The Home Service Expert Podcast - How Getting Rid of Self-Limiting Beliefs Can 3x Your Business in Five Years

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Brandon Vaughn is the CEO of Automate Grow Sell. He has years of industry experience under his belt, having served as the president of All-Clean! SoftWash (from 2012 to 2018), the owner of Vaughn Creative Works (from 2009 to 2017), and the sales and marketing manager of TigerStop Sawgear (from 2009 to 2011). He was also the recipient of the 2018 Small Business Owner of the Year Award (SBA), and became part of the Advisory Council for the Small Business Development Center. In this episode, we talked about Leadership, Business Growth, Company Culture...

you shouldn't even be thinking about promoting someone to a management position until they first recreated their best attributes as a technician in someone else. Until they've done that, you shouldn't even think about promoting them to a manager until they've been able to replace themselves in that quote-unquote best technician role. I think that a lot of people, they just don't know what qualities to look for in good leaders. And then they don't know how to empower people to be good leaders. And I think that's where a lot of businesses end up stalling out. Put someone in a position of leadership in your company,

they fizzle out and then they're the biggest bottleneck in your business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have Brandon Vaughn. He's out of Oregon. He runs a company called Automate Grosselle, and he's all about business growth. He works with one of my dear friends, Josh Latimer. I'm sure you guys all know him. He's worked at All Clean Softwash, where he was the president from 2012 to 2018.

And Vaughn Creative Works, he's the owner from that from 2009 to 2017. And Tiger Stop, Sawgear, national sales and marketing manager from 2009 to 2011. He took over a longstanding service thing with his father. You know, if you're like me, I learned most of my stuff from my dad. And it sounds like Brandon learned a lot from his dad. Brandon, he got so many good things to say about you. 2018 Small Business Owner of the Year Award from the SBA, which is huge. You were on the advisory council for the Small Business Development Center.

How's it going? It's going great, man. Good to join you. Yeah. I'm going to just tell the audience here, I was a little bit late and I really apologize about that. And thanks for being a trooper and hanging out. No problem, man. No problem. So tell the audience what it is, everything that you've been through. Your dad had this company. We've talked about it. And you've done a lot so far. You're 34. I love getting to know you. Tell the audience your story because it was a pleasure to hear it. I actually started my entrepreneurship journey as

a, we'll call it a quote unquote, multi-generational entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur. His dad was an entrepreneur. His dad was an entrepreneur. There's kind of some cool stories surrounding some of those things. My dad, when he made his journey into business ownership, he decided he wanted to just be an owner operator. Never wanted the business to be big, wanted to keep it super simple. And pretty much from 1978, when he founded All Clean Window Service, up until 2011, so 33 years, he was just an owner-operator. He did all the window cleaning, all the work himself. I actually worked full-time with him at the age of 14 and homeschooled through high school, never went to

college, just homeschooled through high school, all the way up until the point when I did a couple of those other things that you mentioned, venture out into corporate world, have a little business. There's a little sliver of time in there too, where I started up a construction company called Cutting Edge Interiors, which I bankrupted in just a fiery heap when the economy really kind of downturned. Which P.S., a little business tip, if you ever want to start a construction company, do it right before a huge economic dump. But for me, it was just really not even understanding business, not understanding being proactive. I kind of followed that same owner-operator mentality, where it was me and one person

doing the construction work. So 2012, my dad was diagnosed with heart disease. And he collapsed on the treadmill, was told that he literally couldn't work physically at all anymore. And no retirement, no savings, no really any backup plan. So at the time, I was kind of doing my own thing. I came back and we had a family meeting and I bought the business from my dad so that they could retire.

So I had this business that's doing $8,000 a month and paying my dad a sizable chunk of that so that they could retire. And then I needed to grow. And that was what led to me getting really uncomfortable really quick and started forward with trying to grow this business. Yeah. I think about $8,000 a month. And I got to tell you yesterday, I ran my whole team, my sales division, 130 guys through a process that shows them what we should charge per hour. And $8,000 a month is tough. I mean, I'm not belittling it by any means, but that's a tough business to make work, isn't it? Yeah, it certainly is.

I mean, the big draw for my dad was that he always wanted to keep things really, really simple. But the challenge ended up being that he had a bus factor of one with his business. So if he got hit by a bus, which metaphorically he did, but even literally if a business owner gets hit by a bus, the business ends. You can't do anything with it. You don't have a team. You don't have sustainability in there. And so that made me super, super nervous. So for me, my focus has always been, I want to spend as much time as possible with my family. And I didn't want something happening to my business or our income

stream that would stop if something happened to me or stop for my family if something happened to me. So that was like a big motivator to actually grow and scale the business. Yeah, I have a buddy of mine. I actually, two days, believe it or not, I'm replacing two HVAC units, one in my apartment complex, one of the house in Scottsdale. And he was over two days ago and we were working together. I was on the roof with him looking at a unit just because I like to dig in. And he goes, Tommy, what do you think my business is worth?

And I looked at him and I hope he's not listening to this, but if he is, you know, I'm sorry. But he said, you know, I said, zero. I said, because you're not here. The business doesn't work. You've created relationships. You've done a great job of what you do, but it's all you. And the only thing you could sell would be service agreements. And how many service agreements do you have? He goes, well, I really don't have any. And I said, exactly. So if you're going to be a one or two or three-man show, you got to have something He goes, well, I really don't have any. And I said, exactly. So if you're going to be a one or two or three-man show, you got to have something to sell, which is future work. Because the business disappears when you're gone. And you mentioned before we talked about Josh Latimer,

and he's just, he's doing, what is it? It's Honor. Honor and Fire. Honor and Fire. And it's all about, he's kind of shifting out of more of the small business to more family oriented. Tell me a little bit of how you got involved with Josh and what you're working on today. So it was actually kind of a cool story with how I met Josh. It actually started when I was a couple of years into my business. And my wife and I actually had talked about, you know, we wanted to, because honestly growing the business, we were doubling almost year over year as we were kind of scaling up, you know, growth.

And one of the things that we had talked about was wanting to eventually sell and go move to Costa Rica. And we wanted to do ministry work as a family. And so the crazy thing was, was I was listening to, I came across Josh's podcast. I don't even know how I found him. I just all of a sudden came across his podcast, listened to it. And he was living in Costa Rica. He just scaled his business up, sold it and moved to Costa Rica. So I actually grabbed my wife and I said, okay, you got to listen to this guy. He's like doing window cleaning, just like we are right

now. He sold it. He moved there. And that actually got me starting to follow Josh a little bit. And then we ended up meeting at a big industry event. And I took him out to lunch. We totally hit it off. And we started doing a couple projects together. He had the exact same kind of passion for family and family systems and automating things just like I did. And we just kind of struck up a friendship. And eventually, after just this previous year, I ended up partnering up with him and Automate Grosselle, purchasing that from him so that he could really focus on his companies. And I could take Automate Grosselle and, frankly, create all the things that I wish i had when i was

starting my business and was really struggling trying to figure out what the heck business systems were and how to automate things so that's kind of what we do now we launched a program called conquer that really helps people with not only business systems but also one-on-one coaching with people who have scaled you know businesses up to whatever level someone would want to achieve and coaches small businesses to kind of do the same thing. I think that's super important to be in a group or talk to somebody that's been where you're going. And I see a lot of people that you see these millionaires go bankrupt, but they go right back to millionaires overnight almost because they take chances. And I think the biggest thing holding people back is not willing to millionaires, overnight almost, because they take chances. And I think the biggest

thing holding people back is not willing to take chances. But you got to be cautious of the chances you're taking because a guy like me takes chances all the time, every day. I can't wait. But I've made so many huge mistakes. I've been litigated. People hate me. The podcast and my book has helped people get to know me a little bit. But if I could go back in time, I would have been a little bit more careful with my choices. And the good news is I don't make the same mistakes twice. And I think that goes a long way. I think what you guys are doing is absolutely phenomenal because you both care and you care about where the business is going and you understand the complexities to take it there. And I think most businesses, and this is a cliche that I talk about a lot, but they work in the business all the time and they never work on it.

Right. it. What would be your recommendation for some of the listeners out there to really take a step back? And actually, the hardest thing for me that's ever been is to actually look what's happened behind me and reflect. How do you do that? I was actually just talking about this on a System Saturday video just a couple weeks ago on Facebook where it's kind of like being on a boat. And oftentimes you're looking down at this huge control panel with all your controls and your knobs and your dials and your KPIs and your metrics and what's a daily goal, what's a weekly goal, what's a monthly goal. Or sometimes you have hardly any instruments on your panel at all. But the tough part is, is I think a lot of business owners, they need to take the opportunity

to just look up and look out in front of them and figure out where they're going. Is it the direction that they want to be going with their business? What is your why? That's something that I know a lot of people talk to and refer. And sometimes it gets clouded a little bit. So for me, I think that there's two things that you really have to take a look at. You have to figure out what is the reason why you're doing what you're doing. Why did you decide to be a business owner in the first place?

Because I think a lot of times people go into creating a business because they have this desire to be free without realizing that once you're quote unquote free, you then become a slave to your business rather than being your own boss. Now you have thousands of bosses in your customers. And especially if you just like, we'll do anything and everything you can to make these customers happy. And then you end up getting right back into this trap again.

So one of the things that I always like to tell people to do is take time to sit down with you and your spouse and take a look at what are your dreams, what are your aspirations, what are your goals personally, and let those be kind of the fuel for what you want your business to deliver on. Because so many people I see, they're a tool for their business rather than their business actually being a tool for themselves personally And there's that that lack of alignment I think causes a lot of discontentment with business owners So, you know and then once you figure out that main focus then

It becomes a lot easier to figure out Okay What's our goal going to be like for our business this year and you can kind of make a plan based upon? You know those types of things there's one thing. I don't know if you found it, but I see a lot of entrepreneurs that typically, if you're at 1 million, you want to get to 2. If you're at 10 million, you want to get to 20. If you're at 100 million, you want to get to 200. If you're at a billion, you want to get to 2 billion. And that quest just never really ends because it's that drive to chase after that. So I feel that there's business owners that can get really clear on what their why is. And that can lead them down a path they actually want to be going down.

I love talking about Simon Sinek, the why. And it still is mind boggling to me. Because I wrote, figure out your why in the book. And my why, as shallow as this sounds, is affirmation. I want people to like me. I want people to say you did good. I want to be publicly recognized and have my employees. It's kind of a sad deal because there's no end to my why.

And of course my why is my mom works for me. My stepdad works for me. My stepdad works for me. My best friends work for me. My family works for me. My favorite cousin. I hope any of my other cousins aren't listening. You didn't even name so many. I have these amazing people around me all the time, but I definitely, my love language is, it's not gifts.

It's words of affirmation. It's just saying you did good and it's a complexity but my real why is to do what i want when i want with whoever i want and to have complete freedom but people look at me and they say tommy when you do get that there's no end because we know you and if you do have complete power, it doesn't end. You still want. And the thing is, is if I'm good at anything, I was an Allstate wrestler. I used to play a lot of sports in high school. I played golf. I did a lot of things. If I shoot a 72, I'm going to that golf course the next day. And my goal is to shoot better than a 72. I'm not going to say I shot par today. I'm

going to say I could beat that. If I shoot a 62, I mean, that's a good nine holes for me. But the point is, I've always got this quest to become better. And the why for you is a lot stronger because you have two beautiful kids. You have a beautiful, amazing wife. And you've done a lot. And a lot of people say, you know, I want to do what I want. I want to have my own job. I want to be able to dictate when this happens. But the fact of the matter is, is most people,

99% of businesses that I find, they end up pawns in their business. They end up being slaves and they go into debt. They don't realize it. They're borrowing money. They're getting into debt. They don't even realize it when it's happening. They go back three to five years later and go work for someone else and try to get out of the debt they took. But they wanted freedom to begin with. And then they found out that their wife's working harder. Their kids are

working for them. Their garage became a shop. You know what I mean? I mean, we've been through this before. I've done this and it's a lot of work and there's big companies out there that have figured it out. They figured out how to motivate people. You got Starbucks, you've got, believe it or not, Walmart. Everybody hates Walmart, but they found problems with the tax code and they figured out to pay somebody part-time with, you know, certain dysfunctions that get disability and they figured out how to maximize it. I don with certain dysfunctions that get disability, and they figured out how to maximize it. I don't think that's a problem because we live in a free market. And I know I'm going down a rabbit hole right now, but I love a general talk about this stuff because these are the things that people don't talk about. The biggest thing is a lot of my technicians could go try to start their own business, but at this very time that we live in,

which is the best economy I've ever lived through, they don't stand a chance against me. They could all leave. I've got such a head start. I'm a better marketer. We're better at sales. We're better at training. And everybody's in the same direction. One of my problems, and I want to hear your perspective on this, is I started paying people more money, believe this or not, 200% bonus structure on their salary. So they make 40,000, they could make 200%, which is 120,000. What I found is everybody is fighting. They're fighting the same fight with me. And if I can show you on a scale what this looks like to my company, it's a win-win. We win and I love to pay them.

How many people can you look at your company and say, I love to pay you more money? Most people cringe and say, damn, their annual review is coming up. I got to give them a raise. What if everything was like, when you make more money, I make more money? I feel the exact same way that you do. I did a video, let's see, a couple of years ago where actually I had one of my sales guys who sold so much for us in our small cleaning business at one point.

I said, I just paid someone in my company 75 bucks an hour, which like in the cleaning industry is unheard of. To have an employee, you're paying them 75 bucks an hour. But I was so proud of him. I was so amazed with what he had done. He pushed himself. I think too many business owners, they're really, really scared to let their techs

or let their employees see like, quote unquote, how much the company is making. Or I don't know if you've experienced this, but quick story about this whole thing. I actually had an employee who one day came to me really upset and he quit because he goes, I see exactly how much money you're making. I see that, you know, we have $2,000 on a day, you know, scheduled. And I know that I'm, you know, making three, 400 bucks of that, you know, two, two to know that I'm, you know, making three, 400 bucks of that,

you know, two, two to 400 bucks, whatever that is there. And you're pocketing the rest. Don't start your own shit and get the hell out of my office because you're fired, is what I would say. You have no freaking clue how much money this costs, but go ahead. That just pisses me off. I'm sorry. Well, so what we ended up doing is I realized that actually it was my fault because none of my employees had ever owned a business. They didn't even know what a P&L was. So what we did is we actually printed out copies and we actually still, what we did is all the way up to the point when I sold all new employees, when they came in, we would

do our weekly team meetings. And one of our team meetings was, okay, here's a P&L. I'd hand it out to everyone. And I teach everybody in our company how to read a P&L, look at the top line revenue, understand what COGS are, understand what GS&A expenses are, understand where their technician pay was, how they could impact things, where the cap of our limit of how much we could pay someone was, unless they did these things. And then show them what our target profit was. And then out of that profit, we'd have our capital expenditures and things that would come out of that to reinvest back into the business as we

were growing. When they understood after all the expenses were what the margins were, that completely changed not only the conversation, but it turned into... When we had our bonus programs, we would call them profit sharing programs. People would be like, oh, but wait, no, that's not my fault that my man hour is down this week because this job was undersold or this problem was here that's outside of my control. And I said, yeah, that sucks. But the company also experienced it too. There was no profit to be able to share. So yeah, I get it. Let's work together as a team to fix these problems. Let's have a conversation rather than just blaming everyone. Let's have a conversation of how we can provide constructive feedback to fix the problem so that the profit's there. And then therefore we can start sharing that profit with team members. So it's a good

conversation to have, I think, with technicians. I think you should be very transparent with exactly how much it costs to run a business because it empowers your team. And the more money they make, the more money the company makes. I think that's a total win-win. I agree 100%. It is. And you're exactly right. I went ahead yesterday and I gave every single, like I said, I went over every bill. And this is just if you own your own business. We came up with this large hourly rate. And it's so important because I've had guys come up to me and they go, these springs only cost $15 a piece. That means if we charge $400 for two springs,

you're making $370. Right. They're going to look at the worst. If you don't educate them, they're going to come up with their own idea on what those things are. I mean, that proves it, right? But what they say is exactly what you just said. You go back to the point where if you're working out of your house, your wife's working for you, your sons are organizing. I ask people one thing. People go, well, I get to go ahead and do that myself. How much is your time worth? You're paying yourself an $11 an hour to $15 an hour job. I pay myself, you know what I do? This is going to sound crazy, but my phone is readily available. I'm not going to walk out of this podcast, but normally out of a meeting, I'll walk out and take a phone call from my office

because they know if they can't book a phone call in five minutes of my time, I can book a $500 phone call. That's $100 per minute. That's more money than most people listening could probably ever take. And I've got a backup line that hits me after it. It's every other manager. And I will book it. I will say I'm probably 78%. You're the last line of defense. They do not want your phone ring him. Oh no. Yeah. But, but the fact is I care so much about this business. It's me. It's my face on the side of the truck as cocky as that is. But people know that when they, they work for me, that I take care of people.

Let me ask you a question. I always have these things outlined on what we're supposed to ask. And I'm going to go into some of these questions, but I always talk about how my business is today and I relate to people and hopefully they get a lot out of it. What do you think about those number one guys, the best guys, because sometimes they take ownership of your company and it's good set of precedents to get rid of them if they're like a bad apple. But don't you let Tom Brady get away with missing a practice every now and then? I mean, what do you have to say about, I'm talking about anomalies, because everybody listening has one anomaly in their company.

I don't care if they're a general manager, they're a CSR, they're a dispatcher, they're a technician. Someone has somebody out there. Every single one has one person. That's just so great. They let them get away with more. What is your take on that? My take is it's a bad precedent to do that. I mean, I think that actually your A players should have the highest level of accountability with anything. I've heard oftentimes, I've talked to business owners and they'll say, yeah, but this is my best guy. He does so much production. He does so much this. So therefore, I let him break this rule and this rule and this rule. And I say, is he really your best guy? I mean, regardless of he's doing this, I just had a conversation with the business owner that said, well, you know, they're my best crew. They get so much production done, but they have a 27% callback rate. And I said, what? They're not your fastest guys.

They're not that. Sometimes I think that people can qualify people as their best when in actuality, the rules that they allow them to break can cause a ripple effect to the rest of your team. Oh yeah, I agree with that. So then you have this compound effect where you have a bunch of team members

that their performance has dropped down because they see someone that's, you know, for whatever reason, because I mean, you know, now we're getting into how to win friends and influence people with regards to, you know, never criticizing people and how everyone believes that they're doing their best work. I think that, you know, precedents like that can, they can be dangerous. You know, they can be dangerous to, to let people like that slide because the other members on the team, they'll look up and say, well, so-and-so is allowed to do that. Why am I not allowed to do that? Not understanding that there actually is a difference in performance between them.

There is. And I want to be the devil's advocate here because in the room I'm sitting in, I had to grab my laptop. I'm in my conference room and here I was sitting here two days ago and I had my general manager and my number three amazing guy Brian and Adam both amazing guys the best best you could ever have in a company and they started talking to me about each and every one and what I noticed was the top five guys is who they brought up. And what I said was, I love this conversation, but can we talk about the bottom five guys? And what I mean by the top five guys travel wherever I want them to go. They're the best at sales. They're the best at memberships. They're the best at... They all work weekends. They do whatever the hell I ask them to

do. And I know it's a relationship that I've built with them. And that's the fact that there's not a hierarchy with these. They come straight to me. And with over 100 technicians, that's tough to have. But the reason I love them is because I love sales and I love hearing their stories of how they overcome objections and when they fail. And I love to learn about that. And that's, I don't love operations. I love sales and marketing. But I said, you could come to me when you talk to the bottom five guys, the guys that aren't hitting our numbers to pay our bills,

the guys that aren't selling anything. They're not working weekends. They refuse to work nights. And that's the biggest thing that alarms me is if you got a manager talking to you about a problem, talk about the biggest problem first. Don't talk about the guys that's paying our paychecks. Sure. Yeah. No, I agree with that. I don't even think that's devil's advocate. I totally agree with what you're saying. I think that the definition of whether or

not someone's the best employee or a top employee, a lot of times just has to do with how aligned they are with their core values. Is there, you know, there's company core values that place an emphasis of, you know, sales over other certain metrics. There's a, you know, core values that place emphasis on, you know, other aspects of your business as opposed to, you know, different aspects of your business. So I think as long as your core values are being aligned and met, then I think that those people, yeah, you should have grapes with those ones if they're aligned with your core values. Let me ask you, I'm going to get completely off topic and do a

complete shift. This is what I do. This is just people people that listen know me but I feel like there's such a big difference between a small business a medium business and a large business what is it that takes that small business that four or five technicians to get to that next level I mean you deal with people all the time I mean I you do. Tell me what changes. What mentally, what changes in their daily routine? What's the concept behind that? To me, I think one of the biggest differences is just stamina. Lacking in execution, which I call lying. If someone's sitting there and they're talking about what they're going to be doing,

one thing that drives me crazy is when someone says, I threw 100 postcards or I threw even 1,000, did this, didn't work. It's like, okay, but you don't have the stamina to be able to actually see an idea through to execution all the way through and then start tweaking things, adjusting things. I think a lot of businesses, they feel like as you grow,

you will arrive at a fully systemized automated business with all of your systems. You won't need to tweak another system again. You just will arrive. But there's different systems that are required when you only have a team of 5 employees, a team of 20 employees, a team of 100 employees. The systems have to change. And then I think the secondary part of that after stamina and being able to make sure that you push something through all the way to execution is the development of leaders in your organization. Because you only have so much bandwidth of yourself personally as a leader. You cannot talk to everyone in your team. You can't

give them the attention and what they deserve. Building up of leaders, not managers, but actual leaders in different departments of your company, I think, is what a lot of people struggle with. They do a delegation by abdication where they'll say, Okay, so, sweet, you're my best technician, you're operations manager. Go get it. You guys want to order stuff. Take the steak. your operations manager. Go get it. You shouldn't even be thinking about promoting someone to a management position until they first recreated their best attributes as a technician in someone else. Until they've done that, you shouldn't even think about promoting them to a manager until they've been able to replace themselves in that quote unquote best technician role.

I think that a lot of people, they just don't know what qualities to look for in good leaders. And then they don't know how to empower people to be good leaders. And I think that's where a lot of businesses end up stalling out. Put someone in a position of leadership in your company, they fizzle out and then they're the biggest bottleneck in your business. I completely agree. And the best performers at one role, as I sat here with my field supervisors, which was the same day as that other meeting, I said, your job is to maximize opportunities. And that means that if your guy doesn't wake up till nine, I don't want him working an eight to 10. And they said, well, he should come

for him. And I said, our job is not to make people come for him because they're not happy. They hate their job. They go work somewhere else. My job is to make you the happiest you could be. So I took my guy that hates waking up. I have several of them, but one guy's been working for me for nine years. I said, you know what he is? He's my 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and he'll run as long as I want because he loves nights. I love that. But he hates mornings. And I made a lot of technicians installers. I made a lot of CSRs dispatchers and I've done everything across the board. Our job as leaders is to find the best opportunities.

And people say, well, I love guys and I hate them at the same time that like to run things like a military. And they say, no, it's not. It doesn't work like that. You got to do it. There's step one, step two, step three. And I go, business is not like that, at least for me. It's kind of rolling with the punches. It's kind of going through the process. And I'm going to tell you this. Everybody says Amazon is great. And I love Amazon. I use Amazon. I order toilet paper through Amazon. I mean, that's how much of a believer I am.

And you get it tomorrow. They have a bunch of issues. And they have the biggest issue is employee morale. And if you get to the point, you know, I love walking into the call center now at the new office. And I love smiling and saying, does anybody need anything? I'm always here in the other room. If you need help booking a phone call, there's never been more use of my time than to book that phone call. If you need help learning the dispatch port,

let me do that. I love just handing out a gift card when I see somebody doing a good job. That's fun for me. Now, that might sound operational, but that's as far as I get. I'm not good, but I learned from my staff. My guy, Adam, my guy, Brian, my guy, Luke, these guys are the best, the best. They teach me every day what work's all about and what my life should be about. So I got to say, having the right team, they became family. Yeah, that reminds me of that Steve Jobs quote where it says, we don't hire smart people so that we tell them what to do. We hire smart people so that they tell us what to do. You know, I think, I think there's a lot of people that are afraid of hiring people above them. And then the ego starts to where, you know, they, they feel like they have

to, you know, well, yeah, but make it this way and make it that way. And you start micromanaging the things they do and you'll burn out a leader just like that. If you start, you know, stepping on what their responsibilities and operations is. So I hired a controller and I was afraid of what I was going to see. I mean, I was like, you know, okay,

I guess show me the good stuff. The bad stuff kind of leave behind because I thrive on good news. But the good news about me is, I mean, even the Bible says this, if you ignore your conscience, it'll start going away. And what I've learned is my conscience, I know what's going on, but it's kind of like, why do people hate the doctor? They don't hate the doctor.

They don't really hate the doctor. They hate of the possible news they could get from the doctor. They don't hate the doctor. They don't really hate the doctor. They hate of the possible news they could get from the doctor. That's the same thing as a financial quick check, which we have every week now. And the people, I mean, I guarantee you 50% of the people listening, well, this could be good or bad. They probably don't know what's in their bank account. They don't know how much your credit card debt is exactly to the T. I don't even know because guess what? We probably spent $25,000 today. I mean, I don't know it to the T, but I did do a financial quick check earlier this morning at 10 AM and I looked at credit cards. We pay off our credit cards every single month. I've never had an interest payment,

but you know how many points I have? I'm going to say over 100 million points I've acquired because we spend a lot of money. So George told me the other day, the air conditioning guy, that I'll never be in debt. I'll never go into debt. And I said, what if you have a mortgage that's 4%, but you get a yield of 8% guaranteed through some type of bond. Wouldn't that make sense to have a 4% net gain? And he didn't understand it because he says, I'm not financial. I believe in my head that he'll spend the money. He just doesn't know. But what are your thoughts about debt? I mean, I believe that... I love Donald Trump's book. It's... Oh, man. Well, basically, in a couple of books that he has, I'm trying to think of the name of the one I was talking about, but he talks about using other people's money.

And I know that's a soft topic for the politics side of things, but the fact is, even if his dad gave him the money, he makes a lot of money and he's done a great job of marketing. And regardless, is using other people's money makes sense if it's going to yield a higher return, doesn't it? Yeah. I actually, I mean, I love Dave Ramsey. I love Dave Ramsey. I love the principle of being debt-free. Our family, we're debt-free. And that was something we went through Financial Peace University. And I'm a big proponent with regards to that. There is a big difference between good debt and bad debt.

And me personally, I think that it's a no-brainer to be able to leverage debt, provided you don't get that debt-income ratio so out of square to where if things do fall down, then you're in trouble. But the thing that I tell people is that if you rent a lease, a shop,

if you go and lease a shop, which most people do without even thinking a second thought about it, they'll lease a shop. Is there difference to also, you know, leasing working capital to be able to do that? You're in essence paying rent on working capital. If that's,

you know, one of your bottlenecks that's holding you back from being able to take advantage of your growth, I know that to be able to scale as fast as you did up to the size that you are, I mean, you had to take advantage of that. Because for us in our company, we didn't experience the same growth that you did. But it got to be a point very rapidly to where we're looking at, okay, we got a double, triple this year. We have to get debt in order to keep up with that demand of growth. And I think as long as you're working with a really good advisor and keeping track of your financial situation, I don't think that debt is a bad thing like some people typically view it.

Well, one of the things I invested in is Dave Ramsey for the company. So all the employees have access. Love that. Love that. That is huge. We did the same thing with our business too. We got our employees and our team meetings. We talk about Financial Peace University and Dave Ramsey principles. That's awesome that you do that. I mean, then they're all bonused on a perspective that they go through. We see how much each employee is doing. But I got to tell you that the biggest thing I find is an obstacle for employees is understanding the fact that there's so much credit card debt they get into. They don't have homeownership.

I'm really proud to say I have new four homeowners in the last three months. And they've gone through Qualify, through my guy that I trust, that I pushed them through. And it's not because of me. It's because of the team here. And here's the biggest, coolest thing about everything is when you can grow in the same direction and everybody's winning. But you know what the winners do?

If you have a whiteboard out there, if anybody's listening, write this down. Write 1A equals 3B. 1A player equals 3B players. And I can prove it with numbers, statistics, and facts, is that B players attract C players and A players hate B and C players. That's true. The highest and the best. And guess what? For every A player, I'm glad to pay them way more.

You know what? I got a text message. I'm going to read this text, but I'm going to look it up right now. But I have this girl that works for me. And she said, you know, my daughter would be paychecks, I may want to be a CSR. Kidding. I love what I do. But seriously, thank you for extending her the opportunity and my granddaughter for so much that she's become. She grabbed the opportunity that she was given. You may even want to mold her into a sales job. Have a great night. Just wanted to thank you and let you know that you provided tools to succeed to someone who took it and she is running with it.

Do you know how much that means to me? That little text message from her mom, that's a badass. She's a cool chick. She's awesome. But her daughter is making $21 an hour and is a CSR. That's amazing.

I know exactly how much that means because I'm the same way. I'm a words of affirmation guy myself. And I love it when people on our team get wins. That's one of the number one thing that drove me to actually grow and scale was to provide more opportunity to our team, to be able to provide those awesome opportunities for them. That's so cool. And here's the deal. I went out to my cousin in Colorado Springs. I actually got him started in the garage door business. I gave him his own company. I'm not like God. I gave it to him. But I helped him and told him where to advertise, told him what to do. Visiting his business, I looked at his want ads, which I'm a marketer and most people don't

realize 50% of your marketing should be to employees. Oh man, that's so true. So I looked at his ads and it said, requirements, must do, average pay this, background check, drug test, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, geez, am I applying towards a prison? What is this? So I rewrote his ad and he goes, Tommy, he goes, I had 25 applicants yesterday. Oh my God. And I said, dude, why would they want to work for you? Millennials want to feel safe and they want to be wanted. Why would anybody want to work for you with that ad? So I told them I have the home ownership. I told them we're willing to train.

We're willing to mold. If you want a career, come here. If you're looking for a job, this probably isn't for you. You know, we've got Dave Ramsey. We provide lunch once a week. I'm trying to do breakfasts now. Why?

I am selling them to me. You know, I'm selling my company to them. And then by the way, we do garage doors. And and we love it if you apply that's right through a personally profiling and all that good stuff i think that that's that's probably a really really understated i think most of your listeners i mean what you said there tommy was such gold because i think most business owners, they don't understand this concept of internal marketing for your internal customers. I mean, even like how clean your shop is and how clean your vehicles are and the dashboards you have up on your screens. I mean, we had a cleaning company and people would come into our shop and they'd see how hyper-organized it was and they'd see big dashboards with all of our team members metrics on there and everything organized inside the office.

And it's professional. Those things matter. Those things matter. And I think some people don't quite understand that it's the exact marketing principles to recruit and attract employees as it is to recruit and attract customers. And PS, if you want to keep a customer, you also have to do good service and you have to take care of them and make the quality there. Just like with your employees, you have to live up to it. You can't just have good marketing. You're not going to have a retention rate if employees come, advertise this amazing company, and then they come and they show up and you literally don't care about them at all. They're not going to stick around. Absolutely. I have a, I have a buddy of mine. He's got a pest control company. I walked into his business one day and I saw,

I mean, I saw these people, they were two feet apart from each other. And he said, I pay the minimum wage. And I go, oh my gosh. He goes, dude, I have 20 people lined up to take their spot. He goes, it's a family here. He goes, they know what we do for them outside of work. They know that we have a congregation here. They know and they understand. And so a lot of people think the only way

to give people anything is through a bonus structure or salary. But you know what? Employee of the month. You know, I'm that guy that likes to be acknowledged. You know how many employees of mine like to be acknowledged? You know how many times that I could shake their hand?

Do you know how many people text me yesterday after my morning meeting? I had seven guys text me and say, Tommy, that was the best meeting ever. And their first job, they all text me afterwards and said, I did exactly what you said. They want to know, as a business owner, we are kind of like the, you know, this is kind of, it's a tough subject, but we are the parents. They want to be acknowledged. That's right. And these are our kids. And I know that's tough for some people because we don't have to be,

and I don't need to act like a father, but I am. I want to pat them on the back when they do well. When they do bad, I don't do that in front of a bunch of people. I tell them side to side. I'm like, dude, it really means a lot to me if you just – because the CSRs and the dispatchers do a lot more work, and it means a lot to me. Do you know when I see a guy make action and actually do what I say,

but then again, my management would tell me, hey, if it always has to be you, but I'm like, it's my approach, guys. If you learn my approach, if you learn the way I do it, and I know everybody wants to talk to the owner. Trust me. I always say if I had five times for every guy in the business,

I wouldn't have my week on Monday. That's right. You got your face on the side of your vehicles, man. Everyone wants to talk to you. Hey, that was a smart decision. I'm not arguing that whatsoever. I agree. You know, we had, we had to hire a model. I'm just glad it was me. And you got, uh, no, you know, I love, I love talking real and I love what you're doing. Thanks man. We're going to go into a few more questions and I want to tell people where to find you. I think Josh is focused a lot on power washing and window washing, and we've got so many different avenues to listen to this.

Where do you find the biggest and the fastest grows? I mean, when it comes down to it, you've got, for me, I would consider, if I had to answer this question, I'd say, is your CSRs and your booking rate and making sure you're delivering the right message to the customer. But that's me going back to marketing. There's so many other factors. I mean, if you had to tell me, what are the biggest gains you've seen with working with small businesses? Biggest gains that we've seen? Like what tactics? What are some of the things that you've seen and you were like, dude, look at this and change this and it doubles your business? I think the biggest thing would be investing into a sales team. I know for us,

when we started getting a sales team and then we focused a lot on unsolicited proposals, we started leveraging VAs really, really heavily to just like, you know, scrape data, mine data, and just send off. We were sending off, you know, just within a few years of getting, kicking off right before we started doubling and tripling, we'd send off like a million dollars worth of proposals a month, just completely unsolicited. And then we ramped that up even more. But things like that, I felt like you need to find that lever. You got to find that lever. And to me, it all comes down to the sales and marketing side. And everyone's going to have their different strengths too. If you talk to a business owner to where his strength is not in sales and in marketing, that's where you're going to get the big win. If you have someone who's really strong in sales

and marketing, but it's terrible in operations, being able to figure out that structure on how to be able to scale up employees very quickly, how to get working capital, that's what's going to be your biggest win. I think it kind of depends a little bit on the talent of the business owner and what their skill sets are. And, you know, that just takes kind of doing an assessment and audit of them, figuring out, you know, what is the number one thing you need to focus on in your business right now before you do anything else? Yeah. And, you know, I think a lot of us have a lot of pride and we don't want to hear it. I'm going to say something here and I'm going to announce it to you because I like you. And it's going to take a lot of pride, but I'm actually scaling back.

It's something that nobody here wants to hear. I'm pulling it in to get the 25% EBITDA. So I'm cutting, but I'm also growing. I will gain revenue this year by far. I will gain profit, but I am going to close a couple of markets. And it's sad for me because I have a lot of pride. And I had a buddy of mine come into town and he said, Tommy, this is one of the best businesses I've ever seen,

but you're losing your ass in these markets. And he goes, can I tell you a little secret? I said, well, if you tell me, it's not going to be a secret. I may or may not. He said, the biggest thing I see is you don't have any real leadership in these markets. And he goes, I know you could turn them around, but what's your time worth? And what's your effort and your energy and your money? Right. Because if you cut these markets out,

you could get to 25%. And at a company your size, do you like a million dollars a month in your pocket? And I'm like, I don't know. I cut the coupons out of my cereal box still. I still drive a 2012 Titan. I live in my apartment complex. I don't know.

I have a lot of great things, but I'm not that lifestyle. But, you know, he just said, it's not bad to win. Don't feel bad about winning. And don't feel bad that you're doing this because these markets are losing you a lot of money. And it's not easy to do. You're going to have to swallow your pride. And it's not easy to lay people off either. But at the same time, you need to be heavily profitable. And at a company your size, you need to have $5 million in the bank. And I don't have $5 million in the bank. I have a lot of assets. I have a lot of great things, but I don't. And I think that it's so hard to cut your losses,

but I am such a proponent of it. And I think it's important to discuss these things because a lot of people out there are going, maybe they like me, maybe they don't. But they're saying, I want to grow, grow, grow. I want to grow a thousand percent this year. Well, I grew almost a hundred, well, 200% of what I was. And what I noticed was I didn't have the right employees. They didn't buy into the program. It didn't fit into the culture. And when you grow that fast, that's the biggest missing element is they didn't buy in a hundred percent. And that was my fault by not noticing that, but I won't make the same mistake twice. What is your perspective on that? That was an honest moment for me.

No, man. I think that's actually something that you should be incredibly proud of. Because every business, regardless of what size it is, whenever you scale, you breach these different levels. You're punching through the next ceiling, then you're punching through the next ceiling. And eventually, you get to a ceiling where you punch through and then like you really bruise your knuckles. And you're like, whoa, what just happened? This is different. This ceiling is something that's different. So, you know, all these different stages of business, you know, that's what we were talking about earlier from the 10 employees to the 50 employees to the 100 employees to the 200 to the thousand employees. Every single one takes a little bit different of re-auditing all the systems and taking a look at what the blueprint is and doing

an audit of what your leadership structure is. So I mean, for us, I mean, I work with a lot of businesses that they're in like the $200,000 to $500,000 range. And they're just trying to get up to that point to where they're seven figures. And I tell them, I say, look, you're going to go through a cashflow purgatory where right now it's you wearing a bunch of hats and to get to that seven figure mark in plus, you're going to go through this thing where your margins are going to get thinner to kind of punch through to that ceiling. And you may have to front, you're either going to have two options. One, you're going to work like crazy and be super stressed out or two, you can go out and you can hire more help and your margins will just get a little bit thinner, but it's going to make

punching through that ceiling a lot more manageable and easier to do. So I mean, I think with what you're saying, you've kind of reached that same point. And that's kind of cool to me because it says that no matter what stage of size of business you're at, you're always going to kind of, you know, hit these levels to where you're going to have to take a step back and then start focusing on restabilizing your systems and restabilizing your strategy rather than just being a hundred percent, you know, growth mode, 10 X hustle grind. Like, you know, it's not possible. That's right. It really, the self-reflection, the fact that I'm able to say this

and tell people on the podcast that I, you know, it's tough for me because I consider myself a grower and I'm really, I consider myself a market leader. Probably the fact is, I'll tell you this, I've made, Brandon, I've made every mistake in the book. And that's why I love this podcast because I hear people that are stronger, better. They've done it.

I don't need to recreate the wheel. But what I've learned is I bring these guys into my business. I fly them out here. I fly to them. I go visit warehouses, showrooms, CSRs. I am so involved with Service Time and Housecall Pro and all these different CRMs. I talk to them at a lot of their events.

I'm doing a lot of the stuff because I learn. I learn every time. And to think that it's so much fun. The humility yesterday, I want to tell you something that just came up in my mind is my main dude in charge of the whole financial branch of the company. He talked to me and he came on a little bit newer here in the last year. And he said, you have a lot of people doing chores and my staff that's under me,

it's kind of a distraction to have to clean the bathrooms and have to take out the garbage. And I said, see, my biggest problem is the number one rule that I have in this company is humility. I said, I get the building clean once a week. But the fact is that when I walk in there two days later, there's toilet paper everywhere. There's pee on the toilet and the garbage is full. The mirror looks like crap. It means you don't have a sense of pride with the company. And my problem is that we all could do 10 minutes a day. And not everybody does. Once every three days, we're nominated to be it. And I'm the guy cleaning the toilets. I'm the guy mopping. I lead by example. I have a lot of humility. And the biggest thing is, is I made

that point to him and I said, look, I understand you guys don't want to get out on your hands and knees and scrub the floors. I'm not asking you to do that. I'm asking you to pick up and clean up and do normal stuff that most people could do if you have a sense of pride of where you work. Because there's going to be a lot of people as I continue to grow, the podcast, the book, the company, everything. They're going to want to come through our business. And I want to have a sense of pride. And I want every single person here to say, I work there.

My marketer, my number one marketing guy in my marketing department said, to say, I work there. You know, my, my marketer, my number one marketing guy in my marketing department said, I said, I don't know, you know, we could try to hire some insurance. And he says, Tommy, I'll hire 10 insurance tomorrow. I said, that's great. How he goes, Tommy, we're a huge 30, $40 million company because we won the fortune 5,000, the 5,000 Inc Inc. 5000 biggest companies. He goes, he had a list on his hand of how cool we were and how great we were. And I said, that's the guys I want working for me. Those are the people that I envision in charge of my company if I'm not here, if I'm out of town. It's the people that love to be here and they have a sense

of pride and they care so much. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that's awesome, man. I love that. I think that company culture, one thing I've noticed is that company culture always starts from the very top. It always does. Company culture is the personality of a business when no one's looking and when the leaders aren't around. I think that, you know, to achieve that is a really tough challenge for a lot of business owners because they don't, you know, company cultures turn into a buzzword where it's just all about, oh, you got the beanbag chairs and you got the ping pong tables and all you do a company barbecue every week, like sweet, what a company culture, but it's not bad at all. And that's one thing I love what you're doing about, you know, I don't know if you've read the book,

the dream manager. I have it. Dream manager. I've heard that book. I'm going to ask you about your books here in a second. I got to tell you, what is the, there's a book.

It's a short little easy book, but it's about, um, it's about building an amazing relationship with the customers. Is it raving fans? Is that what you're talking about? Yes. You know it so well.

Raving Fans is sitting in the backseat of my truck. It's such a simple read and I love it. I love the fairy godfather that comes down. He loves golf and he talks about how to make Raving Fans. But here's what I find is everybody listening. If you could create raving fans out of your internal customers, people that work for you, you'll find that you don't have to ever hire because people will be lining up to work for you through the people that you know and work for you. Preach it, Tommy. Preach it, man. Isn't it true? You're so right. Absolutely.

It's crazy. People don't understand. Imagine not having to spend, always having a constant influx of technicians into your company and all these people that want to work and want to surround you, be surrounded by you and your team because you're taking care of your employees first. People don't understand that you start there first

and then the care back into the company comes afterwards. It's not the other way around. It's 100%. And I said this analogy, and this is so bad of me to say this, Brandon, but I said, Democrats want to change immigration. Republicans want to have a wall. Well, none of them could decide what comes first. Well, for me, I'm going to give benefits. I'm going to make. Well, for me, I'm going to give benefits. I'm going to make them want to work here. I'm going to give it all to attract them. I'm not going to give it to them afterwards and say, well, one day we could do this stuff if we become successful. Right. Oh, you do that stuff first to attract them. And it's a magnet. And I feel like

a lot of people, if you could honestly say the people on this call to say, my employees love me. More importantly, they love my managers, the direct report. Yeah. That's the true win right there. Right. Yeah. Because if it's all about you, you know, there's a good book. It's called built to last. It's by Jim Collins. Love that book. And it's all about hiring the right CEO and who was it? General Electric. The guy from General Electric, he left the company in a great spot. And there's a lot of people, you know how much pride there is? Between you and I, there's probably some pride when you come back into town and you're running a company to say,

we missed you. We had a lot of stuff fall through the cracks with how you're here. That's pride, right? Right. You know what's even better is to say, you left this company so good, so great. You've trained us all that we didn't skip a beat. And you've developed us into better human beings. You make us feel like a business owner. We're part of the business because you pay us on the performance of the business. And you can leave whenever you want. Actually, when you left, we enjoyed it. Yeah, that's the ultimate win. Yeah. Or when they're ushering you out the door and they're saying, go. We got this. You go take your break. You go take your vacation, enjoy time with your family.

Those are some of my most proud moments when you have team members that just are really trying to get you out there because they got your back. And that does not come unless you pour investment and love and care into your employees first. It just doesn't. We won't get that. You know, Brandon, we didn't stick to the questions on this podcast. I don't know for overtime what your average podcast length is. Oh, it's good. It's good.

It's about an hour. Let me ask you this. What are your top books? I mean, you do this a lot. And I rarely get into fiction because I don't read fiction. I've lost every single good attribute that I had to create anything. Now I can only make stuff better. But it's good to read fiction every now and then. I just don't enjoy it anymore. But is there any books that moved you that really

changed the way you look at things? Yeah, absolutely. The E-Myth for me was, I think, probably one of the most transformational books that I read when it came to business. That's what a lot of entrepreneurs say, but it is that good for me as far as it was. It introduced me to the concept of business systems and working on your business, not in your business. And before that, I had never heard that before, ever. So that was a mind bomb for me. So it's always stuck in my memory. How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of my favorite books. I love listening to that one on Audible. Yeah, Carnegie, right? Oh, yeah. That's just an incredible book. Just about not criticizing and the criticism doesn't inherently work and everyone feels that they're doing their-

Listen, Linda. It's all so. That's right. Dream Manager, I love. Profit First, Traction. I fell in love with the book Traction by Gino Hickman. That's just an incredible, incredible book that I love. I love reading that one. Actually, I feel like I need to brush that off in EOS in general, like at least once a year just to try to stay fresh with it because there's so much. Well, let me do this, Brandon. Let's talk about, I know this is a long podcast, but traction to me was just focus on one thing and get it. If you're going to do Google, go 100%. If you're going to do mailers, go 100%.

What you do is you go 100% and you let it work. So many people say, I'm just going to dash a little bit in mailers, a little bit in Google, a little bit in TV, a little bit in radio. It just doesn't work. That's what the whole book is about.

Yep. Yep. That's right. Yeah. And working inside of an ecosystem. That's one thing I love about EOS is it's just a perfect framework to keep everyone accountable and to improve communication between the different departments. To me, it's kind of like the to keep everyone accountable and to improve communication between the different departments. To me, it's kind of like the how-to manual of the e-myth.

Like the e-myth is great to teach you the principles and the traction is like the, okay, roll up your sleeves, let's get dirty, let's start executing on stuff. Man, I gotta tell you, you got so much knowledge. Tell me a little bit about how somebody would get ahold of you for Automate Grow Sell. So the big thing that we did just this last year, we just launched it actually this year,

especially, is something that we call the Conquer Program. And this is a program that we have. We have 15 certified coaches. We have over 160 companies that are in the program. We're adding about 30 companies a month right now. And basically, it's all service business owners purely. And it's getting one-on-one coaching in really tight, small, intimate groups of small mastermind conquer groups, we call them. That's probably the best way to get started, at least with Automate, Grow, Sell, and look at some of those. We have some digital courses and things that we've made and we're continuing to add to our library. But if you go to agsconquer.com, you can learn more about our certified coaches. You can apply to it. Not everyone gets in.

This is an important thing that we look for in attributes is people that actually execute on stuff, not the, not the talkers and the, and just the dreamers, but the people that actually execute and have the time set aside to actually work on their business. So it's an application process, but if you go to agsconquer.com, uh, you can check it out and learn a little bit more. I love it. I love it. You know, they didn't even let me in. What about you personally? Do you have the people look you up on Facebook, LinkedIn? How do you get your email? If somebody wants to call you, what do they do? Yeah. Facebook is typically where I'm most active. When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, I play on Facebook all day. So much of what I do is just investing back into people that are inside of our tribe.

We have a few thousand members inside of our Growth Vault mastermind community, our Facebook group, which is just purely just masterminding with other service business owners. But Facebook is the best way to reach out to me as well is just hit me up there and send me a request and let's connect. Awesome. Well, Brandon, you know, the last thing I do, and this is it, is I try to leave the audience with a really, you know, something that we didn't talk about,

one last thought from you. And, you know, you can go wherever you want with it. I might give my two cents afterwards because I tend to do that. Tell us something we didn't talk about, just one final thought of this whole podcast. Final thought I'd say is that it all comes down to belief. I mean, there's executing and things, but before you even start executing on stuff, you have to believe that something's possible. And one of the things that I like talking to people about is, you know, the seven stages of belief and how, you know, the progression of kind of where you need to get.

The biggest gap that you have to bridge is the six inch gap between your ears because you get so much. There are so many self-limiting beliefs you're not even aware of. I remember when I first started growing, Tommy, I actually laid out an Excel spreadsheet of what our growth was going to look like. And I bet you probably have a similar story of what your first... I had my five-year plan that I pitched to my dad. And it was literally growing the business from $100,000 to $240,000 after five years. That was my five-year plan. I was like, and I remember both of us looking at it and he looked at me dead in

the eyes and he's like, you really think we can grow that fast? And I was like, I think so. I don't know, but I want to try that. And now looking back on that, it's almost comical because I didn't realize how much just those self-limiting beliefs can really hold you back from kind of what's possible. And so work on your belief first, work on your belief. And the best way to overcome the belief is get involved with a really good community. You know, I think that's so awesome that, you know, you guys as listeners are listening to this podcast right here is because, you know, hearing story after story after story of entrepreneurs who have, you know, mastered their business to actually be a tool for themselves rather than being a tool for their

business, you're in the right place. So keep shattering those self-limiting beliefs and then, you know, don't forget to execute. That's awesome, man. I got to tell you, you kind of hit the nail on the head there with the final thought because I'm going through this thing right now that I recommend everybody doing. It's called Your Best Year Ever. And it's on Amazon and there's CDs, there's a book that goes along with setting goals. And one of the things he talks about in the book is it takes the same effort to set a huge goal as a small goal. And if you don't ink it, if you think it, you got to ink it. It's just write your goals

down. You monitor your goals. So you got 365 days in a year. What do I need to do? Not this week, but what do I need to do today to hit my goal for the year? And if I could stay on pace for that and have some type of visual, write an X on a calendar. Have one of those big calendar boards. And I know I'm into Google. Trust me. I've got the Google calendar. If you see my calendar today or yesterday, you'd probably shit yourself because it's ridiculous what I do to myself. But I love this. I love talking to guys like you. Everything you said in here is gold. And I'd advise anybody to definitely do this because this program, when you get involved with these guys, the thing that I know is that they care and you don't find a lot of people out there that

actually give a crap about your business. And these guys do. So I highly recommend whatever this guy says, listen to him. Brandon's been through it. You know, Josh is an amazing guy. These guys are, they're just the real deal. And they're very, very family oriented. And I'm probably not the best person to talk about families because I've been in a family like I told you. You have a business family though, man. I tell you why.

I mean, the way you're describing how you take care of your team, you give family. I know it. I know, I know. I just, I way you're describing how you take care of your team, you give family. I know it. I know. I know. I just, I know one thing that when I have a baby, it's going to be the most important. You know, it's a different, it's a different thing. You know what I feel?

I'll end it on this, but I feel like when somebody does something wrong with the company, they're taking advantage of everybody and everybody's kids. I feel like they're actually stealing from one of my best friend's kids. They're taking food off their plate when I see. So when I see a person doing wrongdoing, not cleaning up after themselves, not caring about sales, not caring about memberships, not caring about financing, not caring about that last booked appointment, not caring about taking that phone call when they don't want to take it, it bothers me because I care so much. And that's the difference is if they could figure

out a way to care like I do. If you got a will, I'll find you the way. All I know is if you have the will, I'll find a way. But I got to tell you, it's been a pleasure, Brandon. And I know this has been a long podcast, but I don't have a timeline because if it goes, it goes. Love it. No, it's been awesome. I feel like we could keep talking for a couple more hours. It's been a blast. I really appreciate you having me on. You're the man.

Listen, if anybody wants to find you, they know where to find you. Facebook is the number one spot. Do you have an email that they could get ahold of you too? bvon at automategrossell.com. There it is. bvon. I can't say that. It was right there, too. All right. Well,

I appreciate it, brother. I hope you guys enjoy this podcast. This is the man, Mr. Vaughn. You got to go see him out. Hey, guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I want to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at HomeAdvisor to the CEO of Valpak and of course,

Ara, the CEO of Service Titan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation. Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples. And it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score. You should have your financial check every week.

You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account. You should know when to cut advertising that's not working. And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book,

and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.