The Home Service Expert Podcast - He Beat Cancer And Says Most Owners Are Selling For The Wrong Reasons | Michael Werner

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Michael Werner has lived several business lifetimes: Goldman Sachs M&A, president of Werner Ladder at $500 million plus, the Gerber turnaround from $100 million to $700 million, and founder of HomeX, where he sold Schedule Engine to ServiceTitan for nine figures. Twenty years ago, doctors told him he had about four years left. In this episode, he and Tommy break down private equity done right, why ownership changes how people work, the three things that motivate every employee, and the four trends that will decide which home service companies survive the next decade. Connect with Michael ⟶ [e-mail] -- 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 🕐 -- 00:00 - Introduction 02:02 - Why He Asks Everyone Their Origin Story 04:19 - Goldman's 15 Minute Rule 06:05 - Growing Werner Ladder Past $500 Million 08:49 - Too Entrepreneurial To Stay 12:07 - The Gerber Turnaround: $100M To $700M 14:30 - Satisfy Customers Or Delight Them? 19:41 - Trust, Time, Transparency: The HomeX Idea 23:30 - Why He Took A Minority Partner 29:09 - The Rental Car Ownership Test 32:29 - The Three Things That Motivate People 36:19 - Did The Trades Give Him Cancer? 38:53 - Hold The Mirror Up Before You Sell 42:39 - Never Say Retirement 47:15 - Four Trends That Decide Who Survives 50:33 - The David And Goliath Strategy 53:00 - Where He'd Put His Money 59:39 - The Death Sentence, In Full 1:02:10 - Long-Term Greedy: Final Advice 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Check Out My Social Media: Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

20 years ago, I was told I'd be dead in about four years. So that really changed my thinking. I was very fortunate. I did a lot of research. I traveled around the world, talked to a lot of doctors. Through the Lymphoma Research Foundation, was able to get a clinical trial put together that I believe saved my life. Any of us, snap your fingers.

You could be gone tomorrow or four years in that we're all here for Blake. You're dead a really long time. And if you can give back and make the world better while you're here, that's really an important thing. All right, guys, welcome back to the home service expert. I got one hell of a guest joining us today, one of my favorite people, one of the smartest guys I know. Michael Werner started his career as an M&A investment banker at Goldman Sachs, grew his family ladder business to $500 million plus, scaled Globe Union,

including Gerber plumbing products, which he saved from bankruptcy, from $100 million to $700 million, and then founded HomeX with a vision to radically improve home service for homeowners and contractors. After self-funding the business, he raised $90 million of equity from a minority investor. He later sold the Schedule Engine B2B Division to service setting for nine figures, and then he merged his remote AI diagnostics, B2C business with Bright AI. Michael has grown his home-ex service business to almost $500 million. Today is going to break down what it takes to scale of business to hundreds of millions of revenue. How AI is changing the way technicians work and what every home service owner should know before taking on a partner or sell.

their business. Michael, how the heck are you, brother? I'm wonderful, Tommy. It is great to see you. It's always fun, man. I just, whenever I'm around you, you got a lot going on, but what I respect the most is just your knowledge and your connections and the way that you've not only grown home service, but you understand technology and you understand every aspect of how a business is valued. I just want to take a quick minute to have you walk through your humble beginnings, even though Grandpa invented the Werner Ladder. And what you're excited about where you're at today, what you're looking forward to?

That's great. You know, it's funny. I was at a board meeting yesterday for a small venture company I'm involved with. And I was talking with somebody about when you interview somebody, do you ask him their origin story? And he was talking to a potential investment. And the guy said, well, I don't want to talk about any of that. I just want to talk about who I am today.

And he said, I'm not investing in that company. And I kind of laughed. And I said, I interview anybody or whenever I even meet somebody on an airplane, I always like to start with their origin story. Where'd you come from? Because I think you're past and what you've done is such a prolonged to the future. So as I think about my background, I grew up in Chicago, went to school on the West Coast. And as I think about the things that really defined who I am, it was working in my family business as a kid, literally, working with my dad sometimes,

going to the office with him on the weekends. But the most important things in my life, number one have been my family and our family values. And so many people in this industry are family businesses where the family values drive them. And in our family, our core value is to always be a positive for us. So I'd say my family business, Warner Ladder, had a huge impact on me. The second big thing that had an impact on me was spending time in Asia. And I actually spent time in Asia right after the Vietnam War had ended and Cambodia was actually liberated by the Vietnamese.

And I got to see really two things happening. One is I saw how bad socialism can be in communism and how it destroys countries and people. And two is I saw China, because I also spent time in China, starting to blossom. And it really helped me understand that yearning to be an entrepreneur. And the third big thing that really impacted me was about 20 years ago I had lymphoma. And having lymphoma actually helped me realize that I'm only here today because of the research that others have done such a long time ago. and actually I was saved by a clinical trial. So as I kind of bring all that together,

when I think about kind of where I am and where I'm going, I have a very simple purpose in the world. How do you make life better for people? How do you make it better for the people you work with? How do you make it better for your communities and everybody else that you are engaged with? So as I think about what's important to me in life, those are really the things that have driven me in my business

and my personal life. I love it. Yeah, positive for us. That's excellent. But you started at Goldman Stacks doing M&A, and you said you were working $100 plus work weeks and drinking from a fire hose. What did you learn about business during that time that still shapes how you operate today? Yep.

Goldman was an incredible place. You know, it's funny. If you go back and I'm an old guy now, I just had my birthday, and my granddaughter was really happy on my birthday to give me the whole six, seven, which I think if the people were talking to don't know, their kids will know it. Yeah. So she goes, poppy. You're six, seven today. So it was really fun to get that. But in the early 80s, when I went to work at Goldman, they had just woken up. It was like Rip Van Winkle. You know, we had back-to-back recessions in the early 80s and then the world was waking up again. And the two things I really learned at Goldman Sachs. One is what professionalism is. It's interesting. Goldman has what they call the 15-minute rule. You need to respond within 15 minutes to any email, any text, anything else you get. And it's that idea of being a professional,

being the best at what you can do, really becoming an expert that really adds value. And it's the idea of doing everything to the level of excellence. The second thing I learned at Goldman is how little I knew. And I worked over a seven-year period at Goldman and then for a private equity partner, who was really a financier. I worked on over 100 different transactions. And every time I would meet a company, it was amazing to me how much new stuff I would learn about an industry, about a company, about a different way of doing business.

I'd say my two takeaways were, one, the idea of professionalization, really being a professional and being intellectually curious. And then two, the idea that no matter how much we think we know, we only know a fraction of what's out there. So you always need to rely upon other people to teach you a lot. So then after Goldman, you went to the family business and you helped grow it to over 500 million. But I know you stepped down in 2001. I think there was some type of disagreement with the P.E. partners? What exactly happened there? And what did you learn from that experience? Yep. Our family business was actually great. When I joined it, we were a little over $100 million.

My grandfather, his two brothers, my dad, his two brothers and a cousin who grew up across the street. It was like a brother built the business. And we're really ready to move to the next level with the business. One of the neat things we had, and I think it's something that applies to a lot of home service companies, is we had the idea of what we called planned nepotism. In our business, we would usually take something. We try to take something that we thought was a weakness, figure out how to turn it upside down and make it a strength. So for plan nepotism, we encourage people, not just Warners,

we actually had over 200 family groups working in the company. So we would encourage people to go out and get the best education for them. It could be Votech school training, or it could be an MBA from one of the fancy schools. And then after you do that, you go and you work on the outside. because you really want to cut your own teeth. You want to really get a feel for what business is like, get some exposure and learn things that you can bring into the company. And then when you come into the company,

you don't work directly for your dad or your mother. You work for somebody else. So I worked for my uncle who is my mentor. And when I came into the company, what I saw was a company that had a great brand, great products, and it was ready to launch, ready to really go big. And the big challenge we had was really figuring out our strategy and how we're going to leverage technology for the future.

because industry in those days was changing. The U.S. was starting to lose manufacturing. It was going offshore. We had competitors from China. We had competitors from Mexico. So the big thing that I really had to focus on there is really how to prepare the business to go forward. Over time, we actually decided as a third-generation member,

our family grew, and we were very bountiful. We had lots of babies. So we decided that we needed to take care of everybody. I was actually the heir parent. I was president of the latter company. And we sold to a private equity firm. incidentally, it's the same firm that ultimately helped create the wrench group. But what I found out is that when we partnered with them, I loved them because their typical plan was to take a company public. And our plan was to go public around 2002 or so. But by the early 2000s, if you didn't have a dot com after your name, it was really hard to go public. If you were pets.com, they went public for $6 billion. And then they went bankrupt six months later. But a latter call. company that was growing 15% a year at good double-digit epita, that wasn't considered very

sexy. So my partners, yeah, it's amazing how that is, right? Pets.com sexy goes bankrupt, word or latter, not very sexy, 75-year-old business that keeps growing. But my partners wanted to sell the business to a strategic. And I knew me, and I knew that I was too entrepreneurial. I would not. I learned in my Goldman Sachs days the way a lot of the strategics operate and the way their

management's think. And I just knew that I would not do well with the strategic. I actually talked to one Fortune 500 company. And the CEO of the company said when trying to woo us about getting us to sell to him, he said, you know, how would you like to have my job one day? And I said, that's really nice to you, but no, I'm too entrepreneurial. That's not what I want to do. And he looked at me and he goes, well, no one's ever said that to me before. And I kind of laughed and said, well, how many guys have you offered it to? But I knew for myself that I did not want to work for a strategic. So I agreed to disagree with my partners because they wanted to sell the business and because they couldn't at that time really take it public. And I felt that I'd leave the business.

So yeah, you know, this is a great topic. And I wanted to get into this later. I want to jump into the next phase. And then I want to talk a lot about private equity and then IPOs and strategics. But I know you became right after Werner, you became the CEO of Global Union Group. and you saved Gerber plumbing from bankruptcy and grew the whole company from $100 million over $700 million. What was the turnaround playbook? And how did you take something that was failing to scale it at that level? Yep. And, you know, what's interesting, Tom, is the same things we did to grow Werner as a successful company,

ultimately became what we did at, or what I did at Globe Union. And I think it all starts with values and culture. So at Werner, we had my family value of being a positive. We had long-term generational thinking, and that's the advantage of being a private family business, because you could really look out five years, ten years, 15 years. And when you think about strategy, you say, how do you build a strategy that in the same way that Jim Collins would talk about good to great, you can really make a company that's built to last. So that's number one, is really having the right culture and the right values.

And then we built the strategy for it. At Gerber, our strategy, and Gerber's part of Globe Union, our strategy was really three things. It was number one to take a look at all the products the company had. And at one time, Gerber had some of the best functional products out there. But then they atrophy. They actually got a little bit fat and happy. It was a third generation family business and it was going south. And we reinvented the product line.

I literally went out and I got all the leading competitors products. We got about 100 different products. And we would bring them to a laboratory and have that. the laboratory test them all for us. And these were primarily very basic things. There were toilets and there were faucets. So we analyzed all the products of our competitors, figured out what was best, and then put together our own product roadmap of how we wanted to have the very best products in the industry. So number one, it started with products. And if you're a home services business, it's the same thing. It's the services that you offer. How do you offer your services

different than somebody else? Number two was really our focus on our customer. And Gerber historically was a contractor's product. And Dan's, which was our Fawcett line, was a showroom brand. So we actually really doubled down on our distribution and stayed true to our distribution. We had opportunities to sell the big boxes. We had opportunities to sell the warehouse clubs. We chose not to so that we could really focus on the core customers that we really wanted to build. And then number three is we looked at all of our business systems. We looked at our manufacturing. We looked at our distribution. We looked at everything and we said, how do we take it from where it is today and raise it all the way up so that when our customers deal with us, they say that you are literally the word I would use is delightful.

And as you think about it, in business, if you satisfy somebody, you're kind of here. But if you can go that one step higher or two or three steps higher and truly delight somebody, there's actually some research that was done that show that you'll be six times more likely to keep a customer if you delight them than if you just satisfy that. So going back to my Goldman days, and it's kind of how it all weaves together, I learned what professionalism was. In my family, I learned how to set the bar really high. And if you think about it, at Werner, we made ladders.

And whether you're at three feet or 30 feet or in an airplane at 30,000 feet, if you come down, you come down and you can die. So at Werner, we had a product vision, which we called up and down safely. And our whole focus was making excellent products and the very best products. And I carried that forth to Globe Union. by fixing the company, by investing in the people, by investing in the products, investing in the distribution, we really were able to make a business that just rocketed it.

And then you fast forward, you're at HomeX. Tell me a little bit about HomeX. It's approaching $500 million. It sounds like you use the same stuff you learned at Werner, but you took on a minority partner, which is not uncommon, but definitely less common. Yep. And that's something I did later on.

When I was at Globe Union, I had a wonderful partner and a great guy. I actually met him when I was looking after I sold out of Warner. I had between my undergraduate and grad school, I lived in Asia, I lived in Taiwan, I lived in Thailand, spent a lot of time in China. As I mentioned a few minutes ago. And I saw that China was coming, that the world was changing and that a lot of manufacturer was going to go to Asia. So I was looking to buy companies kind of like Gerber that were in trouble. and I was going to globalize the manufacturing, keep a large part of the manufacturing in the States, but I also wanted to have suppliers in Asia. I met this wonderful guy who helped me as I was looking at

factories, and then he tried to hire me, and I kept saying, I'm not looking for a job. And after about the sixth time of doing it, I had him actually travel with me. We went hiking in Colorado. I went with him in Taiwan. We went hiking in Taiwan. We realized that we had identical values. In fact, our core value. He would say it in Chinese and I'd say it in English is to be a positive force and we built that business together and that's how we built it to 700 million. But later he unfortunately had an illness and he was terminally ill and he knew that he was going to be passing away in a couple of years. And I also, the same way that I saw China coming, I saw China starting to go and I felt that we had to actually change the business model. I wanted to manufacture even more in the U.S.

I wanted to globalize the manufacturing more in Europe than in Mexico at other places and make other changes. And he wasn't really ready to make any changes. So I realized it was time for me to go. But a couple of years prior to that at the Kitchen and Bass Show, and I'm a big believer in giving back to industries and getting involved in the various trade organizations, I was asked to give the keynote address at the Kitchen and Bass Show. And it was in 2012, the year before David Kohler gave it. And David, who's a great public speaker, gave a speech that was just talked full of

wonderful Kohler commercials. So you saw the bold look at Kohler. And I said, how am I going to compete with that? So I said, the only way I can compete with that was trying to use some ideas. And I spent some time and I interviewed a lot of people in the industry. And I did a presentation. It was an hour-long speech. And I focused on two main things. One is if we can leverage technology and two is if we can leverage networks, we can fundamentally change an industry that had totally been on its ass. Because the housing industry went from a million and a half starts down to 400,000 starts, and it was slowly creeping back up, and in 2012, it was still the tail end of the depression. So my whole approach was how do you change the industry? And as I did

that, I actually realized that there was a real need to change the way consumers take care of their homes and the way contractors operate, and both of those related to technology and to leveraging networks. So if you fast forward a few years, this is in 2012, and in my Globe Union business, I'm then trying to put those things to work. In 2014, 2015, my partner's starting to get sick and doesn't really want to change the business anymore. And my whole ethos is I'm always looking how you build a business, how you change a business, how you make it better.

So my approach was how do we really reinvigorate Globe Union? When my partner didn't want to do it, I said, you know what? I think there's a tremendous need to change housing in this country. So I then said, I can go and start a whole other company. another company. And being a little bit ambitious, I actually started three companies at once. I started one company that's a home services company. That's called a HomeX Services Group. I started another company that was our digital company. In the digital company, we created a

consumer company, which became our remote diagnostic division. And then we acquired, rather than doing it off the scratch, a pre-revenue company called Schedule Engine, which we ultimately sold to service type. And the key, you know, as I look back and say, what was the opportunity that we saw, and it's something that every contractor can relate to. If you look at our consumers, what they typically lack is trust. Unless you know a Tommy Mello who can fix your garage door or a Larry Gemma from Gem company who can do your plumbing, you don't have a lot of trust in the people who are working on your house. And quite often, you don't have control of time. You don't know that contractor is going to come today, tomorrow, or next week, or never.

And the third thing is, there's very little transparency. So you don't know if something going to cost $100 or $1,000. So our approach was, how do you use technology to make it really easy for the consumer? And then on the flip side, what we wanted to do is make it better for the contractor. And I'm someone behind my, you know, my Werner Latter Days, most of our products were sold to contractors. I spent time when I was young, painting houses. So I've always had great admiration for people who work with their hands and work in the trades.

I also have a strong military background. My grandfather was in both World War, so it was always very focused on the military. So the military and contractors were two things that were important to me. And as I was thinking about creating the HomeX business, my thought was, if I can create a business that can make life better for contractors can improve how people live at home, then we can really create something special. And that was kind of the core idea behind HomeX when we created it. Oh, man, there's so many questions. I want to ask you, you know, China, if you read the art of work, which I'm sure you have it.

It's like they play the long game. And now, you know, I've heard this saying so many times. It's remarkable how people overestimate what they could do in one year, but underestimate what they could do in five to ten years. And there's a great book by John Worrelo. And I kind of subscribe to it. I'm different. I was on a podcast recently with Gary Vaynerchuk.

And he said, I'm never selling my businesses. He goes, I have no need to, no ambition to. He goes, I'm not buy and sell type guy. and I said, well, everything should be built to sell. Whether you're going to sell it or not, it needs to be sellable. You start focusing if your software on churn and other key factors getting profitable, the rule of 40, things like that. If you're in the home service space, you just make different decisions based on the fact

that it's a sellable company. But I found that if you could rinse and repeat, I mean, you know, we churned the company at the end of 2022. We're under four years. We've almost five. M-O-I-C. And, you know, you look at Amazon, Facebook, Amazon, I think, JetPesos owns, what, 7% of the company. You look at these companies, they're all like either single or just low-teen numbers because they took on investors.

What is your thought when it comes to home service? You took on a minority partner. I just want to understand your mentality towards how this business should look, especially specifically blue collar home service home improvement. I've got a lot of different thoughts there. And I think my first question I would ask somebody is what are your objectives? And I think I've spoken, we've now done at HomeX, we've done over 20 different, we call them partnerships if they're a major platform and acquisition, if they're an add-on.

And each time we always start off talking to the owner about what their interests are and what their objectives are. So as you think about taking on capital, I'll tell you what we did in this company. Because we had both the services business, which was growing very quickly, growing actually 35% compounded for the last nine years, our EBITDA is growing even faster than that. So that was a business that we could totally sell fun. But then we also had a tech company. And in the tech company, we had more than 200 employees. So a prime reason why I actually brought in a minority partner.

And I was very specific. I wanted a minority partner who would be my business partner, not somebody who would control the company, was really for two reasons. Number one is I felt that no matter how many people I had brought in and no matter how big I grew the company, bringing in a minority private equity partner would really accelerate our growth. No different than my early days at Goldman when I saw what the professionalism was and I saw what people like that can help a company do. If you choose wisely and you have the right partner, you can grow even faster, you can grow better. You can attract better people than you'd be able to track on your own. So that was reason number one to accelerate our growth. reason number two is we needed more capital.

And we had over 200 engineers. We were spending a lot of money in our tech business. So I wanted to be able to have more capital to grow the home service company, as well as grow the tech company. And as an aside in getting that capital, the other thing I did is I took the capital I had put in the business because I self-funded in the beginning. I took that off the table. So I wanted to make my wife happy. I wanted to provide for my family. I actually had brought a funny side.

In the Werner Ladder business, my great-uncle, three brothers started the business, my grandfather and great-uncle. My great-uncle had no natural kids, and he gave every relative he knew of a little bit of stock in the company because he wanted everybody in the company to actually feel like it's theirs. So when they watch the final four and they see a Werner-Ladder there, they want them all cheering for it as opposed to being jealous. So I learned from my great-uncle, and I said, you know what? When I started HomeX, I went to my siblings.

I went to my cousins and said, you know, if you'd like to invest, I'll permit you to invest on the same terms that I am because I want you to feel like you're part of this company because I know it's going to be successful. So we actually did that. Everybody, there were about 20 different relatives who invested in the business. And I wanted to give them the opportunity to get their cash out. So I took a little cash out for that. But I would encourage people, if they've got a home service business today, I would actually

ask them to hold that mirror up and ask themselves a bunch of questions. Because a lot of people just jump and say, well, everybody else is selling, I should go sell. And then they're terribly unhappy. But there's a lot of different ways to fund a business. You can bring in a minority partner. You can put some bank debt on it. You can pay more dividends to yourself or take out more draws, depending upon what your structure is, whether your partnership in LLC or C corp. And getting an advisor who can actually help you who's not just looking to sell your business, but can really help and explore your values and what you want to do can really really make it important for you. So in the case of HomeX, we did it because I wanted more capital to grow.

I wanted the professionalization and I wanted to take a little capital off the table. But as I think about home service companies out there, I think a lot of them are selling for the wrong reasons. We actually had one transaction where the guy wanted to sell the business because he had three employees who worked for him. he called him the three amigos and all they did was fight so he loved his business he didn't want to go but he wasn't willing to deal with the personnel problems that he had and then once he sold the business he was terribly unhappy because then his role in the business changed because he in our

structure he was going to be a small add-on and there wasn't a role for him going forward so there was a guy who didn't really understand why he was selling who was selling for the wrong reasons and then he was unhappy, no matter what we did to try to find him a role somewhere else, he basically wanted to sell us his business and have nothing change. And the first thing I'd tell anybody or the second thing, the first thing is to look in the mirror. The second thing is anytime you sell a business, things will change. If you pick the right partner, they're going to change for the better. If you pick a bad partner, they're going to change for the worse. But to think they're not going to change is really a mistake. You know, part of the reason I sold, and I actually got up at

service tighten and I kind of, me and Chris Hopman had a debate. And, you know, I was up there and I kind of started bawling a little bit. And I said, my parents just turned 70. And I don't know how much time they have left on this earth, but I know that I had decent money, but I didn't have enough money to actually, like, do what I wanted to do with them, like, put my dad in a really nice house with a pool table in a pool, sent my mom off to all kinds of adventures with my stepdad and my uncle, on the last one. And I said, so a big piece for me was just making sure they were taking care of. The other piece was I had given a EIP program of 20%. And there had people that had been with me for over a decade at the time. And I wanted to make it real for them. I mean, I was sitting there

with millions of dollars, kind of living my best life. And I saw them like they were making good money and bonuses, but not the money that would change their life. So I wanted to make it real, knowing that we would make it real again. Those were a couple of things. And then I started to learn a lot more about things like Ownershipworks.org. KKR did it with CHI. Now a lot of companies. I know that Berkshire is doing it.

Some of it, I think, is real and they want to do it. Some of it is they're publicly traded and they want to really, it's more of a public PR move. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on ownership? you know, as a P.E. company, they usually give 10% of P units, profit units. There's other ways to structure things. But what is your overall thought on that? Yep. I start with the premise that, and I'd ask people this,

how many times have you washed a rental car? Zero. Most people will say zero. I've actually only had one person who ever said to me, surprisingly, no disrespect. She's an accountant and said, I always washed my rental car before I turned it in. Aren't you supposed to? So I thought that was a little bit funny. But if you think about ownership, if you own something, you take much better care of it. So in our tech business, and we had in the tech business about 300 employees, everybody had a little piece of ownership.

In our services business, it's structured differently, but we have a large percentage of the company, particularly the management team, that has an ownership stake. So to answer it succinctly, I'm a big believer that when people own, something, they treat it differently. The house you own, you treat differently than the house you rent. The car you own, you treat differently than the car that you rent. And no matter how hard working somebody is, if it's your company, what we try to do is to teach them how to think like an owner. And to me, an owner thinks long term. They think about people. They think strategically. And they're also much less fearful. They're willing to take risk. They're willing to make bets. But they're also

willing to do it knowing what could happen down the road and having plans for it. And it's a sense of saying that if something goes right, I'm going to figure out how to do more of it. If something goes wrong, I'm going to own it. I'm going to be responsible for it and I'm going to fix it. I'm not going to walk away from it. So I'm a big believer in home service companies giving their key people. I think it's hard to do it all the way down because if you're not publicly traded, if you give ownership to technicians. Usually what I found is they'd much rather have incentives. So we do different incentives for them. We don't do equity incentives for them. But for the people who can really move the needle in a leadership position, they're the people you want to have acting as owners and being owners.

And for them, I like to be generous and give them all an opportunity to really create a nest egg. You know what I've found is, at least for my technicians, we call them Pinnacle. And with Cortec, our partner, I was able to convince them to allow me to give the top 5% a grant, which isn't tax the same way. It's just a change of ownership. Some of these people will be getting 500 grand. The only drawback that I don't like is they're going to pay ordinary income versus capital gains. But the other part is if I did give them equity, it's a nightmare for taxes each year. I mean, we're in 24 states, so it becomes a CPA nightmare. But what really helps is, my top performers are just

they're so far they're A plus plus plus and I wanted them to have a reason to really really not only stay with the company but to help mentor others and I think that was one of the key moves I made is I haven't lost one of them not one

and I think that that you hear about the probably worst saying I hear is the golden handcuffs which is a reason to have people stay but the other reason is have them think like owners, although I know it's just a grant, it still has the same effect. I'm a big believer in finding out what are people's, and you've done something with dream catchers, what are people's motivations? What drives somebody? And, you know, what I've found over the

years is there's really three things that drive people. One is there's some people who are driven for achievement and it comes internally. And whether they're shoveling snow or they're installing in the garage door or they're repairing somebody's HVAC system, they're going to do it as best as it possibly can be done. The second motivation are people who are financially motivated, and they tend to be in the sales team, and they like to win the deal, and they like to count their numbers. So for them, the question is, like with our salespeople, if we gave them equity, they wouldn't really care much about it. But if you give them an opportunity to get extra bonuses, get extra spiffs, get extra commissions, then they just run like wild. And that motivates them. And then you've got a

third group where it's social and they're motivated by their relationships with their peers. So part of what we try to have our HR folks do is really understand each people and be able to craft something that's unique for them, treat everybody fairly, but understand where they're coming from and try to give them something. So as it relates to equity, my personal experience has been the same as yours as it relates to things like ownership equity, profits interest directly because then it's better tax-wise, but it's really a pain in the ass for them from filing their tax returns. They can't file on April 15th.

They've got to wait to all the K-1s are in at the end of the year. So we end up using three different things. We've used some phantom equity in some cases where they'll get something when a transaction happens, but there's no legal paperwork before that that's equity paperwork. We use bonuses extensively. And then for certain people, we'll use options. And the options are easy because they don't have to do anything until you have a transaction. Yeah, no, this is, you're,

You're like a guru at this stuff. Obviously, your time at Goldman and just all of your, you're on, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're on several different boards. Yeah, I actually have kind of lost track the number of boards I'm on. I'm probably on too many. I've cut back some of my corporate boards. I've started being on venture boards of small companies because I love working with young, bright entrepreneurs building businesses.

I was in Detroit yesterday in this one venture company. I've got another one that's involved in our home services industry called Bremen, we're just an incredible young founder. And I find those are just so much fun because I learn so much about how younger people are thinking. I also learn about new technologies that I want then want to apply to our own business. So it's a way for me to be intellectually curious and get back at the same time. And if I'm lucky, I'll make, I'll make some money on top of it, which is really good. I never really thought of a number of non-profit. Sorry? I just never really thought about being on a board to learn. I think about podcasting and going to events and actually socializing with people,

but I never really looked at being on a board. I've always thought, man, if I'm going to go be on a bunch of boards, I'm probably distracted from, what is it? Keller wrote the one thing, is like, although I like to get a lot of information from books and podcasts and different information, but I never looked at a board like that of just saying, what strategic boards could I'd be on that would help me with the one thing? I think boards are a great way to learn. And it's not that the board per se is how you learn. It's the people you interact with. It's the other directors. It's learning about all the things, the expertise they bring. And when they distill down their input for the CEO, they try to make it very crisp. So you learn from them in a very clean sound bite fashion.

And then it's also the interactions with the companies, with the founders. That's the advantage of smaller companies. When you are on larger company boards, I think sometimes you learn you tend to learn things you might already know about people processing systems, but it's the younger companies where you've got some new thinking and you've got new technology coming. I want to talk. I'm also a big believer. Yeah, you're a big believer. I'm also a big believer in nonprofit boards.

Okay. So I spent a lot of my years being involved. As I mentioned, lymphoma was a major factor in my life. I think I actually got it from being in the trades. I'm pretty sure I got my lymphoma from painting houses for seven years because when I was a kid, I was painting houses at 1415 and you would just take the benzene to wash the brushes. And later on, I found that benzene's highly carcinogenic. But I'm a big believer in nonprofit boards.

And I think it's really important, my point of view in life. And I think a lot of the owners of companies can do this because it gives you a good relationship in your community. It might be a church board. It might be a local nonprofit, whatever it might be. But then there's also national nonprofits and regional ones. So I've been very involved in things that relate to foreign policy. I'd live my early years.

I spent time in Asia, so that's always been a focus of mine. I'm also very involved in health. And now my new interest in my next chapter is actually in the arts. So I'm on two different art boards, one in California and one in Chicago. That brings me to another question I'm going to have for you a bit here. When it comes to private equity, you know what I've noticed is a lot of my buddies are like, dude, I got this amazing offer. And I'm like, what kind of caveat? does it have to it? Well, some of it's an earn out. Some of it has got to hit this benchmark.

And then I say, how new is the company that are like two years? And they promise the world. And, you know, they're small cap, midcap, large cap. There's a Black Stones, Black Rock, KKRs of the world, Apollo, Ares, you know. And then there's like a mid-cap. I think Cortec kind of fits in that mid-range, depending on the size of their fund. And then some of them are privately held and some of them are, you know, I've already on the public market, which changes things. When you're looking at, I guess it really depends on the size of the company and the industry, but as far as partners, you know, I talked to Dave Geiger recently and, you know, with Horizon, and he said, dude, you make the wrong deal with the wrong partner.

You're going to hate your life, just like you said. And you've got to really know what the next five years look like. and you've got to really go out and meet the companies that they work with. The ones that things went really great and the things that they didn't go great. And understand who you're getting to bet with. And more importantly, the guys you're going to be working with on a day-to-day basis. It could be a P.E. company, but who's the managing partners over that particular deal? There's just a lot of things that go into this.

I'm just curious to your view on overall private equity or strategic. And just there's a lot of options. You can do a dividend recap. You get a delay, draw, term. There's a lot of things that can happen. Yep. The way I approach it is I go back to holding the mirror up to yourself first to really understand what are you after? Because what's interesting is we've done 20 plus transactions. In my career, I've done about 150 transactions. I did over 100 in my Goldman days. I did 20 or 30

in my subsequent years. And then we've done over 20 at Homex. So I've worked with lots of sellers, work with lots of companies. And it's really interesting that I would say about half the time, the people doing a transaction, the sellers, aren't really sure what their objectives are. Of course, they want to say, I want some liquidity or I want to make my life better, but they haven't really held the mirror up and done the deep thinking to understand why. So the Japanese have something they call the five whys, and you ask why, why, why, why, why, why? Good example is we lost the baseball game. Why? Well, they scored more runs. Why? because our pitcher threw too many, you know, down the middle of balls that were too easy to hit.

Why? And when you really drill down to it, you find out that the pitcher had a fight with his wife the night before because she was cheating on them or whatever. And the root cause of why they lost the game was the pitcher's wife had nothing to do with the team. So it's really important to kind of ask those five why questions. Why do you really want to sell? And when you sell, what do you want to do? As I said earlier, there's a lot of people who like to sell, but then don't want to change anything

and want to stick around. There are other people who want to sell and want to leave the next day. So I think the kind of transaction you do depends upon what your purposes are. And then when you look at it, once you have a good sense of that, I think the next thing to do is really prepare the company properly. And you've got to prepare it years in advance. We bought several companies where the financials were such a mess that they didn't know what they were selling us and we didn't know what we were buying. And because we're a private company, we look at things differently. if I were a private equity company and I had an investment committee, we could have never done those

transactions. But there are a lot of companies where the people haven't figured out their financials. They don't have clean numbers. They don't have good reporting. They don't understand what an ad back is and they add back everything under the sun and think they should get paid for that. They don't understand almost the difference between revenue and profits and EBITDA and the capital required. So number two really is, is to prepare the company. And preparing a company goes back to people. Do you have the right people, all the right seats in the company. Do you have the right systems and do you have the right processes? And that's something you should do three or four years before you ever sell a business. So when you go to market with your business, whether you want to stay or you want to exit,

you actually are giving somebody a diamond. You don't want to give them the diamond in the rough. You want to give them the diamond that's been cut and polished and is beautiful. And it takes hard work to do that. So that's kind of number two. And then number three is when you're ready to do the transaction, If you know whether you want to sell it all or you want to sell part of it, then you're going to be able to pick the right banker who's going to do the right thing. A lot of bankers, a lot of private equity firms only like to do one thing or another. And there are, as you said, you know, you can do a dividend recap, you can put more debt on the business, you can pull cash out of the business, you can sell a majority, you can sell a minority, you can sell to a hundred percent, you can sell to a strategic. So you have to again go back and say, who's the right kind of partner I want to work with as a banker, who's the right kind of partner I want to sell with?

and then you can get a much better outcome. And I think the firms that we've seen that do that are much happier afterwards. And then there's a plus one more thing I'd add to that, which is to really think about your next chapter. Like Tommy, you're a young guy, your 40s. I'm older, as I said earlier, I'm at 6'7, hands up and down. And a lot of guys who are 6'7 say, I'm tired, I want to retire. And that's probably most of the companies we've partnered with. Big mistake they make is they haven't thought about their next.

chapter. And it's interesting. When I was young, my mother would talk about being a teenager, and I learned later in life that my mother's generation was actually the first generation where the word teenager meant something. Before that, you basically grew up. You're 18, 19, you went to work in the mill like your parents did. An 18-year-old and a 40-year-old looked alike. Today, when you're 67, and if I were to sell my business tomorrow, I've got another 20 or 30 years of productive life. My dad's 95. He's still on four boards. He still works 30, 40 hours a week. He's totally active. So if you think about it, if you're 67 and you're going to sell your business and snap your fingers in the next day you're out, what are you going to do for the next 20 years? So I really push people when they think about not just the companies that we talk to, but friends of mine now. I've got a lot of friends my age. And I say, don't talk about retirement. Talk about your next chapter. What's going to be important to you? Do you want to continually learn? Do you? Do you want to continually learn? You want to go back to school? Do you want to be able to build another business?

Do you want to be a philanthropist? Do you want to be able to give back to other people? Think about what's important. And if you don't know that in advance, when you're in the trench of doing a deal, because that's like being in a firefight, you're going to make really bad mistakes, and you're more likely to pick the wrong partner. And it doesn't mean you have to have everything figured out, but you've got to have enough of it figured out that you can really have a plan going forward.

I agree with everything. You know, I got a group on Facebook called the Home Service Expert Group. There's about 16,500 owners on there. And you either love private equity or hated depending on your experience or what you've heard. And a lot of people have this really negative view of private equity. Like they're just going to go raise prices and they're going to rip off people and they're going to take advantage of the mom and pops. And so I said something pretty controversial a few months ago. I said, yes, there are bad private equity companies,

but most of the time private equity goes wrong as the owner, like you said, has the wrong mindset. There's integrations that need to happen, and they are going to change the business. Hopefully for the better, they're not just going to boost prices. They're going to find operational excellence within the company, and they're going to build the right leadership team. And sometimes the owner has to go.

Darius-Liver's is a good buddy of money. He goes, if they're under $5 million of EBITA, the first thing we do is find a way for the owner to get the hell out of the business. They're a bottleneck. They're the worst thing. But it's, you know, multiples are through the roof right now. And I've talked to a lot of people that say they don't know if this is sustainable in the home service space. While I see at the same time, every SaaS business that never would think about home service.

Now looking at home service is more sustainable. What do you think? Well, first, what do you think about private equity in general? And I know there's good and bad. And then secondly, where do you think the future holds the next five to 10 years with AI automation and everything else? happening in the world. Yeah. Overall, I think private equity has been a great thing for industry and a great thing for

this industry because it's enabled so many people to be able to achieve more of their personal dreams financially. And I also think, number two, it's like anything else there's good and there's bad, but on balance it's been more good than bad. There are some private equity firms that come in and raise prices, but it's possible that maybe those prices were too low before and the business was operating suboptimely. We bought one business and the guy was the largest owner of real estate and the largest, probably the wealthiest man in his community. And he didn't want to have high prices because he just felt guilty.

He wanted to be able to just make it kind of a working for wages. So after we partnered together, we actually brought the pricing up to market. And some of his employees said, well, how can you raise the prices? We're raising the prices because they were too low before. We needed to make an adjustment so that we could invest in the business. And there's nothing wrong with a business making money. If a business doesn't make money, it's going to go bankrupt. So my point of view in business is real simple.

Of course you have to make money, but then after you make money, you need to be more than that, and that's when you become a positive force. And that's where my core value comes into it. But I'm a big fan of private equity, and I think the right private equity firms can add a lot of value. Having said that, I think there's a lot of smaller private equity firms that don't have the operating strength. They don't have the operating partners. They don't understand the industries.

And they're just financial engineering. and those are the ones I'd really stay away from. And particularly for the smaller firms, the smaller home service companies, I'd be careful with that. So I think that's a good thing. As I think about the industry overall, as I look at the industry long term, I think there's three or four major trends that have started and are going to continue. Number one is that we have a shortage of labor. I'm hoping in the next few years is going to get better, but we've got so many plumbers

and electricians and HVAC techs and garage door techs retiring. If you think about becoming a master plumber in the future, Massachusetts, it takes more years of training to be a master plumber than it does to be a surgeon. It's really hard work and it takes a lot of energy and a lot of application of your time. And the second thing is that the typical plumbers, 59 years old now. So no matter how many new people we get in the trades, we're going to have the dirt of workers. So number one is we're going to have labor shortages. Number two, we've all felt this inflation's real.

And it's not going away anytime soon. You know, we had the China card that pushed down inflation for 15 years why China was manufacturing everything. That's over. China's got a lot of inflation. Raw materials now are in shorter supply. We've got a lot of inflation. Oil, we all know what's going on in the Middle East, etc. And the third big thing, though, is technology. And a lot of people like to have their head in the sand and say, well, technology is not going to impact me. Technology and the cuss that we're on right now with AI is going to be as radical to this industry as the steam engine was to industry in general in the 1900s. Huge play. And then the fourth thing is consolidation. You know, we started HomeX 10 years ago, I think 99% of the companies in the industry had less than 10 trucks. Today, there's probably, and people question the numbers, but it's probably somewhere in the 14 to 16% range of the industry is controlled by a smaller number of consolidators, as they're called. I don't think the trees grow to the sky. That number is not going to go to 100, but I think it is going to go to 30, 40, 50% of the industry being owned by larger players.

And what that means for a smaller independent is if you don't figure out how to manage your labor, you don't figure out how to manage inflation, you don't figure out how to leverage technology. you don't figure out how to deal with the consolidation trend, then you're going to be on the outside looking in, and you're going to say, does somebody want to buy me? And then a lot of people will say, I don't need to buy you anymore. Because my engine is so strong,

I can just go open up a new branch. I don't need to buy you. I can actually build it cheaper myself. And then multiples for the little guys are going to go down. Very interesting. So you think, this is what I've been saying, the big are going to become giants. They've just, they got more data,

and data is king. And, you know, some of the stuff we're building, it's not that I feel bad. I just tell people, look, it's going to be very hard to compete because in the near term, I'm buying better than anybody. I mean, when you're spending almost $100 million

with your suppliers, you would expect to get a better deal. Just like if you, if anybody spends $10,000 with me versus $100,000, $100,000, a hundred thousand dollar client's going to get a better price. I mean, that's just the way the world works. And if you're buying right,

and this is not, just how you're buying your CRM, how you're buying your parts, how you're buying your trucks, but how you're buying your insurance, how you're buying everything in the business. And that's a competitive advantage. And that's why I think it's really hard to compete because people don't need to make as much money on you when you're growing at a certain rate. And I'm a big believer. We actually have a strategy that we call David and Goliath.

And if you think about Amazon as the big player, 10, 15 years ago, I'd look at two or three websites. I'm very frugal. So I'd look at two or three websites. I still look at both Lyft and Uber before I take a car back from an airport. But I would look at two or three websites before I buy anything. Today, Amazon has been so encompassing. I just buy it from Amazon.

But the other flip side is, is still the David. And the David is the small, nimble way to touch somebody. So in our company, we talk about how we want to be the Goliath. We want to be the largest player because our strategy is very different than others. We actually believe in super regional brands. We've got five of them today in the Northeast and Mid-Midavis. Atlantic and each is the number one or the number two player in the market and moving towards number one. So we want to be sure that we're not just seen as the utility. And we actually are

very focused on being the David. And if you think about in the trades, people like to call their guy or their gal. They like to have their person. And we actually want to use technology to be able to provide that same level of high touch for our customers. So we can actually have both the Goliath and the David, bring them both together. And then we really win long term. And you lock your customers in and you get them set up with maintenance plans. And literally, it's the vision of HomeX in the beginning where if we can solve for time, transparency and trust and really envelop and take care of that consumer, we can do everything

for them. I want to ask you one more pretty good question. And then I want to ask some close up questions. There's a lot of strategies out there. You know, you talk to Goldman, you talk to Morgan, I mean, I've met with a lot of investment bankers that actually have different strategies. And there's kind of the tax lost harvesting S&P Chase. There's real estate.

There's Bitcoin. There's PE and VC, which lock your money up. There's actually art that you mentioned, fine art that can be liquidable. There's professional teams, which they say MBA, MBL. NBL and NFL are the only three should invest in. And then there's safer money like bonds and other things of that nature. And there's other ones out there. But when you think about someone that wants to get the best internal rate of return,

I'm just going to be selfish and say you're 43. What would you think about doing if you want a diversified portfolio, but you wanted to maximize internal rate of return? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think I've got two responses to you. one is I would take a segment of my money and I would call it my safe money. Yeah, that's exactly. And I'd let professionals management and I would diversify it.

And by diversifying it, I think two things happen. One is markets go up and down and you'll never, and Goldman and all the people can show you all the stuff that you're never going to have every market go up at the same time or every up and go down. They made for a short period, but then they bounce back. But I would take a percentage of my money might be half and I would diversify it. And I would expect that my returns in that money over time will be market returns because it's really hard unless you're Warren Buffett to beat the market. But then the second thing I would do is I would pick things that I'm really interested in, such as your own business.

And your own business doesn't necessarily need all your money, but that's where you put your passion and that's where you put your own heart and soul. And that's where I've always put a lot of my money. So I've made most of my money by investing in me. I would rather invest in me in my own businesses than invest in somebody else and have them just manage it. I know that any money I give to an outside manager, I can't, on average, if I try to reverse by it, I'm not really going to beat the markets. You're going to have reversion to the meet. But if I invest in me and Tommy with you, you know, if you end up, I know you've done a transaction already and one day you'll do another one. So you'll have your big pot of money.

but I imagine that for you to go and start something else, which might be Tommy Mello brand.com, whatever you do with it, that you'll make most of your money by investing in you. I love it. I wanted to ask you, so someone wanted to reach out, Michael, what's the best way to do that? People find me through LinkedIn, but I don't always respond to that. But for people who would be listening to this,

that might be your friends, I'll give my email, which is Michael at homex.com. That's really the best way to get me. I do respond to those and just tell me what it's about. I'm good at responding to people. I'm good at engaging with people. I try to be relatively private. So I'm not out there.

Our company websites are very focused on the company brands. I'm not out there pumping the HomeX brand at this point for HomeX services. Do you have any books outside of the Bible, the E-Mith, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Napoleon Hill. Do you have any books that really changed your life and the way you look at life and business? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. For the last two years, I would say 90% of the books I'm reading are art books.

And I'm actually learning about different artists and going deep in the artist. And what I'm learning about artist is that they're incredibly creative. and people think about art and people have different opinions of art, but some of the brilliant artists like Rashid Johnson or William Kentridge are very conceptual artist. And I've learned more about philosophy and people and creativity, which then I can apply to business by studying art. So those are really been, it's kind of my new passion and the new thing I'm doing. I'm actually, I've got this crazy idea of trying to build a new kind of living museum and artist's facility out in the West. Coast, which I hopefully in the next year will be able to get started and bring to fruition. But in terms of business books, there are three that have always stayed with me.

The first is Jim Collins. He's got a series of books, good to great and built to last. And even though he wrote him a really long time ago, they've really been impactful, and I always think about them. The second book that comes back to me, and it's one that's very dated now, but it's called Flight of the Buffalo, and it's about people. And it's really about leadership and how to lead people. So those are,

those are a couple of ones that when people ask me what books come back to me, those always come back to me. Other than art, family, hiking, business, and philanthropy, what are your favorite things? That kind of is a lot already. So I'm actually a cyclist and I still try to ride my bike about 2,500 miles a year. I'm a hiker, I'm a skier. I try to, in my good days, I used to be able to ski 30 days a year.

I like to helloski. I like to outback ski. I like to put, they're called skins in the bottom of skis, and you hike up the mountain, then you ski down. And I love to travel. So I'm at the next chapter in my life, and I'm actually trying to construct my life now where I'm one third of my core business. So I've kicked myself upstairs now.

I'm executive chairman of the HomeX Group. and HomeX Group, as you mentioned, will be just under 500 million this year. I've got a great CEO who runs it every day. So I get to kind of be the grandparent and be engaged that way. And then number two is my new business ventures where I'm investing in other companies, and that's part of my diversified portfolio, but I'm doing it where I can actually help people. And then number three is what I call philanthropy and art, where I'm on a number of different boards, including art boards,

and trying to bring that together. And then I wrap all that with really what's most. important which is my family and I've been very fortunate I've been married for 42 years I've got a great wife who's been a business partner with me I joke I was actually at a investment luncheon today and my kickoff I said I have 12 grandkids six of them on back order though six have been delivered so big fan of my children I've had I'm a big believer in family business two of my three kids have worked directly in the business with me my daughter and my son-in-law both worked with me at

at HomeX and then they were in Schedule Engine and now both still work at Service Titan. My son runs M&A and Strategy at the HomeX group and he's currently our interim CFO and he's been terrific to work with and my youngest daughter who just got out of business school, she's ultimately gonna run our family foundation. So I find ways to involve all my family in my different businesses and to me to have a great business

with a long-term orientation to be able to bring your family into it and work with the people that you hopefully and of course love. And to do things that have a long-term view, we're going to make the world better. To me, that's what it's all about. So if you can really do those things, I think it builds a great life. And also to always, you know, always be thankful. And I, 20 years ago, I was told I'd be dead in about four years.

So that really changed my thinking. I was very fortunate. I did a lot of research. I traveled around the world, talked to a lot of doctors. and through the Lymphoma Research Foundation was able to get a clinical trial put together that I believe saved my life. And as a result of that, I've been giving back.

So I talked about early things that impacted me, lymphoma was a major one. And I learned how important it is both to understand that any of us, snap your fingers you could be gone tomorrow or four years, and that we're all here for a blank. You're dead a really long time. And if you can give back and make the world better

while you're here, that's really an important thing. So that's often part of what I tell. people when they think about what's important to me, what's important, hopefully to them, giving back, taking care of other people, making the world better. There's a good book called Die with Nothing about that. Give it away where you can enjoy the fruits of the labor that you do. Two last questions. What's your favorite spot?

You've traveled more than anybody I know. Maybe Cameron Herald's got you right alongside of you. But what was your favorite spot and why? Yep. So the spot that I always want to go back to is a little mountain town called Cresta Butte. And I got a home there about 25 years ago. It's a postage stamp size town at 9,000 feet. And behind my house there, I love working from there as a mountain that goes up to 12,000 feet. And when I'm in Crestabute, I feel like I am communing with nature. It's kind of where I feel the universe all around me. And it's simple and it's holistic.

and it's all about just being outdoors and being in the nature. And I can do all the things I love to do, mountain bike, ski, road bike, and be with my family and friends. Where's that? So if I were to pick one place in the world to go to, that's the place to go to. And I've traveled. I've traveled in over 100 countries. I've been to every continent, basically. And I've seen the world.

But I come back to this country's the greatest country in the world. And to me, the Rocky Mountains are the most beautiful part of this country. I agree with you. It's in Colorado. I agree with you. By far. The world's a crazy place right now. We've got to get back to the foundations of what made this country. Last thing is we talked about an awfully lot of great stuff. I would just want to give you an opportunity to close us out with whatever closing, final thoughts for the audience you might have. So as I think about our industry, there's kind of, and I gave this a little bit of thought, so I figured you'd probably ask me that.

There's probably three things I would share with people in the industry. Number one, when I was a young guy, Goldman and it was before the Wall Street movie called about greed, they would give you a talk and they'd say, you know, greed's actually okay if you're a long-term greedy, not short-term greedy. So my first thought for people running these businesses is how to be long-term greedy. And to me, the way you're long-term greedy is you think generationally, you think like an owner, most of the cases, you know, the people are owners. And you really say, how do I invest in the business? How do I make it great? So whether I keep it long term or I sell it, I've got something wonderful to sell.

And if I keep it, I've got something wonderful to have. Number two is, and I've seen this with almost all the companies we've partnered with, but people tend to work too much in their business as opposed to on their business. And it makes sense because it's a reactive industry. The phone rings when it's 95 degrees outside and it's humid and everybody needs their HVAC fixed or the garage store doesn't work. But you actually really need to think about strategically, what do you want your business to be? How do you get it from here to there?

Earlier we talked a little bit about labor shortages, inflation, technology, consolidation. So really work on the business. You can actually build and construct the business that you want. And then the third thing is, have fun. Because I've met too many people that are just burnt out. And they're burnt out because they're working in the business. They're burnt out because they don't take time to celebrate. they're burnt out because they don't honor themselves.

You know, with our employees, I had some people laugh at me, but the same idea of delight that I use for our customers, I talk about putting our employees on a pedestal. And I say that we don't actually want to be the best place to work because we want to be better than that. We want to be the only place where our people want to work. And I recognize that's a journey. But if you can take that same mentality towards yourself,

towards your family. A lot of these guys and gals have their families working in the business, and they don't always treat them as well as they should have. But put them on a pedestal. Put your employees on a pedestal. Put your family on a pedestal. Put yourself on a pedestal and say, what would I do to take great care of me? What would I do to take great care of my employees? What would I do to take great care of my family? And to me, it all goes back to that core value. You know, we're here for such a short period of time as if we can make the world better, if we can be a positive force, if we can make a difference, then it really matters. And then we've had good purpose. That's how I look at life. And as I look back at my life now, as my granddaughter teases me,

my six, seven, I look back and said, if I am gone today, I feel like my life has been a success because I've made the world just a little bit better. I love it, Michael. This was a great podcast. Thank you for doing it. And thank you for being my friend. I really appreciate it.