The Home Service Expert Podcast - He Went From a Window Tint Shop to a $400M Company (His One Hiring Rule)

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://homeservicefreedom.com/ Dustin Sims went from running a window tint shop to VP of Operations at A1 Garage Door Service — a $400 million company — in under five years, promoted three times along the way. Tommy pulls back the curtain on how A1 actually runs: why serving the customer has to be the North Star, why incentives alone drive the wrong behavior, how to interview for the one trait that isn't on any resume, rebuilding a dispatch culture that had checked out, and the AI stack (call analysis, machine-learning dispatch) behind 30,000 jobs a month with a team of 20 dispatchers. 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Intro 01:22 Window Tint to VP 03:40 Private Equity Reality 11:26 Rebuilding Dispatch 20:44 Leadership That Serves 24:48 Loyalty and Culture 31:38 Customer North Star 38:40 Interviewing for Care 45:50 Family and Discipline 51:04 Raving Fans Standard 59:30 AI in the Call Center 1:05:20 Dispatching 30,000 Jobs 1:12:36 CSR vs Dispatcher 1:18:10 Culture Over Everything 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://homeservicefreedom.com/ Check Out My Social Media: Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/ #HomeServiceExpert #A1GarageDoor #Leadership

Tommy, I just need somebody who gives a shit. Serving the customer has to be the North Star. If you've got some departments that are worried about their paycheck and some departments that are worried about their titles, we all need to be worried about serving the customer, and that allows us to all pull in the same direction. A good employee that gives a shit will bend over backwards to take care of the customer. They're going to do all the right things.

All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today is going to be a great interview with Dustin Sims. He's our VP of Operations. He's an expert in operations at scale, customer service strategy, dispatch optimization, systems integration, AI and customer service, hiring for integrity, team development, career growth, and internal promotion. This episode's thesis is Dustin went from running a window tint shop to a VP of operations at a $400 million garage garage or a company, A1 garage door service, and under five years,

Today, he pulls back the curtain on how A1 actually runs. And what most owners get wrong about customer service and why the best teams aren't built with incentives. You know, I would say incentives are a good topic. But Dustin, it's a pleasure to have you on today. It's going to be fun. You and I have become really good friends. I was just at your daughter's graduation on Friday.

You were. It's exciting. Yeah. We enjoyed the time with you. I enjoy all the time with you guys. We're like great friends. now. You spent eight years running a window tinting shop. And then you joined A1 with zero garage your experience. Within five years, you've been promoted three times to VP of operations.

How did that happen? You know, I sometimes wonder myself. It's happened so fast. So I sometimes I'll sit and wonder, how did I get here? You know? And, you know, I think if you just break it down to one thing, it's that I hate to lose. Your competitive is out. I'm competitive. And if you give me enough time, I'll figure anything out just because I, that's, that's how my heart beats. I just need to solve problems.

And I care a lot. You know, I can't help it. But every business that I've ever, that I've ever worked for, I kind of look at it as if this were my business, what would I want to happen? Yeah. Yeah. You know, how does the window tinting translate into what you do today? Yeah, it's hard to make that leap, but I can tell you everything that I've ever done translates into what I've, what I'm doing today.

Yeah. You know, that business in particular, you know, I was running the business as a general manager. So I was involved in everything. Yeah. You know, I had to know how the marketing affected how the phone rang and the different types of leads and the quality of leads and the customers and how to sell. I sold a lot during that time. Also learned a lot about customer service. I became a black belt in customer service and escalations.

You know, part of what we did was we tended people's cars. And as soon as you touch somebody's baby, you can run into some major escalation issues. You leave a drop of water on a door jam or whatever happens. There's a lot of customer service that goes into that. Was there higher-end cars and how big was that business? I think that business was about half of what we did. And yeah, we did a lot of high-end cars. Okay.

You know, we had Bentley's and we had NFL player cars come through. There were high expectations when somebody spends that kind of money on a car. There are high expectations for the product that you put out. Yeah. I just want to go completely off track and ask a weird question because you were in the company before private equity. And we ran hard. But we put these pieces together. We've got really systematic with numbers and set bigger budgets, hired better, stronger meetings, faster top grading.

And it wears, it wears me out. It probably wears everybody out to have to run. But there's pension funds and firefighters. And, you know, a lot of people hate private equity. And it's a grind. But I would say we're better for it. You know, how do you really feel overall? I mean, the budgets, stretch budgets and whatnot.

but it's not like we're like, let's go take advantage of grandma this week. It's like how do we get more leads and how do we give more options and how do we offer better financing and how do we train our guys more and how do we offer coffee in the way and bring flowers and handle escalations and keep better reviews coming in. I mean, it's not like this. People act like private equity is like, how do you screw grandma over? And we hear that all the time on Facebook.

Yeah, I mean, I look at it like we all wanted to be better anyway. and private equity has, I guess, I don't want to say forced us because we always wanted to get there anyway. But I think it's given us some structure on how we get there. You know, what metrics should we be looking at? How do we move the needle? It gave us a little bit different perspective on the business. And, you know, I was going to work hard either way. So this is just, I think it's giving me a little bit more direction.

I think it's given everybody a little bit more direction. and, you know, working under private equity has not been a negative impact on me or my attitude about this company in any way. Yeah, I don't think it's, I think they did the right thing. And, you know, Doug has told this to me kind of privately, but he's like the real obstacle was, were you going to play ball? Were you going to be arrogant, not listen, not take advice, not look at the math, like run out and do things in every market? or would you, like, at least let us ask tough questions? And I respect the hell out of Cortec. And that's one of the things for me is I've learned a lot.

I think you've learned a lot. And there's, we get these monthly meetings now with Dex 200 pages that we go through data. And I think what's crazy about it is those guys pull, like we were 6% and a half percent accounts receivable because the installers weren't collecting. Just making that change was awesome. I don't know. What are some of the biggest takeaways that you've taken over the last, I guess, three and a half years? Well, I think, you know, just to kind of back up a little bit, I really appreciate you advocating for us with these decks, you know, this 200-page deck. And we all have a little part to play in that. We have data to consolidate and to analyze and be able to answer some tough questions. And you asked, is there anything that you're doing right now that's just taking too long?

It's just bogging you down. When you're working on this deck, when you're working on these reports, you're not working in the business. Yeah. So, and, you know, after thinking about it because it is a drag that time of month when, okay, we've got to spend a couple hours, not only looking at the data, but analyzing it. You asked, do we need to keep doing it at this level? And my response was, yes, we do. It's that one time of the month where we're forced to sit down and look at our performance. and action some of the mistakes that we've made over the last month.

Or maybe sometimes you're digging into something that you should have recognized six months ago. But this forces us to sit down and actually look at it. So I appreciate that. You know, it's tough when we're already running at top speed and then we have to kind of have this side project. Yeah, it's like it's those extra, it's not in the 40 hours or the 50 hours. There's an extra 10 hours that week to go into like 60 hours. Right. And I think it's time well spent.

So I don't have any, again, it's a pain in the neck when that time comes around, but I'm glad every time, especially when I discover something that I feel like I should have seen real time. At least we're finding it now. We're actioning, whatever it is that we need to improve on. You know Eric Van Dam and Rob Parker. You know Mike and Doug. Those guys live on a plane. Like, I'm on a plane a lot. They're like three times as much as me.

They're probably pushing five hours, 500 hours a year. Those guys, they're never going to accept this answer of I'm working hard. But what I've always said is, I don't care if you work 20 hours. I don't care if you work 60 hours. Just do what you say you're going to do. Like, I will say Brian Davenport came up to me. And this is not the majority of the interview, but it's just something I wanted to talk about. because this is fun.

But Brian's like, dude, I'm so happy you're, like, not adamant about being behind a desk. Like, you let us work from home now. Just get our job done. And I think that I just realized, I used to think that, like, behind the desk mattered. And then COVID happened. And it was like, man, people are still productive. They're still, like, they still work hard. And I've seen people behind their desk that aren't productive.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, do you get things done? And I went up to Luke. I actually went to Adrian. And I said, pull a report of RST of their payroll. and the point of this is like it was astounding they make great money I wanted to make great money but we were paying them hourly as well and I wanted to be performance pay and Luke was like holy shit this is alarming I'm going to change it this week and the point is that data so that's kind of something I'm going to start pulling but there's certain things on that 200 pages that we haven't looked at in a long time that probably moved beyond so when I was saying that I'm like we needed that year one that was like we still need the whole times of the VPS. We still need, like, this data, but sometimes I'm like, oh, man, this thing could become 400 pages in another year. Easy.

Oh, yeah. And the difference is, is I want to have the right people because having an outside look in is like, and they dissect that thing, man. You look at their iPads and their circles and notes on every page. Like, they can actually go through it because here's what Doug told me day one. He's like, this is the deck we need you guys to create because this is what we're looking at at every one of our sponsored companies that we've participated with. and this is what we're used to looking at. So we know how to find the needle in the haystack. We know how to comb through this quickly.

And that's really smart. Is build something that we can go through quickly. You're going to conform to our needs, and then you guys are going to add on to it. And Leanne is like, we need to add on. And, you know, we've got six FP&A people. Now you've got a great team that you're dissecting. Man, everybody on your team, Matt's amazing.

Man, you built a really good team. I remember I went through this firefight, dude, where the marketing team got tiny. We needed a bill. Like, we let go of almost the entire team. And it was like grinding. It was like, dude, I've never gotten so deep back in the business. And it actually felt good, but it was a firefight.

And you had to go through that. Like, talk about that real quick. Like, people see us, and I'll tell you this, there's still what's going on in inventory right now? Well, it's gotten better. But when Christina went in there, it was on fire. And like, this happens. And I see people going through it.

I'm like, the fire will calm down. This is like, there's going to be a tough couple months. And as bad as it was, you rebuild and then it gets easy and then it's your round great. People are getting and the stuff's running without you. And you're like, I'm kind of glad that happened. It was hard. It was hard to turn the people over. It was hard to make those decisions.

So talk about when you went through the blazing fire, remember. Yeah. I mean, when I first came to the department, it's not like it was on fire. But yeah, my current position is the VP of operations and customer experience. I'm overseeing dispatch call center, install coordination. And, you know, thankfully, there were already some good people on the teams. But we hadn't really looked at the data in a long time. How can we make improvements?

And so I felt like I needed to be everywhere looking at everything. And I just couldn't do it. So, yeah, my first hire about a year and a half ago was Manny as the call center manager. He went through like seven interviews. Oh, yeah, poor Manny. Yeah, we interviewed probably seven or eight people. He was the first one. And so, although I had a great feeling about him, we didn't want to pull the trigger too soon because it's such an important position.

Yeah. And I know how passionate you are about that position. And, you know, finding Manny, it takes, we're a complex system here. So it takes people a little while to get their feet under him. But once he did, Manny just made everything so much easier. He does such a great job of blocking me from the things that I don't know, but informing me about the things that I do need to know. And then the same, you know, repeat for Matt as dispatch manager.

Same idea. Both very high-level people, they can think on their own. I don't need to micromanage. Nicole on the install coordination team, same way. You know, all of them are doing what they're supposed to do. Now they've given me an opportunity to get back to a strategy level, and I can look at it from a little bit higher level. Look at the data, come up with some game plans, and they can implement for me.

So it was everything. It was, yeah, my hair felt like it was on fire every day for the first six months. Got Mani, that gave me some relief, got Matt, gave me some of that relief. And yeah, I feel better now, even though we're running at full speed. I feel better now that I have that support. Those people are all awesome. When we went through the 360 reviews that were anonymous, it was clear that the call center was pretty good. Dispatch was on fire.

And when Matt started, you guys, how many did you turn over? I think we've turned over since Matt started six months ago, maybe six or seven dispatchers. And how many of the 20 total? Yeah, about 20 now. Yep. And what's the temperature there now? What's the mood? So much better.

So much better. better. Yeah. What's the lesson there? You know, I think a lot of it is just consistency. Well, the moods, the people that walked in, there was crumbs everywhere. They wore their pajamas. It was just, it was nasty.

They stopped caring. Yeah. You know, and that's like baseline. You got to find people that care. And then if the culture isn't right, then you'll lose that over time with the team. And I think that's what happened with the dispatch team. So Matt's rebuilding the course. culture, creating consistency again, celebrating the wins.

I'm holding people accountable. That's what we needed. And so I appreciate him for doing that. You know, Matt came from a different type of dispatch job. Michelle came from dispatching, but rarely think about the people we have. You're not going to go somewhere and hire like this great HVAC dispatcher and this great home improvement, you know,

blue collar call center mad. We've tried all of it. We're like, we're going to find this, as L. Eva would call it, magic in a bottle.

And we're like, we just need to find great people and show them the skills because they bring over all the bad habits. Amy was great. But then again, it was like, remember,

and she knew what she was doing. She was like really great. She came from other home service. But then it was like drama, drama, drama. And like, I've just learned the lesson of like,

we still get great technicians. When we bought Donz, it was great, garage, or doctor, we've got a lot of great people. But it's like, people are like, they just think we're going to go find, everybody that hires somebody left over of A1, they just think it's going to be like this amazing person. They're like, but why do you think they got,

why do you think they're not here anymore? Maybe they didn't get fired. But most of the time, they left because they don't like the competitiveness. It's like, it's stressful because you've got to perform it every single. You're only as strong as your weakest link. Yeah, I know, you know, Manny, he had definitely had some call center experience, but not at this level. And there were other people that were more qualified if you looked at him on paper.

But I knew that it would take a little longer to get Manny up to speed, but I also knew it was worth the time training him in home services. And it was a good gamble, obviously, because he's paid off great. But there are other people that I interviewed. I could have plugged him in. They probably, they had service tighten experience. They had managed large call centers, probably could have plugged them in and been up to speed within, you know, a few weeks, a couple of months maybe. But I needed a culture guy and that's what I got. How bad does the wrong hire?

Because I've done it a lot. Luke, I put them always on the chair and like make him talk about it. Because I want to, I don't want anybody to forget these lessons. Because sometimes, I mean, whether it's in the training department, like, I'm not picking on, look, I'm picking on myself. I was just like leaving the people or leaving the person, there's picking the wrong person or leaving the wrong person in for too long because we know we're going to have to pick up the slack.

And we're like, I'm already busy. But keeping them is going to ruin the department or root somewhat of the company. So what's your thought on that? It's the wrong hiring and then the other one is keeping someone too long. Well, I've made the mistake before plenty of times. And, you know, I think everybody has. And I've gotten better about what to look for. But finding the right person is everything.

I love that book that you recommended. It was the ideal team player. Hungry Amble Smart. Yep. Patrick Leicioni. Yeah. Fantastic book. One of the best that I've read that you recommended because I needed that.

I needed that at that time. I needed that knowledge. So finding the right person is everything. And obviously, yeah, once you hire somebody and they're not the right fit, You go through all these stages where, okay, he does this really well, but just needs some work on this. And, you know, I wonder, I wonder if he just needs a little more time. And so it ends up putting the strain on you, just eating that bandwidth of should I pull the trigger and let this person go or should I give him a little more time? So finding that person up front is so important.

We're all going to make the mistake. But, yeah, like I said, that bandwidth that it eats up, it's taking away time from everything else. Now you're worried about did I hire the right person. Well, I do believe that Tom Brady would have never became Tom Brady without the right coach. So I believe sometimes it's really got to mesh well. Like what might work for you as a direct report? Might not like, I'm way more hands off. I'm just like, go figure it out, except for marketing.

That one I'm like on, but I'm like, I never, even though I used to dispatch, but it was like on paper, never really. But I'm like, I'm not as good as you. So why would I manage that? You know what I mean? And I don't understand inventory. Like the things are like go hire for that and get the best. And I think we've learned our lesson. And sometimes you've got to pull somebody that's like really good.

Like look at Adrian. Like a pair to the CFOs that I've worked with. He's just light years. Look at Leanne. It took Adrian two tries to get Leanne. Yep. I mean, Matt Fink's amazing. He's under a lot.

Like the thing is too. I'll tell you is sometimes you get somebody great. And you're like, I'm going to give them more because they can handle it. I'm going to give them more because you're accountable. I know you've been under the pressure. Like, wait a minute. And Luke takes on 12 direct reports, you know. So like, I told them yesterday, I was like with Robert, Robert's amazing.

He's got on your team. And I was like, I don't want this, Curtis. Colby. Curtis and Colby. I don't want them reporting up to marketing because this is right up Robert's Willhouse he's like, so that'll fall under me. And I'm like, but Robert can handle it.

It should, none of these guys should ever come to you. And it's the same thing except one's an inbound angry customer, one's calling out to one star, two star, three stars. I was like, it just should fall under there because we need to do some miraculous things in marketing to hit budget. And I'm like, that's super important, but that's kind of out of their willhouse.

Yeah, I mean, Robert's another one who is an absolute superstar. I mean, I can't think of somebody more valuable for the company. But, yeah, he's low maintenance. If he's got direct reports, I'm probably never going to hear about it. Yep. And Luke definitely won't. So I think that's the right move.

You know, their customer experience guys, put them under our customer experience manager. I want to play something for you, but first I'm going to ask you. I haven't asked any questions on here. That means this is a great podcast. I said this to Luke yesterday because Brie sent it to me. me, Simon Sinek, but what does great leadership look like to you? Well, I think it's got, there's so many different ways I can go with this, but I think some of the, some of the key components is one, meet people where they're at. I mean, you know,

you mentioned something earlier about, you know, we have to, we have to consider our own coaching when we're talking about how good is an employee. Like, is it, I always think, you know, I always about it, am I doing the right things as a coach? So trying to meet somebody where they're at, you know, look into yourself, is this person, do I need to communicate with this person differently? And I also think it's really important, especially when you're like dispatch is a great example, of standing up for the team when there is blame being put there that maybe isn't warranted. Right.

Talk about killing somebody's motivation. Nothing will do it faster than that. So that's something that I always tried to do is like, you know, really protecting the dispatch team, coaching when it's warranted. You know, I always have to consider, we've got opportunity here. But there were times, especially early on where I needed to step in and protect the team. Otherwise, I could just feel the energy in the room just deflate when somebody came through and, you know, put it on them. why did you send this guy this far away and, you know, that sort of thing. So those are a couple of key components for me.

You brought up Patrick Lee Sioni in the first book we read as a team years and years and years ago. It was the five disfunctions of a team. And the book explains is most leaders care about their team more than the company. But you've got to defend your team, but also this idea of marketing lived in a silo. They weren't talking to anything. So it was like, bam. And then accounting was like this and finance was like this and FP&A. And it was like, marketing is not doing their job.

No, hiring's not doing their job. And it just turns into this like, well, how do we work together? Because we all got to hit these goals. So this is Simon Sinek that reset yesterday. What do you think is the most misunderstood aspects of being a leader? What do people get wrong? Oh, simple. Most people think being the leader is being in charge.

Incorrect. Being a leader means. you take care of those in your charge. Being a leader, as I said, is the acceptance of the awesome responsibility to see those around you rise, whether you have formal rank or not. People do as they say, because they have authority, but nobody trusts them, nobody likes them. Nobody would quit a job for them to follow them. And you and I both know people may or may not have that much formal authority, but people trust them and love them and would follow them anywhere. And if they left, a group of people would follow and go with them. That's leadership. Leadership is an act of service.

and when people feel like you have their back and you want to see them succeed, they will reward you with love and loyalty. That's what happens. Oh, I just got goosebumps. But it's true. It's like, and like I've had a million people, you know, within the company, not a million,

but like if you ever go start a garbage company, we're going, but I'm like, no, that's not built to less. It's not what Jim Collins would say. Like, no, no, no. We built a company. We've got great people. And I do a horrible job. Like, I'm my own worst critic.

Like, I really do. I want to be so much better. That's why we built the exact connect. I at least want to know birthdays and recognize face to be able to look. That's why the scorecards have faces because I got sick of walking around here going, dude, I don't know who you are. I know all the originals. I mean, like, and when Danny, Meredith got fired, I was like, we need Danny. And when Dean, when we closed down in Portland, I'm like, Dean's been loyal.

We need Dean. Like, those guys have been loyal, but I didn't say they need to, they're not going to be a VPS. you know. Yeah, I think there's something to that. So there's this, this, we talked about making sure we get rid of the people that aren't the right people. But I think there's something that you've, I think you've done really good at identifying. And that is, it's not just loyalty that you want to look at, but also how does this person affect the rest of the team when they walk in a room? You know, there's this certain people are culture people.

And although we can probably find somebody to make more calls in a day or to, you know, use the system a little bit faster or analyze the data a little bit better, we have to give a little bit of grace to those that have been loyal because everybody else on that team sees that loyalty. And if it doesn't matter to us as leaders, that loyalty that person has showed and we let that person go, then everybody else, will, I guess, look at loyalty like it's not that important. Like this isn't an important, this isn't an important principle of the company, the idea of loyalty. And I think it needs to be, and everybody needs to have that message. I have a meritocracy, but I say, I need to earn the loyalty of just a graduation. I never missed one orientation. And I spend more time with the technicians than it stars because that's the bigger workforce.

Yeah. You know what I mean? And I can talk to them better because that's really what I did when I started for the first five years. I'm not saying CSR's dispatchers, the warehouse staff. I just don't even know what I say except for a 20 minutes like the company history. Like, man, I hope you load the guys up on time. And I hope you got to smile. But it's like it's important.

I want to do so much more. And like the future of my leadership is going to shift over of like being the trophy giver out. You know what I mean? Just like the add-a-boys. And I think people think, man, Tommy must work so hard. And I'm like, my goal is to remove myself and hire the people that could do better than me. And if every leader in the company sit and they're like, well, if I'm not doing anything, then will Tommy or anybody want me anymore?

And it's like, that's how you elevate up. Man, they made that work like clockwork. And where else can we put like, what else can they do? They hire so well. They built the culture up. That's why you've moved up is because you've got a lot. I mean, with service tight and handling the VoIP system and, like, the technology, we use LACE, we've got power BI. We've got all these different tools we're using.

And I think that's the piece that no one really, I mean, the technology is coming out as we talk about it. The AI and the fundamentals. So it's not like someone's going to walk it. Like our stuff is tough. But like, I got to go win the loyalty every day. Yeah. And just because no one could walk up to me to say, remember what I did for you last year? I'm like, remember what I did for you last year?

It's like, I got to still come in. I don't want to be in Sanpoint Idaho saying, guys, work harder. Make sure we hit this. Like, I like to show up. Yeah. I do want to be in Sanpoint, but I want you guys to be with me. Like, let's have team meetings. Let's work our ass off from like maybe 7 a.m. to noon.

And they go on a boat ride and they go golfing. You know, I'm in. But this is really good. I just like having this talk. Dylan was in our meeting this morning. And Dylan is making everybody to laugh. And he's like, how you doing? And then he's just, and I just text him.

And it feels so good, I was like, dude, you're a killer. I'm so happy you're on our team. And I just, I love doing that. And then sometimes you forget. But I seen it and I'm like, man. And he's like, and he pounds the desk and goes, you guys got to get it. This is my Monday. You call me up and you go get him.

And I'm just like, dude, his passion and the passion, I'd say competitiveness and passion. and just a way to figure things out. Because we don't have a guide. We're going to do over 400 million. And we're going to uncharted territories. It's like where we're going, you know, it's like the DeLorean from back to the future. And there's no like book we can read exactly to just know, like, of course, read a bunch of books and learn about culture. And one book I wrote down is firm feedback in a fragile world and be able to get firm feedback.

But meet people where they're at if they can handle it. But hire the people that I can handle the feedback. Yeah. No, I agree. And I love that you sent him, sent. Dylan that text. You know, at the vertical track event for garage door freedom a couple weeks back. Yep.

You know, I remember one morning you told the crowd, there's somebody back at the office running things for you. Yeah. I want you to text them right now and tell them how much you appreciate them. And so I watched the people around me and say, let's see, let's see who does this. And you said it three times. No, really do it, guys. and I watched a couple of people next to me on the third ask pick up their phone and they texted somebody. And I bet you that changes their relationship and their perspective on how they communicate with their team.

So that was, I thought that was, you know, a small moment, but a big moment for me when I saw people actually do that. I'll show you one other thing, and this is not a big deal. But, you know, Josh, Josh H has been with us for a long time. Of course, not getting the best jobs. It's his birthday day. And it's his birthday today. So I know it's his birthday. So I just, I just, you know, it doesn't mean much.

But I think it's important. And he sends me a paragraph. I mean, a long paragraph. Happy birthday, big fella. I hope you're having the best day ever, man. I just want to tell you, I love you. I appreciate you. Hopefully your jobs are getting better.

And, yeah, man. Hope you have the best weekend. And hope you're having the best year of your life. life. Making a great day, man. Let me know if you need anything. And it's just like, like, those guys have been loyal to the, to a fault and like, see, things don't go perfectly and I know that.

And I was going to talk to you guys. I'm like, can we get this guy? Like, and half the time I forget, I would tell this story about when I forget. This is great. Because how often have I forgotten I told you? Yeah, no, I know the, it's been going on for years. But yeah, when guys come to you, say, I've been getting bad jobs. I'm just, you know, kind of down on my luck.

And you'll, you'll come and talk to, to me or the dispatch team and say, hey, can me just hook this guy up for a little bit. He needs a little boost in morale. And then half the time you forget. And either way, the guys will, you may have, may have gotten this message. Say, I'll let dispatch know and you forget because you're busy. And then, you know, a week or two later, the guy texts you back and says, thanks, Tommy, I'm getting great jobs. Yeah, like I'm setting records again, whatever you said of them worked, it's just, it's a mental thing, it's a perspective thing. Yeah, it is. So you said that serving the customer has to be the North Star for the entire

organization. What does that mean practically? And how does making the customer the focus help align the team where everyone's motivated by different things, titles, money, career, growth, etc. Yeah. So I'm going to, I'll go back a little ways and, you know, how I kind of got this mentality. When I was just a kid, you know, 16 years old, I worked for this pet shop. I worked for a pet store. And it was a small pet store, family owned, been around forever, right at the time when these pet smarts and pet cos were coming out everywhere. So there was major competition. You know, these companies were coming in at, you know, with lower prices. And it was drilled into me at that time that customer services everything. We're carrying the bags of dog food out to the cars. We're doing

everything we can to give that customer a great experience. The store is spotless. Who wants to buy from a place that smells like crap? You know, we're talking about dealing with pets here. And so that was my first experience. Had a great, a great owner of that company and a great first manager who really taught me how important that customer experience was without, and it just seemed natural. It made sense to me. So they, I got, I bought in immediately at 16, years old. And then later, you know, first couple of years of college, I worked for Vons, a grocery store. Yeah. It was a Safeway owned Vons at the time. And the same thing was happening there where, you know, this is the mid to late 90s and Walmarts were coming out with grocery

stores and targets were starting to sell groceries. And so there was major competition. We were union. So employees got paid a lot. You know, we had to charge a little bit more than these other companies for for our for our for our groceries and so again it was all about customer service the customer asked you where the oatmeal is you walk them to the oatmeal you don't just tell them it's on aisle five there was I mean they they drilled us on how we communicate with customers as they're coming through the line because I started checking pretty early on rather than just bagging groceries but there was there was a protocol for everything and how to take care of these customer. So it was in my mind from an early time and then it continued when I when I ran the

tent shop. And so I realized how important that was for a long-term strategy in any company. Serving the customer has to be the North Star. If you've got some some departments that are worried about their paycheck and some departments that are worried about their titles, you know, some employees that are worried about whatever, you know, some employees that are worried about, we all need to be worried about serving the customer. And that allows us to all pull in the same direction. You just reminded me of the book that kind of explains everything you just talked about is called raving fans. And it explains how these cheaper stores started opening up and they're like walking out with the groceries, you walk in.

And you say, listen, what are you shopping for? Let me walk you around and let me help you do that. And like you pay extra for that service, but it's the best service. When Barnes & Noble opened, the other bookstores that are still around had to figure out how do they beat with customer service? And I think that's so important. I want to ask you, so you said, then incentives aren't the right way to drive customer first behavior. That's going to surprise a lot of people. Why not?

What works instead? So I don't know if you remember this, but probably about five, five and a half years ago. I wasn't a dispatch manager for too long at the time. You said, Dustin, tell me what the best dispatcher looks like. What's the profile? And I said, Tommy, I just need somebody who gives a shit. Yeah. And that's really what I'm looking for in a good employee.

A good employee that gives a shit will bend over backwards to take care of the customer. They're going to do all the right things. And I'm not saying that incentives should go, way because I think, especially at scale, you need to do something to drive the right behavior. But the truth of the matter is, what I've seen is the metric isn't always the right behavior. It's not always right. There's some things you can't quantify. Like, you know, I've heard dispatchers say, well, you know, I can't miss one phone call because

it's going to affect my pay. But I've got three people over here asking me a question about their, about their text or about their customers and they're waiting. So I have to go make sure that I answer the phone instead of letting it roll to somebody else when really the bigger gain, the bigger benefit to the customers and to the organization would be to answer these questions. And so that's just one little example of how, you know, you can kind of, you can go awry with incentives by all of a sudden that's all somebody's focused on is the numbers and not focused on doing the right thing. You know, Adam and Luke, Adam was their old C-O, Luke's the new C-O.

And these guys shake their head. They scratch their head all the time, and they're like, well, go ahead and do that because you make more money. You already at the house called the RST line. Like, run that extra call. But what I found if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs is there's only a certain amount of money. Like if the bills are paid, there's money in the savings account. For a lot of people, like the vast majority, it's not necessarily more money. I will say, I wish it was for some people because I wish they paid off their house.

I wish they got to go on their dream vacations. I wish they just pushed a little harder to get a little bit more because they got the, you know, I was talking to Trevor yesterday about the VPS and he's like, dude, he's like some of these virtual product specialists, they work eight hours a day and they take four half hour breaks. he's like, I take no breaks. He goes, that's why I'm number one. In the last two weeks, he's number one. And I said, give me a full list of what I need to know, of could I make mantle better?

You know, I asked them all these questions, not necessarily only about the VPS, but I just think finding people, what if they want more PTO? What if they want to work for tens? What if they want, you know, what, there's a great book, The Five Love Lulogages of the workplace, finding out maybe they never want to talk on a stand. You get a guy like John Phillips. He's like, dude, if I could talk on stage more, I will do anything because that's like his love language. And it's finding that stuff about people. And it's, I guess the question I would ask, how do you interview forgive a shit? Yeah. Really difficult. Really difficult to find that. But sometimes it's in how the person dresses. You know, do they, do they take pride in their appearance? you see their car in the parking lot? Do they take pride in their car being clean?

There are some things that indicate somebody gives a shit. You know, asking them questions about how they handled certain situations at the last job. And sometimes you can glean that. But overall, it's one of those things you almost have to go by feel. And you never really know until they get in the seat. Because people can, I've got, I've had professional interviews come through and ban Boozell me, I had no idea. But there are some things, there are some things that, that you can pick up on for sure.

Do you think a great resume looks bad? You know, I've switched my thinking to, I'm not throwing a bad resume out right away. No, but I'm saying this resume looks like gold. Like these people look like, it's almost like went to Harvard, studied at, we don't see those coming through our garage store, business, but I know what you mean. It's like, do you think those are like good or bad? I mean, it can be either way. You can go either way. You got to just interview. You don't, you don't know what to you interview at least. But yeah, and I guess what I was getting at is absolutely like the interview doesn't, or the resume doesn't tell you enough. You know, it could be

a great interview and you've got somebody who's, you know, ran it through at this point. Now they ran it through chat GPT or Claude and it's perfect. Or you've got some. You know, it could be a great interview. And you've got somebody that, you know, could be a great applicant. And they made a couple of mistakes because they're busy. They're working all day. And they tried to fill this thing out in between jobs or whatever. And so it's, it's, you need to dig deeper. So I got more, a lot more.

So my buddy Kossum gives this masterclass on how to recruit VAs from other countries. And he's like, by the way, other countries, these people will outwork almost anybody. Like, they really do. if you get the right ones. And they know like three languages and they show up on time. They're willing to work weird hours of the day or night. And he says what you do, number one, to screen them is you have them read three paragraphs and make a certain video.

Because they're not even willing to read or make it the follow simple instructions of making a video. And then he goes, after you do these tasks, you make them do something they can't get right. Like there's no way because you gave them the wrong instruction. They didn't give them enough data to do the job right. and you see how they respond. And I'm like, dude, that's a lot of, like, but the screening process should be the filter.

And then all the best people that I know, especially in the home improvement space, they make you learn a script. It's a very basic script. It's like three or four sentences, but you need to just know this script when you come in and that you need to say it's smiling. We're not asking you to audition for a play

and read like a bunch of lines, but you need to remember these four sentences when you come in. And if you do that, that just shows that you really want this job. One of the things I think we've done is now people want to work for us. We've built a brand. I remember it's so hard in a new market. I mean, Sophie will come up to me and be like, dude, nobody's applying because, like, no one knows who we are.

But I remember when we got branded correctly and people like know us and we put podcasts out there like this. It's like people find the stuff to like, we want to go work there. How important do you think the brand is to attracting talent? I mean, through what you've seen and hired? Well, I mean, the more known we are, I think the more people look at us as like a solid company. Somebody that's not going away. Yeah, somebody that's growing that they can move up in a position. Right.

Yeah, this company is growing, then it's got opportunity. Right. And so I think that's really big. Now, as long as our reputation stays strong, like, it is. Like on Google Indeed Glassdoor. Right. Yeah, because I can tell you that if I was applying for a job, I'd be looking at the Google reviews and how will they take care of their customers. Glass Store has a rating, you know, how do they treat their employees, which you kind of have to take with a grain of salt, considering people that aren't with us anymore.

You should be able to quit or get fired are the ones that have a powerful, like any other thing. Right. But we just, I mean, I think our leadership team cares so much about, about, about about the people, about the employees, and we need to show it more. I'm talking to myself, you know, we need to show it more. Because that's, you know, a lot of your, a lot of your next employees are going to come from referrals from existing employees. If I was working for a crappy company, I wouldn't want to refer a friend. No, also, I think a lot of the people are like, if I refer the wrong guy or gal, like, it's on me. and I'm going to look really bad.

I think some of the top talent in this company, they don't refer a lot because they're like, this is a place of excellence. I've run into that before where I've got some people that maybe need a job, but I also know they like to take a lot of time off. And there's a lot of things they like that, they're not used to performing at this level.

And we're just high performers. We have a lot of high expectations. Some of my friends, I love them dearly, but they may not be willing to put in those hours. And that's their lifestyle. That's the decisions they've made for their life and no judgment at all. Just not a good fit.

Well, I look at a lot of those people, you know, and my buddies came out from Michigan, and I love these guys. These are like I grew up with them. And I showed Jimmy my schedule. And I showed him the Saturday. And he's like, dude, you don't call. Like, you got to come out to Michigan.

Let's go golf. And he goes, Tommy, he's like, F bombs. Like, I would never F and why. your life. And I'm like, no offense, Jimmy. I don't have kids yet. You don't have kids yet, but I'm going to have kids. And I said, you know, I've done the hard work. And that guy's going to be working until he's 75. And like, you got to decide what season you're in to put into work. But if you never want to do it, one of my buddies, Mike Paradise just passed away. and he was still at the grocery store, and he was 68.

And, dude, he was not healthy enough to work, but he had to work. I actually moved him into the apartments for a while. I tried him like $700 rent with no extra fees, but he was in there for about a year and a half, got out. And I'm like, I never understood, like, you could get, the younger you do it, the better you are. I mean, but you still show up for your kids. I mean, how often do you, it's hard.

Because you got a good marriage. You got two amazing daughters. You're very invested in your MMA and working out. How do you make the time? Yeah. Sometimes I feel like I can't be good at any of it because I need to give everything a little bit of attention. Right. And so that's tough for me because I don't like not being great at things.

And so sometimes, you know, certain days I'm not the kind of dad that I want to be or the kind of husband I want to be. Certain days, I'm not the kind of employee that I want to be. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a constant struggle of where to put your, put your effort. And, and I think I've, I think I've figured it out at this point. Thankfully, my wife is very patient and knows, you know, that, that this isn't forever. So she's, she's very patient with me and accepting when I have to log in from home and that sort of thing. The tough thing is with, with kids, because you know you have limited time. Yeah.

So, and which I think is so great that you've waited because it is a grind. What you do is such a grind. And you just couldn't be a great dad. No. With what you put into the business right now. So, yeah, I mean, it's tough with kids because, as you know, my youngest daughter just graduated high school. She's about to leave to go to college. And times limited.

Well, here's the deal. They say you spend the majority of the time between 1 and 18, obviously, or when they're born 18. But I feel like with your family, you're going to get just how close you guys are. You're going to get a lot more time. Lindsay's amazing, by the way. She is, like, the coolest chick. Her and we have become, like, best friends,

which is really cool just to hang out. We get along. And Luke, we just got a lot of camaraderie. You remind me of a good book that you should be. I don't know if you ever read this book, but it's called Off Balance on Purpose. No. Because people say I want to be balanced. And Dan Thurman talks about this, and he's like, how are you going to be great with God,

great with family, perfectly fit, working your ass off and have a lot of fun with all your buddies and be the perfect husband? Like, there's all these things. So pick how you're out balance because of the seasons of life. When people say I want balance, it's like you said. I felt like it's hard to be good at everything. So you've got to pick and choose those times to get ahead and sprint. But if you're a sprinter, you'll be good at the times you need to be.

Yeah. And for me, I think those, look, it's impossible because I haven't been a dad yet. But I think those crucial years are like between one and seven. It's not like you give up with their seven. But now they're getting into extracurricular activities. Yeah. They already know their favorite food. They've already seen, are you on your cell phone all day?

Are they on their cell phone? You know, as he said you guys were really strict early on. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, we were really strict with the girls early on. And, you know, eventually we weren't as strict. But they had other things going on. You know, one thing that I said was you are not going to lay in your bed all day and flip through reels or TikToks or whatever you're going to do. That's not going to happen as long as you're living here.

Yeah. And I wanted my girls to grind at something. I didn't care if it was a musical instrument. I mean, they both got into jiu-jitsu and into wrestling in high school. And so, I mean, that was perfect because it is a grind. It takes discipline. all those things that you need to be successful in life. But, you know, so strict enough to make sure that they maintained the grind.

And at the same time, making sure that they weren't isolated socially from their friends. It's a very tough balance, especially now. Yeah. I can only imagine. I mean, I don't know. It's tough to think about AI and TikTok and Instagram. What's the difference between being a leader and a dad? Or what is the commonalities?

Yeah. I think I'm probably, I think sometimes I'm a better leader here than I am at home, maybe a little bit more of a manager at home. But I try to. It's all women. Think about that. It's all women. It's all women. Yeah.

So, but I always, I always try to, you know, not, I always try to get my kids to buy in on. This is why we do this. I give them stories. I give them examples. I tell them what it looks like if you don't figure this out now. If you don't understand discipline now, here's what it looks like when you're when you're older. Yeah. And so I try to, I try to give them those life lessons that, you know, I've got, I've had 50 years to learn.

Of course, myself at that age, I was no better, you know, but I also didn't, you know, my, I think parenting was just so different when, when I was a kid. Yeah, it was like we had TV, but it wasn't like, we'd go out and play and then when the lights come on, on the roads, you come in. You come in, like, and there was no. Like BMXs and Yeah, it's like go do your own thing, figure your own stuff out. And I had to get myself to baseball practice some days.

And you know, you just have to figure it out. And so I think that was, I think that was good for us, even though now we try to protect our kids from all that. And it's got its consequences. Yeah. I get it. Tell me a little bit about Robert. I mean, you mentioned them earlier,

but what makes him so special at what he does? You know, I think it goes back to what we started this conversation with, which was, I don't know that there's anybody who cares more than Robert Blasey. He's our customer experience manager. He handles escalations along with everything else. Anytime a customer calls in that's already dealt with us, they're asking. He loves it, too. He thrives in it. And that's a, as you know, there are very few people that thrive on that.

Very few. And actually enjoy it. Yeah, he enjoys it because he likes to turn customers who weren't happy with us into raving fans. And that's a rare individual that can grind that out and enjoy it every day. But there's nobody better. You talk about a brand ambassador. He believes in A1. He bleeds for the company.

He does what it takes to make sure our customers, anything that he can do to make our customers Braving fans. I wanted you to listen to something because we'll edit this. And this guy found him and he talks about if I could find this one. But he talks about, basically

he says, listen, my kids aren't getting anything except for my time. We make a lot of money. We're wealthy. We could retire them and their kids. But if they don't learn at a young age that they're not going to be taking care of. They'll never learn the skill to be self-reliant.

And that's a tough one, especially if you, for a father-daughter relationship, is thinking about, you know, there's a lot thinking about, but like you don't need a man. Like, you could be independent. And this is so hard because I haven't had kids, but I wanted to help out, you know, people in my family won't go into details,

but just then I realize I'm holding them back. And once you let them, that go, they got to figure it out and it's so hard. How do you think about that? I know this isn't a podcast about family, but I think it's important. Yeah, I mean, I think it's not only about family, but employees. Like, sometimes you have to let people fail. Yeah.

And there's no better teacher than failure. And so I look at it that way. I look at it for my daughters. And the thing is you can have one kid that if you do everything for them, they can still be, you know, a rock star or at others, they need to learn the hard way. And they need to, they need to feel failure. They need to know there's not a lifeline because I've seen it happen with, you know, friends, extended family members, or when somebody knows they have a lifeline, they treat the moment a little bit differently. And, and I, you know, I always, I always told

my girls, you need to have discipline so you have options. I want my kids to have options. There's no way I ever want the strategy to be, how do I find a rich husband? Right. You know, I want my girls to be able to hold themselves up on their own and then be a great partner to somebody, not to rely on somebody. Because as soon as you're captured like that, it sucks. And then you stay in a really bad relationship and you start getting mistreated. Yeah. That's exactly what can happen.

Even if you don't get mistreated, everybody knows deep down if they're not contributing. And that's just soul-sucking. I don't want my daughters to feel that way. You know, I've said, like, look, I've got some really close cousins. And I was like, man, I could give them a great gift. But how would this be? This is my scenario that I've envisioned. Guys, we're going to Rio de Janeiro.

It's all on me. And then they go, well, number one, I got to work. And even if you're paying, what am I supposed to do? Dad, could I have this? I want to go, take my kids to go get ice cream. It's like, so my idea was, what ideas do you have, how could I help you or give you a loan? And it's a forgivable loan. If the business takes off, great.

I don't want you to ever feel indebted. But how do you help a person, what do they say? There's an old saying, give a man a fish or teach a man to fish. And I think that that's important. I want everybody to do good. I want to help them go to the areas where there's a lot of fish. I guess that's the best way to say it. You taught about a fish, but we're going to help you even find more fish.

Yeah. Well, you know, the truth is that most people aren't built like you with your mentality. And so you can, you see this opportunity this person has. They're great at this. They can start a business doing this. Some people aren't built for that. They don't have the stamina. No, because it's mostly going to go to failure.

I always say if like I had to rebuild A1, even you give me $10 million. dollars to start it to build a camaraderie in this day now you're thinking about reddit and like the marketing and the recruiting of what it took to build a training center how many times we've rebuilt it shut it down reopened it like and then like the apartments and all the crap like even if i knew the exact strategy to build a camarader and get the right people build the right incentives and the technology stack and all the different things but really the camaraderie amongst the team that's the hardest thing and it's like man like you work under luke tell me a little bit about that. Well, I have a great relationship with Luke. I really appreciate him as a leader. I think he

just knows how to communicate with me to get, I don't want to say get the most out of me. I don't feel like he's manipulating me into it, but I want to do a good job for Luke. And part of the reason is he works his ass off. Yeah. And so he leads by example. He does. He does. And I want to, I want to, I never want him to feel like something on my plate is on his plate. Right. Like I'm almost not even viewing him as a leader because, although I do, and he does lead me, I don't want him to feel responsible for my stuff. Anything that I'm responsible for is on me, and it should not go any higher than that.

And so I protect him from that because I really respect him. And, you know, I could give a million examples, but he's, He's just cool-headed. I think he knows when to put the screws to somebody in a good, positive way. And he knows when he shouldn't. And I don't know. I can't say enough good things about Luke. He's a rock star.

I think he's, you know, I always say I think he's the most valuable person at the company. But, yeah, well, he's, I'll tell you what he's, he's a self-taught person. I mean, he had his own garage or company, built his own website, figured out how to build doors, figured out service titan when he had to. When you're pushed up against the wall, he could just self-teach. He can figure it out. And there's not a lot of people that could just walk in a room and go, what's the next big thing? And I'll say, like, he loves Joan.

Because Joan came from the corporate world. She's our project manager, and she helps prioritize. Yes. And I really want someone under Joan that works directly with my side projects. Like this stupid project I want to do of get 100 testimonial handwritten letters with before and afters that every guy hands the customer because Cameron Harold talked about it. But like there's no time to work on those stuff. But that's all I think about is about it's customer experience. Yeah.

And I think about like, man, this is like trust, trust, trust, signal, signal, signal. I love this door. And it's like, but that's not a priority. Of course it's never going to be the top 10 is make Tommy's 100 page vines. I know what you mean. And so I, and I've always, I'm always thinking about how do we get the next lead? How do we get the next great guy coming in? How do we give more options?

Like, I'm looking at like Mantel's act because like Mantle's never going to work for Rogers, but he flew out here and like with Luke's help, we made it work. And Vahey's coming out here to help us figure out stuff. And Lace, tell me a little bit. Tell me about the technology you use. Yeah, I mean, we're, we've been implementing AI in the call center and in the dispatch department for, I guess. Lace has been about the last year and a half or so.

You know, we had some problems to solve that was difficult through Service Titan. We are, you know, our abandoned rate was going up. You know, we were missing calls because we just couldn't staff for those spikes in call volume. We didn't have great visibility into our metrics. You know, in Service Titan, when an agent takes an incoming call, they get to determine whether that was a lead or not. Yeah. So they didn't try to lie.

Some of them did. No, there's gray area. You know, yeah, we, I think we rooted out the people that were, you know, possibly lying. So I didn't have to deal with it once I got to the department because my predecessors dealt with that pretty severely. But, yeah, I mean, we didn't know exactly what our data was. You think about it, a call comes in, and it's one of these gray areas, like, there's no way anybody could have booked that. that that wasn't really a lead. So we just, we kind of left it to them to,

and that's just the nature of the system, to self-manage those call dispositions. And so we need the lace to come in and listen to the transcripts and say what actually happened. Was this a leader, wasn't it? And, you know, they give us insights to our actual booking rate. And cancellation rate.

And cancellation rate. And a lot of other things, you know, the sentiment of the customer on the phone, We got a whole playbook built out where are our agents doing what they were trained? Are they hitting all these points? And Lace has given us visibility. You know, before we had Lace, we had to, we had one QC guy that was going through and listening to three calls per agent per week, which he did a great job at it. But you're testing, but you're also testing 8% of the calls.

Yeah, it's nothing. It's nothing in the grand scheme of thing. So this allows us to give a playbook score to every agent based on. on all their calls. So. And how is it, you know, obviously, this is an endorsement for Boris. I just, when I met Boris, I realized he's one of the smartest guys in the room. And you work with the leader.

That's what I was trying to do is get access. I'll say my best quality is who, not how. Who do we need? And I'm going to get the best out of it. That's why we work with Lauren at Search Kings. And that's why he's on a call every freaking all the time. He's not meeting with anybody else, by the way. It's not like he's jumping on customer service to go do those calls.

And like Vahey coming out here is like, I. expect to work with the best, and I will not work with you anymore. And sometimes I ask too much of our vendors, but at the same time, like, we take care of them, too. Like, you'll jump on the phone and tell people about the different vendors we use. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We do shop tours and give them access. Absolutely. When the vendors are working with, like, Lace is a great example. But there are other options. You know, there are 100%. But there's a vocally. There's a same day. I mean, it goes on and on. Yeah. And all of them have their advantages. But what I like about Lace is when we ask for something, they give it attention. They're on a weekly

call with me and we're going through, you know, where we need improvement, some new builds that we need. And they're just very responsive. So it's a great partner. And I've always believed that this vendor, and you're the same way, but I've always believed in this, the relationship with the vendor is two way. You take care of them. You got to help them win. You got to help win. And so I have no problem getting on and letting people know my experience with with lace and or or anybody else that we work with because they take they take great care of us and I want them to, I want them to win. So if you imagine we're in the 90s and you want to win a basketball and you got access to any player in the world. Who are you picking?

I'm picking Michael Jordan. Yeah. Well, let me explain something. Every single company has their Michael Jordan. Most of the time it's the founder, but a lot of times it's that key player like Luke is, like kind of my integrator, because you can't have multiple integrate. Like I just give Luke like a lot and he's like, what do you want me to cancel? What do you want? And like he always says his goal is to make my dreams come true. And I go to you for some stuff, but Luke's like, don't go to my direct report because that's kind of like, you could ask questions, but it was kind of insulting and I get that. Because if you were prioritizing something, then I go walk in. It's like, what do I do here? It was confusing. But that's the thing that if everybody

listening understood, there's an A plus player in every team. I don't care what marketing agency you're using. I don't care who you're using as a vendor to buy parts from. I don't care who you're buying your vehicles from. There's somebody in that company that's an all-star. And what I've always tried to do is say, who is your freaking best? Because I'll get you more business and you know what to do with. In fact, I could put you out of business. I'll get you so much business. But you better treat us like gold. And I'll treat you back. like gold. Yeah. And like that's how I start the conversation. That's how I started out with service type in 2017 when we got on. We're at such an advantage having that access. I mean,

you know, I've been at smaller companies where you don't have that access and you get the C player. But you got to ask for it too. You got to ask. And so yeah, I agree. I think plenty of companies just take what they're given and think they don't really have a choice. But I really appreciate the access we've had with like the top of the food chain at all of these companies. And it just, it makes our lives a lot easier. Well, I don't want to work with a company if I don't have top access, and I'll just say that. Pro Book, Dispatch Pro, I know we use both. A lot of people ask us, and there's pros, and by the way, they're probably listening. So tell me a little bit about, because what are the pros and cons? Yeah, well, first of all, we, you know, these are dispatching

softwares. One of them through Service Titan, so it's, you know, a native system through Service Titan. And then ProBook is something we're trying out on the side. And, you know, what were we solving for with these? It was like, we've got thousands of jobs to run. Right around just under 30,000 a month. Yeah, 30,000 jobs a month. It sounds nuts. It's an insane amount.

And we've got a team of 20 dispatchers. You know, so they can't get to it all. They can't look at, okay, this particular technician does great in this zip code. and this job type, it goes to this technician, and there's just no way that they have that kind of processing power. Well, you know, enter Dispatch Pro and ProBook. Now you've got this machine learning and AI that does have the ability to do the math on these jobs

and line up the best customers and jobs with the right technicians. And so, you know, we are running these two side by side, trying to figure out which is the best way to go. You know, Service Titan is putting a lot of effort into improving their product. And we, you know, we appreciate all the, all the efforts they're putting in. It's a big ship to turn at Service Titan. So I understand things take a little longer than any of us would like. And at the same time, you know, ProBook is a great team in that they can move quickly.

They, you know, it's similar to the relationship with lace where if we ask for something, they can move pretty quickly on it. Just some disadvantages that it's not a native software. Right. You know, so there's positives and negatives to both. And I just know that one way or another, like the dispatching AI and dispatching is here to stay. Yeah, that is. I think it's funny that people are always like online. Like, you guys don't use 20 softwares.

I'm like, if you see our marketing, the way we set up our vehicles, the way we do inventory, Phil Spark, Field Force, Power of BI. I mean, it's like, what, it goes on and on. And I'm like, no, we do. And you can bounce around through them all and you're like, holy crap. And I mean, not everyone's in all of them. They're all customized for this certain thing. I mean, if you really look at it, like we switched to Asana for project management.

I mean, we're using a lot of different things to run this business. It's not like, man, we got this one awesome CRM that it's not possible for a company like ours. And things are starting to get more agentic and be able to do more things. but it's still, it's a weird time we're living. And a lot of times I ask God, I'm like, what, not Y, yes, but why was I born in 1983 to go into this new world? You know what I mean? Like, it's crazy. And I think the next five to ten years are going to be insane.

The question I always get is, how should I pay my dispatchers? And you've really explored and experimented a lot of ways. and there's no silver bullet. No. And it's not like, man, if I figure out that pay grade, I'll be able to recruit everybody and everything will work out perfectly. It is a constant grind of training, hearing, listening, training, listening, being there, firing, retraining. It's like, everyone's like, man, if I knew what they knew, no, it takes constant work. You got to show up every day. You got to grind.

You got to do it every single day. And then it starts to get good. And then something happens. And you've got to rebuild and the company grows. You've got to restructure everything. And we've had every single thing. So where does somebody start at least? Well, you start with the right employee.

You know, back to... Yeah, exactly. It's not about the incentive. But if you did say incentives really help, and I do believe people should be able to make more than $700 a week. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, and I know we've talked about this. You and I have talked about this before.

I'll pay somebody more if they're worth it. Like we just, like, if we've got the right person, we'll pay them more. And, you know, with dispatch, we've been all over the place. The, since I've been on board, I think I originally rolled out an incentive plan for dispatch as a dispatch manager. I don't think there was anything in place when I came on. And, you know, we're looking at, we're looking at anything that we can do to, like, recognize the right behaviors. So, you know, what are the important things that a dispatcher does? Well, they, they got to answer the phone when a tech calls or a customer's calling them back.

So how many calls are they taking versus how many they're missing? We want to make sure the schedule stays full. You know, if we've got capacity today and we don't fill it, that capacity is gone for the year. That revenue is gone. There's no going back to yesterday to refill it. So we've incentivized dispatchers to pull jobs from the future into the slots today. Move up, bro. Yeah.

And we measure that by the revenue that came out of that. job, not just the volume of work because they can pull trash forward that we don't necessarily want today. But we want them to go out and look for good jobs in the right areas and then we'll measure the revenue on that and the revenue dollars get added to that dispatcher scorecard. And they have certain levels that they need to hit to be at our top tier. We've looked at, you know, we do quality control. So every job that comes in, we want dispatchers looking at it to make sure there's not a duplicate profile.

We want to make sure that there's, you know, not some kind of job history that was missed. And now we're not sending out the right tech. So how many of those QCs are you doing today? You can poke holes in a lot of this stuff, by the way. And that's what's tricky about dispatches. You can poke holes in just about anything. But it's probably, it's a puzzle. That's what we've always said is your.

And by the way, me and you could be. dispatching, it'd be totally different, but it'd still be totally right. And we could have the right reasons of why we did things. And there's no, and you love to say it needs to be a system. We preach systems and we're preaching technology and do things the same way every time. But you can say, well, this guy needed off. So I reroute this guy, and I gave him off till 10 a.m. tomorrow. Like, that's not wrong. And there's people that have stuff come up, but it's like, there's a lot of judgment that goes into it. So complex. It's so complex. Yeah, that's the toughest thing about, like, even being able to point out a good dispatcher, because, like,

if today, I looked at yesterday and said, why did you do this? Why did you do that? Like, this doesn't look right. There could have been something in that moment that made it absolutely the right decision that you just can't recreate the next day, that that department moves so fast. They're making split-second decisions. And sometimes even though it doesn't look like it was right the next day when you're looking back, it was absolutely the right thing to do that day. And so I think everybody needs to keep that in mind when they're, you know, maybe judging certain moves that are made. Not to say that there is an area for opportunity. There always is a way to get better at that, you know, those split second decisions.

But really hard to recreate it and hold somebody's feet to the fire. I've got some speed rounds to finish up. So this is like 101LEV. You got a CSR and a dispatcher. Now, at a very young age of business, I had more of an office manager that did everything. Counts receivable, counts bill. Like they took the calls, they dispatched. I mean, that's what I did.

I mean, I was dispatched for a couple people, but I'm like, like, just try to stay in the same, like, vicinity of town when you got a few trucks on the road. But why would you want to split those up? It's a different personality. Completely different personality. You're, you want your call center agent to be bubbly and very customer-centric. Not that you don't want.

that from a dispatcher, but this is what you're looking for specifically in a call center agent. They need to kind of have a sales mentality. They want to win that booking. And a dispatcher is a puzzle solver. They're probably a little more in their own heads and the wheels are always turning. And it's, I'm not saying you can't find somebody that can do both because I think smaller businesses have found that. Yeah. But especially at scale, these are different personalities and you just need to split them up. The dispatcher needs to be looking at things logistically. The call center agent is more, you know,

winning the job and sales-oriented. You know, I think that's one of the things we've realized over the years is like the zero line, the IS team, the VERS team. We put specialists in that really know how to be great at something. And they've got scorecards that are super complex because when you're responsible for everything, you're responsible for nothing.

because it's really hard to put a scorecard of, wait a minute, people are like, how do I hire a general manager? General meaning, what are they responsible for? Everything? It's like, what are the three things that you know they're winning?

And I'm not perfect at it. Like, Elle's a lot better, Brian Davenport and Adam helped, but like the manuals really mattered of how do you win at what happens in this scenario. I want to get back to more of an agentic kind of like, you know, I know Matt's or sometimes Luke's been upset about like,

Matt or somebody. It could have been you at certain times. It's like, well, they didn't know they could break this. but it's like, that's like tribal knowledge. It's like where's, where, and it's so hard to figure out because it is tribal knowledge. And it's so hard to put that onto a document of how things work. And if you break this, you do this. Because my dad, what I love about my dad, when a car breaks down, he knows there's three things, air, fuel, and spark.

And he understands why it broke. And he knows exactly what to look at based on this. But there's not a lot of people in our. company that knows exactly what to look at and why. And I don't know how you, how do you pull that in except hire smart people? But then they're like, kind of the crutches, well, they know how to do it. And then it's like, they can't leave because when they're out of time, like, hey, I need help with this, because you're the one that knows it.

And how many times does that happen? I mean, it's not bad with us because I was going to tell you about pinnacle's pretty awesome. We go out, play volleyball. We have the blast. We go out. Like, I don't think Luke, you or I are like, man, I'll do a podcast or something, but I'm not logging in every day, like checking out, like making sure everything is, like,

we're going out and having a blast. We're not in the business. We'll run a meeting or something. But we're at the top people in the company, and the business still does great. Yeah. How does that happen? Great leaders. It happens with great leaders and great employees.

And people that, again, like when you have a, whether it's just winning or your customer centric, then it doesn't matter to me if my boss is looking over my shoulder. and I think that trickles down. It doesn't matter to people if their boss looking over the show. They're going to try to do the right thing every single time. If you're in a position where you've got to look over somebody's shoulder and tell them what to do for them to do the right things, and you've got the wrong person. And I think it's a testament that we can step away for a week and the business still runs.

That means we've done something right with hiring. I always say, look, guys, I told Lyft Chamberlain and like, we're going to suck. We're going to fail. It's not going to be great. just know we're going to figure it out. Like I always tell Luke, just go ahead and do it. Who cares if we fail? We'll figure out Edison.

Thomas Edison figured out a thousand ways of not to do it right. But so many people are willing to try. And I'm like, dude, we're going to suck. We're doing door to door. It's not worked out great. This is our fifth year. But I'm like, man, we're going to crack the code. Just don't give up.

And now, like Justin Tatum was working, but it didn't really have fun. So Jeremy Lamb's going to help. And then we've got Josh and this run of Orlando others can help and like they're possibly going to figure it out but I'm not quitting I'm not telling Lenny do let's crap like it's still working but I'm like this thing could go we could have 10,000 door to door people but no one's going to try you're going to be like that won't work for garage doors yeah and I think that's important is like they're like you know same thing with mantle though like that'll never work yeah I mean it's something I had to work on personally because I

I like things to be right before they're implemented and I quickly realized here that we don't time to run a million tests and and to make sure things are right. And you and Luke have given me the freedom to break some stuff and fix it. So sometimes it just, it just requires. It moves faster to break it a few times and go than to wait for perfection. It's a perfection is the enemy of just getting started. Four more questions. Dustin, what's one thing about how we run A1 that you think most companies completely miss?

We talked about a lot of them, but what? Yeah, I mean, I think culture is the, I don't, I don't think a lot of companies understand the importance of culture. And that just means that everybody's pulling in the same direction, you know, it means that there's consistency. It means that there's respect up and down the org chart. And I think a lot of, a lot of companies think that if everybody's just pushing the right button, and the sales numbers are high, then we're good. But people don't work to their best ability if the culture isn't there. And that's why I wanted to hire leaders that focused on culture.

Because, again, if you can't be over somebody's shoulder, making sure they're pushing the right buttons, then they can fall back on culture and they know what to do. 100%. I think it's funny because Adrian at one time said, you know, does Quartet know that me and Luke pretty much run the majority of this business? and I'm like, I don't want to run the business at all. I want to dream.

I want the vision. I want to hire great people. I want to be the culture guy. I want to be at the orientation. I want to talk to the technicians as much as possible because those are the people meeting the customer. I think the CSRs and dispatchers are super important because they're talking to the client and sending the first. So that's super important. But I'm like, do you want me being a workhorse with a, you know, $400 million?

Is the CEO the guy? Or the founder. I actually like founder much better than CEO because I don't think I'm the best CEO. I don't think I have great one-on-ones. I think I'm bad at most stuff. But I'm like, you know, I don't want to be the guy that says without me, this company's not, because that's vain.

And I think that's like, I don't want to be like, I'd love to say, man, if I left for three months, this company would run astonishingly. I just want to be the guy hitting the gas. I want to do the guy high-fiving. I want to be the guy. Look, the founder's story, how we started the company. company, you know, handling a lot of the marketing. And by the way, the TV and radio mean nothing.

We've tested both and it does better because people buy from a person, not a company. And if I'm like, dude, I used to run every job. When I get a one star, I show up with literally flowers to a job and make it right. Like, that's how the company was founded. Mom answered the calls and did a great job doing it. And, you know, so that's the part I want to be. I'm like, dude, I don't want to be going through a, like, I don't mind going through these meetings and looking at stuff and coming up and I just want to be the question,

ask her. Like that and I think that great CEOs, they're, they're planning the next five moves. And, you know, by the way, not every one of them work out. I mean, this five X CEO is great because they've got to be focused and you've got to move in quadrants and you can't do more than one quadrant at once because they'll break things. And that's, that's like continuous learning for me. Like, that's what I want to do. And I think it's weird because I just don't want to be the guy. Like, man, I know service time better than anybody. Come to me for that. Never.

I want to barely, I don't know how to log into payroll. And I know there was a time early on that you had to know everything. But as you've evolved, there's no way the business can grow if you're the bottle. If you're the only one that knows this stuff. No, that's the most owners listening. They're the bottleneck. Yeah. If they think they know the most, like you should know the least but still have the best vision

and be able to ruthlessly prioritize. That's what this says ruthlessly prioritize. What's something you know now as VP of operations that you wish you'd know when you were running that tent shop? How important the data is. I would have set up a better way of collecting and analyzing data where I was. I think that's been, you know, some of my biggest growth. I've grown a lot since I've been here, but that's some of my biggest growth is really, knowing how to find the data,

knowing what to do with it, knowing how to action it. You know, I, yeah, I wish I would have known that earlier in my life. You know what? It's all a math equation and it's all literally like you fix. It simply goes, what is your revenue goal? And this is how we do our budgets.

Not this is how we buy companies. But what's your booking rate minus cancellation rate, divided by your conversion rate, divided by your average ticket, multiplied by your cost per lead, and that's how you figure it out. And it works every time, as long as the data is accurate.

That's the problem is most data that we were using. And this is the problem with performance pay, is that people can't trust their paycheck, and it's not accurate. It could literally bankrupt a company. For someone listening who's thinking about joining a company like A1 instead of running their own business, why might that be a better path for someone?

Yeah, I mean, starting a business or growing a business now, you've already run, you've already illustrated some of the, some of the challenges with that. I can't even imagine trying to blow a business up from nothing to even a $10 million business right now. I mean, especially if you don't have the brand to draw it. We already talked about it. With vendors, you're dealing with probably B and C players, so they're not going to

help you as much as they will at a company like ours where we have a, players that we're dealing with helping us build things out. I had my own business for a couple of years selling window treatments. And it is a grind. You're in everything starting out, especially when you're small. You're never on vacation either. You're not on vacation. I had two young daughters, and I realized that in order to be great at this, I'm going to need to be, I'm going to need to put my family life on hold. And I wasn't, that's one of the things I wasn't willing to do. And my mindset wasn't right at the time.

I sucked at it. And yeah, a business owner, especially a one-man shop, there's just so many, nobody can do everything. Nobody can be good at everything. It's so nice to be able to come into a company like this. Focus on your strengths. Take a position where you can be, you know, the best at some aspect of the business because that's what your personality is leaning towards. So I don't know.

I can't imagine trying to grow a business now in the current atmosphere, especially with AI and the investments that you need to make to grow, very difficult. Yeah. I mean, I remember when things were working out for Adam, he wasn't enjoying his role. and by the way, he came over, coolest dude ever. I love good.

He just loves the team. Still feels like a brother. I love Adam. I mean, he is a brother to me, but like, yeah, we talk about that all the time. Yeah, I love Adam. But, you know, these skills,

I got along great with Adam. He got along great with a lot of the team, and we built something special. But going to work with someone else necessarily, they don't translate. Like, I hired Mr. Beast, one of his top guys, garbage. Didn't know how to,

blow me up into Mr. Beast, but people assume, so sometimes it's like the camaraderie. This is what I'm talking about. That's what's so special is the team. How do people connect with you or learn more about A1? Yes. By the way, you're a pretty busy guy. Yeah, yeah, I've got a lot going on. But, you know, anytime somebody wants to talk about A1, I am more than happy to talk about my experience. And some of the things we talked about here, Like it's just a great, it's a great place to work. You walk into the, you walk into the office and there is an energy that people can't

describe. And so many people mention it. You imagine it's got to be pretty special for somebody actually talk about it. But yeah, I mean, anybody can email me. They want to get a hold of me. Talk a little bit more. As you know, I'm willing to jump on the phone with anybody. Yeah, you know, I think it's me to do more shop tours down the road and especially with

you know, garage our freedom and the different garage are companies we coach. Like, we give it all out. We give out the playbooks. It's, it's like, there's so many things you could just give out, but it's so hard to implement. I mean, it's like, yeah, get lace. And then just make sure you do this. And it's like, where do I start? Yeah, it's like, hey, just kick the field goal from 44 yards.

Yeah. You know, just keep your leg. It's like, it's like you with MM. it's like you can tell people the rare naked choke is probably one of the best moves. Here's how you get out of it. But you got to do it a thousand times and practice it every day to get good. Dustin, it's a pleasure, man. I don't call this long a podcast for a long time.

But I was like, dude, I just want to have a conversation. Close us out, brother. Anything last on your mind? No, I just, I really appreciate you bringing me on. This isn't really my comfort zone, but this is one of the things that has helped me grow at A1 is, you know, putting myself out there a little bit more. and talking about, I'm very passionate about it. Anybody that talks to me one-on-one can know that I'm passionate about my job and about the problems that we're trying to solve.

But it's nice to be able to speak to a little bit larger audience once in a while and get used to that. Because I do have a lot of great things to say about the industry and A-1. No, you're flexing those muscles, man, and you're doing great. I don't think five years ago, it's not that you couldn't handle it, but now you're just really like, you're just more comfortable. You talk on stages, and that's something like, you know, there's this idea

of what happens if you train them and they leave, you know, you've always heard that. And then what if you train them and they stay in, they blossom and they live their best life? It's just like, and you were going to self-teach yourself everything.

You're like Luke, like you're going to figure it out. But like, put you in those uncomfortable zones, and then you start to get good and flex those muscles and you're doing great. I think there's a lot of value in this podcast. So I appreciate you, brother. you're amazing.

Thank you. I'm proud of you. Proud of everything you do, brother. I appreciate you very much. That's a wrap.