The Home Service Expert Podcast - How Freelancers Can Help Your Company Scale Without Taking Big Risks

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

When people ask, why did you get into this business or what do you do? It's the realization that every single company is a technology company, even if you don't realize that you are. And if you're not, it's because you're missing out on it, which I think is exactly what you're saying. The mom and pops that are still doing things the old way, it's not that you can't do business that way. You can in a lot of ways.

Their customer base may prefer that human approach, but it's inhibiting their growth and it's preventing them from being able to pass on intellectual knowledge, institutional knowledge to other people. It's all sort of in here. It's not in the organization. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. You guys know me, I'm Tommy Mello,

and today I got some special guests visiting us from new york we got michael solomon and rashaun blumberg did i say that right you nailed it all right blumberg not bloomberg experts in entrepreneurship freelancing technology and hiring they're based out of new york like i said the times management, their co-founders from 2011 to present 10 times ascend co-founders from 2018 to present and a brick wall management. Were you guys together on that one? Yeah, we were. Yeah. It's 95 to a present Michael and Rashaan founded the 10 times management, a tech talent agency. They are thought leaders on talent economy and the future of work. They've been featured everywhere from The New Yorker and CNN to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and published their first book, Game Changer, How to Be 10 Times in the Talent Economy.

LaShawn graduated from Wharton School of Business with a degree in entrepreneurial management in 1994. For more than 20 years, he's created and led successful organizations based in tech, entertainment, and the nonprofit sphere, finding new solutions for longstanding and emerging challenges. Michael Solomon is an established entrepreneur who has helped build four organizations, for-profit and non-profit alike, that share a common goal of improving people's lives. He has a passion for personal and professional growth, he's optimizing himself and all that he works on as a personal mission. Quite the resume, guys. I'm glad to have you on. What I'd like to do to get started is just basically have you guys introduce yourselves and talk a little

bit about what you guys have been up to the last you know decade and what your goals are here in the future i mean more than what you've already just told the awesome audience i know yeah i mean you you sort of nailed it uh just one clarification it's it's 10x 10X, 10X management, 10X ascend. You told me not to say 10 times. 10X. It's all good, 10X. I'm so sorry. No, all good. I would say the part that you left out,

which is probably the more interesting part in mine and Michael's relationship, is that we've known each other since third grade. So we've sort of been de facto partners in businesses since third grade. Some of them totally on the up and up and some Some of them totally on the up and up, and some of them perhaps less on the up and up. But in the last 25 years, we've created three companies, BrickWall Management, 10X Management, and 10X Ascend.

And we put out a book last summer, or actually the beginning of last fall, which in the middle of a pandemic was quite interesting. And I think the thing know, the thing I would just add to that is our background, what we started out doing with Brickwell Management was managing entertainment talent. So that would be people like John Mayer and Citizen Cope and Vanessa Carlton. And we did a lot of consulting with Springsteen and that was a great business and a great beginning. But what we saw when the music industry was disrupted by the internet was an opportunity to figure out how do we do new things

and i can imagine that as technology continues to advance that you a lot of your listeners are are facing threats to their business either from the marketing and the selling side or even just sometimes there's technology that comes along that makes what they do either more difficult or obsolete. And what we ended up figuring out was a great path out of a difficult moment by just having a little bit of a pivot and a light bulb moment. And that light bulb moment was the tech talent with the new rock stars and they need a representation the same way that rock stars and athletes and entertainers do. So tell me a little bit about 10X and the process of establishing it and what are the main goals of 10X? Go ahead, Michael. Sure. So what we did was we set up a talent agency for tech talent. The difference is

most talent agencies represented athletes and entertainers. And we just said, these are the new clients. So basically what we do is we take all the pain out of freelancing for them, and we take the difficulty and the pain out of finding high-level freelancers away for the companies. So some of your listeners may need to build websites or build software to make their businesses run more smoothly. We are a much better alternative to going on an open marketplace on the internet and hoping that you're finding the right person. We've got people we've worked with for years. These are all high-level tech freelancers who we know we can trust. We know their quality and they've been tested. And so companies come to us with a need

and we introduce them to the person, make sure it's a good fit, figure out how to structure the engagement, get them on their way, and then make sure that the engagement goes smoothly. I mean, we're not managing the engagement as in we're not keeping the trains running on time, but we are there to make sure the quality control exists. And I would say really the fundamental shift for us between representing musicians to representing tech talent was the realization that in the modern world

where companies have to do more with less, everybody who you employ is talent. And if you don't think about them as talent and you don't think about yourself as talent, much the way, say, a team would think of LeBron James as talent, right? You can't treat people the same way that you used to when you could just throw numbers at problems. Now you have to do more with less. So you have to really think of your employees as talent. And that shift was pivotal for us in allowing us to realize, like, just because we work with rock stars or entertainers, that doesn't mean that that's the only type of talent that may need the type of representation that we provide.

So that was the real shift for us is really viewing human resources is so cold and talent is so much more aggrandizing. And I think, Tommy, the other thing I just throw in here is that, sorry to... No, go ahead. I'll stop soon. Another hour or two, I'll stop talking. So the book, which you mentioned, Game Changer, is really a distillation of what we've learned because there aren't a whole lot of people who have seen talent across this many industries. We've worked with musical talent, we've worked with writers and producers in the music industry, we've worked with filmmakers and entrepreneurs, and then we worked with the tech talent.

And we got to see this through line of what is it that all talent wants, and for companies and for small businesses, when they're bringing on people, they need to understand how the people they're trying to bring on think. And that applies to the top-level talent. And it also applies to the younger generations, Gen Xers and millennials. Yeah. You know, Gen Z and millennials is what I meant to say.

It's a great question. And, you know, the thing that's going on right now is we've got a true labor shortage. We hear about it the most in the home service space. I guarantee you that there's people that are working on homes right now saying they can't get enough people because during COVID they considered a lot of us essential workers. And I know a lot of the industry has got to hit hard, but everybody's like, I see all over Facebook, just raise your wages, raise your wages. And I'm thinking to myself, most of the small businesses I know are not even making very good profit. They make a living. The company doesn't make a profit. When we talk about EBITDA, there is nothing in their business of EBITDA. They pay themselves, they're 90 grand,

they're 120 grand. And I'm like, they're going to have to take a pay cut. Personally, I feel like a lot of these people shouldn't own businesses. I'm not saying to get out of business, but treat your business as you need to make a six-figure income and your business needs to make at least 10%. If not, we need to start changing things or you might want to look for something else. When you go into business, I always tell people, if you're like me, I had to put the first 10 years of sweat equity in because I didn't have any money. So I put my time, energy, and focus into that business. And that's what substituted as money. I didn't have anything, but it's

a great conversation to have. And I love this. I used to tell people, and maybe I'm wrong. I've done very well, but I've also made critical mistakes. And I could write a book literally on mistakes made on Fiverr and Upwork. It should be called that because I've had four people work on a different project of mine. I've been referred to amazing people. And it's almost like building a house. You always think, hey, it'll be done by June. And then, of course, I get involved. And I go, no, no, no, I want a different HVAC unit.

I want to change the garage layout. Oh, I want this. I want this. I want this. And then I realized a lot of the time it's the owner's problem that changes all these changes. But here's the problem is a lot of times the builder or the techie will say, no, that's fine. It's not a big deal, but then it just happened. We're late and then we're pissed. And a lot of times we do a waterfall approach. We want to have everything instead of an MVP, which is the minimum viable product.

And I know I'm going a little bit over, kind of over the top of maybe some of the listeners out there, but what are some of the best advice you could give? Number one of the mistake of going to Fiverr and Upwork, I guess, Rishan, you can kind of address this one first and then we'll let Michael comment and then we'll switch around. Well, I think you nailed it. I think keeping it simple, right? When you're first starting with somebody, once you have an established relationship with somebody, you know, the cadence of how they work, you can really expand things into larger and more complicated projects.

But certainly on an initial project, keep it simple, right? Go for that MVP. Don't try to get everything in there. And also really work on formulating what that scope of work is going to look like. As you pointed out, if you're building a house and the house comes with a certain HVAC, if you change the HVAC or you change the way that that HVAC works, it's going to change the way that the project is run. So you sort of make that decision about the HVAC unit up front before you sort of sign the contract. And then you try to stick to it.

There are obviously going to be changes and iterations and things that happen during the course of a project. But keep it simple. Get to know the person a little bit. Try to go to a pre-vetted out like ours. I think you nailed it. Upwork and Fiverr, you can find great things there. It's not like there aren't great talents on those platforms as well. But we use the analogy of a shopping mall. Those are huge shopping malls. And maybe you go into a shopping mall and you find something great. But maybe you go to the shopping mall, you find something great, you bring it home,

it looks terrible. You go home, you go back to the shopping mall, you find something great. But maybe you go to the shopping mall, you find something great, you bring it home, it looks terrible, you go home, you go back to the shopping mall, you have to return it. What we do, and there are probably others like us, is we play the role of the personal shopper. We find out what you're looking for, what you need, and then we provide you with that resource. So we're trying to take the pain point out of you trying to figure out who is right. And maybe you have to look at 10, 15 people before you find that right person. Our goal is to find the right person the first time for you. And then we often recommend, especially where there isn't a technical founder in an organization, we recommend starting small.

Start with a smaller project. See if it's the right fit between the tech talent that we're presenting and what your needs are. Not every human interaction works right. Even if you've got a brilliant mind... By the way, we haven't defined what 10x is. For us, 10x is the brilliant mind, but also brilliant at the ability to communicate and work with other people. So if we find that right match for you, ideally, they're going to be able to work within your

confines of how you do business. But it doesn't always work that way. So start out small, make the scope of work very clear and discreet. Try to stick to it as best you can. Get a sense of who that person is or who that team is. And if they work well with you, grow from there. The only thing I would really add to that is when it comes to pricing, people think, oh, wow, that person is expensive at $150 an hour. Unfortunately, you don't have enough variables to know if they're expensive. Because if you don't know what they get done in an hour, you can't tell if the person who's $150 is actually cheaper or more expensive than the person who's $20 an hour. It's just that simple. And you need to look at all the variables. And

people often look at Upwork and say, oh my gosh, those people are so cheap. But if you have to do the project four times with those cheap people because they get it wrong, you actually haven't saved money. You've spent more money and you've lost a lot of valuable time. And that's really why... And this is true for all of the business owners you're talking to. they know that when they produce quality, they can charge for it because it's actually value. And people get a little confused between something being cheap and something being valuable. And I think it's a really important distinction. I completely agree with that statement. I think the biggest mistake is a lot of times cheap guys price themselves expensive too.

So it's really understanding that. I always made the comment is I'd rather pay somebody for 40 hours a month, a $300,000, you know, the equivalent to $300,000, which is, I don't know if I have to do some math real quick, but hundreds of dollars an hour, then have a $60,000 person looking at our tax strategy or something like pay for the best for a certain amount of hours than getting somebody mediocre like a bookkeeper. When you

compare it to accounting, I'd rather have the best controller and best CFO in the world looking at our stuff versus a high-level bookkeeper for how we're going to be approaching taxes. And I think I could agree with that wholeheartedly. I mean, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've always loved the cliche that Jim Collins talks about with built to last when he talks about GE, what was his name? Jack Welch. Jack Welch and how he left the company so much better than most CEOs ever do. And I just love that concept. And I know that's kind of getting offhand, but there are people that can work with anybody. And I just feel like entrepreneurs, especially in the home service space, we come up with an idea, but it needs to be able to do this. And it needs to be able to do that. We want this, we want that. And I just feel like if you just

stood in front of a whiteboard and you wireframe for a little bit, and you started to figure out what does the user interface need to look like? What are the five competencies, five little things you want it to do? Once those five are done, what we tend to try to do once you get used to this kind of stuff is say, you don't decide what you want. Let your customer decide what it needs to do.

Because literally a lot of times they'll pay for the development, depending on what you're developing. One of the things that I've always needed a lot of help with is right now we're integrating HubSpot into another CRM and getting someone to understand how SQL servers work and be a master at a CRM.

So literally, whether that's Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, or even just something like Sunday or Basecamp or something to be a project manager or Trello, what is the best way to find somebody that's going to be a master to come inllo, what is the best way to find somebody that's going to be a master to come in and help you with your CRM, which is basically our livelihood in home services, customer relationship management system, or an ERP? Michael, I think this one's you, but if you want me to jump in, I'll just give my two cents. Why don't you start out and then I'll

finish up. The good thing about places like HubSpot and Salesforce is they have their own internal certification process. So it is probably a little bit easier actually to not necessarily find people who are the experts that you're talking about, but to qualify those people once you do find them. We tend to deal with people who are working with tech stacks that are not as codified as those, like encapsulated,

where you don't have certifications for Python, really. You can't say, oh, I'm a level 5 out of 10 Python developer. And then you know, okay, you're halfway towards being the best of the best. But there are different HubSpot certifications you can get. There are different Salesforce certifications you can get. So they've tried to make it a little bit easier to find people who have certain qualifications. That said, it's still very difficult to find people with any qualifications. So you have to sort of be out there when we're finding our own clients to represent as the tech talent. We start in sort of concentric circles. We start with the people who we represent first. And this is how we started back in 2011.

We had about eight or 10 people we were representing and we went and they brought their friends in, right? So if we already knew that those people were really high quality and they were recommending these other people who they said were high quality, it helped us to build this network of people who we knew were at a certain quality level. And we've sort of expanded from there. But I think when you're talking about something like an expert within one of those known and codified areas, you really want to look for people who have the right certifications. I don't actually think I have too much to add there. I think that what the question begs is exactly why we have a business, which is when you're out in the world and you are completely sort of helpless, it's a little bit like finding a doctor where you just don't know if they're great or not. You can look up where they went to school.

You can get certain information, but it doesn't tell you whether they're going to do a good job for you. What we built was a roster of people where we know them and we have trust in them that we can rent them out comfortably and they're going to do well. And I think that this problem of verifying someone's capability is exactly why we built our business the way that we did. By the way, I should mention, Tommy, that we use HubSpot as well. And we had to build our own CRM because we didn't have... Salesforce really couldn't handle the edge case of what we do. And we've had our own challenges over the years to integrate HubSpot into our own CRM, that's always going to be a challenge because you're trying to take something off the shelf, essentially, and customize it to your specific needs, which can certainly be done. It's just not that simple to do.

You know, I thank God for the more robust APIs, and then you've got Zapier, and then you've got Webhooks. Without the stuff with a good user interface like HubSpot. It's hard to build something now because I don't want 20 different logins. And thank God for the logins through Facebook and Google now that really make things a little bit easier as well. But it's so complicated because you look at a tool like HubSpot, which overlaps all these other tools. And we're looking at another tool now called High Level that we've been using that's amazing as well. I don't know if you guys have heard of that, but it's crazy what agencies are doing with it. But what I like about HubSpot, and the first time I heard about HubSpot was Marcus Sheridan,

they ask, you answer. And I learned a little bit about the buyer's guide about how you could send out a buyer's guide to your customer, and then it will actually tell you every page they visited and how long they spent on each page. That prepares you to give a score of the customer of what they want to buy. And I want to throw one thing out there,

and I'd love to hear you guys' what your ideas are about this topic, but technology is the true game changer now. I just know that the guys that are using an invoice and paper, they're not using things like Domo or Power BI. They don't understand what we're talking about. I'm just really worried for them.

I'm really worried because it's almost like having Walmart come into your city and you'd be in the small store. And I don't like that analogy because we're just trying to do the best thing we can. We're using technology to make better decisions. We're using technology to calculate where our avatar is, when to reach out to them. And technology is the end all be all. The things that I know about the business,

the likelihood, I've got 4,200 call tracking numbers. The things that we do are just, it's a technology-based company. I say we're a technology company who's focused on people that happens to do garage tours. That's exactly right. And that's our pitch usually when people ask, why did you get into this business or what do you do? It's the realization that every single company is a technology company, even if you don't

realize that you are. And if you're not, it's because you're missing out on it, which I think is exactly what you're saying, right? The mom and pops that are still doing things the old way, it's not that you can't do business that way. You can in a lot of ways. Their customer base may prefer that human approach, but it's inhibiting their growth and it's preventing them from being able to pass on intellectual knowledge, institutional knowledge to other people, right? It's all sort of in here. It's not in the organization. And there's so much efficiency, not even just on custom-built stuff that allows your customer to interact with you in a different way, just internal, some even free tools that are so good. And I see all these people, especially once you get people who are above

about 35, 40 years old, who learned a little bit of technology a long time ago and haven't continued to invest time and energy. And the experience that I've had in life is the absolute best investment that I make in anything is in making me better and stronger at what I do. And so I will spend time Googling how to do something that I do a lot. Because if I can save 10 minutes a day on doing something, that's a lot of my life I get back. And there's a lot of efficiency to be built in. And we've written blog posts about these things because there's so much that makes life so much easier. And my experience of people in the world is they are not using these

things. And by the way, and then that becomes a giant frustration because somebody who's using Microsoft Word instead of using a Google Doc, you're just taking my time away from me because I have to convert it and explain to you why it's better. Or I can use your version, but then I can't do it on certain machines because it's not cross platform the way you want it to be. Like, there's just so much lowanging fruit to improve yourself and your team. And I'll give you one last example is if you've got a team of 10 people in your office who are doing work on computers, and those computers are slow, and you try and tell me that you don't have

the money to buy new computers, I will turn back to you and say, you're paying salaries that are far, far, far more expensive than a $300 computer that you need to you and say, you're paying salaries that are far, far, far more expensive than a $300 computer that you need to replace it. And you're paying somebody who's sitting there watching a wheel spinning around because the machine is too old. That's not a good use of your time and your money. And you've got to figure out how to be able to afford those new computers. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, 100%. And I've been on both seats where I've said we don't have the money for that. I think what the problem is with most home service companies is you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. Like I've got four monitors, big monitors, and everybody's like, we need four monitors. I'm like, you need two. But I have different stuff on mine. We have alarm systems and I want to check the cameras for different stuff. You know, I got to tell you guys, just little things that go in from QuickBooks to Intacct. We're in the middle of that.

It's a big operation to switch. It's actually costing us $60,000 to switch from QuickBooks to Intacct. And we spent a lot of money because it's got to be perfect. But it's a much more robust system to have the insights. We use a thing called Expensify on our cell phones where we take a picture of each receipt and it goes directly into that chart of accounts and it does a reconciliation. The thing that we're able to do with technology, and it's really interesting being in the home service space because you're like, wait a second, dude, you said you do garage doors. And I'm like,

yeah, I know, but there's a lot more to this thing and you start to get big. Well, let me ask you, what's the biggest advantage and disadvantage to working with freelancers or freelance talent? Well, look, I think that if there's a job that should be done by a full-time W-2 employee, you want to have a W-2 employee do that job, right? I mean, there are certain things that you don't necessarily want to put a freelancer into. What we talk about at our company is hire slow, rent fast, right? It's this idea of you need to find the right person, but you don't have that right person yet, but you need to move forward with some sort of project, rent, rent somebody. But once you find that person, bring them in. And I think what the

pandemic has really shown us is A, remote work can work. I mean, this is something we used to preach before the pandemic. It was probably one of the main reasons why we wanted to write the book that we wrote was that so few companies were understanding that basic premise. Like, don't just fish off the pier that's local to you. Fish off the pier that will bring you the best fish. Now that companies are better suited for a blended workforce, meaning they can have people work remotely or they can have people work in the office, now more than ever, you can determine whether a job can be done

by a freelancer or a full-time employee. So I don't think that there is necessarily one answer that's correct for what is the right use case. It could be a rent fast, hire slow, or it could just be that this project is going to take time away from your full-time employees and it's encapsulated. And so you can bring a separate team

in to just do that one thing. It really depends on the situation. Do you guys allow for companies to hire your freelancers? Yes. At SW2? Yeah. So essentially we set up the agreements. I mean, again, the premise on our end, the reason why we started this company is we wanted to help provide opportunities for and sort of protect the freelancer and also provide a solution for companies. So if there's a marriage made,

if we bring somebody onto a project as a freelancer and the company falls in love with them and the freelancer falls in love with the company, absolutely, we're happy to make that marriage. It's not our core business. It's not what we sell. We would never tell a company like, hey, try this person out.

And if you love him, you can hire him. That's not how it works. But it would just, our contracts basically shift to more of a recruiter model. If they end up hiring, we get a percentage of the first year's compensation, just like a headhunter would. Oh, sure. That makes sense. Michael. I mean, I think that there's a lot of reasons to evaluate full-time versus freelance. The upside on freelance is it's flexible. You can get somebody started. In our case, you call us, we can have somebody started in a few days, whereas it would take months to find the right person and hire. So there's that. There's lots of roles in your company that aren't full-time roles. You don't need somebody all the time. So it makes a lot of sense to have somebody that you can go to when you need them. There's certain skills that you need once in a while, or even just for a single project. That becomes a really good use case for a freelancer.

The other one is when you have an experiment to run and you're not sure how this is going to work or how this person integrates into your company or your system. So you can run an experiment with a freelancer and see, does this yield the results that I'm hoping it's going to? And is that worth pursuing? And the other thing that often comes up is, especially in companies that are doing technology work, they end up having people who do things for them regularly, whether it's a freelancer or full-time. And often that person doesn't have enough time to do everything. And they start this list that's often called a backlog of things that we need to get to, but they're not raging priorities. We're not losing business. The lights aren't going off because we haven't gotten them. So bringing in somebody to temporarily get rid of that backlog is another one. We call

that sort of cleaning up. And then there's another use case, which is you've got technology built and it's either out of date or not working the way you want it to. You're not going to hire a full-time employee, unless you have a massive code base, to bring it up to speed and get it optimized.

But it's a great opportunity to bring somebody in who's going to sort of come in as a SWAT team member and fix things, optimize things, give you recommendations that you can consider for the future, and then go on their merry way and you can bring them back as needed. So I think those are really valuable use cases. And there's a few others, like if you're going to hire tech talent and you have no tech expertise, you may want to hire a freelance to help you hire the tech talent because at least you have somebody who's able to tell you, yeah, that person knows what they're

doing or no, they don't. And if you're hiring somebody who's a freelancer by choice, they don't want the job. That's not going to be competitive to them. They're just going to be happy to give you the advice about who you're hiring. So what is that? You know, I know what it's called, but I can't think of the name. It's like a project manager and they'll help you take on everything and help you get all the details about certain expectations, dates. There's a lot of Q and A, what do they call that? Not Q and A. QA. QA. When I've got to do something, we use cases. So we've got to say, if this, then this, if this happens, then I want this. And literally I've had to build hundreds of these and go through it. And I got so annoyed the first time i had to do it i said oh i just want this to

happen and as i realized when i got more and more in tune with technology is the more questions they ask the more use cases they want the more details they need the more deadlines they gave the better the output was the qa at the end when they go through it and they go through and they say break it and i'm like man i'll break the crap out of this thought and then i started i mean literally i've got things that record it automatically crashes it fills this out i've had these huge excel sheets that i gotta put this time exactly this exactly the crash but that stuff what i tell people that are listening right now there's a lot of people you guys when you go to try a technology try to figure out a way to keep it simple simon

just make it simple in your head and have it do one core thing there's a few core things but i talked to a lot of guys they're like i want to build a new crm and it's going to do this this and this and i'm like just so you know i use service titan and it's going to do this, this, this, and this. And I'm like, just so you know, I use ServiceTitan and it's a $12 billion company now. I started when they were $2 billion. But to build off CRM is not worth it. We've done it. We've done it. We've been there. We know the pain. And I think you're absolutely right. It goes back to that. Keep it simple. Start small. Try the MVP. One of the things we get a lot of demand for, especially for companies that are smaller, that don't have a core technology competency, is for part-time freelance CTOs, people who can really come in and, from a high-level architect, those products that

you're talking about, understand how to represent what the needs are of your company, and then figure out which technologies to apply to that, whether they actually build it themselves, or they bring on freelancers who can specialize in the specific areas you need to have built. That's one of the things that we do. And I think that speaks to exactly what you're talking about. You want to have that wireframe. You want to understand what it does, what it can't do, what it will do, what it won't do, and how the user is going to work with it in order to be able to build something. And then put it out there and see how your customers interact with it. Do they find problems with it?

Do they want additional solutions? Then you can start adding on and iterating. Yes, I just want to add, there's an expression that exists in the contractor trades, which I use all the time, which is measure twice, cut once. Oh, yeah. That is exactly how you want to build with software. You don't have to know everything, everything about what the product is going to do in five years, but you have to be very clear about what you're building now. If you don't have clarity about what you're trying to build, you won't know when you built it. You'll keep tinkering with it.

You won't be able to get an accurate estimate because somebody's going to give you one estimate and somebody else is going to give you a different estimate because they're not clear on it. So the first thing is consistency around what is it you're trying to do? How do you define it? How do you document it?

So that you can go out to five vendors and get prices and have questions asked and answered. It's a really, really important part. And people often overlook the value of that. And I think that it can't be overstated enough. I used to paint garage drawers in 2005 and 2006. And I got so efficient at it. But what I learned was it's all about the prep everything was in the prep but i think development in a way and not to mention like if you think of van gogh and michelangelo the best artists of the world is what they used to do is they used to have their own style and that's how developers work the problem is if you gotta have a developer take on a new project that where a guy left off it needs to be very well detailed on what's going on what was

the thought here what why did you develop this piece of code needs to be in layers and it needs to be explained and it needs to be readable from anybody and i think the guys a lot of developers don't do that it's extra work they don't want to do it because they want to say look i have a rap business we do vehicle raps and i don't give people i don't just give them the rap they got to pay a lot of money to get that from me. And I think developers want to say, hey, I spent two years on this, but good luck. That's why you need to get it capsulated and get it sent in. And someone needs to verify that the code works from what's in that. There's so much to that. And is that something you guys kind of help facilitate to make sure that that doesn't happen?

Absolutely. If there's a customer, it sounds like you've got a pretty big operation. If there's a customer like yours, where there's a project manager in-house or someone who can own the product, we're going to make sure that our people are working with that person hand-in-hand to make sure the outcome is a good one. If it's a smaller business and they don't have a project manager or don't know how to project manage, we're going to recommend hiring one of our people to project manage it. And it may be the same person who's writing the code or maybe somebody separate, but who's really very much on top of the product. The other thing that I think is worth stating here, because a lot of the listeners are non-technical, is building a digital product is not exactly like building a house. There's a lot of similarities, but you really have to define elements

of how it's going to be built in order to get to an accurate price. I'll give a super easy example. Us non-technical folks, including those of us on this podcast right now, might say to somebody, well, then the data has to go from the phone to the server. That seems simple idea.

For a programmer, they need to know with that, like that just begs other questions. Is it going to go over 3G and 4G and 5G? Is it going to go over Wi-Fi if there's a Wi-Fi connection? Does it only go over Wi-Fi and wait until then? Does it go from one to the other to the other? All of those things, which seem really simple, have to be defined in order to get to an accurate estimate and have a successful outcome. Because otherwise, without defining that at the end, the customer is saying, wait, it only does it when I get back to a Wi-Fi connection. I wanted it to go the whole time and the dev didn't know that. So you got to make sure that

everybody's on the same page and those things are documented. You know, my brother-in-law works for General Electric and he's a CIO, manages over a thousand people in the healthcare department of General Electric. And he goes to India quite a bit. He goes to China quite a bit and he works with a lot of developers, but I've done development before. And I contest to this is I developed some software with some overseas developers. And I said, okay, I forgot my login. And they said, okay, we can reset it from the server, from the SQL, you know, the database.

And I said, well, where's the, I forgot password. They said, you didn't, you didn't ask for that. And I said, this is common sense. And what I realized was with developers in general, even guys in America and women, whoever it might be, is if you don't tell them you want it, they don't think of it for you. What I always thought was common sense with any employee, it's kind of like, hey, flush the toilet when you finish. Sometimes you got to tell people this stuff and it's crazy. And I'm sure you guys know. Yeah. I mean, look, it is common sense, but at the same time,

as to Michael's point, the sophistication of what you have to do in order to make that common sense thing common sense is sophisticated enough that it has to be explicit, right? Because if you could just say, oh yeah, we'll just put a link there that says forgot my password, that's super simple, but that's not what it is, right? You have to change the architecture now to generate all of these backend processes in order to have that ease of use thing happen, which is why these things are so important to be explicit and why we try and have our guys really suss out that scope of work ahead of time, right? To ask that question, do you want a, if you forgot your password, do you want to have

logins at all? You know, because there are a lot of CRMs that don't have any logins. You either have user credentials or you don't. When we built our CRM initially, we didn't have a login. It wasn't meant to be that way. You were either in the CRM or you were not in the CRM. You couldn't be added to the CRM just through a manual login. So all these things are, that's why it's like not building a house. You're not really building four walls. You're building something in five dimensions, in two languages. It's crazy. It's crazy. And it gets very difficult. I think my main point was, I've done things in Python, Ruby, Rails, PHP,.NET. I've worked on

projects in a lot of different things. And now I just love APIs and how most of the software is already built. What I think, here's a really good question that I have, is a lot of times what I've wanted to build already exists. It just needs to be modified. For example, there's a really, really, really amazing software out there that allows you to make, whether it's custom forms, for example, there's a software, I'm trying to think of it, it's called something form. And you can load videos whether it's custom forms, for example, there's a software, I'm trying to think of it. It's called something form and you can load videos. You can load before and after you can load all these things. But I wanted to build my own software.

My question is kind of like a guy does a patent or a trademark. You're able to search the database of everything out there to make sure. Is there anything out there that if i've got an idea that i know i'm first to market because there's got to be for example i've been airbnb in right hey you guys are familiar with airbnb and vrbo yeah so rental houses and i'm like they don't have a software that does before and after pictures and verifies and then if there's damage it goes directly to the renter and says when i walked in the house this was like this and you can do some stuff through the interface, but also I want to know the cleaning lady that there's damaged sheets. Boom. It goes straight into Sam's club or Costco or Amazon and orders the next day. Like all these things should be

so simple to create accountability. And I know there's gotta be something out there, but the, I'm like, where's the database that I go on? How do you figure that out? Right. That sounds like a very specific use case that you're describing. And I think you're asking the question on a broader level. One of the reasons, and I didn't bring this up as we were talking about use cases before of freelancers versus full-time, but another great use case for a freelancer is you have a problem that you believe can be solved with technology. And then you find, oh, there's some programs that look like they do this. Maybe I can just buy that or rent, you know, subscribe to that. But it doesn't do everything I

want to do. And getting in technology, it's called the build versus buy debate. And getting a freelancer who's an expert with technology to come in and understand what needs do you have for your company and prioritize them a little bit. And then what's available on the open market that meets your needs and how many needs does it meet? And what would it cost to build your own? If you wanted to build your own, like you were talking about building a CRM, no one should be building a CRM. One of the things that's really important for companies to realize is if you're an HVAC company, you're not a software business. Yes, you're a technology company and that you need to harness the power of technology to operate your business and to make your business more efficient. But you don't build software. That's not what you do. That's

not the core of what you do. So all of a sudden, if you start to build complicated software, now you're doing something that you're not an expert in, and it may not be the right move. But bringing in that expert to help you evaluate build versus buy, or even researching, in the example you just talked about with the Airbnb idea, what's out there that either does this or could do this, those are great use cases for smart technologists. Hiring a really low level with three years of experience developer out in the world may not be the best person to do that. You want somebody who really understands because that's a sophisticated problem

you're trying to solve. You're not just trying to build a digital tic-tac-toe game. You're trying to evaluate if the market possesses tools and programs that will make your life better, or if you're going to have to build your own and you want somebody who understands the pros and cons of both and can lay that out for you very well. So here's a question that everybody really, I guarantee you could learn a lot from.

Right now, there's a lot of really great CRMs for home service that kind of cover the gamut. And most of them have some type of API or webhook or a call that goes into an accounting software. But I get this all the time. They'll look at five of them, all great demos, and they're like, oh my God, it's a great demo. And then I'm like, well, listen, first of all, you need to think about where your company is going to grow into. Don't just take the cheapest today because it's a pain in the ass the bigger you get to change your complete system. Yesterday, I was on American Airlines in Miami. That's why American Airlines is still on the same shit they were in the 1970s. They just crack it and change it and modify things because they can't shut down for that long and retrain the whole entire.

They can make little changes at a time. So when it comes to picking a CRM and understanding, is your freelancer somebody that you could say, okay, you got like a questionnaire sheet. And I could say, this is what my job is. This is our avatar. This is our customer. We do service agreements and we go through all these things, Q and A, and then they help kind of identify what software is going to be the best for us to grow into. Because that, to me, would be like, everybody needs that that's on this podcast. Absolutely. I mean, that's a big part of what people are coming in to do is the people we rent out, they write code, but really what they do is they solve problems. So what we look for when we

bring on tech talent is somebody who has a problem-solving mindset. So what they're doing is they're looking at, oh, your current system doesn't do these things. Your customers will be better served by these things. And then, by the way, these are things that have to be defined by the business owner or the product owner. It's not like they can walk in

and know anything about your business. And then they go out and they figure out what's the best solution, whether it's an existing piece of software or building something. And a good person will lay out the pros and the cons on both sides of that equation. But Tommy, I think you're hitting the nail right on the head with why it's so difficult for small entrepreneurs to make that leap into technology. It's so overwhelming and daunting, right?

We're still a little bit in the Wild West, where there are companies popping up left and right with solutions that look very similar to, let's say, Salesforce. They may not be quite as robust. They probably don't cost as much, but they provide a different niche. And it's virtually impossible to know which one to choose because there isn't necessarily a database or a Yelp rating, right rating for each one of these things to tell you and guide you towards that. So I think that it is a real challenge now.

And whether it's working with companies like 10X or baby-stepping into solutions, there are real challenges out there. We face it on our end. I mean, we're a small business as well. We have to make decisions all the time about different types of technology. And sometimes we have great information and sometimes we have less than perfect information, but we try and get as much information as we can and then make the decision and try not to get overwhelmed by it. Because that's really the biggest impediment, I think, is trying to figure out which way to go with a decision

because there's so many options. I think that small businesses and myself specifically, I've always had a hard time hitting the finish line. We get close and then it's like you spike the ball and you're like, well, I needed to do this now or I just realized this. But for the listeners, what do they need to start thinking about today to really be able to come to you guys prepared

to where you're not like, dude, you're all over the place. You didn't take your Ritalin today. You need to really just start with this, this, this, and this. Here's one, two, three, because I think that's, you're going to get a lot of people that come to you guys and say, and it's going to be spewing stuff out. What's the best way for them to start working today? So there's two things that they should walk in the door with, either of them. One is, I need a product that's going to do this, this, this, this, and this. And this is how it connects to the rest of my system, if that's relevant. And two is, I don't know what I need, but this is the problem I'm trying to solve. When I do this, I want this to happen. And it's really about help me think

through a process that I can improve and save money and make more money. And I think that with either of those, if you walk in the door to somebody competent, you're going to start a process. It's not going to be like they're going to be writing code within an hour. There's really that measure twice part is going to be them asking questions and them understanding. And the people who are the best of the best, and this is really what we look for when we bring people in, don't just start thinking about how am I going to write code to do this problem? They start thinking about, wait, you said this is what you need, but isn't your business this? And wouldn't it be better if it did this? And I know I'm being very abstract, but what our people do and the people we look for is they're not just going to do what

you think you need. They will, if that's really what you want. It's not like they're going to fight you if you say, this is what I want. But what we really encourage them to do and what we interview them for and what we put them through their paces for is being a good partner and thinking about the problems you're trying to solve from a very macro level about the business. And what you hear, what you most often hear about offshore development disasters, you very rarely, I mean, sometimes you do, but more often than not, I don't hear that people didn't know how to write code. What I hear is they didn't ask questions and they just did what they thought I wanted without really understanding what my business needed.

And when I asked them at the end why they didn't do something, they said, well, because you didn't tell me to. That's not a good partner for building technology. But in a perfect world, and we don't live in a perfect world, but in a perfect world, the ideal customer comes to us with a discrete project. They know what they want to do. They allow the contractor to build it. They developed a relationship and then they expand it from there.

But the reality is we get all types of customers. We get individuals who have no technological background that want to build something all the way up to Fortune 100 companies that have huge technology departments. So we have to sort of decipher the various points at which the person we're dealing with is at and figure out that's part of our process of determining which of our clients makes the most sense, right? If they have to work with somebody who is a non-technical founder, we want a contractor who understands people like that better, has patience for people who are not technological, who don't understand the questions

to ask and maybe need to be prompted more. For example, the, you know, I forgot my password, reset function. One person may think that that's just common sense and another person may think like they didn't ask me for it, therefore I'm not going to build it. So that's part of the vetting process on our end for the customer is to figure out who are they and where are they sort of on the capability standpoint spectrum in order to know what kind of client to provide them with. But every project is different. And every customer, we call the companies that come to us customers, every customer is different. They have a different problem. Yeah, it's interesting. I had a guy approach me the other day and he said, I want one of those sites that compare five different companies,

kind of like, you know, the airline ones. And I said, well, that's great. That's not hard to build. It really isn't. You get the people that you trust, you get maybe five stars are great on Angie's list. But I said, how are people going to see this? And he said, what do you mean? I said, it just doesn't automatically pop up at the top of Google unless you pay Google. So you can have the software, like a website that's built, but you still got to pay a lot of money. And what's your revenue model? Like, okay, great. So now you've paid to get this seen by people.

How are you making money? Are you getting referrals from these companies? Well, that's a big piece of it. And I said, obviously there's ways to do that. And it's interesting you brought up building websites because right now, you've heard of mobile get in that was years ago. It's gotta be able to load mobile, but now they're looking for a lot more.

They're looking for content that is unique. And it used to be like, you could do these things called best spinner and you could spin content, build 25,000 pages and rank for everything. And now it's really about quality. And now there's social signals. And I think WordPress is the way to go.

I don't know what you guys are used to, but there's all kinds of different sites you can build depending on if you're building an e-commerce site, but for home service, it seems like WordPress. What's a good piece of advice when thinking, there's not a lot of people on this that are listening that I would tell you, we're right in

the middle of rebuilding ours and we're running it through tests right now that it loads like like you hit a button and it loads and the content is readable and there's a good nav bar that allows you to navigate through the site and we're doing a lot of interlinking to get people to spend more time on the site a lot of things that are really technical from an seo. But what kind of advice would you give to people that might have a basic... A lot of these guys are building their own websites. And I'm like, oh my God, why did you do that? Because that's horrible. But it's so important now. I think a website, people are saying a website might not be as important because the Google page, it's a GMB or the LSA ads or the pay-per-click ads, but what would you tell somebody

about building their website if you had to give them a piece of advice? Well, I agree. WordPress, I think, is a great solution because it's got the built-in backend functionality where you can update manually. Like a lot of self-built websites, the issue is how to update it.

Once it's built, okay, fine, but then if you have to make changes to it. So I think WordPress is a great customizable site with a lot of back-end infrastructure and using tools like shopify where you can expand and and add capability to it you can start small and then go big i would recommend i mean it's it really goes back to what we started this conversation with which is start small keep it simple right work up to the seo Work up to the SCM stuff. SEO is something that you have to keep track of over time. It's not a set it and forget it. So you can start off with a best practice now, but in six months, that best practice could change. So you'll have to iterate.

So I'd say keep it simple. Work with a company like WordPress. There's also Squarespace. There are a couple of... But our guys tend to work mostly with WordPress and our sites for our companies are built on WordPress. So I would recommend that. Keep it simple. And I think, again, you know, you asked that question earlier about freelancers versus full-time people. This is a great use case for freelancers. If you're going to build a site yourself, spend a couple hundred dollars and get a freelancer who's got expertise on that platform if it's going to be WordPress and get some advice. Because getting the SEM, like getting the metadata right for each page is really worthwhile because people are either going to find your site or they're not going to find your site. And if you don't know what metadata is and you don't know

how to build the site with that in mind, you may get done and then you're going to go to somebody and say, hey, how come I'm not ranking in the search results the way I want to? And they're going to go look and they're going to say, oh, you're going to have to redo all of this because you didn't put in the metadata. And that falls into the spend a little money at the front end, learn some stuff you don't know,

especially when you're DIYing it. You know, there's another thing called schema data that shows up with the stars next to your name that makes you completely jump out of the page when you go look. And a lot of people don't know how to do that. And this is where you hire a freelancer every single time. And I'm telling anybody that's listening right now

is I think you should take advantage of these guys on this because if you don't, you make a lot of mistakes. And it sounds like these guys have got the Because if you don't, you make a lot of mistakes. And it sounds like these guys have got the right people to run you through. I definitely have consulted a lot of other people to help me. And I'll tell you what, a lot of times they've been wrong. So go to the best of the best. We're actually getting ready to start this thing called Pitchbox. Pitchbox is several hundred dollars a month. And what it helps me do is find links, really, really great links that'll link into us. So when I'm donating to a charity, for example,

we're giving 25,000 bottles of water to charity, but there's like 10 places that take it. Not selfishly, but just because two birds with one stone, they're all giving to the homeless. They're all giving to the same people which one would also and i don't want to sound evil here but maybe there's a link involved that they would put on their page that would help us out too to get more customers that might donate water so it's crazy how much technology my life today runs off of technology my google calendar runs my life but without technology it's crazy to think of. I grew up with a VCR. I used to play on Atari before Nintendo came out. It's crazy. I was on the first computer when

Dosh Shell came out before Windows 95 or an Apple when we played Oregon Trail. And now to think of how technology runs our lives, it's amazing. I wanted to ask you guys, someone's looking to get into websites. Someone's looking to get into just a little project they want to help their business run better, maybe an inventory module. What's the best way to reach out to you and get ahold of you guys for help? So they can learn more about the book, which I think will be interesting to all of your listeners and viewers and contact us through our book website, gamechangerthebook.com. And our LinkedIn and various other connections are on there. There's also a fun test to see where you land on the 10X spectrum yourself,

which we didn't really get to go into much, but it's a fun little test. And that's how they can get in touch with us. We'd love to hear from you. And then I always ask this question, other than Game Changers, if you had two books to recommend, not the Bible, not the E-Myth, because those are like almost everyone. Each of you guys, two books to read. Obviously, you guys got to read Game Changers. But other than that, what would you recommend? I'll give you guys each two books to kind of talk about. I split a lot of my time reading between

fiction and nonfiction. Currently, I'm reading a biography about George H.W. Bush. So personally, I would love to recommend history. I feel like if you understand history and where we've been and how we've gotten to where we are, you can understand where we're going a little bit better. So I would take any biography of any of our presidents and learn a little bit about who they are. So that would be on the nonfiction side.

On the fiction side, I tend to like historical fictions, books that are sort of based in actual fact, but also elaborate and expand from there. There's a book, I'm spacing on the exact title, but I believe it's In the Garden of the Beast, which is about the American ambassador to Berlin in 1933 when Hitler comes to power, which I think is completely fascinating. So those are my two throws right there. Awesome. So I'm going to start with a book that's sort of about the future of work that was written by a guy named Andrew Yang, who's known for having run for president this last president. And mayor of New York as well.

And running for mayor of New York. But the book is not about i mean i'm sure it was a platform for him to get attention for his presidential run but the book is most importantly about the future of work and how technology is going to eat up jobs and what does that mean for society and i think that anybody who's got more than you know a few years left in their life really needs to be looking ahead at the future and seeing how is it going to impact them. And a lot of jobs in a lot of sectors are going to be gone and it's going to change things. And he does a really, really good job of laying out what that looks like. The book is called The War on Normal People. I think it's published by Hachette. That I would highly recommend. And the other one is a book put out by

the Arbinger Institute called The Anatomy of Peace. And it's not directly related to the topic we're talking about, but the thesis of the book is that in any relationship, you can view the other person as an object, and then you're treating them with sort of a heart of war, or you can have a heart of peace, and you can have a heart of peace and you can see them as a person and understand that what the other side looks like. And I think that we all who are doing business, you know, there's, there's not a single person who's doing business that wouldn't benefit from better human relationships in how they treat each other, treat other people, how they understand them, how to get what they want in a negotiation. This is not all about being benevolent. This is about helping you reach your goals and figuring out how other people tick.

And I think that book is a really powerful way to sort of look at how do we advance that. I love it. I love the fiction side. And then we've got the opposite side a little bit. I'm more of a just, I read self-help books and I didn't get the name of the book off the top of my hand, but it talks about linear growth versus exponential. And if I took a hundred steps, I'd be in Chicago with exponential growth. And the technology that's growing right now, I think Elon Musk is talking about putting a chip in a human brain here as soon as next, end of next year. Crazy?

Yes. I always ask this question. It's challenging and I'm not going to have you guys answer it, but it's just something that if you guys had a child today and they can put a chip in and tell you exactly if there was disease going to come exactly the nutrients that child needed exactly everything they need to live a better life, happier life, just protect them from disease for everything. It's screened blood, but it also probably kept track of them. It also did some things that you might not want.

Would you do it? And that's a tough question. I don't want you guys to answer that, but technology is a scary thing. The last thing I do on the podcast is give you guys each a few minutes to talk about something maybe we didn't get a chance to discuss.

Talk about a lot of great things, but I'll give you guys a few minutes each. Anything you want, some takeaways, could be anything that maybe we should get up and do today when it comes to technology, but I'll give you guys the floor. Rishan or Michael, whoever wants to go first, I'll let you guys close us out. I'll go first. I mean, you know, one of the things we talk about in the book, and we touched on it a little bit here, is sort of upskilling. It's about taking your time, your free time, and figuring out how to optimize yourself, either professionally or personally. And I think that that really should be underscored, that we can't overstate how important that is to be able to stay abreast of what's going on, especially in light of what you're talking about, Tommy, with the technological advancements, if you're not paying attention, if you're not upskilling, if you're not continually learning, you're going to be left behind so quickly. And so that I would say is the takeaway on my end is really use a lot of your downtime to upskill and optimize both

personally and professionally. Yeah. I would expand on that just a little bit, which is, I said it earlier, the best investment you can make is investing in optimizing yourself because everything you do is you doing it. So the better you can do it, the more successful you're going to be. And I've never regretted time I put into that. And the other thing I would say is be kind and help other people and not, again, not because the world's going to be better because you do that. It will be, but that's not the reason to do it. The reason to do it is you're going to feel better when you do that. And I think that we're living in a world where, you know, especially politically, but socioeconomically in so many ways, we're sort of getting more and more divided and more and more about the

other and unwilling to listen. And more importantly, unwilling to even understand how could somebody have that point of view about anything. And I think that we have to figure out a way back to the middle, back to trying to understand each other, even when we disagree. So I love that.

You know what I want to see more of? I want to see more of healthy debates by really, really smart people because that's healthy. And I'm sick of the news that might be fake news. It might be fake media, CNN or Fox or whatever it might be. Non-political, just I want to hear a good debate on the pros and cons.

I want to talk to people that have been in those shoes before, really been there, that I can understand what they're feeling. And I think we need more of that. But I appreciate you guys. We talked about a lot of great stuff. It's crazy how we could go on these podcasts about home service and be talking to a technology company that helps hire people for freelancers. But that's the day we live in today. So really appreciate you both, Rashaun and Michael. And we'll get you back. And we'll talk a lot more about the book next time we jump on. Thanks so much for having

us. All right. Bye-bye. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on.

And do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences. Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside

look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it. you