light cheating and stuff going on. And I'll tell you, people do think most people don't have any idea on why they charge what they charge. They go, this is the industry average they charge too much.

And my only thing about that is they have no idea what it costs to run a real business. They say, Tommy, why would I pay $200 per guy per month for a CRM? What are you crazy? That's highway robbery. Well, that's why I charge what I charge because my customers know when I'm on their way. It sends them a profile picture. It tells them a little bit of background about them. It tells me how long they were at that job. They go, Tommy, how do you spend that much for acquisition? That's nuts. You got to charge your customer so much money. Well, I know how much it costs to make money on Google. And I know it's a bidding war on Google and I got to be able to compete at the top end to get the most customers that take care of my employees. Well, you probably created 50 or a hundred times more jobs than most other garage door companies.

There's not just the money and you're bad for money. The ripple effect of you operating a business that big is profound on your entire local community. The jobs you create, the restaurants, the mortgages being paid because of the paychecks from you, all the vehicles that you're buying from local sale, like everything. You're just, you're creating this rising tide for everybody. That's why capitalism is freaking awesome. That's the point. That's why America is the wealthiest country in the history of mankind is because of this idea that you can be six foot two. You can go get the bananas. Ain't nobody going to pull you down except yourself and your own brain.

Yeah. And you're right. It's innovative and it's always, and I'm not unsatisfied with where we're at, but we decided to pump the brakes for eight months and just say no more growth into new markets unless it's by M&A. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna take way more market share. We are going to literally, I mean, next year we're gonna reject and do 12 to 14 million in Phoenix alone.

So you start thinking, I tell everybody we're in all these different states and they go, holy cow, how much are you doing? But we're not even scratching the surface in the areas we're in because we kept growing new, new, new. And people go, why do you grow to a new area when you're not even dominating the areas you're at? And my number one explanation for that is I'm planting seeds. I know it's going to take a while. I got to water them. I got to fertilize them. I got to get enough sun on them. It's going to take me two to three years per seed for it to start to blossom. And the fact is that I knew going into this, I wanted a lot of seeds planted. Now it's time to

water and fertilize them. And then I'm going to, you know, in eight months to a year, I'm going to start planting again. But that's my best analogy is there's no way to get around that unless you do M&A. And then you got the two years you're buying into that. You got the guys. You just got to get the guys better. You've already got a name for yourself. But when you go in from scratch, nobody's ever heard of you. Nobody's seen your trucks.

You don't know what marketing works the best in that area. You don't know people are more responsive to Google. A lot of people, you know, in Albuquerque, it's a weird market. I can tell you. It's not like anything I've ever been in. I've heard Utah, Salt Lake City is a lot like Albuquerque in that different things work. Some people there are a lot more about the church, and that's the best way to go about being involved in those communities. But I want to dive into – there's so many questions.

I could go on. Me and you could do this all for days at a time because I love, rather than going through these questions, I just kind of wanted to have a conversation. And it's so easy with you because you've got such a wealth of knowledge and the people you've worked with and the people that you're involved with. I want to talk a lot about some of the different things you offer with SendJim and basically talk about your consulting as well. So you showed me send Jim and I love the product. I love the platform and I love the voicemail drops. I love everything that it does go through it and tell everybody about what that does. Okay, sure. Thank you. By the way, it does two things. It helps you get new customers in a proactive way, and it helps you keep customers through some of what we call relationship marketing tools. So what I mean by that is we have a couple

core sexy features that people freak out when they see. Two of them for customer acquisition, the first one's called Radius Bomb. So imagine this, and depending on what kind of business you have, but imagine you could use like a Google map and you could zoom in on one particular neighborhood or even one individual home, or you could zoom around and use a polygon and draw a circle or a polygon shape around only the lakefront homes of this one lake or just the gated community over here that's on the golf course, or just this one, you know, super influential homeowner's house. That's the president of the homeowners association? What if you could, in five seconds, circle their house, click a button, and send them physical direct mail? That would be really cool, right? Well, that's what Radius Bomb does. But the way we

make it more powerful is we make the mail highly personalized because you can put a picture of people's house on the card if you want, or you could take a screenshot like the entryway to the subdivision where those people live and put it on a card that goes to everybody in that one gated golf course community, which is insane, right? So as they're going through their junk mail, they see the card, bam,

it's got the entryway to their own gated community on it. They're gonna read the card, right? So it does that. And then the second part that makes it more effective, it depends on your industry, It depends on lots of things, but these postcards are five to 10 times more effective than regular direct mail. It's because of the personalization, the hyper-targeting, and then the third one is multi-touch. So little businesses are terrible with direct mail. They're terrified of direct mail because they go do an EDDM campaign or they go buy a list

and bomb out 10,000 cards. They spend a whole bunch of money and nothing happens. It's because they're doing it wrong. They're not picky enough on who they're targeting. They're not personalizing the piece enough with a good offer and some other personalization. But most importantly, probably, is the fact that they're not hitting on multiple touches. Well, our system will automatically send a card, you know, once a week for three or four or five weeks or every two weeks for three months, whatever makes sense for you. And that's what Radius Bump does.

So you can sit in your underwear, circle a thing, click a button and a whole sequence of direct mail that's personalized is gonna just go to them. It's insane. The other piece of technology on getting customers is called neighbor mailings. And our system can integrate with several different CRMs, and we're looking to hook into more.

But you don't have to use a CRM for this to work. But imagine you do a garage door install for Bob, or you clean carpet for Sally. When you're done with that job, our system will automatically take Sally's address, and we're not going to send her something, but we're going to pull a list of the closest 15 neighbors or the closest five neighbors or the closest 50 neighbors. And we're going to send them a personalized sequence of card after card after card talking about how you just did work for Sally. These are very simple, but very powerful tactics. And then the last piece that we offer is the relationship marketing stuff. And you can send your customers Christmas brownies, and you can send them iTunes

gift cards. You can use it to send your employees gifts. You can send them Amazon gift cards. You can send them caramels and chocolates and cookies and popcorn and all kinds of just little gifts, along with a greeting card in a box. And it can be automated. So every customer that spends over 500 bucks with you or over a thousand, bam, they get gourmet sea salt caramels with a thank you card that says, you know, Sally, thank you so much for letting us clean your carpet. You know, we'd really appreciate some referrals and a Google review, stuff like that. So those are the three big components.

And we do offer ringless voicemails as well as maybe a fourth component. And you use those for your past customers. Imagine instead of physically dialing 600 past customers to check in with them, imagine recording a 20 second voicemail, clicking a button and at the instantaneously, all 600 of those people get a voicemail and a missed call from you without their phone ringing. That's called a ringless voicemail. We call it voicemail bomb. And that's what we do as well. So one of the things that I want to go over, I love the mailings and just everything you're doing is just incredible. I love the concept.

I mean, literally, I always say it's 10 times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. And the same thing exists with employees. It's so hard to send more money on recruiting than just keeping the current ones you have happy because something like 86% of people are unhappy. But there's certain compliance issues that you should start, everybody out there should start adding onto their agreements on the back of their invoices

that it's okay to communicate down the line with you. Anybody can do mailing, but via text message, via voicemail drops, via phone calls with a programmatic dialer versus just dialing once at a time. Because once you got that compliance in there, you've got a really good list and you own that list. And that's what builds the value of your company.

When you go to sell it, if you have, like right now I have 175,000 clients in my list. I mean, the fact that I could reach out to them on demand anytime for any new service I had. Now, here's the cool concept, Josh. This is something I'm working on. And I think this is the coolest thing ever is reaching out to my clients, but using another company. So what I mean by that is I can reach out to my clients and say, it's time to winterize your garage door. Here's how we do it. And by the way, this is the bug company that we use to do it. And here's what you need to know from them. So now they're paying me every lead they get to use my list, but I'm not necessarily

endorsing them a ton. I'm just saying, this is the company I use. I love these guys. I'm endorsing them. But at the same time, I'm not promoting them. It's not an email. It's literally before winter comes in Arizona and it gets to be, you know, 29 degrees is probably the worst we're going to get. But the concept that you have is basically, and the way I love this is I just talked to Josh earlier about my, Joshua, about my Christmas light business is I just love the fact to be able to reach out to customers in different ways. So you're more likely to get it when you can get a referral. It's almost like a personal referral Josh's business. When I send out to a company that we just, or a homeowner that we just

did their Christmas lights, Josh is going to mail everybody on that street and say, look at your neighbor's perfect Christmas lights. And they all know this person. They're on the HOA committee that their kids play baseball together. So any unorthodox way of hitting the customers is just pure genius. And whether it's partner marketing or doing what Josh does with the mailers and the voicemail drops, I can tell you these things really, really work well. You got to hit them with the right message and you need to know the right demographics. And the more data you can grab on people, the better. And I will tell you guys out there that are listening, the more data you can grab about the customer, were they in their 50s or 60s?

Were they young? Did they have a nest in their home? Because that means they're going home automation. The more steps you grab, the more things like Josh could bring to you because you want to be able to segment your database. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then I want to talk about your consulting and get your last thoughts. Sure. Yeah. Well, everything you're saying is so true. And I know that for smaller companies, sometimes all this stuff feels like overwhelming, but let me simplify it for everybody. The largest asset that you own is your current book of business. That is the most

important thing you have. And unfortunately, most everybody, like 95 plus percent of quote unquote self-employed service companies don't even come remotely close to leveraging that asset enough. They don't call their customers enough. They don't email them enough. They don't stay top of mind. They don't do it. They're just not doing it. They do it a little bit, then they get weird and they'll make 20 calls here and then they get distracted. They're doing something else. They don't have a plan to engage their current book of business. When you do that, you literally, it's free money. It's free money. We just had a guy this summer sent out 1400 ringless voicemails to people that have not hired his company in 18 months. It took him

half an hour worth of work. He clicked the button. He booked $33,000 worth of work. That's free money. And everybody listening to this, if you have customers that are cold or you haven't seen them in a while, if you're not leveraging that, that's pure madness. Before you even think about all the super advanced SEO, magical unicorn fairy dust marketing tactics and the three-step Facebook ad ninja trick. None of that crap matters if you're not doing the foundational baseline stuff, like engaging with your actual customers over and over again, like number one. Like I view it like a bucket with holes in it. And so people get obsessed with trying to get new customers, but they put no effort, budget, money, thought, strategy at all into how to keep those people in their bucket

forever. That's insane. It's insane. So I don't even remember exactly what you asked me, but I got really passionate there. So I just want to encourage people to focus first on what's first, which is making sure you're keeping your customers in your bucket, making sure you're squeezing every ounce of value out of that list that you can possibly get, then add layers of complexity gradually on top of it. A hundred percent. That is so well done. So email marketing and keeping those customers coming back is the lowest common denominator. That's the easiest. It's such low hanging fruit. I bumped in, this is super one minute story. I bumped into a guy last week at the gas station and he owns a company called Moxie. They do bugs and just pest termination, whatever. And he goes, Tommy, I know we've been talking about this for years now, but he goes, I have about 6,000 people on my list.

And he goes, I've had so many clients come back to me through our email marketing campaign. He goes, it's nuts. He goes, I'm embarrassed that I haven't done it. And he goes, I was actually going to talk to you about leveraging each other's list. And I said, absolutely. I'm open to that. And that's what I was explaining to you, Josh, is kind of the concept of using each other's partnership marketing, because I believe partnership marketing is by far with the kind of guys me and you are,

we could go out and we know a lot of business owners that we can bring a lot of value and we could use each other's lists and we can actually, we know how to actually, the hardest part is tracking this stuff, but it's pretty easy once you get the basics down and you can build a very, very, very, a more successful business than the top guy on Google would be the partnership marketing guy. 100%, I believe in that. The top guy for every search term on Google in your market. If you master partnership marketing and do the things like Josh is mentioning right now, you will be far more successful. And it's not as hard as you think. And it's a lot cheaper, but it takes time and it takes discipline to stay involved in it.

So Josh, real quick, talk to people if they want to get ahold of you and find out more, if they got a million dollars less and they love what you're saying, they want to grow. What's the next steps to get ahold of you? Well, a good way to follow what I do is to listen to my podcast. If you're already a podcast listener, I know people that listen to my podcast are now listening to all of your podcasts. They're like binging on them. Just search for it on iTunes called the Quick Talk Podcast with Joshua Latimer. And you can also reach out on Facebook. You just type in my name, Joshua Latimer and follow what we do. Then you'll get all the information you need if you have interest in tracking me down by doing one of those two things. Okay. And one of the things I always ask is give me three books that you would say

would be the most impactful for the listeners out there. Oh, sure. Yeah. Well, the first one that comes to mind is The One Thing by Gary Keller. And the opening quote in the beginning of that book is, if you chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither one. And it has to do with focus. It has to do with what is the one big domino that if you focused on accomplishing that one next thing, that by doing it, it would eliminate or make unnecessary a whole bunch of other things.

And we all run around like circus monkeys or chickens with our heads cut off when we try to grow our business, including me. And we need to remember that we only need to do one big thing at a time and we need to stay focused on it. So that's a great book, super popular. Another book that I love is Expert Secrets, which is by Russell Brunson.

And it just talks about how to create a tribe. How do you create like a manifesto? And really what you're doing, Tommy, and what I've done is like, it's not about them following me. What it's about is people like us are going in this direction and like building a movement. So if you have any interest in like being an influencer or starting your own podcast, that book is the book you have to read. It's unbelievable. It's called Expert Secrets. It's actually a free book. You just pay the shipping. And then the third book is Dream 100. Or I'll do a combo. Dream 100 by Dana Derricks or Giftology by John Rulon. My friend John Rulon is a professional gift giver.

And he's a professional networker. And it's just, it'll take too long to explain everything. But it's crazy what you can do to build high level relationships. If you get a little bit strategic and you target the hundred people that you need to have a relationship with, whether it's builders in your area or realtors or whoever, you build this list of these influential people. And then these books talk about the strategy and how to build authentic relationships with all those people. So giftology, what was the other one? I know I got the other two expert secrets, giftology and the one, but I've read that by Gary Keller. And, what was the other one? I know I got the other two, Expert Secrets, Giftology, and the one, but I've read that by Gary Keller. And then what's the other one?

The other one's called Dream 100 book, The Dream 100 book by Dana Derricks. So yeah, that book's amazing. That book used to sell for $2,000. It was just a regular book, but the guy, he's a marketer and he sold it for $2,000. It's a normal price of a book now, but it's a very unique take on that whole strategy of how do you be strategic in getting relationships

with people that will help grow your business. So there's 12 chapters that I subscribed to in the ultimate sales machine. And one whole chapter was being top of mind all the time so that you're there for your top clients. It's the 80, 20 Pareto rule of the exact same thing. I can't wait to read this book that's 100% all about gifts because in the book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, he talks about getting stupid gifts like they're fun. They're desktop gifts. What is that game called that you play and you turn them and you match up the colors, the Rubik's Cube? Rubik's Cube. And he goes, you can buy those things for less than a buck. He goes, send them in a FedEx package so they get opened by the CEO. Right.

If you still can't figure out why you're not using us yet, give me five minutes to show you why. Or he'll send them a tape measure and he'll go, tape measures, 50 cents, just real cheap ones with their logo on it and say, are you measuring the success of the garage door company you're using now? Because if not, you need to definitely give us a shot, you know, and it's every three months he's hitting them. And he goes in the book, he talks about eventually somebody is going to screw up. And he goes, if you were to get your top hundred clients, if you were just to get five of them or the biggest, let's say five out of 10 of the biggest ones in your market, what would that do to your business? And see, I'm more of a transactional business, but I do have custom builders that if I pick up one, they can be giving me a million dollars a

year easily custom doors. So, well, you, you might be a transactional business, but you are not transactionally minded, which is really weird you said that because everybody that's broke that has a little business that's not working, they're all trying to make money today to buy groceries and free. They're terrified to play the long game. Some of these relationships, we landed a $300,000 annual cleaning account with General Motors. The way we did that was through relationship marketing for 18 months. It might've been longer than that. My partner did that, Chris, but you know, you got to play the long game. So I, I'm more relationally minded, not transactionally minded. I don't care about making a dollar right now. I care about the

relationships in the future. That's great advice. And if you could create that. So I think a lot of small businesses, they do great on relationships, but that's the only thing they do while they go to the city of commerce and they go all do this stuff and they meet people and that's their only business funnel. Whereas I look at one garage door, I fix it. It's done for 15 years. But if I could get back in their door and create a relationship that they use us for a lot of things. And it's a lot more difficult to do that than people think. But that's my next year. My next year is to say, I want you to confide in us and use us for everything that you're interested in, whether it's a bug company, but I want to have like Google does Google guarantee program that if you screw up, then Google's going to pay the customer 2000 bucks, but you're not going to

be able to advertise again on Google. So I have that relationship with my painter. If he makes a mistake, he'll go back and fix the same thing because he gets so much business from us. But Josh, I like to leave it with one last, one final thought. This is it. You got one mind map to share with these people that are listed. There's everybody from a hundred million dollars down to a $10,000 a year right now. So let's make it one final thought here. Okay, my final thought, encouragement, motivation, inspiration, chest bump, fist bump, noogie high five to everybody listening to this

is to remember that there are a ton of people, a lot dumber than you, that already have what you want. And so you can do this. Like you can do it. You don't have to be a Harvard MBA, ninja, perfection, everything, know everything person. It starts with you understanding the truth that you're fully capable and competent to achieve whatever it is that you're trying to do. Yes, you have to put in the work. Yes, there's going to be some pain and suffering. But one of my family slogans that my kids all have t-shirts, it says this on it. It says, it doesn't matter how hard it is. It only matters if it's worth it.

I love that quote. Doesn't matter how hard it is, ladies and gentlemen, it just matters if it's worth it. Wow. Think about that when it comes to your diet today. I just had a cupcake earlier. As long as it was worth it, I guess you're good. Josh. Hey, I love this man. We, I'd have you on every three months. So we can just pick different topics. Cause I think anybody listening, got a ton out of it. Just your, your, your experience, your knowledge, your fortitude, the fact that you know so much with the technology side of it, you've worked with a ton of people. You relate well to these guys. You are in the field. Blue collar, man, is what it's about.

And I think that everybody listening is in the blue collar industry. And a lot of us, a lot of the people I have on are so smart and so successful, they don't remember those days. And they go, culture, culture, culture, culture. And you talked a little bit about that, but I'm like, I know I need a culture, but I've only got two employees. I can barely sleep at night. I want a good culture, but what does a culture mean to two guys?

So this was great. And I really, really, really, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate you being on today. Thank you, Tommy. All right. See you guys later. Talk soon. Hey guys, I just wanted to say thank you

for listening to the podcast. And I wanted to talk real quick about the new book I have coming out in November. It's called the home service millionaire. And I discuss everything it takes to hire the right people, train your salespeople, how to get tax breaks. It talks about how to sell your company for the most amount of money. We've got a lot of great contributorships coming on. Everybody from Paul Akers about how to go lean to how you do sales from enterprise, how to get the best write-offs in the industry and save a ton on taxes and actually make your company look more professional. I got the CEO of Service Titan. I got the CEO of Valpak. We've got great people on here that know

everything there is to know about marketing and Google. And there's basically no secrets we left out of this book. Literally, there's people that have read it so far say, I cannot believe you're giving all this information away. And the reason I did that is I just feel like you guys could just take each one of these gold nuggets and run with them. I mean, the ultimate goal of the book is to make sure that everybody is successful and makes money. If I could contribute to your lives, then that would be amazing. And I feel like it's the least I can do. And I really appreciate listening to the podcast. I hope you enjoy the book. Go to Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com and pre-order your book today. Thank you.