The Home Service Expert Podcast - Getting To Know The Man Behind The Book Home Service Millionaire

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

In this special episode of the Home Service Expert, Tommy is interviewed by Home Service Expert’s Coach, Kenyon Curtis. about Tommy’s new book, “The Home Service Millionaire.”  In this episode, we talked about marketing, systems, leadership...

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. Hey there, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert Podcast. Today's

going to be a little bit different. We're actually going to interview me, Tommy Mello, about the book we have coming out called The Home Service Millionaire. And Kenyon is going to be interviewing me. Kenyon, do you want to explain to them what we're doing here and the point of this whole podcast? Absolutely, Tommy. Thanks for that introduction. It's really cool because we've done this before. There was actually another interview I did with you. We're going to talk about the book, about why did you come up with this book? What do you want people to get out of it? And also, how they can get the most out of reading it.

Yeah. It's kind of funny because I started the book over two years ago and I had a coach that really wasn't the type of coach I was looking for to help me get it started. And I had a finished product almost a year ago now and gave it to a dozen people, which you do when you write a book. And it just wasn't everything I wanted it to be. It didn't give enough information because I wanted to be technical yet strategic. And my life has really been an obstacle. I mean, I've had a lot of things, a lot of failures went into this book. The reason why I wrote it was mostly because I don't want people to go down the same path that I went down on so many things when it comes to people stealing from me, bad hires, drugs actually happening on jobs. There were so many things that I made mistakes on. And I document many of them in the book and really show people the right way

to make money in business. I love you sharing that concept because while you were explaining that, I just realized it seems like everybody's kind of in their own journey of figuring these things out. And man, there is so much information out there that can help make things easier in their business. So what, like going into your journey, like how long did it take you to figure this thing out? Because you've got business down and you're still looking for ways to improve. I know that about you. How long did it take you to come to a point where you thought, hey, you know what? I've got more of it figured out than I have. How long did that part take you? A few years or what? It took a lot of documentation and understanding the mistakes

that I've made to come up with a real idea and concept behind the book. And then it was refined, refined, refined. And the difference between me and a lot of other people that write books is I'm constantly reading. I mean, literally thousands of books. I mean, in my Audible, I'm up to 800. And on my bookshelf, I probably got... Every podcast I have, I buy all their books they recommend plus their books. So I'm up to well over a thousand books that I've read. And I've really condensed everything I've learned and everything I've applied into this book. And I think it's a great place to start when you're going into business, or if you've already got a successful business, because it addresses things like mindset and attracting A-plus employees that you can keep on board and really creating a better

marketing system and understanding your numbers. And I'm not going to get into the details of understanding all your numbers, but I will tell you that knowing the score is so important. And I play a lot of sports, Kenyon. And if I didn't know the score or... I went golfing with my dad yesterday, for example, and I wanted to beat him. And I knew exactly what our score was the whole time so I could win the match. And we had a blast. It was super fun. And, you know, he's got me by 30 years, so I was able to beat him. But I at least knew what was going on the whole time. And no matter what hole we were on, I knew what was going on.

And that's so important in business, and people miss that. They do. They don't seem to pay attention to the challenges. I know that you have a much different approach to your challenges now that you did back then. How did you used to approach them? Because I know we probably have a lot of listeners and people that are maybe doing it their way or whatever. It could be work and could not be.

But how did you approach your challenges before? It seems like now you're more strategic. But how did you do it before you learned that? Like a problem would come up, what would happen? Like drugs on the site, right? Drugs on a job site. Like how would you deal with that back then? Well, back then I was a big person in people. I would say I got the wrong people. I got the wrong manager. I got the wrong drug test done. And I really blamed it a lot on people. I walk in and I go, you know, this is crap. And I fire people and I was angry at work. And it was really a bad place to be. I remember taking a deep breath before I walked in the front door because I knew

there was going to be a slew of problems. And over time, I just had a conversation with my mom. My mom actually works for me. It's funny. She moved out in 2010 from Michigan. And I've had everything happen. I know how to work with family. I know the obstacles that are related to that. I discussed that in the book. But regardless of that, she kept saying to me at one point, Tommy, the solution is Bill and the solution is this guy and this guy and this guy. You need to get a better guy here. And I said, that's not scalable. They get hit by a bus or they win the lottery. That person's gone. My Lord and Savior, the people that saved my business, the grand finale of my business, boom, they're gone. It sounds like you and her were thinking the same thing, right? Like replacing this person or this person's the problem. And she would say, hey,

yeah, but also replace them with this person who's a better solution. That's kind of how you were doing it. Well, back then, it was a mistake to always hire the better, try to find a better person. What I found was it was the systems. What caused a person to end up on a job doing drugs? Well, drug tests became a big thing. Customer surveys became a big thing. Understanding of a guy with speeding became a big thing by the systems. Systems dictate everything now in my business. And the numbers are black and white, allow me to make really quick, fast, precise decisions. And that was never like that. I mean, 2006 to 2012, I would say, it really was a nightmare, Kenyon. So what got you to the point of finding something different? I believe

that the change happens because of one of two things. Either the problem got so big, you had to do something about it, or you finally just desire to make an improvement. I think with you it was a little bit of both, but what would you say that made the shift? Where was the turning point in that? I would say this is going to be crazy, but I found someone that I worked really, really well with that picked up some of the missing pieces because I'm really good at offense, but I never really had a good defense, like screening the employees, making sure to do drug tests, and very,

very good background checks and really putting systems in place. And when I found somebody that was a little more micro to add to my macro, and I really did get tired of it. I got sick of coming into work, finding people that were dating and people that were... 8 people were on a cigarette break with an office full of 10 people. And I'm like, who's answering the phones? And we missed phone calls. And slowly, we started... I didn't know the problems were happening. So I got a couple systems in place. I remember when we had a call cap. I added a call cap one year. And call cap just tells you if you missed a call or not, and if it booked or not. And all of a sudden, I started looking at stats and how many calls were actually answering and how many calls were booking. Because I was

one of those guys, believe it or not, that used to say, we got to be booking at least 90% of the calls. When I'm in the office, I hear them. we're booking all of them well little to my knowledge we were booking around 50% when we turn on call cap and that's no joke and it was scary well that's when I think I got an epiphany saying things got to change and they got to change fast because I'm spending all this money on marketing but we're not even booking the phone calls mm-hmm your marketing really wasn't helping I mean it was helping drive the phone calls but you're not even booking the phone calls. Your marketing really wasn't helping. I mean, it was helping drive the phone calls, but you're missing a lot in that percentage. So much. I remember I had a gal named Kathy and she was an all-star. She'd have people on hold

all the time. She had three people on hold. And I mean, you cannot make a successful business on the booking of the calls when you have a person that's got three people on hold constantly. And I had no idea how much she was going through at the time until a few years ago when I saw how much of an all-star she actually was. So really what happens sometimes is we push some really good A players away because there's no other A players or because you're just overwhelming them. And I had no idea that I was doing that. Yes. I mean, this is obviously something that affected you because you were like, okay, this is painful, right?

You hate coming to work, walking into problems. But then that's a really good point. We're like, you said it, but it pushes away the A players. But what do you think their attitude, like how is this really affecting them? It was a very depressing atmosphere. You know, people do one of two things. They do it to avoid fear.

They come to work to get the euphoria of what they feel like. And most of my decisions came of avoiding the negative. I try to dodge bullets all the time. I don't want to deal with negative people, man. I'm always around. Now I've surrounded myself around an amazing, happy, successful team that we row in the same direction we get over things, but it wasn't always that way. And I think one of the biggest things to my success was just having two ears and one mouth. I listen to people and I implement really, really fast. And I think I'm in

the fetal stages of what we're becoming because I really do want to make this garage door company into a billion dollar a year company. And I know we're on our way to getting there, but we're still not even close to the end of the marathon. I know there's going to be a lot more things that change. And I had a guy tell me a long time ago that people that'll take you to a million might not be the same to take you to 10 million. And those 10 million might not be the same people that take you to 100 million and so on and so forth. So it's something to think about because small businesses feel so loyal to the people that bring you to the next level. But loyalty, it could kill a business. And I just have to say, I don't like to fire people at all, but I do know that I expect results.

I'm going on a little rabbit hole, I know that, but I award people and I put this in the book, not on tenure, not on how long they've worked here, but on results. And somebody can move up in the first year past somebody that's worked here in 10 years. Right. Well, look, let's get into a little bit because I really love the passion you have for people. It's one thing that... I don't know who sees that in you, but it's something that I've noticed. I watch how people do things. And I watch how you work with people and how you talk to people. And look, you're a big guy, not only in stature, but you're a big guy in business. But man, from my perspective, it seems like you've stayed grounded to your roots of just really trying to help other people out. In fact, a big example was your market manager over in Texas. We talked about him the other day. What was his name? The one that's from

here. Travis. The reason I love this story... I talked to Travis one day. I was talking... Because I like to pick people's brains and ask different questions and dig a little deeper into what's going on to find different answers. And I was chatting with him and I said, so what are you doing here? And he says, well, I used to be Tommy's competition. I was like, really? And he's like, yeah, but he told me that you were actually helping him along the way or something. Is that, that was true. Was it like, weren't you trying to help him or guide him a little bit in his business? Yeah. We had several conversations about how to increase his marketing and how to be able to not necessarily charge more money,

but deliver more value, which then the outcome would be more money. Because I think for a long time, Travis never understood how much it costs to run his business. Therefore, he ended up selling it. And I'm glad he did because he's working for me. And I think he's going to do great. I really do. He's a go-getter. He's an amazing person. He's an amazing me and I think he's going to do great. I really do. He's, he's a go getter. He's an amazing person. He's an amazing dad and amazing husband. But I think that we really compliment each other well, but I think that most companies that I meet, they don't charge the right price for the value they deliver because they just

go with the industry average and they don't know where to go from there. And that was where Travis was. And that's what we talked about. Okay. Now it's kind of cool because he like, and so here's, here's Travis. He's in your market in Arizona. He's your competition in garage doors. Why were you helping him? Why were you having those conversations with him? You know, this is kind of funny. I was golf. I went to talk off the other day with the biggest competitor, me and Daryl. His name's Daryl. His name's

Daryl. He is my nemesis when it comes to business, but he's still one of my great, great friends. I got to tell you, we went to Topgolf and we discussed certain things in the industry. He told me he's 55, I think, maybe 52, somewhere in there. And I'm, I'm 35. So he kind of really mentors me and I mentor him in certain ways. But he said, Tommy, he said, if I were you, I'd really think about buying a building. I made money in grassroots, but I really made all my money in real estate. And here we are moving into a nice new building because I took his advice. So what I've learned is be close to your competitors. I mean, there's no reason. There's enough out there for everybody. You don't have to be selfish.

I love to talk to my competitors and make sure they know. Heck, I even tell people, and when Travis had his own company, I'd say, if you want to go to another company and get a second quote, go to Daryl or go to Travis because these guys are at least honest

and they're going to take care of you. They stand behind their work. I just don't like people that go in and they really ruin it for everybody and they play these dirty games of leaving bad reviews for people or talking bad about other companies. We don't do that here at A1 Garage or Service. And I don't advise that for any business. That is super cool.

I love that attitude. To me, that's a mindset of abundance. It's a positive outlook of what's going on instead of being bogged down by the problems and challenges. You hear some people complaining about their competitors and stuff like this. But man, you just embrace it. And a lot of that attitude has been one of the reasons that you came out with this book. Because this book is really meant to help any business owner, right? Whether they're a quarter million a year, 1.5 a year, no matter where they're at. If someone is going to buy this book,

what was your intent in putting it out? When you were writing this and you were thinking of maybe business owners that could read it and it could help them out, who were you writing this book for? What type of person, like the avatar, right? What type of person are you writing this book for? Well, it's called The Home Service Millionaire. And these lessons that I've learned apply to any business. It's the same concept. I mean, whether you have a real estate business, and I'm just using this as an example of if you're tiny or if you're huge, Keller Williams is still doing the same thing as the smallest broker out there. It's the same fundamentals that get you to grow to the biggest you can be. So it still goes back to the same concept. I mean, hire A-plus players, turn on a lead machine, get your mindset right, make sure to retain great employees. I mean,

people are what make the business, but the system is what dictates how they come on board and how they stay on board and how they know where they're graded. They should know if they're getting an A plus or a C, then you should be able to explain that within the manuals and everything they're going to learn. So I would say anybody could take a lot out of this book. I definitely wanted it to be somebody looking to get into the home service business, somebody that's maybe young in the home service business that sees themselves going in eight different directions. But I also, when I was at the Clopay convention, I went into a room that was all about people selling their business. And I mean, Kenyon, this building, this room was just overloaded. There's people standing around, there's people taking notes. I mean, it was crowded. And I went

into the next one because they had two of these. And it was overwhelmingly busy. It was all about how to sell your business. So I just realized, and I get all these questions, Kenyon. I get the same question. How do I get good people? How do I pay my people? How do I sell my business? So we really went out. We found people that are way smarter than me. I got a guy that over a billion dollars of transactions that tells us exactly how to sell your business. So the questions that I received over the last two years in my podcast and just the people I've helped, I mean, those are the way that directed me into helping put this book together. Got it. Yeah. And you really collaborated with a lot of people. I mean, the names who is on here as contributors to the book is, it's impressive.

And I don't know this, but it seems like this book possibly has more contributors than any other book that is like this. Is that accurate? Well, I did a rough count yesterday night, and there's 11 contributors. And there's people in this book that are just the godfathers of what they do. So I'm not a pro at financing. We sell it and we sell it a lot, but nowhere near 60%. So we had a guy named Darius Levers talk about how his business sells more finance than anybody, I think, in the United States or North America. And Alan Rohr is an amazing woman and she just

knows finance like the back of her hand and how to keep your books in order on a weekly basis. And she explains all that in the book. So what we did in this book is I really sought out the best of the best. I really did it. It was hard. This is what took the most time is to find people that were not only smarter than me, but have done it and done it over and over and over. And their reputation is just flawless when it comes to the things I had them talk about. I think that the biggest factor of the book is that it's not Tommy Mello. It's a combination of me asking questions and getting the best of the best to contribute. And we put something really, really spectacular together that I feel that no matter who you are in any home service business, and a lot of other businesses apply, this book will definitely help you see things

in a different perspective. And if anything, it's just a way to open your eyes to what's out there because a lot of companies don't have service agreements in home service. And I think that that's a mistake. And in the book, we explain that. A lot of people never heard of Amazon Home Services. We define that and explain that. We talk a lot about the changes in Google. And these things, if you don't take advantage of them, your business will suffer point blank. It's that simple. Right. It's so crazy. I see so many people just struggling. I used to do it myself until like you. I think it took me a little longer to get in the game of real mentoring and coaching. But man, I used to struggle with sales and struggle in business in a lot of ways.

And I thought I had all the answers because I was like a lot of business owners, right? Pretty smart guys. They have a pretty successful business. It seems to be working pretty good. But it just seems like most people aren't out there asking questions like you that can really like, okay, here's this challenge. Why don't I start asking somebody? Hey, here's this problem that come up. Who has a different solution? This book is really going to be amazing for people that are maybe to that point of pain,

where, hey, I'm finally ready to look for some answers. But also someone that has a business that's working, but they're wondering, why have I been stuck at the same revenue for three years? And just give them some different ways of looking at things and some different strategies. For anyone that picks up this book and reads it or listens to it, however they choose, what do you want them to get out of it? There's probably a lot, but if there was one message or one purpose of this book, what would you say it is? When I intended to write it, I wanted something that covered everything, the main things in business.

And unfortunately, I didn't want to write an Encyclopedia Britannica series. So it doesn't have everything, but it has the core values of what makes a successful home service company, as well as some strategy with tactics. So I was really afraid to ask for help. I didn't want to show anybody behind the scenes. I mean, it was- You probably didn't want to show anyone your weaknesses, right? I mean, isn't that a thing?

Like, I don't know. I think some people are afraid that that might show their weakness. Well, yeah, I knew. I always knew that my QuickBooks were a mess because that's not my strength. I always knew that the warehouse was not organized But I kept saying we're going to grow grow grow

We'll fix it later because I'm not good at that stuff And then I finally met a couple Different consultants that walked through the building And they gave me some advice And then I remember Audible came out And I'm like wait a minute Now I can listen to the books while I'm driving Or when I'm on a plane and I don't have to always read. So that like that 10 times my learning and all this came together.

All of a sudden I embrace my weaknesses. I think that's the biggest difference of what really was the defining factor of my success is when I really embraced my weaknesses and I learned to, what I say is when you're on a boat and it's sinking and you got to get, you're still going several miles. You got to find the biggest holes and fix them. Well, me, I avoided those holes. I was like, I hate that hole. That hole sucks.

And it's causing me a lot of money, but I don't want to, I didn't want to look it in the eye. And in this book, it kind of forces you to do that. It forces you to know where you're at and to get help. And I'm a big fan. I really am, Kenyon, of whether it be a trainer when you work out or a golf trainer when you play golf or a business coach when you're in business is they see outside looking in. And this book really could be that mentor for you. It could be that outside person looking in, making you aware of these things and showing you what you need to be looking at.

And it's not the end-all be-all, but I do think it competes with some of the good books out there just because of the people we have in the book that are amazing contributors. You might call it like a compilation of some of the best ideas, the best ways of looking at things, and some of the most important parts best ways of looking thing at things and some of the the most important parts of the business that i think you're right that a lot of people they they overlook they just kind of put it off thinking they'll get around to it some other day and this really does bring it up and puts it in a spotlight of hey you've got a challenge here it is and here's a solution that's super powerful i mean we've got a lot of great feedback already on

on people that are uh you know doing a pre-edit and pre-read before the release. So we're super excited to get this out. I want to say one thing, Kenyon, because you reminded me of something. Because we have Ara Madesian, who actually is a CEO of Service Titan that wrote the forward and he put in a section about CRMs. But what he told me on a podcast was, with Service tight, it's really, really tough because there's 10 different ways to the top of the mountain. And he said, so we have a hard time really figuring out what the best ways are. Because everybody has a different style of the way they do payroll, the way they write

up a job, or the way they sell a home warranty. So we had to take the top three, every single facet of home service and really define what the best practices were. So I kind of really tagged along on the back of Aura and Service Titan and found the people that they chose. And those are the majority of the people that are contributors to the book because they did their research. We have 3,500 massively successful home service companies. I mean, massively. So what I did was I tagged along. I could go out and try to find this stuff,

but they know the innards. They know the business inside and out. They've got access to every one of their businesses. I mean, we got employee best of a month one time, but we didn't get best of the year. The guys that got best of the year, I mean, those are the guys that I learned from. You know why they were able to do the best of the month, the best of the year? It's because they have access to the back end and they actually saw

the results. So rather than me trying to figure it all out, I just wrote on the back of them. And that's how I chose these people because they know they were the best. Therefore, I knew they were the best. And I seen these people speak live in front of audience of 500 people plus about these things that we put in the book. And they took their time and made it so easily readable. The biggest difference about the book that I ask people to do is you get them reading a page or a chapter or the book,

you go out and you implement it. You have no time. This is today. You get started. You don't put it off till next week. You don't say, when I get back from Christmas vacation or when I get back from spring break or summer, you get started today

and you will see some huge impactful things happen in your business. And more importantly, you'll smile when you come to work. And that's the most important thing is you like what you do and you figure out why you're in business. Because if you can't find that, you should just go work for somebody else because business is difficult.

One out of 10 survive. And if you hate business and you hate people, go work for somebody. But if you love it, I'm telling you, this book is for you. It was so much fun to put together. I just get so excited and passionate about it.

Dude, I know I can tell. And this is one of the reasons I love working with you because it's just your attitude and outlook on things, just the way you look at life and the way you look at it, especially the way you look at business. You said something there that sparked a thought because there are a lot of people that think, man, I hate my business.

It's not working. I have so many problems. And they're looking to sell. They're looking to just shut down. They're looking to go to a nine to five because they don't think that they can cross that hump of loving their business again. But you did that, didn't you? Yeah, I was there. I remember I ran every job, Kenyon, and people would say, dude, you got to stop running the calls. And I'm like, no, I write the best tickets. I'm the best salesman. I get the most referrals. I get the most Yelps.

I can run eight jobs in a day. Most guys could only run four. We need me in the field. And finally I realized, holy cow, I took one step back to take 10 steps forward. And I got out and I started working on each technician. I started working on the business. I started working on the recruiting where I'd go out and I'd recruit two guys and I'd work with them. I still ran jobs, but two guys came with me. And all of a sudden I'm like, wow, this opened up so much time for me to work on the business. And it really made a huge difference on the bottom line is I was not the savior, the guy that made the ends meet anymore. I could leave town and the business still ran. And when that happened, it didn't run

all on your shoulders anymore, did it? Yeah. I mean, literally I was, I was holding everything on my shoulders and I mean, if I was taking all the mail, I was checking all the emails. I was working with the taxes. I was dealing with the registered contractors. I was dealing with the marketers every day. It was on my phone. When I went home, work started after I got done running jobs because I didn't mind running jobs. That was fun for me. But then I had to do all the administrative stuff. Then I'd have to do interviews. And then I'd have to order inventory.

And it's like, holy cow, how is one person or even two or three supposed to handle all this? At that point, you're probably wondering, what was your revenue at that time? I mean, I got to a couple, maybe two, three million bucks when I started to realize. I think at the tip iceberg of me being in control of most things, I was around five, which sounds crazy, but that was a lot of work. But here's the thing, Kenyon. The profit of five million was nowhere where it should have been. I mean, you should be 18 to 20 percent easily. I was not doing anything close to that.

So, yeah, I was doing a lot of revenue. So here you're doing $2 million in revenue, but just killing yourself. Oh, yeah. You can kill yourself so easily with even doing $5, $10 million. I mean, I know businesses, Kenyon, and this is true, that do $10 million, but they don't take anything home. They make a loss. And they still don't empower other people.

And I think the biggest, most important thing in business is to start empowering other people and giving them a chance to succeed without you staring over their shoulder see this is really cool i think this adds to the avatar you know someone that this book would really help out it could be that guy that maybe he's wondering if he should sell or not and he doesn't know how to get his passion back well the reason i can't get his passion back is because he doesn't realize that some of these things he's doing and working so hard and so many hours to try and make it work, there's an easier way to do it. I've talked to a few of the guys that we're working with on the home service expert side. And one of the things that stops so many of them... In fact, one of our guys, he's already

doing an extra $50,000 a year. One of the things that was stopping him is he thought it was going to be a lot harder to grow his business than it was. He thought, I've worked so hard to get to my quarter million or whatever he was doing. He thought, how much harder am I going to have to work to get to half a million? And some people, I think they have to work twice as hard or three times as hard because they're working hard to get where they're at. They think they've got to work harder to get up, but it's really not about that, is it? No, I mean, look, putting the right steps in place, here's your thing. Marketing is the last thing you do. And I explain this in the book, but I want to go over this basic principle real quick.

First, you need to have a good magnet for your avatar, which is your marketing. So you need marketing. Then you need to book the phone calls, close the deal, and charge the customer enough money to make what's called a profit. And you're in business for one reason, one reason only to make profit for the company. So some people forget that they don't understand that. So we go over that concept in the book. But the biggest thing I want you to take out of this is most businesses are not doing the best they could in those other things. Marketing is my passion. I mean, there's nothing more in life that I like more or love than marketing. And then it's followed by sales. Because I think I love sales. I remember asking several women on dates. That was me

selling myself. I remember me in a vehicle. That was sales. Everything I do, every time I face a human, that's sales. So I love sales. But I also love the fact of marketing. So it's really tough for me to say, let's not focus on marketing. Let's not focus on sales. But I always take 10 steps back and look at it. And when you look at a business, it's so easy to see that the culture needs to be there. What I mean by culture as well is you just need to like the people you work with. If you're opposing hands

all the time and people i've had literally technicians and i think this is going to be familiar for a lot of people is you're in a little meeting maybe once a month maybe once a week once a day if you're like me and there's somebody rolling their eyes not paying attention on their cell phone well now i don't tolerate that i've taken a hard stance against that and get the hell out of my meeting and you're going to take the next three days off, that happens again, they're out. Because I need to build a culture that people respect me, my managers, and their fellow employees. And that's so important. And I address that as well. But I think there's a lot of gold nuggets depending on what size of business you're in. And that's why I say it's a one-size-fits-all because we're doing tens and

tens of millions of dollars. And I want to be doing hundreds of millions in the next year or two. And I know there's a business out there that strives to be that way, but there's other people that just say, Tommy, I'm happy. My why is I want to make $250,000 this year. Well, you might only have to do a million bucks to do that. So I don't think you have to grow your revenue. This isn't about making these huge revenue numbers. This is about finding out what you need internally and what your goals are because you got your family, you've got your religion, you've got your personal life, you've got your business. You've got a lot of things to worry about. So we need to figure out why your business exists. And it goes into that as well.

Well, and I think that at the end of the day, you know, someone that's struggling or really fighting the fight to make what they're making, as soon as they pick up one little part of this book that could help them, you know, one section or maybe a combination of them, you know, however it shows up for them, they're going to find a way to make one part of their business easier. Then all of a sudden, next thing you know, like you've done, you start to work less and really turn your business into something effective, something that you can be happy with and realize that once you find out how much easier your business can be, then you can double and triple in no time. Yeah, it's not hard. I mean, when you find your biggest weakness and you fix it, your biggest weakness, and

I don't know what it is, but it might be recruiting A players. It might be changing your payroll. Look, I'll tell you a little story about my Christmas light business because you know I started that last year. We didn't do so well last year. I did the marketing and I trained the salespeople. And I will say, wink, wink, I think that was very successful. Yeah, right. But I looked at this fetal business. It's just starting last year. And I applied the same principles to my $30 million plus business. So I spent $70,000 in advertising.

We got over 1,400 calls. People that wanted estimates. We didn't call back at least 500 of them, I'd say. So we didn't even get back. So the point was we ended up taking a loss. Now this year we're going to do super far in the black, but the point was we had to buy all the lights because we store them. But you know what our labor was, Kenyon?

Guess what our labor rate was? I don't even know. 64%. There was overtime up the yin-yang, going back to jobs, cars breaking down. I mean, look, the first thing I knew I had to fix this year in the summer, I worked really, really hard with my partners, is to come up with a compensation plan that actually rewarded the right stuff and discouraged the wrong stuff and would not surpass 35%.

Because I'll tell you what, if you own all of the widgets, which we do at the Christmas slate because it'll tell you what, if you own all of the widgets, which we do at the Christmas slate, because it's the second year, you don't have really any expenses as far as your parts costs. So having a higher payroll cost is okay. So 35, 40% you can live with because there's a lot of labor involved, but not a lot of parts costs. So, but when it's 64%, that was our biggest demon last year. We passed that. We really got to discuss what is going on in your business. Because once you fix that big hole, you are going to start smiling in the mirror again. You're going to start jumping in the car to drive to work.

You know what I mean? Yes. So your curve on improving the Christmas lights business is going to be so much faster because of everything you learned and improved on in your garage store company. Oh, I took a seat back and I looked at it and I examined the numbers and I really, they told me a story. Those numbers. Isn't that funny how fast, most people don't think you can switch the button that fast.

They don't think you can turn the dial that fast, but you've done it in the Christmas lights because of everything you know. Let me tell you this. We are not even halfway through our Christmas season. Okay. Johnny called me, my partner last week. What we did is we raised prices 40%. We lost 30% of our clients. He goes, Tommy, you're not going to believe this. I said, what?

He goes, we already did way more this as of this week than we did all of last year. Wow. You know how much money we spent so far on marketing, by the way, Kenyon? In the Christmas light? In the Christmas light. You told me we did before. What did you do this year? 30 grand? $3,000.

$3,000. Really? Over 70 last year. $3,000. So we said, we got to fix what's going on here. So I said, okay. And it wasn't all me. Trust me.

I have great partners in this business. I own A1 solely, but this one, I have a partnership. You know, we came to the same conclusion. Let's not spend money on marketing because we can barely get into the jobs we're going to. Number one. Number two, we need to have a better way to recruit and train and give these guys a compensation plan that makes sense. And number three is let's raise the prices of our deal because we've got more business than we can handle. Let's raise it.

So we raised it. And what do you know? We could do half the jobs and make the same amount of money but way more profit. And bada boom, bada bing, the numbers told us a story. And that's why I love the book because it really tells you how to do this stuff. That is so cool, man. This is the kind of stuff that makes it exciting and why we've already got so much distraction and excitement about the book. And this is one of the reasons we decided to do this podcast this way because I think most people, man, if you don't jump on and grab this book and make it part of your library or the start of your library, or if you're not a reader, right, for you guys that are listening and guys and gals and whoever's listening to this, this is exciting stuff, man.

It's a way to really make business exciting again or just make it easier no matter what part of it is. Last week, I spent all week in the recording studio because I made the Audible version. And I do think the Audible version has a lot of advantages because if you're like me and you're on the go all the time, it's really tough to sit down and read a paperback book. I love paperback books. I love them because my little trick is I read the book, I highlight the page, and I put the page that really meant a lot to me in the back. Then I write cliff notes of the book. And then I read those cliff notes

every week. It's only three or four pages because it means a lot to me. But you can do the same thing on Audible. And it's me reading. And I share a lot of insights to some of the things I put in the book within the Audible. And I just think that of insights to some of the things I put in the book within the Audible. And I just think that that's probably a great solution for some people out there. It's the Home Service Millionaire Audible Edition. If you don't have Audible, you need it. It's an amazing tool if you like to listen to books. If not, hey, read it. It makes sense. We also will have it available on the Kindle version. So whatever anybody likes, whatever platform they learn on the best, I highly advise you pick it up in that attribute or that form of what you like the best. So I just wanted to put

that out there, Kenyon, because if they're like me, everybody has different learning styles. Awesome. Well, it's a great way to do it. It really hits on that. You can really impact more people that way by providing that other alternative. Listen, man, I think we've covered a lot of great stuff, given a lot of some in-depth behind the scenes of the way you look at things and what really drove you to put it in the book. It's just been awesome getting to know you. In fact, you and I met by going to coaching

that we met at an event where we were both getting mentored. And that connection's really been huge. And also, thanks again for the opportunity to interview you and pick your brain some more and show people a little bit more about what's going on in Tommy's brain that gets you doing what you're doing so they can learn it too. This is your podcast, so however you want to wrap this up, man, I think this has been awesome and very helpful and informative for whoever's listening. Perfect. Well, Kenyon,

I appreciate you coming on. And I just wanted to say, actually, I just got done writing a letter to my family about the book and I wrote my why. I kind of started out by saying, you know, I've been dragged through the gutter. I've been stolen from. I've been lied to. I've had negative reviews. I've had amazing people quit. I spent way too much money on advertising that I didn't need to. I didn't have systems. I had over seven trucks break down in one day when I didn't have a new fleet. Late calls, lost relationships. The story goes on and on. And the reason I wrote it is that I didn't want anybody else to turn out the way that some of the stuff that I went through. So the book is really out of passion to help people

and to create more home service millionaires. So if you're like I was, or you feel any of those pain points, or just want to find a way to improve faster, I really recommend the book. If you don't like it, send it back to me. Tell me I'm a piece of crap. I don't really care. I understand. And it might not be for everybody, but I really did take the time. And I think we've got amazing people in the book. So please, if you get a minute, it's homeservicemillionaire.com. You can find it on Amazon. It's on Audible. It's on Kindle.

And I think it'll make a difference in your life. And that's why we wrote it. That's my why is because I want to create way more millionaires within the space. And I want to create these strategic partnerships with you. So I appreciate you listening to the podcast as always. My name is Tommy, the Home Service Millionaire and Kenyon. I really appreciate you coming on. Awesome, man.

Thanks, Tommy. All right. Great. Thank you. 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.