The Home Service Expert Podcast - Growing Your Bottom Line Through Better Execution

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

Thor is the founder of Peak Performance Group and the host of Peak Performance podcast. He is a successful entrepreneur who has founded, bought, and sold several multi-million dollar business throughout his entrepreneurial journey. As a profitability coach, his passion lies in helping business owners grow their bottom line through better execution. In this episode, we talked about accountability, client relationship management, hiring...

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. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's Tommy Mello here, and you're listening to

the Home Service Expert. I'm here with Thor Conklin today and would love for you guys to really experience some of the stuff this guy's done. He's got his own podcast. And Thor, I'm really fortunate and excited to have you on today. How's your afternoon going? Man, it is going great. I'm looking forward to this. I have been preparing this for the last week, and I am ready to rock and roll, man.

All right. Well, listen, what I like to do in the beginning is just let people know why they should listen to you and hear a little bit about what you're doing, where you're going and where you came from. I'll give you a quick background. So grew up in Jersey. So I'm a Jersey guy. So if you hear me say water or daughter, I throw words into words occasionally. So that's just that's just me. And I wasn't exactly one of the bright students. I graduated in the top 25 of my class. Unfortunately, there's only 26 students. True story. And when it was time to go to college, I was like, you know, I'd like to go to college. But apparently I did not apply myself in high school. So I could not get into insurance school. You know, you're really messed up in high school

when you can't get into insurance school. So they told me, hey, you know, you've got to go to a community college and get some grades, good grades in these areas and come back and see us. So six months later, I showed back up with my transcript and they were shocked. They're like, I can't believe that you actually showed up. I said, look, you tell me what to do and how to do it. I'm going to execute and get it done. So that was really kind of the start of, you know, setting my mind to something and then just going after it and getting it done. It was interesting, even though it was insurance school, it was actually part of St. John's University's business school. So I joke about that a little bit. But that set me up in a career that actually led to my first entrepreneurial experience. I was helping private equity firms enter and exit deals. And we were doing the risk analysis for them.

And then one day, a private equity company came to me and said, Thor, would you be interested in coming to Workforce or setting up your own company? I'm like, wow, I had not really thought about setting up my own company. And they gave me 20 minutes to go into a conference room, true story, 20 minutes to name the company, come up with a business plan and present it to them. So I went into the conference room. Yeah, true story. So my first company was Private Equity Risk Consultants, PERC. And I did the whole thing in 20 minutes. And I walked out of that office on Park Avenue, representing one of the top five private equity companies in the world. I had 15 top clients, had a combined revenue of $12.7 billion. So it was one of those, you know, not one of those

typical stories in business, right? It's like I bootstrapped the thing and I started, I instantly started with a lot of traction. That's incredible. I mean, I've read about you and, you know, you started out pretty humble beginnings. You were a caddy. Doesn't sound like you were born with a golden spoon by any means. No, I was the one feeding people. You know, I was the spoon feeder. Well, yeah, that's that's incredible.

Fifteen clients, twelve point seven billion dollars. You know, I'm in their revenue. Yes, that's not my revenue, their revenue. No, no, no. That's incredible. I mean, I work with the biggest home service companies in the United States. Direct Energy. They do billions of dollars. They do a lot of

franchises and things of that nature in HVAC, electrical and plumbing. And it doesn't amount to near that dollar amount. So that's incredible because, you know, everybody needs to know more about private equity. If you're going to grow your business, you should be involved with private equity. And what that allowed me to do also, which was really cool, is I was able to get around some of the smartest minds on Wall Street and in business. I mean, if you want to find out people that are just executing at the highest level, hang around a private equity firm, hang around Wall Street investment bankers. These guys and these women are smart at what kind of language can I use here? You can use everything right they're smart as shit all right yeah

we'll keep it at a b level yeah they are some really highly intelligent people that really know how to get stuff done yeah we're gonna dig into that i'm excited about that because surround yourself and i really believe this we hear it all the time but when you surround yourself with these people that make you better you know i play a lot of games i play golf i shoot darts i go shoot pool i bowl i do a lot stuff. And I tend to always go with people that are better than me because I want to get better. And it's the same thing in business. You know, you hang out with these people that have already made it and it's easy to get there. I mean, you know, one of the questions I always like to ask is I really do put a lot of time into my business.

And there was a time where I was working 12 hours a day. I mean, literally, I would answer the calls. I would run the jobs. I would do the taxes. I would do inventory. I would take the phone calls of complaining employees, everything. And I think a lot of the people that are listening right now have that same struggle. And your relationships suffer.

There's no easy way to do it. Look, I mean, it takes time to be successful, but tell me a little bit about what you know. I mean, 9-11 was a big deal. Tell me a little bit about what you've been through and how you've been able to overcome some of that. Yeah, thanks. 9-11 was a very difficult time, and I'll go into that in a moment. Here's something that it sells really well on the internet, and it's a bunch of BS. You can have everything. That is the biggest lie that has ever been sold. You can have anything that you want, but you've got to make some decisions on what you're willing to exclude. And we all get 24 hours. We all have the same amount of time. If you go after everything, you'll get nothing. Figure out what it is. And

unfortunately, some things are going to suffer for a period of time, but you have to recognize that. So that's just one thing that I see so often with our clients. We run a profitability consulting firm and they want to attack all these different areas and you've got to figure out what's most important and go after that. So thanks for bringing up 9-11. That was obviously a very difficult time for everyone in the country and everybody in the world. 9-11 was a little closer to home for me. I had my team located in the World Trade Center on the 105th floor on 9-11. In addition to losing a third of my team, I actually lost one of my best friends that day as well. And trying to rebuild a business and take care of clients with all of the personal tragedy and the business just issues.

You know, paperwork was done. Everything was just in chaos. So you learn from that experience the necessity to have backup plans, the necessity to have a cool and calm demeanor when stuff happens. Stuff will happen. After working with industry for the last 30 years, everything that's not supposed to happen or couldn't happen or that'll never happen, man, I've seen it happen everywhere. So stuff happens. You've got to be prepared. And one of the mistakes that so many people make, not only just in business, is we think that we shouldn't have problems, right? It's like we get past the point where we have problems. We're always going to have problems. Hopefully our problems are getting bigger or better. And what I mean by that is if you're having the same problems over and over again, that's not good.

When we were little, right, we had a problem in dirting our diaper, right? When we're 90, we might have that problem again. So those are acceptable, right, when we're one and when we're 90. But if you're having that and you're 50, we might have some problems. So you're always going to have them. The only people that don't have problems are the people that are in graveyards. So it's a part of life as you grow. And as you expand,

I think the universe, God sends you even more tasks, more difficult tasks to overcome. And as you grow, they're going to continue to grow. Yeah. I think that that's a great point because there's no such thing as perfection.

And what I try to do is just set short-term goals and try to get little accomplishments. And there's an old movie. It's called What About Bob? And there's that baby steps. Remember Dr. Marvin? And I think about that all the time. I'm like, it is baby steps. You make little improvements and you're moving forward. And it's so important to remember that. But, you know, I do pretty well overall. I'm not bragging. I need a lot of work, but I don't have it made. I don't have these great relationships that come with success just in business. There's spirituality.

There's your body. There's all these things that you're supposed to be balanced with. And I have to fire people. And I have culture problems here and there. It's inevitable. We're growing very, very fast. So it's always a challenge to grow as fast as we are. You know, you've been super successful throughout your career.

You trained some of the top companies in the world. Tell me about some of the stuff that you're going through right now that kind of humanizes you and says, hey, I'm just like you guys a little bit, you know? Always. I just finished up four days. Every year I go away for two to four days and I do my annual planning. And I look at what happened last year. You know, where am I right now? What happened? What went well? What didn't go well? Where do i want to go next year and what do i need to change in order to get to the results i want next year and i'm constantly looking at what doesn't belong what doesn't fit what's getting in the way for example right now i'm about 219 pounds and my ideal weight is really 198 and i i did a mount everest challenge recently where I climbed up a mountain.

It was supposed to be 17 times for the equivalent of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet over a two and a half day period. I only got 12 done. And one of the reasons was I was carrying an extra 20 pounds up the mountain, which is not a cool idea. I figured if you're going to climb a mountain, do not do it with 10-pound dumbbells in your hands or around your waist. And that's what I did. I had the mindset. I did what I wanted to accomplish, but I did not go into it prepared like I should have. And what I realized was is that I needed to make some changes, and I've been struggling in this area.

I've been trying to make some progress, and I finally determined that what's the root cause here? And it came down to alcohol. Now, I don't drink a ton of alcohol, but when I do have a couple of cocktails, what do I want? I want some sugar. I want something, you know, the next day I want a hamburger, french fries and a Coke, right? Sure. So I was hoping that I was going to find the root problem was Brussels sprouts. But I found out that it was alcohol, you know.

So it's like, look, if I'm serious about making the changes, I've got to find out what that root cause is. So that's one of the things I'm definitely struggling with. And the other thing in business is, and this happens all the time, and I think people are going to relate to this is people want me. They don't want necessarily my team. Yes, they'll take them for certain things. But at the end of the day, clients generally want the guy or the woman. So I'm always struggling in trying to figure out, you know, I've only got so many hours in a day. Everybody wants a piece of you. I mentor young entrepreneurs. I do that. I am very involved in entrepreneurs organization where I'm a member.

I sit on the board. So I have two platforms, which is private equity. Now you got me on the private equity thing. Peak Performance Accountability and Peak Performance University. They're two online platforms where, you know, we can really scale that business and we're going to do it through technology. And I'm struggling with the technology. You know, our teams come up with the platform. It's not doing what I want it to do. And I want to throw it against the wall sometimes. Yeah. You know, I talk about this all the time and technology is a must. My brother-in-law's a vice president at GE and he told me about three

years ago, he said, Tommy, at GE, we don't talk about COOs anymore. They're going away. I said, what do you mean? They're operations. He goes, no, it's CTO now. The technology runs operations. It spits out the KPIs to run a company. And it wasn't that black and white, but he's been talking about it for years. And now I've got one of the most advanced CRMs out there that I could just, I know everything. It's got AI built into it. It's not, I found out the other day on a podcast, it's not artificial intelligence. It's augmented intelligence, which just takes the past into consideration to make calculated assessments. But yeah, I mean, technology is, it's crazy what's going on right now with it.

But I got to tell you, I have a lot of businesses. I mean, I love the garage store business, but I just I find myself going on to the next thing. And sometimes I go back to the beginning and go, wow, we've built a successful company. But when you start over and, you know, it gives me back to the roots of where a lot of the listeners are today of just how do I do it? What do I how do I establish these KPIs? How do I even get started in technology? And it's a roller coaster. Tell me a little bit about where you think you start with. You've worked with all these amazing people. Tell me the roadmap of GetGoing and how it looks. Yeah, perfect segue. It starts the same way with everybody. I draw a big V on a piece of paper or on the board

on the pad that we're working. And that is at the top. And it's your vision. And it's really getting a clear vision of what you want for your life. Because I found myself at one point in my life where I had a business and I was in it for the wrong reasons. It was not going to bring me closer to my ultimate vision, what I wanted my life to look like overall. And I got caught into that with the blinders on saying, okay, this is what I want this particular business to do. But it was actually leading me away from my ultimate vision. So if you take a V and you put that on top and you figure out, okay, this is the vision. This is how I want to spend my time.

This is where I want to live. This is how I want to conduct my time. This is where I want to live. This is how I want to conduct my life. Start there. And then underneath there, there's legs or there's a foundation that you set. And I call these AOLs, areas of life. And that's where you're going to have your health and fitness. You're going to have your family. You're going to have your relationships. You're going to have your business. You're going to have your investments, all those different areas. It doesn't matter what they are. But here's the key. You've got to make sure that those areas of life support and are in alignment with that vision. Because so often we have a business that the business is not supporting us,

we're supporting the business. If it wasn't for us, the business would, quite frankly, crumble. And that's not the way that you become a business owner. That's where the business owns you. So I always start with a vision, then establish those areas of life. Now, one thing that I've come up with, it was interesting because I was always looking for that secret formula, that magic sauce, you know, that one thing that was going to give me a process, a map, a formula that I could follow. And I'll go through this real quick for you. I've had pieces of this and pieces of this are going to sound really common and there's no big secret here. I had pieces, but I was missing some other pieces

and I wasn't getting consistent results. And believe it or not, I was on the train system of the Atlanta Hartsfield Airport going through the terminals. And if you've ever been to Atlanta, they've got this train, runs under the terminals. And the terminal all the way out, it goes from A, B, C, D, E, F. And actually, well, actually, let me start with baggage claim. It starts with baggage claim. It goes to T terminal, A gate, all the way up to F. Okay.

So I'm on the train, and I'm like, oh, my God. I said, that's the formula up to F. Okay. So I'm on the train and I'm like, oh my God. I said, that's the formula. There's my map. The map is the map. But I said, it's backwards. As you take the map and you start with F, you've got to figure out what you want. And often people don't do that. They just get caught up in, oh, let's go.

Let's just start running and we'll figure out where we go. You've got to figure out the end destination. Second E, you've got to come up with an efficient and an effective plan. The next step is D, you've got to make a decision. And it's funny because most people think that, you know, okay, you make a decision and that's it. Then you can start acting. But there's actually another level, which is C, which is the commitment phase. You know, recently I wanted to make sure that I got it exceptional shape for 2018. So I said,

all right, how can I do this? I need to cut out the alcohol. What else I need to do? I need to get a really strong and very challenging physical challenge for me. So I went to the try the Ironman page. I'm like, okay, wait a second. I can't swim that well. I've never run a marathon. I'll sign up for a half. Right. So I signed up for the half and I'm like, okay, I'm here. Maybe I should do the full 140 miles in 17 hours. I'm like, that's crazy. So I had made a decision that I wanted to do it, but it wasn't until I hit my, you know, put my credit card information in and then hit send that I was actually committed. And then I took a further act. And that was, I posted up on Facebook

and said, community, this is what I'm doing. I'm a person that keeps their commitments. You can bank on it that I'm going to do this. And it's funny because the first three letters, right? Figure out what you want, fish an effective plan, and decide, spell Fed. So that's what I talk about. You know, the Fed is just where like a lot of talk goes on. Nothing happens, but there's a lot of talk. So then when you move down into the next terminal, which is B, that's your belief systems. And this is where the piece that I was missing. And I didn't realize how much our belief systems come into play and affect the results of what we're trying to accomplish.

The next one is A, of course, for action. You've got to take massive action. But there was another piece of this that I was missing, and that was the accountability piece. I wasn't being held accountable. I could talk a little bit more about accountability. The next one was time. You know, so often as entrepreneurs, what we want to do is we want to do something, right? We want to take some action. And when do we expect the results? Now, immediately. And in business, you know, things take time. And also you've got to TMA,

track, measure, and adjust. Constantly looking at those KPIs, those critical drivers. How are you measuring up? And then what needs to change? What needs to pivot? And then finally, if you do all of those, you can then end up at baggage cap. And I follow that religiously for anything that I want to accomplish. That's incredible. I love the process around it. And when do you feel like you kind of came up with that I mean where were you in life how old were you yeah really I had I had about 80 percent of it going back about 15 years and it wasn't until 24 months ago that I found that I found it on the wall that's incredible so what now that you know, you build your vision and you got those legs that come out, which

are, there's five major things, you know, your health and everything. Yep. You draw that up. You get the process rolling. You figure out the end goal. You work backwards. I agree with that. Let's say your vision lines up.

Let me ask you this. And I know there's a lot to it. I don't want to go into family because everybody has difference about their weight goals, family goals, spiritual goals. But let's talk about business for a moment. Tell me what a good vision would look like. I mean, is it like, well, I want to make money. I want to be able to travel. I want to have people that I grow people. I mean, tell me what some of the visions you've seen in the past, because I want to really let the listeners understand what that means. Yeah, so great question. So the vision is about your overall life and it would go something like this.

It doesn't have to be measurable. OK, don't think of a vision as, you know, being a smart goal or something. The vision is I wake up every morning with a sense of renewed health and happiness. I'm surrounded by people that love me. I have an amazing business that turns out more cashflow than I know what to do with. I am healthy. I'm sound. I give back. I'm a contributor to my community to God. It's about a feeling that's created. I wake up, my bedroom window looks over the Gulf of Mexico. It's about a movie or a vision, not tangible goals. Does that make sense? Okay, yeah, 100%.

Good. So you get the vision, you build the legs out, and I love that. Track, measure, and adjust, TMA. So what I've found as an entrepreneur and really being involved in well over a dozen businesses, I've watched people work their asses off. I'm talking workaholics, 14 hour days, meetings, answering every call. And I look back and I go, you got nothing done. I've had employees. You've done nothing.

What have you done this week? You work your ass off, but you got nothing done. So what I recommend is people to journal. And I say, get a calendar of every hour, write down what you need to get done that day, but let's find out what you really do. And I have a partner in a business. I won't go into details on it, but I told him to do this. And I looked at it and he's running around buying the guy's lunch, going to Home Depot, going to Lowe's, going to this, going to that. And I go, oh, my God. I go, we need to work on delegating with you. But, you know, we go back to that 80-20 rule. And that's really what I want to talk about is tell me some tricks up your sleeve that you use to really be able to focus on getting

actionable items and making accomplishments? Yeah, look, it's all about execution, right? You know, at the end of the day, we run a profitability consulting firm, you know, and if you take the word PEAK, P-E-A-K, and you made a little triangle or a little pyramid, you know, at the bottom is knowledge. Of course, you need some knowledge.

You then need accountability. Then you need the execution. And then the execution leads into profitability. So if you can't execute, I don't know, go home. Yeah. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, if you can't execute, find somebody to execute, because if you can't execute, nothing else matters. So first of all, Sundays is my day where I can look forward to the coming week and figure out what's going on. So first of all, you've got to have a calendar. If you're not running your life through a calendar, start over.

You've got to have a calendar. It's got to be – that's got to be the process. Dump the to-do list. Dump the task list. Run your life by the calendar. So Sunday I'm looking at that. I'm plugging in – and quite frankly, most of them already plugged in appointments, et cetera. I plug in block time.

A lot of people will talk about block time. They'll talk about. I plug in block time. A lot of people will talk about block time. They'll talk about minimum of, you know, 50 minutes block time. I think that's, for me, it doesn't work. What I have to do, my block times have to be four hour segments or more. I don't want to be switching from task to task. It just doesn't work for me. So if I'm going to be doing, let's say sales calls, I'm blocking out four hours. If I'm recording for my podcast, I'm recording for four hours. I don't want to be switching back and forth. Another thing that is in my calendar every single week is thinking time. And what I mean by that is I literally take 90 minutes. I sit in a chair that only is designed for thinking. I don't watch TV. I don't read. Because what's happening

is my mind starts to understand that when I'm sitting in that position, in that chair, in that room, it is thinking time. And what I'm doing is I'm asking myself great questions, and I'm solving problems about my business or whatever else I'm working on. But it's a time where I am in deep thought and laser focused. Nothing else is around. There's nothing going on, And I'm focused just on that. I'm taking time to work on my business and people need to do that. I don't care how busy you are. A matter of fact, if you're busy and you don't have time for thinking time, that's exactly what you need. Next is get yourself an assistant. I mean, you know, the amount of money that it

takes to hire somebody virtually or, you know, next to you, you can get a lot done with a little amount of money. So you've got to have some, if you can't afford it full time, get somebody in 10 hours a week, five hours a week, doesn't matter. You've got to start to delegate that stuff off. And I just run my schedule. My schedule runs my day. I have a schedule. If you want to get on my calendar for a phone call, a meeting, or anything, you have to go through Acuity. That sets everything up. I don't touch it. It's all automated.

Definitely get a scheduler. And then I do my annual planning that I just talked about. So now I know exactly what my 2018 plan is. I know what my third quarter plan is, my half year, my three quarter, and what's December. I know what I have to get done in December in order to hit my goals next December. I love it. So it really comes out of just, it sounds like to me, what you've done is, and I think this is not easy, but you're super organized and you're planned and you live off of a calendar and you have hard stops when you need to. And it makes sense because

most entrepreneurs, man, we're all going 90 miles an hour. And sometimes the road takes us in the wrong direction. And it's hard to recover from that. But once you have a calendar, then you say, listen, this is a hard stop. And like you said, I'm all about delegating. I think the hardest part for most of us, and I'm okay with it actually, is trusting other people because I don't open my own mail. I've got someone that looks at my email and reports back. I've got an assistant. I've got a lot of people around me and I give up the trust.

Tell me a little bit about that because I think a lot of people listening right now might say it's hard to accept the fact, but they're not going to do it as good as me. And if I don't do it, no one will. So how do you let that go? Yeah. Do you want a business or do you want to practice? Do you want a business or do you want a job? If you want a job, you want to practice, you want something that you can make a decent living at, do all the stuff yourself. And I'm okay with that. You're not an ideal client for me.

Our clients don't operate that way. But if that's okay, if that is your goal, that's your vision, and that supports you, awesome. But if you want to build a business, you've got to rely on other people. 2018, the theme for me is teamwork. I worked out with the Navy SEALs for three days last year, got my ass handed to me. I was last on every single one of the rotations, but I learned one thing. There were 25 year old guys in that whatever hell camp or whatever you want to call it last year you know and here I am I'm the old guy right and we've got I got two sandbags and I'm like we're running up this hill or I was like we can't do this and I found out that I had to give my sandbag to somebody else

but then what happened is I take a couple steps and 30 seconds later a minute later I was refreshed I took my sandbag back and at some point the 25-old Navy SEAL that's going through Navy SEAL training, the real Navy SEAL training, in a couple weeks, he can't go any further. I've got to take his bag. And as a team, we were able to accomplish so much more, and especially as male entrepreneurs, right? What's our motto? Hell, we can do it, right? If it's to be, it's up to me. That is a belief system that I want to totally destroy this year because if I keep having that belief system that it's meant to be or it will be, it's up to me, it's never going to go to that next level.

And here's the thing on delegation. There's a misconception that delegation is let me give it to somebody else and then I'm out of it. That's not delegation. That's dumping. That's right. That's dumping. That's abdication. If your team member can move it forward 90% for you, let them do that. Just last night,

I needed to remount one of my people. They missed something that was, they should have missed. I said, I can't have you missing this fax. I said, this is not acceptable. That's another thing. Leadership, I think right now within most organizations suck because you've got leaders that think they're leaders and they're nothing more than, well, they're not leaders because they're not holding people accountable. They're not holding them to a standard and they're not taking the necessary steps. And quite frankly, when things aren't the way they should be, letting them know with no uncertain terms, this is not acceptable, this behavior is, and here's the consequences. Absolutely. And, you know, a lot of them miss that. And the first thing I recommend, I love the vision. And I think that's, you got to start with

the why and the end in mind. But, you know, my girlfriend called me, she was on this trip and she was offered a job, but he said, I just want you to run with it. And he said to her, just let me know how much money you need. And I just that's it. And I said, geez, that is so open ended. And just what we need, what employees want is they want to know when they're doing good. They don't they want to know when they're doing bad. They want to know black and white, not gray. What's expected of them. So you start with an organizational chart and build a hierarchy if you got that person or not. And you describe what's good, what's bad, what's expected, who reports to who. And if you don't have that, and I'm guilty of it. I've started a business.

Yeah, yeah, we all are. I mean, it's not not you're like, listen, we're only three guys in this business. We don't really need that. And we keep telling ourselves that. But that's not OK. I mean, so I think you're absolutely right. Is, you know, we talk about annual reviews or and I'm not a huge fan of that. But I do think you need to have some type of way to make sure you're giving raises and you're watching people. You know, I was talking to a guy earlier and he said, and your reviews are bullshit. I said, I agree, but I do like to have a time of the year where I look at raises so people don't get left behind and have some type of system behind it, you know? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, if your employees do not understand where they stand every single week because they're not getting any feedback, that's when the annual system doesn't work.

They need to know where they stand all the time. And when you're training them what to do, how often do you have to do it? Over and over and over again until it sticks. Well, and the most important thing, and you're right, I was going to ask you about that. But the thing is, is a leader does not tell everybody how they're doing. The leader talks to seven key people, 12 key, you know, Jesus had 12 disciples. So you empower your managers. If you're the guy that's got to do everything, you might as well, you know, you'd drive yourself crazy. I mean, it'd be impossible.

One of the first things I said to our head of ops is I said, I work for you. And she's like, what do you mean? And she goes, no, I work for you. And I said, no, I work for you. You tell me where to go, how to go, when to go. I want everything laid out for me. I said, I don't want to be driving this train. I want to be on the train. I want to be part of a train, but I need you to drive it. I want to be working for you. So it was a card concept for her to understand. That's amazing. You talked in one of your podcasts about doing the same thing 10,000 times and

really being a master of one trait. Tell me, for entrepreneurs that are listening, what are some of those habits that they need to be doing to become a top performer of that task of just doing it over and doing it the same and getting expected results? Yeah. How you do anything is how you do everything. And it's about doing the basic things over and over and over again. One of the things I talk a lot about with my clients is micro commitments. And that is making sure you've got a set calendar for the day. But then as you're going through, make these micro commitments as you're going through.

Let's say you've got 10 minutes left on your prospecting calls or whatever. Go, okay, look, in 10 minutes, I'm going to knock out five of these things. Okay, boom, get them done, get them done. Keep yourself accountable. Really, really important. And by the way, if you don't have an accountability manager, you need to get one. I don't care where you get one, but find one. And I just want to point out, there's a big difference between an accountability partner, which does not work, and an accountability manager. An accountability manager is somebody that you pay a small fee to that holds your feet to the fire. Accountability partners just simply become good buddies at some point. And then,

you know, when somebody's having a stomachache, they're like, oh, I understand, Susie, you know, you don't have to do your work this week. That's how most of those accountability parties turn out, right? And I know that because I've been part of that. You form a relationship and you don't want to be the bad guy in the relationship. You need somebody. You need like a Sergeant Holka from Stripes that goes, look, I don't care about you guys. I do care about you, but I'm going to come off like I don't care about you. I'm certainly not going to accept your excuses. You know, it's funny. In our paid accountability program, we've got two excuses that you can have.

One is you died during the month or you were incarcerated for more than 14 days. Other than that, our team will not accept any excuses because stuff happens. So make sure you have somebody holding you accountable. Let's not talk about October. No, I'm just kidding. Well, I love that. And I learned a lot just now. I love this stuff.

Tell me a little bit about that. I want to dig into that a little bit. So if I'm going to post an ad or go find a company, how do I even find an accountability manager? What does that process look like? Because I'd really like to get that going in my organization. Yeah, you can search out. There's not many companies that do it. I think we're one of the few ones that do it.

And individuals will hire us. Firms will hire us. And it's basically outsourcing all the stuff that you would like to do but just don't have time to do, and you need somebody to hold the team accountable. So those programs start at $99 a month and go up to $800 a month. If it's not us, find somebody that, and again, what we're doing, you could do as the leader. You could have somebody in your organization

doing it. You've just got to be able to, you know, there's always somebody within a company, or at least in the larger companies. It's kind of like the mom that nobody is, everybody's afraid of. It's like, Oh, don't go talk to Joan. You better get your stuff done because Joan's not going to take any shit from you. You know, you need that, that strong person that is going to follow up. And when you say I'm going to have it done by three o'clock,

if you don't have it by three o'clock, someone's after you. So that's what we, uh what we do on a weekly basis. I love that. Where do we – I want the audience here to find out as much about you. So we're going to talk about that at the end. But if I wanted to sign up and the audience here, if someone wants to sign up for that, where do they go? What's the website? ThorConklin.com.

Got it. Okay. And I'll have this – I'm going to have a whole page on how to find your resources on my website on the Home Service Expert. So we'll have that available. If you guys want to go check that out, we'll have a link to that. So I talked a little bit with you about my CRM. It's a customer relationship management system.

And I'm just, I'm absolutely obsessed now. I got to tell you a quick story as it was a turning point for me and my business is I got to tell you, without knowing that the key performance indicators and without knowing the efficiencies, I was demotivated. I was like, man, I was like, I just I felt like I was it was the blind leading the blind. I was in the dark and we switched over a year ago. I mean, we were successful. We were making money, but I just, I really wasn't motivated to grow. And now there's like this new fire and I've got this data and I'm a data guy. I love researching and finding the problems and I just love CRMs. I mean, I talk about it a lot. Tell me a little bit about what you're using to keep track and how you're using technology. Yeah, you're going to love this section. You're going to hate this section. I'm a B2B guy, right? I mean, we're a profitability consultant. So, you know,

we go in and help companies increase their profitability. So our starting program starts at $2,500 a month and goes up to $100,000 a month. So I'm B2B. So I'm not trying to figure out how to get that customer to spend $100. So understand where it's coming from first. And we use Zoho to answer your question. Our CRM is Zoho. But here's the thing. Instead of relying on – we don't rely on a CRM to keep our relationship management going.

We have a tool called a meeting. What is it called? A meeting. M-E-E-T-I-N-G. Meeting. It's not a technology. It's not an app. It's a meeting.

Oh. The way we – exactly. Exactly. So the way we – I'm like writing in town. I know everyone's all like, I've never heard of that one. Here's what CRM, right? Customer Relationship Management Software.

Well, the way we manage our relationships with our clients are in meetings, face-to-face meetings. We manage them. If they're not in town, we manage them through Zoom. So we are constantly in front of our clients, keeping that eyeball to eyeball relationship. With our employees, we do that with a huddle. Every day before we start the day, we get together for five to seven minutes, stand-up meeting, and we're talking about what's going on in the company. For everything else, we use Zoho, we use Asana, Acuity is our scheduling software. But in our business, we're building relationships not with thousands because that's just not our model.

And it's building deep relationships with people. So we're doing a lot of the old school stuff of taking meetings, having conversations, and talking with a lot of consumers. They might have thousands of customers. You can't necessarily do that. You need something to manage that. And I'm sure so many of the other guests have given you some great resources. If there's someone out there listening that manages a customer base of under 100, make sure that you understand and really get to know them. People call me all the time.

They're like, Thor, I want to increase my business. I'm great. How many clients you got? I got 150 clients. I said, that is absolutely wonderful. What I want you to do, I want you to pick up the phone. I want you to go talk to Susan. And I want you to have a conversation with Susan.

And I want her to be so obsessed with you as a provider that she can't stop talking about you. Because what you're doing is you're spending your entire time shouting at this audience that half aren't listening half don't even know what you're talking about and the people that really love you your customers the ones that are paying you money today you're not spending any time with them you're treating them like second-class citizens because they're already in the system you're looking for the next one that hot one it's kind of like the girlfriend right i got the system. You're looking for the next one, that hot one. It's kind of like the girlfriend, right? I got the girlfriend.

Now I'm looking for the hot girlfriend. You know, go back to your base and have them so obsessed with you that they can't stop sending clients your way. Yeah, keep loyal. There's a book called Raving Fans, and it discusses the loyalty. And it's really expensive to just find replacement clients and just be burning through them like that. And that's not the way to do business.

So that's my unorthodox CRM answer. No, I love it. You know, for A1 GarageJars, we're seeing about 4,000 clients a month. And it's a different process, though. If I'm doing any type of consulting, I mean, it's so important to have that relationship. And I actually one of my mentors in the real estate market, he has a great relationship with every one of his his people. And but I'll tell you what, I met another guy through him and his name's Jim. And he doesn't talk to his clients. He does, but he doesn't.

He just has so many of them. He communicates on, they have meetings, a couple of meetings for one hour that it's open forum type stuff. But, you know, I guess if you have a hundred clients, I always tell people, listen, I have a couple hundred employees just in one business. And then I've got a bunch of other stuff, But if I gave them each seven minutes a day, 200 people times seven minutes, it's 1400 minutes. There's not enough. There's not time. So I do agree with you though. You've got to talk to your people. You've got to get to know. And I treat my employees, especially over the last year, a lot different than I used to because because, you know, if they're not happy with you and your business, how are your customers going to be happy? So yeah. Yeah.

If you had to do it all over, let's say you're starting your business from scratch and one of your eBooks, you talk about seven execution killers. Tell me some big ones. I know of a lot myself because I've done them. But tell me, obviously, alcohol is one of them. But tell me about these seven killers that you mentioned in the e-book. You know, and I came up with 85 execution killers. That's 85, believe it or not. It's crazy. It's like the odds are stacked against you, right? You've got to do everything right and then avoid these execution killers. One of them is motion versus action.

And you talked a little bit about that before. You know, people think that they're busy, that they're getting stuff done, but they're not finishing it. They're not paying it across the finish line. Energy is a big one. You know, people think that they can just, you know, burn the candle at both ends. If you don't have the energy to show up and deliver at the highest level, you're not going to be able to execute. The game of business, when you really get into the exceptional companies that are winning the deals, they are doing the small things over and over and over again consistently because they have the energy to be able to do that. Doing the important versus urgent.

Putting out the fires versus dealing with what's really important and moving that forward. You know, you brought something up and immediately I could tell that you had a successful business just on one comment that you said. And it went something like this. You said, I learned that I needed to go step by step by step. And entrepreneurs hate steps by step by step, right? We want to go from A to Z in one move in one second and have it all fixed. But the way stuff gets done, the way we execute is we get a little bit done every single day and it starts to stack on each other. Look, if we improved 1% a day at the end of 90 days or actually probably 75 days with compounding, we'd have 100% improvement.

Yeah, that's crazy. And it's just a little tweaks, man. It's those dials, right? That we got to just And you got to keep right, right. You got to keep the scoreboard, you got to measure it, and then you've got to adjust. You know, I had a guy come into my office, he consults us on Fridays, he's, we're his first client that he's ever consulted, but he's a big fan of visual management. And he said, Tommy, he goes, I've never seen a company with this much passion. He goes, every one of these guys and gals here would take a bullet for you. And he said, the one thing that I see more than anything, and this was a year ago, he says, man, you've got the best firefighters I've ever met. He goes, dude, these guys will drop at a hat and they will go put out a fire and figure it out. But he goes, well, my goal to do is to stop those fires from ever happening. We're going to work so

hard on the systems that will stop every single fire. And it's, it's being, what is the word I'm looking, you know, where we react, it's proactive. So, you know, I learned a lot just from that little thing. And the good thing is I fall on my face all the time, man. I got to tell you, I'm learning every day. I just, I try to be a sponge and I try to, I accept failure. And because, you know, like Thomas Edison said, he failed 10,000 times. He didn't really fail. He just learned the wrong way to do it. Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's great advice just to really get some help sometimes. And that's a lot of the stuff that you guys do. So I'm going to definitely look into that accountability management.

So when you talk about leadership, how many people do you have in your organization total? Four. So four, four with the four. So that's good. Yeah, there you go. And you have, how many would you say virtual assistant type people? For me? Yeah. One is full time. She's in the Philippines. Okay. I want to bring up an interesting note here because people hear that and they think $6 an hour. I found this woman. I pay her almost the equivalent of U.S. dollars. She would cost me about $125,000 in the U.S.

And $40,000 for her in the Philippines is like, oh, my God. MBA, brilliant woman. Yeah. Yeah, I love VAs. I have several of them, and I'm always delegating certain things. Certain things you want to delegate, certain things you don't. Yeah. She's a virtual team member, not an assistant.

Sure. And there's a good book, The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss, that he talks a lot. There's a whole chapter dedicated to virtual assistants. Great information. Read a lot of his books. I'm a pretty big reader, and I want to talk to you a little bit about that. I'm going to talk to you a lot about some of the books that I've read, and I'm working on my own book. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on some other good books. I mean, in my Audible, I just passed 700. Yeah, me too. That's awesome. Sometimes, you know, I'll tell tell you the truth i've been going through a lot of personal issues with my girlfriend and uh a lot of it's

had to do with my time and the fact that i'm on my phone and that i uh you know i think i took her for granted to be honest with you and uh looking back at what you've done, you said, I got four employees and I got a virtual assistant and I'm going out on a limb here, but I would say that your life is going pretty good. You're getting some goals. You get to travel when you want. And I don't think by any means you're not underworked, but you're not overworked. You get to live your life. Am I right? Yes. I'm sure you can imagine the days where you were just burning the candle like a lot of us do and relationships were suffering. Tell me a little bit about that and how you overcame it. Yeah, you know, it is tough

on relationships. I'll go back to, you know, I had a period where I had a manufacturing company. It was, we were doing about just under $4 million in sales. And I was doing business in Asia, in Taiwan, China, Vietnam. We were manufacturing equipment that went into nail salons, manufacturing facility here in the US for furniture. And I was working around the clock and cost of goods that the manufacturer were going up. what I could sell to my customers kept going down. It was like a up and down, up and down. I finally decided to close the business, sell off the assets and be done. In the process of that, my wife of 22 years decided to leave and say, hey, here's a business that I'm dedicating all hours possible trying to save and to create profitability in.

And there becomes a time where if anybody in your life, whether it's your business, your finances, your girlfriend, or your business, feels like they're being neglected and you're not spending the time, you're going to end up with issues in that area. So that definitely affected me. It has effects, I think, in all areas of your business. Yeah, it's everything. And there's a book by, I believe it's, let me see, I got it right here, Dan Thurman. It's called Off Balance on Purpose because there's really no way to have a perfect life. And like you said before, it's a big lie all over the internet is, your problems are going to be solved. And I meet so many people that are so wealthy and, you know, very rich people as far as money goes. But some of these people are poor. I mean, they just they they have everything around them, but they have no close relationships. They have nobody to love.

And it's scary. It's scary because, you know, I got kind of my legs pulled out from under me a couple weeks ago. And she said, you know, we got to take a step back. And I was like, wait a minute. But, you know, I understand it. And it's a good story that, you know, we get overwhelmed. And I'm going to use this to my advantage. And I just think the biggest thing that you said is really figure out what you want. And that's tough, man. There's a good book. I always talk about books and I'm not getting paid here to promote the books,

but it's by Simon Sinek about finding your why. And that's not easy though, right? Like, no, let's find our why. Sure, start at your why. Let's talk about that part of our brain. I mean, how do you do that? I mean, you said you create a vision, but as far as business goes, we want to make money

and we want to have good employees and we want to build a legacy. What else is your why? Tell me a little bit about your why. Let's step back one step. I want to answer or put another comment on the last thing that we talked about and I'll come back to the why. One of the things I learned through that process and the divorce is when I am with someone, I don't care if it's a client, a prospect, a friend, a girlfriend, I take my phone and it's off and it's down, period. When I'm with you, I'm present with you.

Now, I can't be with you all the time, you know, like from six in the morning till six at night. You know, when I'm grinding it out, I don't have time to focus on you. But when I do, you'll get my undivided attention. And my clients know that. And I set boundaries with them. And I teach them how to set their own boundaries because if they're not setting those kind of boundaries, they're suffering as well. So I have gotten better in that area. Now, as far as the why, and here's a really good point that I want to bring up is I always ask those questions because I do not assume nor do I find that everyone is in business to make money.

As crazy as that sounds for you and I, some people are in it for the mission. Some people are in it for the artistry because they just love their little baby, right? They love their product or their service. So I've got to be really careful not to make any assumptions. As I go into doing an analysis of figuring out why their profitability isn't where it needs to be or they say they want it to be, sometimes their motive is not profitability. Sometimes it's something completely different. And sometimes they don't even understand what it is. So what I try to get to is not what they're after, but why are they after what they're after? What I mean by this is so many people will seek money because of the status that it gives them. Others will seek it because of what they can buy

and they think that's how it's going to make them feel. Other people do it out of this sense of scarcity. And I've got to have this because I've got to protect my family. I've got to have enough money for retirement. I don't want to grow old without money. Just because they're after the profitability of the money, there's various reasons why. And what's interesting is they get stuck sometimes in this single focus. This has to be the vehicle in order to get me to my objective. And I come in and I want to find out, okay, where's the end goal? And are there other avenues that can get you to the same feeling and the objective that you're trying to achieve? Yeah, so if someone's overall goal is, hey, I want to have enough money that I can live through retirement. Great.

Okay, so do you want to amass enough where that nest egg is going to throw up enough cash flow that you don't have to work anymore? Do you want to continue working until you're 80 just because you love what you're doing? And you start to, it's all about questions. You know, I do very little talking and I do a lot of questions. Thank you. Yeah. You know, I, I've really been thinking about that question a lot. And realistically, I still, I say this and I've said this the last couple of weeks, is I'm still working for money, but I don't think I'm far off from having money work for me. And I bring up this thing I have always, I'm a big fan of physics and the stars and time travel and all that, and read a lot about the cosmos and Einstein's theories. And he says that the strongest power in the universe is compound interest. And I've reinvested a lot into my own business. And I continue to do that because

we're growing so fast. And I know this is so cliche. And I think a lot of the listeners might say, well, that's so vague. But all I want is freedom, really. And freedom can happen if you have money working for you. And, you know, and here's here's something I want to bring up, because I was talking to my general manager and I was going to tell you this earlier, but I completely lost my train of thought with it. But, you know, this guy was he saw one of my technicians at the picking up a garage store and he said, I went to one of your jobs. I can't believe the prices you guys charge. And he said, if I didn't work for this company, they pay for my truck, they pay for my insurance. I'd be dead because I needed to go into the hospital for two months. And he goes, they give us a truck. They give us

gas. They give us the tablet. They give us a laptop. They give us our uniforms and they give us paid time off. And I was talking to my general manager last night and I said, man, I said, it would be nice to go back in time and just say, hey, I'm going to work out of my house and I'm not going to have any overhead. But I said, that's not a business. That's not a business. I can leave now for a month and we'll set record weeks without me. And that's a business. I mean, with the people that are listening, where do you recommend to get that through to them and really build that freedom? Well, I'll start with the word freedom. So let's say if you and I were working together, I'd want to understand what freedom really means. Because if you sit down and you say, I want freedom, I'm going to give you or assume that the freedom that you're looking for is what I believe the word freedom means to me.

So when you talk about getting to the why, I want to get to the why of what does freedom mean to you? Then you'll answer that question. Then I'll say, well, what does that mean? Why is that important? Why is that important? And I'm constantly going to drill down until I understand without a shadow of a doubt what the word freedom means to you. And once I understand what freedom means to you, now I've got a shot at actually hitting the target. You know, it's like, it's dating, right? You've brought up dating before.

If someone says, I want somebody to love me. Okay. What does that mean? What does that mean? You know, you have to come home on time. What does that mean? You know, I want you to kiss me on my neck, uh, right side, left side, how long, how much pressure, wet, dry, you know what I mean? But all those nuances mean something. So we go through life so often thinking we understand what we need to do for ourselves and what we need to do for others and what they mean. And we don't even understand ourselves what freedom means. Freedom means something very specific to you. And it might be what you mentioned. Hey, I can go away for a month and my business is still operating. Great. Does it mean anything else other than that?

Why is that important to you? So it's like an onion. So I love the idea of getting to why. And I do, I get to the why and what specifically does that mean with words. That's when you really get to the true essence. And then it's really simple to achieve it once you understand what it really, really means. What I took out of that is amazing. And I think that people can relate that are on the call is you might say, I just want to make money to retire. Well, why? And if you keep going back, back, back, back, back, you get to the root of it. And yes, I love that. I'm a big fan of recruiting and hiring A players and great leadership could take a C player and make them an A player. But it's a cliche term that we use. But literally what I found is people could

get done 10 times more things. It's about results. An A player to me gets results. Tell me a little bit about building a funnel because the number one question I get, and I'm talking 12 times a day, is I put out an ad. I'm posting all the time. I have competitive wages. How come I can't find anybody? I don't have that problem. I've got a lot of answers myself to that, but I want to hear your solution to hiring and how to find great people. Man, you just hit a topic for me. I was literally on the phone with somebody, a mentor before I got on this phone. So buckle up because here it comes. First of all, yeah, this is, I do this for myself and I do this for any of the clients that we work with. Number one, you post an ad, begin the ad thing. Please read this ad carefully. At the end of the ad, you're

going to have some keywords or a phrase. You know, I love basketball. It doesn't matter what the words are, but you tell them that you want that in the subject line. When you start getting the returned interest in the job, if they don't have that in the subject line, they have anything else, whatever it is, they're immediately excluded. Only the ones that follow the instructions are into the next round. I never, ever post what I'm willing to pay. I want to hear from them because I don't want to get somebody in the organization that really wants a hundred grand, but I'm only offering 80, but they're willing to take the 80 until they find the hundred. So I do not offer any guidance on what the job pays. I ask them what they need. Next, once they make it through that next round, I set up a Zoom video conference where we have a conversation. They know that it's going to be

video. If they're not willing to get on and have a video chat with me, we ain't going to the next stage. I don't interview. I audition. If I was a owner of a basketball team, NBA basketball team, am I going to pick somebody based on their resume? No, I want to see their film. I want to see them actually perform the tasks that I want them to do. So if I'm hiring somebody to edit the podcast, for example, this is what I did. Here are some audio files. I need you to edit these and I need you to send these back to you. And do you think somebody's going to turn around and cop an attitude? You want me to do some work before you actually pay me? Yes, you're going to get

that. Guess what? You're not the one. Next. So I make it a very difficult process, but I tell you, this is what you end up with exceptional players because you weed out all the whiners, all the people that don't want to do what's necessary. If you're not willing to do that, you know, what's going to happen when you actually get into the job and it starts to get a little difficult at times. so that's it that's how I it's an audition it's not an interview one more thing on to this if you can visualize four squares a picture a box and then draw a line through it and across to create like four quadrants on the left-hand side if

you put skills on the bottom portion put Now, if you do not have a written culture that every single employee understands, knows, and knows what the culture is and what it's like to adhere to the culture and not adhere to the culture, stop, figure that out, and make sure you have it. So sometimes you've got an exceptional employee. I mean, they're just a rock star. They might be a salesperson, but they do not fit into the culture at all, right? They're just great skills, but they're just a pain in the ass. If you go across the boxes, the upper left-hand corner, you put a C in that box. In the right-hand corner, you put an A in that box.

In the lower left-hand corner, you put a D. And in the right-hand corner, you put a B. If someone has low skills and does not adhere to the culture, they're a D player. Really easy. We know what to do with them. They need to find a job somewhere else. The B players, right? They're really, really good with the culture they fit in, but their skills just really aren't where they need to be. We can move them up to become an A player through giving them skills. Let's work with them. Let's mentor them. Let's train them. The A players, of course, we love them. That's what we're trying to get everybody to be. But here's the mistake where so many organizations make. There's that superstar person that's just

a cancer. And the C stands for cancer. And these people are the toughest to get rid of because they're like, ah, and they're driving revenue to the bottom line, but they're just a pain in the ass. And we keep them around and they destroy the culture of the company. And ultimately, if you don't deal with them, they'll bring down the company. I've fired three exceptionally great employees because of that. And it's not easy. No, it's not. I'm a profitability guy, right? It's like, all right, you know, I can put up with there, you know, but it's destructive to the company. Don't do it. You know, the people listening in the home service industry, we have

technicians and whether it's a chimney technician or a gutter replacement technician. And I think we all hire bookkeepers and there's a lot of important roles, call center reps, dispatchers. There's so many important things, but technicians are the ones that I feel like are a little bit harder from most people I've talked to in the industry. And here's what I want people to realize on this call. Let's say I've got a guy, my best guy does 20,000 a week. He's not the norm. Let's say a good week is 10,000 in your industry for a week. Let's say you got some bottom producers doing 4,000.

So that's a $6,000 variance. So 6,000 times 52 is 3312,000. So right now I have 100 technicians. So let's just say 20 of them weren't doing their job. So we'll times that by the, they're not hitting their goals, which I look at three things. Their customer satisfaction rate, their profitability, and their close ratio. Those are three main things that I pay attention to at least. There's a lot of other things, but that right there comes to $6.2 million just for replacing them with good players. So

$6 million is the opportunity cost. So let's just take that number. And I spend, you know, between three and 400,000 a month in marketing, depending on the PPC campaigns and TV and time of year. But we'll spend $35 on a Craigslist ad or we won't use Monster or Career Builder or Indeed. I think that that's broken. And I think if I've got the potential to make $6 million and to open up a funnel, you should be spending a percentage, a lot more money than $35 every two weeks. Oh, yeah. You should be. Six million is not the right number.

The number is 18 million. I'll tell you why. Because when they're all A players, they're out there. Those are the people that are getting invited to dinner with the customer. Those are the people that are telling their neighbors, you've got to meet Bob. Okay? This guy is amazing. The B players and the C players and the D players that are out there representing it, they're the ones turning around to the neighbors and go, oh, do not call that company.

Whatever you do, don't call that company. So I think the number is 18 million. And that's incredible. And the people out there talk about this story. I met a guy 10 years ago, probably maybe a little less than that. And he owned several car dealerships and lived in a mansion. And I was out in his garage fixing his door. And I said, listen, I cannot believe this place. It's amazing. He gave me a tour of the house. And I said, I'm a young entrepreneur. I'd really appreciate it if you could give me a pointer or two. And he said, Tommy, I own all these dealerships. He goes, you know how much time I spent? He goes, I make a phone call for 15 minutes at night and talk to my key man.

And I know everything. And he goes, my secret is I pay 20% more than the industry average. And he goes, I've got the lowest turnover of any dealership I've got. And he told me all this stuff. And I took that to heart. And I did that with my technicians. I just had a hard time doing that internally with every single person. And lately we've just been really, I mean, my payroll is well over, you know, right around 150 a week, but that's not even a big deal to me

because they're producing, you know, that might sound like a lot to some people and a very little to some people it's relative, but they're producers. And it's amazing what happens when you pay people right. And I think that's a big driver is we've got paid insurance. We've got eye care. We've got, we pull life insurance policies for people. That's part of coming on. We give paid vacations, but we give a good salary. And I think you're right for everything. It's just the most problems I see is the funnel. How do you get people to come on? And I go, well, how are you paying?

Well, I pay – I start everybody at $12 an hour. And I go, well, I don't know for sure. You can get good people, but they're few and far between. So what do you think to build that funnel? What's the funnel? Well, I try to figure out what the most I can pay. Now, I know that's coming from a profitability consultant, right? But I'm trying to figure out the most I can pay. So I sit down and say, look, based on what you're going to be doing for me, this is how much I can pay. But I've got some

good news. I've got some other areas that we want to grow in. And if you can get us from here to here, here's what you're going to make. I did this initially with the girl in the Philippines, and she almost fell off her chair. She goes, that's like double what this job should really pay. I said, that doesn't matter to me because the value that you will be providing to me if you can get to these levels is massive. And I am happy to pay that. So, you know, feeding the funnel, you've got to get A players. A players will outperform your B players and C players. Do not hold any C players 15 to 1. It's immeasurable. And if you're not consistently firing people that are not up to standard, you're not doing your job.

I remember a mentor of mine told me one day, he said, Thor, can you think of somebody in your firm that if they quit on Monday, you'd be happy? I'm like, hell yeah. He looked at me and said, you're not doing your job. If I was your chairman, I'd fire you. Interesting. That's a good validation point right there. Yeah, I can relate to that. Another thing, Thor, that I a question that you get is if you were to sell your company today, let's say the company taken over said, listen, I need this to run like a well-oiled machine.

You'd say, OK, well, I know I'm going to have to get rid of these three people. And, you know, it's another way of looking at it because I've held on to them because I'm loyal to them because they were loyal to me so long. And I don't think that's the right attitude. I can tell you that people listen to this call, whether it's an Aunt Susie, it's a child. Family's tough, first of all. Secondly, you held on to somebody because guess what? They've been with you through thick and thin and you feel like you owe them. But listen, I have a couple hundred employees and they all have kids.

So that's 600 people. They're relying on me to make good decisions so that we could continue to feed their families and give them insurance and do the right stuff. So because somebody stood by me that I'm supposed to take a chance to not have them do job security anymore. You know, and that's the way I condone it in my head. It's not easy to fire anybody. It's not. It's not. You know, and I have one client that they can't make any hiring decisions unless they talk to me. It's pretty funny. He goes, look, I'm a lousy hirer. He goes, I need protection from myself because you have to approve all the new hires. That's awesome.

I always say never, ever hire someone that you can't turn around and fire. I've got another client that just comes to mind that it's his high school buddy. It's long-term friendships, and it is what it is. Don't hire people that you can't. If they do not perform, that it's going to cause issues in another part of your life. Yeah, that's – it hits home a lot. I mean my mom and stepdad work for me and my dad works for me and I got – so I write about that in my book. Is family the right thing?

And at times it could be and I'm not saying don't do it but I'm saying it's never. Yeah, I'm not saying don't do it either. Just make it really clear that, look, I know your family but here's the expectations this is what i need done and if it can't be done i need to know that if this doesn't work we still are going to be friends or we're still going to be family yeah i had a buddy of my best friend growing up in michigan he worked for me and things didn't work out and we went separate directions and, you know, he gets it. And so I put my cousin in the right spot. But, you know, and one thing about hiring is you got three ways and you never forget this, that the people out there, you got three ways to be able to hire. You could recruit and train from the ground up. You could steal your competitors' best people,

or you could buy out a company and just you basically buy your workers. And I'm highly interested in all three of those. I've bought out companies. I always steal the best because they know I pay the best and they know that they've got a culture here. We have a morning mojo call every morning and we tell them how they're doing. and we hire people from the ground up. So there's not only one thing fits all, there's several ways to get good people. So at the end of the day, I think I'd love to talk to you more about the accountability manager and start to get involved with you on that. And I want to just find out how people can get more of you. Obviously you've got your website.

It's Thor Conklin. That's C O N K L I N.com. And, uh, correct. Tell me a little bit about onward nation.com. Oh yeah. It's just our Facebook group that we have that you can interact with other people that are peak performers. So that's one of the Facebook pages.

So what else? How do I get more of you? If the listeners out there, what else do you got that could help out and how else would really get a ton of value out of, because again, you're not going to end up in my drip campaign is if you send me an email of 50 words or less to Thor at Thor Conklin dot com and you identify the biggest issue that you have in your business, I will write back and I will give you a four-step process to eliminate that problem completely or at the very least move it forward significantly. It is not going to be an autoresponder. I'm going to respond to it. You're going to get the four points. And then if there's something specific that you have in that email that I can give you some thoughts on, I'll do that as well. I love it. All right. Well, I'll think of my 50 words

here very carefully. It's been great talking with you. I like to talk a little bit about some good books. If there's anything you recommend, anything you read lately that you want to share and just leave with you with some final thoughts that maybe we didn't cover something you might have wanted to. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, and I don't want to be remiss in forgetting this as well, is, you know, if you're struggling in your business or you're just not getting the profitability that you want, you know, please reach out to me. You've got the email address and I'd certainly be or so in my Audible account as well. I really, really enjoyed The One Thing, a phenomenal, phenomenal book. If you want to be exceptional at execution, you've got to figure out that one or two things that you're going to absolutely be focused on. If you spread yourself too thin, it's not going to work. Fan of Geno Wickman, Traction.

A lot of the stuff that we do is very similar to the Traction model. We just incorporate a psychological piece to it because here's the thing. Most people know what to do. They're just not doing what they know they need to, and there's something getting in the way. So if you want a formula or a roadmap to follow, you there's something getting in the way. So, you know, if you want a formula or a roadmap to follow, you can find those anywhere on the internet. It's not about lack of knowledge. It's about lack of execution. And that generally comes from something that you don't see. And we all have those blind spots. I have those blind spots. That's why I have advisors

around me. So those are two books that I really enjoy. I've got a whole bookshelf full of them. I could go on and talk about books for hours. I love that. Well, I definitely want to get you back on. I want to talk to you more about everything. There's a book you should check out. I just read it last week. It's called Blue Fishing by Steve Sims.

I interviewed him. Yeah, it's funny. I bought his book. I haven't read it yet. Oh, it's Steve Sims, man. I haven't had him on the podcast, but he is a great book. I haven't read it yet. Oh, Steve Sims, man. I haven't had him on the podcast, but he is a great book. Yeah. Yeah. He's got a great story. Yeah. He's really good. Yeah. I've read all about him. It's great stuff. So listen, I really appreciate your time, Thor.

Absolutely. Look, the version of me that you see right now, you know, was not the same version 10 years ago, 20 years ago, five years ago, or last year. So I'm constantly figuring out how to improve myself as well. And what I really love about your audience is I get to see all kinds of different businesses. And the lane that you guys are in and taking care of the home services, it is a terrific, terrific lane. There is massive amounts of money to be made in this area. It is something that does extremely well, regardless of what the economy is doing. So, you know, hats off to you. If you're in that lane, you've chosen well.

Hey, listen, I'm sure the listeners appreciate it. I appreciate it from somebody that's worked with so many companies and absolutely going to communicate in the future about working with you. So thank you very much. And thank you. We'll connect very soon. Awesome. I enjoyed it. Thank you. All right, sir. Take it easy. This was the Home Service Expert podcast. Now listen up. Do you want to dominate your market, triple the profit you make without working those long 12 hour days, seven days a week? If the answer is yes, my team and I are opening up some new time slots to help you solve your biggest business challenge. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book a free 30-minute call with our team today. I will repeat that,

homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book your free call today.