The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Craft an Articulated Sales Argument to Recession-Proof Your Business

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

Jim DuBois is the founder and CEO of Squeegee Pros, Inc., a window cleaning/pressure washing company, as well as WindowWashingWealth.com, a coaching program that helps window cleaners turn their business into a scalable, systemized operation on auto-pilot. He has grown his company into a 7-figure business through effective sales and marketing. He also writes for the American Window Cleaner Magazine. In this episode, we talked about small business, strategic planning, new business development...

The articulated sales argument, otherwise known as a USP, unique selling proposition, it's the argument you build. would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone but you, regardless of price. But you know what people do? You know what companies do? This is what they say. I'm the best quality. I'm insured. I'm bonded. Satisfaction guaranteed, right?

I'm dependable. I'm reliable. But now do this, Tommy. Put this phrase, this tagline after those. Highest quality. Well, I would hope so. Dependable, reliable. Well, I would hope so, right? This is what people do. This is what these companies do. They do nothing to separate themselves from everybody else. 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 a special guest visiting us from Charlotte, North Carolina, Mr. Jim Dubois. Let me explain to the audience what we're dealing with here. First, I met you, I was speaking at the IWCA window washing convention in Atlanta, or no, Savannah. And you were very, very successful. Ask great questions. Definitely knew I wanted to get you on the podcast. You're a small business expert, strategic planning, window cleaning, new business development. You're based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

You're the CEO and founder since 1996 of squeegee pros. You built your first business at the Jersey shore at the age of 19 and moved to North Carolina and slowly built up a seven-figure window cleaning, pressure washing company through sales marketing by focusing primarily on free markets, storefronts, large commercial, and residential. His business now has approximately 40 members on his staff. He writes the Business Builder articles for the American Window Cleaner Magazine and speaks regularly at conferences. He's also founded windowwashingwealth.com, a business building coaching program that helps window cleaners turn their business into a scalable, systematized, policy-driven

operation on autopilot. That's what I like to hear. And me and Jim hit it off. So Jim, I'm really excited to have you on. I think this is going to be great for the audience. Well, thank you, Tommy. And I appreciate you having me on as a guest. I'm looking forward to this. I think we're going to have a lot of fun. We will. We will. The main thing I always start with is we've all had blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into every business. I want to hear about your upbringing,

how you started your first business, moving into North Carolina and just some of your trials and then where you're headed, what your goals are. Is retirement in the future? Are you going to buy more companies? Is coaching going to be your life? So you want to just give me five minutes to just let everybody know where you are, where you're going. That sounds great. It's funny you ask the question because I'm a farm guy from Indiana. And when I was there, I was 16 years old. I remember sitting at the kitchen table and my dad asked me, so Jim, what do you want to do for your life's career? What do you want to do for a living? And I said, dad, I really don't know except one thing. I want to do my own thing. I want to start a business.

I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to do something. And I graduated. I went to college for two months. So I'm officially a college dropout. I packed up my little Volkswagen. I moved to the Jersey Shore. I was 18.

I got a job washing windows. And I remember I showed up in a suit and tie, my little Volkswagen. There I am, a 19 year old kid, had the job in five minutes and I started and I worked for this company for a year and I loved it. I loved it. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, why not do this as a business, at least something to start with to get my entrepreneurial life on track. And I did. And after a year through some trials and tribulations with that particular job, I decided I'm going to, I'm going to go out and start a company called Dunrite Window Cleaning. And that's what I did. And I did that for a few years. I built it up. I had 600 stores. I had 300 houses that we did annually. And it was a really cool little

business. And my friends were a little jealous. I was driving the bed. I had the boat. And there I was just a young guy, but I was kind of making it. So eventually I sold that business. I got into an MLM business called New Skin International. And I did that for a few years. Did well making it. So eventually I sold that business. I got into an MLM business called New Skin International. And I did that for a few years. Did well with it. Had 2 million in revenue, 2,000 people in my downline. And then the media got a hold of it because people were making too much money too fast. And it just pulled the carpet right out of this organization that I built. And my income just went right down the tubes. I was depressed. I was in a place that I never want to go to again. And I packed up. I moved down to North Carolina. I remember I walked into a mattress store. I needed a mattress.

And when I walked in, I noticed the windows were just filthy dirty. And I said to myself, I'm going to pitch this guy on the window. And if he says yes, I'll start another window cleaning business. Well, he did. He said yes. That day changed my life. This was in 1996. So I started.

Fast forward a little bit. Pre-COVID, we built it to where I got up to 3,500 storefronts, regularly serviced, residential, 400 homes we average a month. And then we have a large commercial pipeline of jobs that come in as well. So today I come into the office a couple of days a week. I tweak the systems. I focus on capturing market share. And really my sole job with Squeegee Pros is to make the company as valuable as I can. And then in 2017, kind of alluding from what you were saying, I started windowwashingwealth.com.

It's a window cleaning specific coaching program. We have 36 licensees, I call them. Some are people that are already in the business and they're stuck. They don't know what to do next to grow and scale. And others are brand new and they just see window cleaning as a business to get into. So that's kind of the quick story of how I got into it and quickly getting to where I'm at today. But the one thing I've learned along the way, Tommy, is when you get into something like you, me, you have to have fun. You have to eat it, sleep it, drink it. You have to have such a passion for it that nobody can shake your faith if you're going to go to the top. And once you get that in your blood, it just becomes you and nothing can stop you

most of the time. You might get slowed down, right? You're going to hit the bumps in the roads and we've all hit it. I mean, 2001, 2008, right now are parts of those things. So those are some of the trials and tribulations that I've hit. And there's a whole lot more to that, but that's kind of a little bit of the bigger picture, a little bit faster getting. So right now you've got, did you say 17 licensees? 36 around the country. Oh, 36. So you're training people how to make money i think you've gotten your business successful now i've taken on training students and i'm doing this out of giving back that's my way to give back i don't make diddly squat from the podcast and the people

i consult i do this for a nice fresh breath and i get amazing people on the podcast to learn but i'll tell you this a lot of people are like, I'm going to go teach. I'm teaching because I enjoy teaching because I've learned a lot through a lot of mistakes. If I focused all the time that I teach, but I just need to give it a break. I eat, sleep, and breathe. Like you said, garage doors. I mean, the holy water was soaked in garage doors when the guy puts it on me. Everything I do is garage doors. So I break it up. I learn about other industries. I learn about acquisitions. I'm talking to higher level CEOs. I'm finding out what works in the HVAC business. What's window washing doing? Because that makes me better at garage doors. I'm selfish. I look for other people, but a lot of people think

they're going to get into these things. I promise you one thing. You put all your time, effort, and energy into what you're good at in the home service industry, you're going to make a lot of money. As long as you pay attention to the KPIs, I see people getting too distracted. So although just with my podcast and my Facebook thing, I think I could bring it easily a million bucks a month profit. I'm not doing that right now, but I will be in the next two years. And I'm learning at the same time. But ultimately, I'm going to bring in three to $5 billion in the next five years for my garage door company. No one's ever even heard of those numbers. So where's my time best spent? And I just want you to talk to the audience a little bit about why are you teaching other companies? What's in it for you? What's in it for them? I know what's in it for them. And where do you see

yourself going in the next five to 10 years? And what's the ultimate goal? Are you going to sell to a private equity company? Are you going to start consuming other companies? Are you going to team up with doing IPO? I mean, what does it look like and where are you going with both sides of the businesses you're working on? Well, Squeegee Pros, that's my bread, my butter. It's my passion. It's my baby. It's growing up. It's growing up fast, exciting. And Christina, she's president of Squeegee Pros. So I invested her in as a partner. So the torch is being slowly passed into her hands. So my job right now is to make squeegee pros, one, as valuable as I possibly can. But two, I want to be the largest commercial storefront window cleaning operation in the United States. And I will be. It's just time. It's just chipping away and it's just keep going, going, going. Residential, when I started residential in 2008, when the market crashed,

that's when residential came on the map. So it's been 10, 11 years. My vision, my goal was to make it the biggest residential window cleaning company in Charlotte. And we've achieved that. So now I just want to get bigger and bigger and bigger. The residential side by itself, I want to hit 3 million. That's 30 technicians that I need. The storefront side, the map is laid out in order to get there. So that is in motion. It's an autopilot operation.

It's completely systemized with or without my involvement. But I still come in a couple of days a week because I love it. Window washing wealth, I'm having so much fun, so much fun. Kind of like what you said, just talking to people. It's funny because when I, for example, have one licensee of mine came involved with me in zero to $95,000 a month in 29 months, never picked up a squeegee prior to this. I pinched myself because I had a little tiny part of that success where he just followed the game plan, the hiring, the marketing, the systems, all those things laid out window cleaning style. And when you can help somebody change their life and just get further along in whatever direction that they're going,

window cleaning this particular business, for that makes me smile and sure there's a money component to window washing well but i'm not looking to turn it into a bahamut coaching company my objective my goal is i want 50 licensees and i'm done and i will stop and just maintain and manage those 50 to be as successful as they can possibly be. We'll see what the horizon brings after that as the opportunities might come in. So that's Ouija Pros. That's window washing. Well, when you get into acquisitions and things like that, I've done 19 of them, small acquisitions in the window cleaning arena that's fueled my commercial growth and residential growth

to a degree. But acquisitions just as one component of my company. I'm invested in part owner of a landscape company. There's rental properties. When I look at acquisitions, I look at the financial landscape of my life and what can I do to fuel my retirement and all of those things. So it's like when you take that magic pill of entrepreneurialism and nothing can get in the way, your whole world becomes your oyster. It's just what you want to do with it.

You know, what's interesting is I'm a different human being than I was five years ago in like this crazy way. I'm thinking about just today, and I was a little bit late and I apologize about that, but I was working on a new van setup and i'm on the whiteboard and i'm I literally filled up a whiteboard in less than three minutes. I knew what I wanted And I said here's how it's going to look here's how it's going to be and then these guys are looking at me like holy crap and then

I said For my checklist. I said, where's my checklist for the new vans for both companies? I want to sign up from both companies, everything. I want a date of when it's going to be done. And I want to have a penalty built into when it's not done on time. And I basically said, the whole way I think about things is manual system standard operating procedures. Everything's got to be written down and everybody needs to agree and communicate and understand and be able to repeat it back to me. And if they can't, there's no structure. Why do I get mad if I can't get mad? What am I mad about? What were they supposed to

do? They don't know. And the crazy thing is with the small businesses I see, they're like, dude, this guy keeps doing this. Show me where you wrote down what he's supposed to do. Show me where you created what his day should look like. Everything that he does on a daily basis. And I think that's just, there's something with small businesses. You get chaos, but they learn to love chaos. They become firefighters and they're really, really good firefighters. They're first responders, man. They get in there and they fix it and they fix stuff all day long. But why can't you stop them from learning how to stop fixing and stop creating those problems? It's like, I'm passionate about it, but I'd love to hear your perspective when you were smaller, how you got more systems driven and expected output, because it's mind boggling now that I know it, how I didn't understand it before. And I can't go back

there because it's just, it's, it's chaos and it's distractions and it's bad time management. It's funny you ask the question because systems is like the new buzzword today. I didn't even know what systems were when I started my company. But what I can say is every time something was not right, every time something did that went wrong, I had to create a checklist. I had to create a document. If I hired somebody and they were an inbounder or an outbound and they were on the phone and I would, I called a TMC, train, manage, coach. I could hear them, right? And anytime something wasn't right, I'd have to go in there and talk to them. And I would bring the script out. We would role play. So every time there was an issue that was

holding back, what I felt was the scaling of my company. I had to put something together so it wouldn't happen again. And little by little, these microsystems and subsystems and eventually these systems all started to come together. And that I see, in my opinion, is if there's a secret sauce to scaling and being successful and getting through the mess that so many people get stuck at where they hit this wall, right? I call it the ignition stage. They're a one-person show, maybe they have a helper, and they're in this stage where it's easy. They get up in the morning,

they go wash the windows, they go home, they get paid, it's easy. But so many of those people want to go to the next level. They want to start hiring people, right? And they get to a point where, okay, let me hire somebody, but they don't know how to pay them, right? They don't know how to create culture. They don't know how to implement the policy so that it works. And what happens is they start doing this and then they get all frustrated and they go right back to this ignition stage where it's just them and maybe a helper and that becomes their life. They call it, it's a business, but it's really a job. So for me to get through that wall, I just started taking all these little things and putting it into a systemized operation,

which I didn't even know what I was doing at the time, but it was working and it was making sense, but it allowed me to start scaling. It allowed me to start hiring people so that I could get to the next level and the next level. And I call them revenue trigger points, meaning when a certain revenue is hit, and I'm talking to a licensee, for example, when they hit $20,000 a month, that's a time to hire a residential administrator or office administrator a customer service rep but most don't know these things they don't know when to bring the supervisor in when does the monies work to make that work and they get so discombobulated that the business just starts to fall apart and they go right back to a one-man show so the systemization is a big

big part of it for me and i can can tell you, Tommy, in my company, we have seven. We have a recruiting system. We have a lead generation system, a service system, world-class service system, an ethical selling system, an enforced policy system, financial and expansion systems. And when you start laying all this stuff out and you start putting the documents together and you start enforcing this stuff and you start getting together with your leadership team every month, every quarter, and making sure every I is dotted, every P is crossed, little by little, it starts to turn into a machine, a systemized machine that turns into an autopilot operation. But you know what? Most never get there because they have no clue how to get there,

even though they want to. You know, I love the TMC train manage coach. I'm going to put that graphic out there. I have a vehicle wrapping company for A1 mostly. So we do wraps and my buddy runs it. His name's Chad and he doesn't really, he doesn't have any experience and he's doing very, very good considering. I just kind of threw him in there and said, figure it out.

But I told him the other night we were up talking, having a beer and I was like, dude, here's the deal. We need to go visit the number one company or the number two company in the United States. We need to pay them really good money to take our time and we need to go learn from them their standard operating procedures. I want their checklist. I said, this will fast forward us five years. We're going to know what software they use. We got to explain

to them that we're not even their competitor. And if it were my way, I'd give them a little bit of equity. I'd give them some profit sharing and I'd have them even show up and I might even have them take our phone calls. And I learned how they advertise. Go to someone who's done it, that has a vision, that's built what you want to become. And you find the right owners. Some of the owners are interested in doing different things, but if they're like, I'm the biggest I want to be, and I'm not going to grow out of Massachusetts. This is where I'm at. You go visit that company. You get out of your comfort zone and you just, I want to pick up your SOPs. I want to see your depth chart, your org chart. I want to know what marketing's working. I want to see how you intake a customer. I want to know the software.

I want to know where you have them sign off. I want to know how you sell financing. I want to know all the problems that existed 10 years ago when you started. I want to know what clients you turned down. I want to know what you sub out. I want to know, do you get a finder's fee? Do you do referrals? All these things are like, they're out there and you're providing that and window washing because you've gone through all this. You've gone through a dozen years of mistakes, trials, and tribulations to be able to define this stuff. And I'm just like, dude, I don't want to do that. The money, the opportunity cost is just too much to do this in the business I'm working at with that I'm very little involved in, very little. But you're absolutely right. This stuff is amazing that you just said. I've got a lot

of notes already. So what made you decide on residential and commercial? You've got a few different sectors there and it's not something I usually recommend because you got to be set up differently. It's different training, different harnesses, different insurance, different workers, comp, different ladders. I don't know your business like you do, but I don't see a huge advantage of having two completely different animals. So explain to me why you chose that. Sure. So one, once I moved down to North Carolina, a little more mature, had the Dunrite window cleaning up at the Jersey Shore, played with that. Here's the thing. When I made that decision, when I walked out of that natural store that I was going to start my window cleaning company, I had to put together

my vision. I had to put together what do I want to do with this thing? At least at that stage, where do I want to go and how do I want to participate in what markets? What I did know is glass and concrete, pressure washing, is everywhere. Everywhere you turn, there's glass and concrete. So there's really four markets one can penetrate. High rise, which I decided not to do because the higher you go, the less glass and concrete there is. So I decided to stay on the ground. I already had familiarity in storefronts. So that was a natural progression to start at that point. And that's where I stayed. For many years, I stayed in storefronts. And that was really where I wanted to go. And I just wanted to make it as big as I could make it.

So when the market crashed in 2008, well, window cleaning being more of a luxury service for storefronts, well, I started losing accounts. And I started pulling my hair out. So I had to make some decisions because I don't want to lay anybody off. And those that know me know one thing. I don't like to go backwards. So I had to figure something out. I had to figure it out fast.

So I decided to start the residential side. And that was in September of 2008. And I had never really mastered the residential side, even though I did 300 houses a year, but it was just happenstance. It just came in through the ways that they came in. So now I have this new reality in front of me. I've got to start this, as you're kind of saying, this whole new company or division from scratch. And I got to figure this whole thing out,

the hiring, the marketing, how do I pay people, the services that I want to penetrate. So little by little, it started to take shape and to take form. And as I mentioned earlier, today we're doing 350 to 400 houses a month, and it's just a machine. But during all of that, we get calls, we got calls for just large commercial jobs, schools and churches and hospitals and things of that nature. No retelling, just lift work and things like that. So when I was building out this platform of this window cleaning company, I do three things. Storefronts is going to give me permanent residual reoccurring income as long as I maintain the losses. Two, residential.

It's instant money. When the house is done, we 90% of the chance we're going to get paid. Okay, three, four, 500 bucks when the house is done. And three, the, 500 bucks when the house is done. And three, the large commercial jobs, well, this was a facilitator for large chunks of money at a time when those jobs come in through the pipeline. So now that I can look back on this, this 2020 hindsight is great because now when there's volatility in the marketplace, I can lean on commercial, I can lean on residential, I can lean on large commercial because we're experts at all three of those.

So the market crashing in 2008 was actually a good thing because it forced me to start residential. And here we are, COVID-19, right? If I did not have the residential side, I'd be fighting right now more so because of the storefront side, because they're all being challenged. So we had great decisions that we made along the way. I refer to my leadership team, and it's brought us to this point. So that's why I started where I started, but it evolved from there. And I think the decisions I made, I know the decisions I made were fantastic, because it's got us to this point where we have a little bit of leverage or we can lean on one or the other. So come the end of March, we leaned to residential.

And we, Tommy, we put the throttle down and we just exploded in revenue because we had to make a decision. We had to force feed something or I was going to have a real big problem on my team. So it ended up being a blessing in disguise, I guess, and one way of looking at it. I hate it for everybody. This whole thing is even going on. But that's what got me to where I'm at today. I agree. You did the right thing. I see two different outcomes here. And this is my perspective. So don't take this the wrong way, but you made money during commercial. You did a lot of money. You had consistent money, but you said COVID forced us to go into residential. What I love about residential

is you've got hundreds, if not thousands of people, a big commercial account shutting you off because screw up the vault. It could be volatile. You could have to lay off 10 people. But I noticed one thing in garage doors, the guys that do commercial rolling steel, they do fire doors, they do access systems. They make a small fortune when they master it, but they don't touch residential. And I look at this company like Vortec and they've got a go-to-market strategy and there's very little competition for them. But I'm like, I'm playing chess when everybody else is playing checkers in the residential game. So I'm like, you guys, good luck. And I could scale fast in residential. I mean,

I can get people certified in less than two months and I can make the phone ring off the hook. Commercial accounts, I mean, they got to think about something. You're talking about 18 months from now because it's got to go to here, to here, to here, to here. I'm not saying I hate commercial because I've seen people make a fortune in commercial. But what I found is the small companies that are doing commercial always lose. They think they're profitable because they look at the ticket size, but they're not set up. They don't have the materials. They don't have the know-how. They'll make enough money to say it's worth it. But when they really, really dig into their CRM and their accounting software, their ERP or whatever they might be using, they're not making

a lot of money. And it's very rare. People have very rarely proved me wrong. Because if you pay attention to the warranty calls and the skilled labor you have involved and the tracking of the hours, but I would say that COVID forced you into something. And my guess is when you see your ROI on scaling your residential, you're going to go, holy crap, let's do this 10 more times in a few other areas around me. And then when you go to sell, when they analyze your company, the quality of earnings is what they call it. They're going to do audited financials. They're going to go, well, he doesn't have Home Depot. He doesn't have any large clients. The worst case scenario, these four mansions on this one street account for 2% of his revenue. If those mansions,

God forbid something happens to those, he's a pretty solid company. So I get it and it works for window washing. I just don't like it in a lot of industries where they're like, I do Home Depots, I do home warranty companies. I do a little bit of everything. And we're specialists of nothing. I could do anything. I'm a handyman. And those are the guys I'm like, look, pick something, man. And it could be as simple as chimney sweeping or window washing is, in my opinion, I'm like, man, is that recession proof? I want to get my window. I'd go wash my own windows if I was in a bad spot. But I've got the money as a business owner and a homeowner to say, I'll never wash my windows again unless I absolutely love it. And I'm teaching.

I don't have any kids yet. But if I had a little daughter, I'd be like, we wash our own windows because we're adults and we could do this. And I'm a good father. But other than that, I'm not going to do that stuff. So what's your take on that? So when I look at my company, it's really squeegee pros is really like two companies under the company umbrella. My residential guys don't do commercial. My commercial guys don't do residential. It's

two distinct entities in itself. The beauty of storefront, super smart. And when I look at the storefront side, there's not one account I could lose that's going to cause harm to my company. Meaning we don't do large chain. We have pre-COVID 3,500 storefronts. These are your just boutiques, your restaurants, your convenience stores. Yeah, they might have two three four five six seven locations so we have sales guys out there that are b2b sales guys picking up stores so if we lose five or ten stores in a month but we're always in a growth mode i'm fucking pre-covid we're in a rebuilding stage right now but we're continually in a growth mode but it's its own division inside the company so that's that animal over here. And it's a machine. It

just goes, goes, goes. And then you said something that holds so true on the residential side. The market that we go after in residential is the upper middle class. It's the affluent, super affluent. And these people, like you, are the least and the last to be affected by any economic issue situation that comes our way. And right now with my company, especially, there's a new five-letter word out there. And that word is clean. Everybody wants clean. Window cleaning, house washing, gutter cleaning, pressure washing, all the things that we do. Plus, more people are home now than they ever have been.

And when they've got that disposable money to spend because they're not going on vacation, because they want to do the right thing for their home because they're always home, we're the first to call, provided we're front of mind. Most of my competitors are sweet. They're not even out there doing what we do. When we put that throttle down, we put it down hard. So that's how my company is set up. And because of that, we're able to, I believe, win certainly right now on the residential

side, but I'll win again on the, in the end on the storefront side too, because I'm like a turtle. I just don't stop. We just keep selling, selling my sales guy. We hired him. So we took a break with the whole COVID thing. And I hired him in June. First month out, $1,400 a month in new storefronts. This is reoccurring. We're showing up once a week, once a month, twice a month, whatever it is, some kind of a frequency, but we don't do it. And when you start extrapolating those numbers over a few months, a year, two, three, four,

five years, you can see how I built that commercial storefront division into what it is today. And it's the same thing like with garage doors on the residential side. We just turn the marketing dial up. We listen to the inbounders, the outbounders. We're watching the return on investments on whatever marketing plates that we're spinning. And you know, some of the plates that we spend wobble. But if there's a return on investment on there, we just keep it wobbling. And some of the plates that we spend wobble. But if there's a return on investment on there, we just keep it wobbling. And some of the plates that we've got a 33.52 times return on our money on Google. 33 times.

People would kill for that. So we just turned it all the way up to see what's going to happen. And when you start taking all these marketing places, you're just turning that dial up, provided, here's what happened with me in a two-month period of time april may ish we bought four more trucks residential we hired eight more people just to keep up with the demand and we're still a month at so we have to create yes you did 33 times on ppc or organic or your lsa ads or your gB? Because there's four different algorithms. Sure.

We do it all combined. We do the four pack versus the five pack. We don't do Google guarantee, but we do Google dynamic ads, primarily where it's coming from. We're at the top of SEO, Google Maps, Google business listings. So all combined based on the calls that come in. Now that's exceptional. Hands down exceptional. But is it?

But is it? Well, you know, I would split those out if I were you, because organic is a completely different strategy than your GMB, which is your local, which is getting reviews and citation sites. And there's other things like building directions to expand it. And that's completely different than building links and getting content on your website. You see, I generate 10 times on my pay-per-click. So if I spend $10, I want $100 back. But number one, I don't love the same company doing all of them because they give credit where it's not due. And they want you to spend money on the PPC and the LSA ads when the GMB and the

organic are getting all the work. But 33 times for your stuff, I would just, I don't think people understand the ROI. You've got repeat business, which pool companies have not a lot of companies have. So you could spend a lot more because you got a lot better lifetime value of the customer, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is another area where so many service businesses miss the mark. When's the last time you had an electrician out or a plumber out to your house? Or in my case, I had a garage door company out to my house. In every case, they come, right?

They do the work. I never hear from them again. I don't even know how to reach them again because they never hear from me. So one of the things that we are paramount on is we never go away. Once we get that prospect, once we get that customer in the database, we never go away. We do what I call multi-channel marketing, online, offline. We're constantly in front of them. We're constantly in front of mine. So maybe next month they're not ready for our services, but they're everywhere they turn, my company's right in their face. So you literally become the obvious choice.

You become the only choice for them to call if you do it right. And so many missed the mark. I love this stuff, man. You got me going. I love someone that's energetic, that can keep up. Phil, you know, you've learned a lot of lessons, obviously, through the years of a bad economy. I'm very fortunate and you're very fortunate that we are still allowed to work. There's not tanks going through the streets and we're considered essential. But if it got way worse and let's say it spread and it was killing in the 10 percentile of the people, you know, we'd be locked. I mean, and I don't have a plan for that except laying off a ton of people, which I didn't have to do. But if I wasn't allowed to work, I've got enough money to pay for three months easily. I mean, that's my number. I have

to have three months. Everybody should have three months. I have enough to pay payroll right now for about 14 months if I had to. But a lot of my stuff is performance pay. So guess how much my performance pays if we're locked up? So actually I could probably pay for the next five years because all those people wouldn't be making anything because there's no performance. But I wanted to talk a little bit about recession proof. What is your plan with the commercial side?

Because right now you need to be saying, when everybody opens back up, I need to be the first one at their door. I need to be saying, when everybody opens back up, I need to be the first one at their door. I need to still market share. I need to triple the day that I'm allowed to triple. So what's going through your brain to say, great, residential's killing it. I'm happy. We're scaling that. We're spending the right marketing dollars. But when this opens back up, because some people are closed right now, I want them to understand they should be working on the processes. They should be putting the SOPs. They should have a marketing plan that's gangbusters. So what do you have up your sleeve

that's going to go out and just plow? A couple of things. One is, and when you look at storefronts, that business model is very simplistic. You probably get the idea. We put routes together. We put one guy on the route. He does the windows over and over and over again. And that's how that primarily goes. But the strategy that's worked very successfully for me through the years is two things. One is acquisitions. We have an acquisition system in place. Every year, we track all of the new competitors coming into the marketplace and all of those that have left. And with that, we have strategies in place where we're constantly, when I say constantly, every three months, we are in front of that window cleaning company,

ready to sell, ready to sell, ready to sell, ready to sell. And so again, we become the obvious one to call when that time comes, which is how I've done the acquisition. So we're stepping up that game. The second thing is a sales team, a B2B sales team. We already know we're picking up the count. So even though we're in phase three where we're at here in North Carolina, there's some sales superstars, some sales closers. Let me raise the bar in pay. And we're performance-based, pay on everything that we do as well with the technicians and salespeople in the field. So let me assemble a team more so than I've ever had before. And we're just starting to do that right now to add to what we have right now. So that's how we're approaching that. The other side to that is we are looking

and we're having staff meetings now and we're designing who we feel on the larger commercial side, who's our dream client? Who's the clients that we would kill to have if we could somehow get past the gatekeeper, which we're working on that to make that happen. So we're working on that

and we will put the're working on that to make that happen. So we're working on that. And we will put the throttle down on that as well to start bringing in a lot of those accounts. But my baby, my focus is the little storefronts. They're never going to go away. They'll always be there. There's always a recycling of small business. They go in business, they go out of business. So it's just a matter of staying out there and selling, selling, selling, selling, selling. But most don't. Most don't go to the level that we go. So to answer your question, those are the things that we are doing, things that we're working on to do. And we will not stop until we get to where we want to go. I'm going to go speed around here in a minute, but you brought something cool up, the gatekeeper. And I've got some clever things to do. If you get a minute, you should call me. We'll find your five biggest customers you're going to go after. We're going to find out the LLC.

We're going to find out the person. We're going to skip trace them. Then we're going to send them a really nice letter, but then we're going to stalk them on LinkedIn and Facebook. We're going to send them a gift and we're going to continue to send gifts to him every three months. And the gifts are, one's going to be a tape measure. And are you measuring the results of who you're using with your logo on it? The next one is going to be a Rubik's cube. And it's going to say, I'm still puzzled why we haven't connected. And you're going to find things that he loves. You're going to get find a John Mayer CD and find something that's signed on eBay for 15 bucks. And this guy is going to go, who the hell is this Mr. Dubois guy? Because I got to get ahold of him because he's so damn persistent. And that customer, you find five of those is going to be

able to three quarters worth of work and it diverts the gatekeeper. And this is the stuff that people love to talk about, but they never do anything. But I got so many more questions. So let's start. And we can go a little bit longer, but I want to know a little bit about, I know a lot about acquisitions and I know how to value acquisitions. The problem is it's hard to build something. Today I called my wealth manager and a couple of lawyers and I said, I need to build something that seems more attractive to them than me. And I think what I'm going to have to do to do hundreds of them a year, I'm going to have to let them remain some type of equity holder. I'm going to limit the amount because the day I buy them, they're worth four times more because I'm the platform company.

But I want to make it so attractive that when I go out, Jim, if I had a town hall with you and I was window washing, I was A1 window washing, that you'd go, dude, I'm pretty interested in this because this actually takes my upside to more than I could cash out some chips today. I can make a hell of a great salary. I could get rid of all the crap I have to do. And all of a sudden, I can make this equity that it's remaining worth 10 times more if I do what this guy says, and he's got a proven track record. So for me, I'm answering the own question first is I got to make something that's so damn sexy for the other person. And I think you need maybe one, two, three options, but it can't be, you know, I hear this,

every situation is different. Yeah. Different people want different things. But if you make it rocket science, you don't get any deals done. And I find out the guys that are making hundreds of millions of dollars, the best guys in the world at this, it's very simple. It's very clean. Here's how we do it. It's laid out. Here's what you need to get together. We're going to do some tests. We're going to do it. And here's what we're going to give you. So I'd love to hear, you've done a lot of these. What's your perception of a good acquisition? Well, perhaps fortunately in window cleaning, there's not a lot of people that buy window cleaning companies. So I kind of have that going for me. And like I was saying before, the strategy that we do, again, we never go away.

Once the list is made, they're constantly hearing from us. So when they're ready to sell, they typically reach out. Being that window cleaning, I'll start on the commercial side, it's so simplistic. I just find out from them. They send me information, whatever, how the conversation goes. What are they doing in revenue a month on their storefront business? Let's say it's $5,000 a month. All right, now I have a number. So when I'm buying that type of business, I just put a multiple on that $5,000 a month on what I think I can get for it. But when I'm on the phone with them, I'm asking them questions. I'm never answering any questions on this first call, but I'm asking them, why are you selling? My first buyout, he was moving to Washington State. Well, that was a

shoo-in for me. I just got some killer information. He's going to sell or he's going to let it go. And there's nobody else after probably that's going to buy it. So that made the negotiating tactics that much more aggressive for me. But then every question that I'm asking them, like, what kind of pricing are you getting per store, per service? And the answer typically always is too low. They don't price high enough. And I'll say, do you have contracts in place? None of them ever do.

And I say, hmm. So I started going through this checklist of all the reasons why it's not a good buy for me. And now they're a little bit disappointed thinking that they're going to get all this money for it. But then I'll say, give me a day or two, I'll call you back and I'll give them an offer. And the offer is whatever it is. Typically, it's going to be on the storefront side. And I've bought them anywhere from one to six months worth. One guy had a hundred accounts, but he had nothing more than that. He had all the negative answers to the questions I was asking.

I said, look, your business is not worth hardly anything at all. It's basically just a list. Yeah, there's some ongoing frequency there. And I offered him one month and he took it. So I've done 19 of these and they've all, the sweet spot's been about three to four times, but here's the thing. I never put money out of my pocket, maybe a hundred bucks, maybe 500 bucks. Everything is put into future revenue. Absolutely. And then with future revenue. Absolutely. And I've done it every single time that way without exception. So that's that side.

Then I go over to the residential side. I've yet to buy a large residential window cleaning company. Those that I've bought have all been under a quarter of a million dollars a year. So to me, there's no, in most cases, there's nothing there. There's no admin. They're basically one, two man shows. There's no supervisor. There's no staff.

What assets do you have? The only thing I want to buy is your amazing employees or your amazing customers because of your website or because of your partnerships or because you have something out there like stickers that are 50 years old. And I want to buy your phone calls and I want to buy your employees. And then I'm going to retrain them,

requalify them and 70% of them might make it through. But unless you've got a 10 technician company, all I'm doing is coming in and giving you equity is something you didn't build. I might as well grow organically. What's the purpose? Unless you have a really good asset, they're driving lots and lots of leads. Why would I come in there? Because I'm good at hiring. I'm really good at marketing. I'm good at training. I do what I call TMC. That's train, manage, and coach. But the main thing is there's got to be an opportunity there. I want to ask you, what is articulated sales argument and why is it important? The articulated sales argument, otherwise known as a USP, unique selling proposition, it's the argument you build.

It's the reasons why a prospect should do business with you. And it should and it has to distinguish and separate your business from all the other competitors that are out there. When you're designing an ASA, the mission is to get the customer to say, I would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone but you, regardless of price. But you know what people do? You know what companies do? This is what they say. I'm the best quality. I'm insured. I'm bonded.

Satisfaction guaranteed, right? I'm dependable. I'm reliable. But now do this, Tommy. Put this phrase, this tagline after those highest quality well i would hope so dependable reliable well i would hope so right this is what people do this is what these companies do they do nothing to separate themselves from everybody else well it's not objective it's not objective it subjective. So you got to make it quantifiable,

right? So the thing is they say I'm open nights and weekends and we do background checks. I hate that. What do you do that's different? We carry a hundred thousand cycle powder-coated max life trademark springs. That's quantifiable. We run our warranty calls before we run new service calls. That's how important our warranty is. And that's a fact. 97% of our installs have started on time. And the 3% that didn't were resolved in 48 hours. And here are their names, if you'd like to call them. That is real stuff. I love this. Keep going, because you just made me smile. You're nailing it one after the other because what you just said in so many words that so many others don't do is you're educating

the customer. When you educate them on why what you do is so much better than everybody else, just because you're educating them, it starts to get them to be 100% full circle, all eyes on you because no one else is saying this stuff. And the other side to that too, Tommy, is when you're marketing, window cleaning, pressure washing, et cetera, that's vanity stuff, right? So you have to go deeper as to why they need to have a better cleaning. When the ice dams fill up, it pulls away from the gutter from the house. And that's the other reason why you need your gutters cleaned and so on and so forth but if you can find the pain of that person and then offer the solution you're going to win most of the time and these articulated sales arguments i mean i'll be the

first to say it if you're brand new in business and you're in the home services industry and you're brand new just starting out you got to start thinking outside the box on what's going to make you better because you have no track record. You've got to come up with some stuff, things like you just said. So like my company, some of the things that I would say that I say are unique selling propositions, one, we are rated number one on Angie's list nationwide in A ratings. No one's even close. That's huge. That's instant credibility. That's an articulated sales argument. Another thing is, how many times have you waited for the technician to come to your house or whatever service it is? They don't call you. They said they were going to be there. They haven't showed up. Well, we guarantee our

estimates in 72 hours or I buy them dinner. No one wants to wait. And now they know that they're going to come out ahead, at least to a degree, if we're late. Do we always get there inside of 72 hours? Most every single time, but not all of the time. You know what we do? We send them a gift card so they can have dinner on us. We do things like one of the USPs that we have on my website is we have more Google, Facebook, HomeAd advisory reviews than any of our competitors. And again, that just adds credibility. But then you get even deeper with some of these things that you're talking about, that once you're there, once you are able to serve that customer, that's when the game starts

to change if you want to create retention that goes through the roof so they keep coming back to you. When my technicians are on the way and then all this stuff is cracked. When our technicians are on the, on their way, they have to make a phone call to that customer. Hey, this is Jim. We just froze the window painting. We're on our way. I just want to let you know, we're going to look like we're going to be there right on time. Can I pop by the store? Can I get you a soda or something?

I tell you that nobody does this stuff right yeah i heard you say at the conference but we've been doing it even prior to that when we pull up we don't just park anywhere we got a parking spot where they can see you yeah this is easy stuff you know this new truck i'm designing is when you walk into my driving showroom we're going to show you why a1 then i'm going to show you the parts we use, why the installation better is better. The installation, why our warranty is better. And then I'm going to give you a checklist and say, here's what I want you to go through, because I'm going to ask you when I finished, not only to give you a testimonial,

but Jim, I want you to call two other of my customers. When you call two other customers, these are our last two, I'm going to give you another $50 off. But you got to call them because I'm going to check up on you, Jim. You got to call them. I want to hear how I did. I'm just as curious as you. But I'm going to give you this checklist. It's got about 12 things on it. It's about cleaning up. It's about seeing darkness. Just so you know, Jim, I've got two pairs of eyes on everything. We call every single installer after we finish. We're going to make sure to blow out your garage.

We're going to make sure that your light bulbs are installed. We're going to make sure your springs are balanced. We're going to make sure we left the door cleaner. And listen, I'm going to have James out here. He's a big dude. If you need help with getting anything down or any other problems in the house or need a washer move, we're going to take care of that for you. We are a set it and forget it type company. This is the things we compete on and we are the best. And just so you know,

let's go through each and every part. Let me explain to you why it's important to you. And the difference is, is there's nobody doing this stuff. They all have good ideas, but they don't know how to do it. They don't know where to start. And like I said, this isn't fair. It's like guys like us, you can't compete against us because we're tenacious. We want to start. And like I said, this isn't fair. It's like guys like us, you can't compete against us because we're tenacious. We want to win. And it's like, I'm always looking for something better, for a better way to treat our customers, for better things to do for our employees, for better ways to go to market. And not a lot of people are like that. It's most don't do what we do. Most don't. And why? Well, they just don't know,

but they can know, right? What did I do after you spoke at the IWCA? I do this in every conference that I go to. I go right to the keynote and I start asking, I just start drilling with questions. I learn more from that than I do anything else. And I do this every conference I go to. I read books, leaders or readers. I might've got that from you. Leaders or readers. I love that. I said that at the conference. Yep. But you know what? It's not hard to make money. It's not. If you just start thinking, what does the customer want? How can you serve that customer? What's their pain points? What is it about that customer that's, how can you serve that customer like they've never been served before? And when you start putting all this

stuff together, like when we give it, love it, yes. When we give an estimate and we do competitor analysis every year, they'll come to my house, Christina's house, somebody's house. I want to see what my competitors are up to. What are they doing this year? Where's the price point? Where are the highest price in my market? And I want to keep it that way. We raise the bar. I have a lot of haters because I grab market share. They don't like that. But we also do things where my customers, I can't even imagine them going someplace else. We show up to the estimate to do the estimate. The estimates are compelling. We give them a free gift right at the estimate. My job is to move into that person's house. If I can move into that, so we give them a gift.

It's always there. And the gift is something that they absolutely want. They're not going to throw it away. Anytime they need this, this, this, or this, they go back to that gift. And my name is always right in front of them. You're not going to tell us the gift? Sure, I'll tell you to do it. So I wrote a, I didn't really write the book, but it's a 24-page manual,

how to clean anything in your house, stuff that you would never think of before. Because we're basically appealing to the housewife. But inside there, I've got some goodies in there when it comes to password trackers, when it comes to how often they should get their gutters cleaned, how often they should get their windows cleaned, how to clean things that they were... My wife, after I put this thing together, Tammy, I had her read it. She was like, her jaw just dropped, meaning, all right, I just won. I wrote something really, really good here. But you know what? It goes back to what I was saying before. We never go away. I want to move into that person's house so that they always know to call us. When we finish the

job, they get a beautiful gift from us. But the gift may be part of it, but the other part of it is all kinds of marketing material so that they spread it across the kitchen table. The neighbor comes in, they see this, they see that, they see this. Then when you couple that with all the other things that we've been talking about, where you're just constantly in front of them, it's just not hard to build a customer base that keeps coming back to you over and over and over again. You know, here's the biggest thing is experienced shoppers will spend more money. I'm going to a nice steakhouse tonight and I'm guessing I'm going with some marketing guys. So they're probably going to pick up the bill, but I always pick up

the bills. So it's not a big deal. But the point is I'll drop three to 400 bucks with three guys tonight, including myself. And I won't even think about it. The difference is, is a lot of people listening. It'll spend 30, 40 bucks and say, that was a lot of money. Maybe we should have gone and ordered the food ourselves. I will pay more for royal treatment to know that it's going to last. My house, years ago, was the best investment I had. I mean, I paid 275,000.

I put 200 grand, 250 grand into it. It's worth about 900 now. Your home is probably the most valuable thing you're gonna take care of in most Americans' lives. And my big thing about that is they're willing to put investments in it. They're willing to put, you know, you're going to hear me real quick. I think I might've said this at the conference, but 40% of your curb appeals, your garage is the 102% ROI. It's a smile of your home and darn it. It saves you a lot of money in the summer and winter under your energy bill. And kids go in and out of it. You probably use it like your front door. Let us get this fixed right. Let us make this the Taj

Mahal, the focal point of your home. And I'm passionate about it and I love it. And as I talk to guys like you, I've got so much stuff written down. It just re-energizes me to go fight. The problems that happen is Muhammad Ali got old. He stopped fighting. He couldn't. I mean, the best of all time, Mike Tyson, he's getting old old if I could keep my energy to where it's at it's like there's nobody that could compete because I'm so competitive and you're the same way look you're out there you're like dude it's impossible I'm gonna be knocking out these doors and the tenacity and just the overall you know I wrote down a lot of words, persistence. Just it's hard to compete with, and it's fun because you can take over an industry. Absolutely.

I got to interject for a second because this is how my brain works. The day I started my business here in North Carolina, somebody has to be number one, and it might as well be me. Somebody has to be the best, and it might as well be me. Somebody has to be the best, and it might as well be me. And that was my vision. When I walked out of that mattress store, and I started putting together my plan of attack for the Charlotte market, that's what rang into my brain, and it has never stopped. So every day, whether I'm here or I'm at my home, I'm chipping away.

What can I do to raise the bar even higher? What can I do to be even better? What can I do to capture even more market share in my particular market and maybe other acquisitions that I might do? When you start thinking like that, when you start putting yourself in the trenches and not coming up for air until you hit these specific targets and goals along the way, you're just going to charge forward. You're going to charge ahead and you're going to come out on top. Eventually, you're going to come out on top if you keep

swinging the bat. You know what's funny is I'm going to give some of the best clues I've ever given right now. If you want to know how to win, find your marketing source you want. Find the guy on every billboard. Go visit that guy. You want to learn about to win? Find your marketing source you want. Find the guy on every billboard. Go visit that guy. You want to learn about billboards? Find the guy that's on every billboard. You want to learn about Google? You want to learn about reviews? Call the guy that's getting the most reviews. You want to find out more about Craigslist? Find out the guy that every other ad for epoxy floors is Craigslist or whatever it might be. Go find the most common things in the world, which are HVAC in Arizona. It's probably,

you know, landscaping, things like that. And find the people that are winning at it and call them up and say, man, you are killing it. I've used you guys before. I am so impressed. Can you do me a favor? Can I take you out to lunch? It'll be 30 minutes. And man, I got a couple of tips for you too. I'm really excited. Look, I always ask people, give me some constructive criticism, but why wouldn't you want to follow winners? So I find the best, like, for example, I found the best guy. This guy wrote the book door to door millionaire. He's a door to door knocker. He's working with me right now. Door to door millionaire is setting me up with door knockers. I'm going to have 25 guys in every single city keeping six.

Nuts. These guys are the best of the best. I went to the best and I cheated. I hired him. And he wasn't even for hire. But I'm pretty tough when I want my way because I beg and I pray and I plead and I call and I beg.

But I love this stuff. It's got me so excited. I'm fired up. I have to interject a second. Door to door. So I have this new licensee in Johnson City, Tennessee, and we're getting him started. He goes, Jim, what do you think about door-to-door knocking? I said, you got to go do it, man. Orkin is huge with door-to-door sales. So we put together a little preliminary for him. Day one, we got the analytics, three and a half hours door knocking, 64 doors, six estimates, four on the spot sales, $1,500 in sales.

I said, Tony, check this out. Let's double the hours and reduce it by 30% to $1,000 a day, right? A typical person out there. Oh, yeah. You build realistic expectations in a scalable model, then you forecasted it. Yeah. And when you start thinking like that, I love this stuff. It's just right on.

You can take any one of these marketing plates and just go with it. We haven't done door-to-door yet, but that's something on the horizon. I've been talking about it for two years. I just haven't got to it yet. But, yeah, it's just crazy. It's just not hard if you just go with it. But it's, you were saying something before that I have to go back to you for a second. When you start finding the best of the best in these select industries in your area,

and you start reaching out to them, like you're saying, you know, the next chess move is now let's put together a joint venture. Let's put together some affiliate marketing or some reciprocal referral generation. Dude, it is, what's in it for me and how do you make it easy for me? I teach people with affiliate marketing is it's gotta be so simple. These guys can't even get their own salespeople to do what they want.

They're like, dude, I can barely get my guys to show up on time. Don't give them something else to do. So you gotta work with their software and you gotta make it, hit a button and make money. It's got to be, keep it simple, Simon. If I was going to teach anybody how to do affiliate marketing, is make it so simple. It's hard to say no. It becomes endless, right? Oh, it's a generation of referral based. It's, it's fricking genius is what it is. And I'll tell

you what, I'm working with the top guys in the world. And it's like, you know, when I do it at garage stores, the thing that's going to be tough is for me not to do it in every industry because I already know it. It's like I've always watched millionaires. They go through recessions. They lose a lot of property. You know, they lose everything. But guess where they are in two years?

Right back at the top because they have balls, first of all. I shouldn't, I try to, you got to be willing to take educated chances and calculated chances. And you got to, you got to learn from your mistakes fast and you got to be willing to ask for help. Look, there's no roadmap except the roadmap is the people that you have around you. It becomes your inner circle and it becomes you making time out of your schedule, either quarterly or monthly to go visit some other shop and talk to other business owners. I try, I mean, I'm talking to you right now. I have at least two to three podcasts a week because I got a lot in the hopper. I'm going to start doing two a week.

I get this stuff all the time, not to mention all the books that I read and the consultants I have. And you know, most people are like that, Tommy Mello. I've got more haters than you, I bet. I've got lovers and haters, no in between. But how do people get ahold of you anyway? What's the best way to reach out? I'll give you my phone number. You can call me, text me 704-451-0409. And in my email, I'll say it and spell it, jim at squeegeepros.com. That's J-I-M at S-Q-U-E-E-G-E-E pros, P-R-O-S.com. And I tell you, I love this business. I love entrepreneurialism. I just love everything about it because if you just focus and go, you can change your life. It's just not hard.

And give me three books. They don't have to be anything, you know, books that you've had along the path. I mean, everybody says the E-Myth, so don't say the E-Myth. I'm disqualifying the ones that I get every single time. Raving fans, I get every time. And I love these books. Trust me, they're my Bibles. But we know the E-Myth. We know raving fans.

Give me three books that have really helped you along the way. Okay, let me see. One would be, this is going back. This is probably late 80s, Charles Givens. The book was Wealth Without Risk. And it really set the stage of my life on bank accounts and insurance and investing money and paying myself first and accumulating something for all the hard work that I'm doing. That's one. Another one I read that I really got a lot out of was Marketing to the Affluent, Dan Kennedy. And that was a game changer for me with how to talk

to them, how they talk to you, how to design your marketing pieces to get their attention. They don't do Groupon. You've got to come up with something else. And one that I'm reading now, you kind of alluded to this earlier, some of the words that you were saying. I'm reading it now. I'm almost done with it. And man, it is making my head spin, Tommy. Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes.

Wow. Well, that's one of my favorite books. Here's one. So Chet Holmes passed away. But one of the things I was talking about the other day, I know his really well she lives in florida and it's the 12 principles but the one thing that he says is you got to be able to train fast and you be it's the picking of the employees that you learn and you challenge them and you say let me tell you something jim i don't know if you're a1 quality you know i'm just sorry but i don't know if you're ready to kind of i don't know if you're a one quality, you know, I'm just sorry, but I don't know if you're ready to kind of,

I don't know if you're the guy for me, Jim, I don't see you getting over some of the obstacles in this business. If you back down and you're a little, uh, I gotta be careful here, but if you're just not ready to step up to that and say, Tommy, if you don't think I'm ready for this journey with you and I want to jump on board with you, you're sadly mistaken. I'm going to not only make you money, but I'm going to make the culture better there. I've studied you. I want you and I'm here for you. And if you don't,

if you don't, you got to learn to challenge people and they got to be fearless and they got to be ready for obstacles and ready for change. And if you could do that, that's the one biggest thing. He teaches time management, hiring a players. He teaches everything from A to Z, how to train people. And this book, it's what I call the red Bible. I know I talk to Bibles a lot. This was the second book after the E-Myth I was given this book, but I'm going to do this. All good books. What would you tell the audience? We talked about so many great things here. This podcast was absolutely fire. I love it when I connect with somebody like you. I'm going to give you a few minutes to kind of close us out and tell the audience what they

need to do today, next week, next month, and what they need to be thinking about and coming out of this pandemic, what should be going on in their minds? That's a great closing commentary there. One, me personally, I'm just a regular guy. I have no unfair advantage. I don't have the Midas touch. I'm not a miracle business maker. I didn't already buy an existing business that gave me a head start. I didn't have a lot of money. I started with $100 to start my business. But there was one thing that I had that those that are listening need to get if you don't have it. You have to dream.

You have to have a vision of where you want your business, your life to go. I started with one client, that mattress store. And I had really no idea what I was doing, except for the little things that I did along the way with the previous company. So I had to figure it all out to get to the level that I'm at now. So when you start taking a look at this and you start breaking it down, you have to reach out to those that have what you want. And I wanted it so bad, Tommy, so bad. And I still want it so bad. But I wanted it so bad that I was willing to do what most are not going to do.

I was willing to do the uncomfortable. I was willing to stretch out of my comfort zone. I was willing to just get out there and just make it happen somehow, knowing that I was making mistake after mistake after mistake, but I never quit. So if there's four words, start and don't quit. Number one. Number two, keep swinging the bat. Because what happens if you keep swinging the bat? You're going to hit the whole thing. You're going to hit some once in a while. You're going to hit them. And if you just keep doing it, you'll keep hitting them. So I guess that's like the lesson rule number one in the rule of business.

Just go for it and don't stop. Pandemic, don't do what so many people do. They close up. They go into a little shell. They're freaking out. They don't know what to do. Then they don't do anything. Us, we're out there grabbing market share.

But yes, and you said the words, you have to take risks, but you make a calculated risk. Christina and I sat down for, it was probably two weeks, strategizing how we're going to get through this and how we're going to make this happen. And we, alluding to what we were talking about before,

we knew the market that we served and we just started turning everything up, namely the marketing, and just putting everything together that we already do, and we win, and win, and win month after month. Our revenues are going literally through the roof. Four trucks, eight guys in the last two months just to keep up with the demand. So don't let pandemics, don't let downturns in the economy scare you away. You just put that head down. You start just scribbling.

You're talking to your staff. You're reaching out to people like you and me and everybody else that's out there to figure it out how we're going to get through it. There's no magic pill. There's no magic secret. It's just hard work. It's just getting out there and just giving it everything that you've got in a smart, decisive way. Because most aren't going to do that either. There's so much there. I think the

one thing is, the one thing I've realized since I've talked to you at the IWCA, the one thing I say that I've become really good at since then is reflection. looking at the past because I'm so I'm a visionary. So now I look and I say, what could have been better? What communication, what technology, what script, what checklist, what standard operating procedure? I find holes. I find bottlenecks. And if you can look at the past and say, what could we have done to get more efficient? What could we have done to communicate better? What could we have done to sold more? What could we have done to lower the rate to get that 31 times multiple of our marketing? And as you start to reflect, you see, we get so busy and just engulfed with time. The time gets stolen from us when we're in a small

business, especially in home service, because we got to go. It's easy to run a restaurant, in my opinion. All my problems are when you open the front door. I can contain that. See, with us, all of our problems start at the front door. Then they go to my customer's house. They go to my logistics, my driving. Then they go to my distribution center. Then Home Depot messes up. So our problems are everywhere. So people that think, oh man, the restaurant industry is tough. I mean, it's tough through the pandemic, no doubt. But I'll tell you what's tough is everything is our problem. Our distribution, our supply chain, our phone systems, our internet. I mean, it doesn't stop.

So you wonder why people haven't taken over like Domino's Pizza. At certain companies, it's hard to scale a business nationwide. Like SafeLite Repair is done. SafeLite Replace, SafeLite. They've got to be system-oriented. Man, this is killer. Let me throw something else out there. Keep going. I wanted to throw one thing out that I was thinking of. For those of us that are in a pandemic situation, a lot of us are, if you want to pandemic-proof your your business here's some insight one develop your dream team your banker your attorney your insurance guy and your accountant that's your family in contact with the family business cash has always been king right and it's you know it's cash it's cash flow and it's positive net income keep a a focus on that. Another one is find out what your customers, what do they want? What's going to make them feel comfortable when you're going into their home during this pandemic and able to serve them, like PPE, for example. is hire super hard. You want the best of the best. You only want A players.

And if they can't abide by policy, they're out. That leads to culture. Culture is so important that it will absolutely set your team about. We did an Outback takeout here at my office a couple weeks ago. We had all of our lead guys here. We were here for three hours just eating, drinking beer, just talking it up and just talking about things that said, hey, we got your back. We're going to get through this. We're going to be bigger and better than we ever have been.

Who wants to go along for the ride? See, pandemics, any way you look at it, every day is a new day. So that forward thinking becomes crucial because now we've learned something along the way. It may happen again. And we only get better. It will happen again. We only get more streamlined. Yeah. I'm going to text you.

I've got your number here. We need to get together more. I love talking to guys with the same energy. You see, not everybody clicks and that's fine. And certain people can never keep up with us. They'd be like, dude, I don't even like to be around those guys. They're fast and they talk fast and they're loud and they're obnoxious. They say what's on their mind. I meet very few people that are on the same wavelengths. And I think we are, but obviously I think there's a lot of cool things we could do

with each other. That's pretty cool though. Just tenacity, that desire to be number one, that aspire to be number one is the main thing for me, finding competitive people. But see, I could find somebody that's not as, they don't aspire to be number one, but I make them competitive. My dad made me competitive when he'd say, look it, I beat you. You can't even beat me with one hand at pool. And I'd be like, oh, I'm going to beat you. I practice every freaking day till I whooped his butt. And then he started playing two hands and I whooped his butt and he goes, holy cow. He used to do 70 pushups a day.

I got to 100 a day. My dad was the reason why I'm so competitive. And if you could learn to pull that out of people and challenge them and gamify and competitions and friendly things and group activities, you could push out the aspiration to be number one. And I think a lot of us don't realize that, that we have the ability as leaders and to build a culture that demands that. But I like to have an upper hand

and get that in the beginning though, because I control who I hire, no one else. And at least I have the systems to get people. I get a big one leg up on most people because I can save anybody in five years. I can do psychology. I could listen to their problems. I could help them, but I want to find a winner and just make them a huge winner. You know what I mean? When we hire people, Tommy, we're looking for that A player. And when you can put dangling carrots in front of them, incentive programs in front of them, we just introduced a stiff program recently. All of a sudden you get to see what these guys and gals are made of. And little by little, their bars start to raise because they want to be the

best that they can possibly be because they want to fit into the culture that you've created. So it almost becomes self-filling for the company to just grow when you can find those people that recognize those opportunities because they want to win when they can hit those people that recognize those opportunities because they want to win when they can hit those incentives and hit those stiff rewards and it just makes them a better person. Hard to find those people, but they're out there. We do hiring events. We don't do one-on-one interviews. We do hiring events. It saves us so much time, but everybody's competing against each other because they all want the job. Well, look, I'll tell you my biggest secret right here is I don't hire

people on the unemployment line. I hire them by making everyone, I teach every one of my employees to turn into a recruiter and they make a lot of money. Adam said we paid out $70,000 in the last month for new recruits. And I'm like, best 70 grand I've ever spent because you know what my top guy did last week? 79,000. So that was one guy. So he picked up a couple of big accounts. He picked up a small HOA, but look, that's one good hire. I've got a guy that's going to do 2 million next year. What do I care? Look, at the end of the day, give a lot of money, get great people. Find people to switch careers is how you find the best. Find somebody that's amazing. They're amazing at flipping burgers. They're the best busboy you've ever seen. Give them a chance to be the best garage door guy, the best window

washing guy. Jim, I got to run here, but I got to tell you, keep up the energy. And I've already texted you, so I can't tell you enough. There's podcasts like these that are fire, where we give back, we give everything we got to make other people successful. We bring people with us. That's what's important to me, is I want to be looked at at my funeral with, man, that guy changed my life,

and that guy made an impact in my life. And you're doing that to a lot of people. So keep up the good work, and congratulations on everything. Thank you, Tommy. Thanks for having me on as a guest. I just so enjoyed this whole time that we spent together. I've got a ton of notes here. So well, I'm already, I'm already, I'm ready to go to work. Hey, listen, I gotta go tell my assistant

to do 20 things. I got five minutes and you know, I'll go over everything with you. Let's touch base this week. And like I said, keep it up, man. Just let me know. I text you and we'll be in touch, brother. I appreciate it. Thank you again. This was a lot of fun. All right, man. Take it easy. 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 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.