The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Create a Thriving Company Environment to Attract A-Players

Episode Date: August 23, 2019

Brad Weimert started breaking national sales records at the young age of 20, as the top sales representative of a company with 30,000 employees. In 2009, he established Easy Pay Direct, an online credit card processing company. Through Easy Pay Direct, he helps e-commerce businesses find creative solutions for payments done online, via mobile, or even in brick and mortar shops. In this episode, we talked about Recruitment, Business Growth, Financing...

So, trying to build a hiring system that is effective to find the right character traits and competencies. It's trying to find operational systems that help me focus on how we approach things as opposed to exactly what we're doing. of the basic principles that we can make decisions with. And one of them is, I have to expect that the first time that I delegate something, it's not going to be anywhere near 100% because they have to get up to speed. So if I delegate something four times, and the first time they do it 30% right, I have to have patience and say, okay, well, let me try to reframe this or help you understand the process better. And next time you can get it 60% right. But it's really learning to be patient with people and help cultivate the good ones. 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, ladies and gentlemen. Tommy Mello here. I'm here with Brad Weimert. Brad, how's your day going? It's good, man. I appreciate you having me on. Yeah, I'm excited. What part of town are you in, actually? What part of the country, I should say? I am in Austin, Texas. Oh, I love Austin. I spent my 30th birthday there. Nice. Great town. And that probably sounds that sounds like trouble to me, Tommy.

It was, yeah. But it's a long time ago now, but it was fun. You know, there's a lot to talk about here because I think financing is a secret weapon that a lot of home service companies don't really think about. And you've been involved with all the way back from Cutco selling knives door to door. Tell the audience a little about what you've been involved with all the way back from Cutco selling knives door to door. Tell the audience a little about what you've come up with and a little bit about the things you're working on now. Well, there are kind of three core elements in my life right now that I'm spending most of my time focusing on. Easy Pay Direct is one of them. A lot of running and physical exercise is another. And then the third is Unplugged Fiji, which we predominantly work with people

that are taking credit cards when the card is not present, meaning they're not swiping it. So the majority of our business is Ecommerce companies, usually between $1 and $50 million a year, where they're taking the card either on the internet or by phone or on a mobile app. And the mobile app for us qualifies most of the time. It's not present, even though today you could actually swipe cards that way as well. So that's kind of the nutshell of Brad Weimer's world. But all of it is exciting in its own right and has kind of different nuances to it. Yeah, it sounds like you've done a lot over the last years. I know you've actually climbed Mount Everest, what was it, twice? Yeah. So I did a mountain climbing adventure. I didn't actually climb Everest. I climbed a mountain 34 times in a row, which is the height equivalent of climbing Everest twice.

Oh, I got you. Okay. That's still quite an incredible fee there. I've never came close to climbing a mountain other than Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, which is like a little hike. Nice. Camelback's great, though. Actually, when I was training for that particular adventure, it was training for it on Camelback. So I was in Phoenix for an event and I was waking up at like four o'clock in the morning and going over to Camelback and then just hiking it over and over and over. So like up and down six times, which was a blast. Camelback's awesome.

Yeah, yeah, I had fun out there. So when you grew to be as big as you are at this point, what are some of the struggles that you've come up with and actually faced as far as being able to get and scale the business? Honestly, I think one of the most significant challenges that I keep bumping into is I'm a doer. I'm an executor. And what has gotten me to be successful in life in general is that when something has to get done, specifically when it's under pressure, I will grab the reins and run with it until it's done. But as you grow, you hit a point relatively quickly where you have to recognize that you can't do everything by yourself. And so going through the process of learning how to delegate and how to trust others and how to invest in others and lead others to build their skill sets, I think has been probably the biggest challenge in my adult life from a business perspective. Yeah, that's always been difficult for me, too.

And I've had a lot of managers around me say, I would rather just do it. If I don't do it, it won't get done right. So what have you done to overcome that challenge? Well, the short answer is I'm still working on overcoming that challenge. And then beyond that, for me, I always try to fall back into structures and systems. So trying to build a hiring system that is effective to find the right character traits and competencies. It's trying to find operational systems that help me focus on how we approach things as opposed to exactly what we're doing. And I'm always trying to go back to

the basic principles that we can make decisions with. And one of them is, I have to expect that the first time that I delegate something, it's not going to be anywhere near 100% because they have to get up to speed. So if I delegate something four times, and the first time they do it 30% right, I have to have patience and say, okay, well, let me try to reframe this or help you understand the process better. And next time you can get it 60% right. But it's really learning to be patient with people and help cultivate the good ones. Yeah. What do you do about getting the right people on board? Because that's a good question that I think all of us struggle with, especially in the home service niche. Yeah.

You know, I'm right in the middle of working with an HR manager to redesign our hiring systems. And I'll give you kind of the basic flow of what we're doing. But the number one part of it is, again, it's creating a system. So the first thing that we want to do is define the role clearly. And there's two parts to that. Once we know that we need a role, it's outlining a mission for the role. So what's the ultimate objective of that role? And then it's creating a list of outcomes. And you can think of those as KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. But what are the metrics that we really need them to... What are the outcomes that they have to achieve in that role? And once we know that,

then we can go and say, okay, well, what competencies does this person need to have in order to be good at this role? And those competencies are things like detail orientation and being tech savvy and leadership skills. And once we've defined, let's say, a list of 5 to 10 competencies, we'll go through and rank those and say, okay, well, what's the most important stuff on this list? And what are the must-haves versus the, we don't really need those, it'd be nice to have them, but they're probably low on the list. Because at the end of the day, there are no unicorns, right? People always have shortcomings. And frequently, it's the shortcomings that make their strong points so strong. And that's a really important thing to recognize too. But once we've ranked those, then we... And this was the key. This was one of

the big things that I was missing in the hiring system, was we rank those competencies, and then we go through the, let's say, five or 10 competencies, and we create definitions for them. So if we say, you know, detail orientation, we'll go through and we'll write a few bullet points, two or three bullet points for what does a highly detail-oriented person look like? And then we'll also write a few bullet points for what does a really terribly undetail-oriented person look like? And then we'll also write a few bullet points for what does a really terribly undetail-oriented person look like? And then what does the middle of the road look like? And we do that because if we can define what high, medium, and low are,

then no matter who is doing the hiring, we're all using the same criteria to rate them on that particular competency. And that's a huge thing because that allows it to be less subjective and really a scoring mechanism. So from there, we say, okay, we're looking for these 10 competencies, and we'll come up with questions that we think will help us find those competencies. But the questions will be specifically targeted with the outcome of trying us find those competencies. But the questions will be specifically targeted with the outcome of trying to find those competencies.

And so if we have a question around detail orientation, we'll listen to their answer and we'll look for those traits that either make it high, medium, or low, and then give them a score on that question of three, two, or one. Again, this is a way to make this an objective process as opposed to a, oh, well, they felt like a good person. You know, yeah, they seemed awesome.

Which is frequently what I was hearing from people on the team that were hiring. Was, oh, you're going to love this person. They're great. And my response is, why? And they tell me a couple things and they're all excited. But it came down to kind of a personality thing. And they're like, oh, we all like people that are similar to ourselves. So this was a way to make it a little bit more objective.

Does that all make sense? It does. I really like that because I've never heard that approach of defining what the characteristics are. And I think a challenge for me would be able to identify some of these characteristics. Do you use personality profiling like flag page or disk? Yes. And that's a part of it.

And I haven't used that enough over the course of time. But we are doubling down on that right now. So we've used disk historically, but I haven't had a really thorough understanding of the entire kind of disk framework. So I have people do a disk assessment, and then I kind of glance at it, but not really make assessments around it. So now we're, I think we're probably going to move to Myers-Briggs, but either way, my belief there is, it's not as important what personality profiling you're using, but that you really thoroughly understand it and can extrapolate what the different scores, right, what the different ratings assessments mean relative to personality behaviors.

Yeah, I work with some people that have tried them all. They showed me their flag pages and I have not adopted it yet because we spent a small fortune all getting disc trainer certified guys all the time. But yeah, I really like flag pages. And I've not done a ton with Myers-Briggs, but I know when I was in my master's program, we took a bunch of personality profiling and we really got to see different things that we were good at and not good at. And it's really good to identify your weaknesses because I don't like to be a well-rounded person and work on the things I hate because I want to be a happy guy that, you know, I've got 200 employees. I want to work on the things I love. And why would I want to, there's so many people that says, yeah,

I'm going to really focus on doing this better because I suck at it. And I'm like, well, what are you good at? Make yourself the best at one thing. You know? I love that. Yeah. I'm a perfectionist by nature. And one of the challenges of my adult life has been to back away from that and work on

just accomplishing as much as I can and iterating, right? Let's get version one done. Okay, let's get version two done if it ever happens. But we end up with a lot of version ones instead, which is fine. I think it ties into what you just said, which is I need to just focus on the stuff that I really enjoy doing and like doing. And that can be hard, especially when you're feeling bandwidth constraints, or you don't have A players on your team. Yeah. It's important to identify what is an A player. It can't be subjective. I feel that so many people say, I feel like you're doing a good job, but there's really no evidence of that. It's just you see them working all the time. My general manager used to work with this gal all the time.

He's like, she's one of the hardest workers I've ever seen. And I'm like, she gets nothing done. She's always working, but there's nothing actually... There's nothing getting done. So we use this master project list that we focus on. What are the five biggest movers that's going to make the company... Whatever is going to move us towards a goal. It's not always the most amount of money, but maybe it's just a process that's broken that we feel like we could really work on.

And we spend time every day focusing on those top five things until they're done. And then we pull another one over from our master project list. And it really helps you stay on task. It's been a culture thing for us to really start embracing this. And it's making a huge difference because we're getting stuff actually accomplished now. Instead of everybody saying, I was really busy today, but I still got so much more to do tomorrow. What did you really need to get done that was going to move the company in the right direction, work on the business instead of in it?

Yeah, man. Well, I'd love to hear what you use because what you just said, that employee that says, man, I felt really busy, but they can't pinpoint progress towards a goal, those employees get frustrated, burned out, and or quit because they're not inspired. And if you don't feel like you're progressing, life is not very much fun. No, it's not. And that's why what I had to do is master the steps of delegation. And I don't dump anymore. I tend to write things down, have a sign-off, and actually have a handbook and a manual that people sign off on. And it's changed our whole business. It's like people accept their responsibility and they know how they're being graded. Steve Jobs used to, in a certain career at Apple, he used to fire the bottom 20% each year. But it was very black and white.

You went into the fourth quarter, you knew what you had to do to surpass that bottom 20% each year, but it was very black and white. You went into the fourth quarter, you knew what you had to do to surpass that bottom 20%. If you didn't do it on December 31st, you were packing your bags, you were out of there. It was everybody didn't say, what an asshole. They said, okay, this is how we've done it every year. And he calls it top grading. And that's what, you know, there's a whole book about top grading and I'm a big fan of it. I'm not a big fan of pushing people on. If they got a will, I could find a way. But there are a lot of people you might bring on. And after the honeymoon phase, you realize that will is kind of not there anymore. You ever get that? Yeah, no question, man. Scott Lowry, a friend of mine that owns a marketing agency called Fathom that really

all they focus on are major marketing plans for universities, which is kind of an interesting niche. But he said, look, if you're ever letting somebody go and they're surprised, that's your fault. You failed as a manager because the expectations weren't clear to them. So how are they supposed to do well? You never set the right expectations. And I really like that. I like the idea of that's the onus there is entirely on leadership because you should have a game that makes it very clear to the employee, hey, this is when you're doing well.

This is when you're not. And that's it. Yeah, that's true. And it's really, it's hard to do that i will tell you in accounting because it's like i've got checks and balances certain roles become difficult there's such easy roles to punish and put performance improvement plans or give the carrot to and of course small bonuses and it's really difficult and other ones but it just takes someone that thinks like an accountant to come up with a game for an accountant

that they can win and to keep track of that. And I got to tell you, personally, I love math. I don't love accounting. I don't love QuickBooks, but that's just, that's me, I love marketing. So it's one of those things you probably like owning a platform that does merchant services. It's all about numbers.

So I don't know if you like to look at a balance sheet in an income statement. I'm definitely a numbers person. And I can definitely geek out on spreadsheets. But it's not what excites me. So I'm good at it. It's not what lights me up. Yeah. You know, there's some people that just they like the order of it.

I like those people around me because they kind of balance me out. because I'm like, ah, this is not fun for me. But I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs, they set these huge goals and they never really get to the bottom of them. What advice do you give some entrepreneurs that they don't really know how to goal set or sometimes they set them way too big? I think those are two different things. So I think that if you're setting something that's really big, the biggest thing is to break that down to small bite-sized pieces and make sure that those pieces accomplish two things. Make sure A, they're driving towards the goal, but B, they are motivating enough to keep you going. Because if you said, one of the things that happens with us is our customer service team

or frontline sales team, we can show them what our financial goals are for the year, but that's not inspiring to them. And if we can't show them how they're... Let me actually reframe that. In order to get it to be inspiring to them, we need to show them how their independent KPIs contribute to that goal. We need to show them a way that their day-to-day activity is actually helping move the needle on the goal. And if it's totally disconnected, then there's no inspiration, there's no motivation. And I think that principle applies to an individual and also to a team where, you know, if you set a big goal, and you say, okay, well, I broke it down to the smallest pieces, and you start doing the small pieces, unless you can see exactly how that's contributing to the big goal. It's not inspiring, it's not

motivating. And I think that people, you know, you can say, like, I'm an incredibly disciplined person, and I will grind it out. But you're remiss to ignore the fact that motivation plays a big role in this stuff. And you really is a collaborative effort to have them have a voice. I think I read somewhere that 78 or 82% of Americans feel underappreciated and undervalued at their company. And that was unbelievable to me, but I'd imagine in this day and age, there's probably 70% of children and parents feel underappreciated in their homestead. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think the other major thing with goal setting for a lot of entrepreneurs in particular, this probably applies to other people, but,

and I don't think of myself as sort of the prototypical, you know, squirrel chasing entrepreneur. I like to think that I have a little more focus than that. But people that are idea people that are running in a bunch of directions, one of the things that prevents you from maintaining focus is the little discouragements that stop you from moving forward in a specific direction. And sometimes they're totally unconscious. Sometimes a friend says something and all it is is a sentence that plants a seed that takes some of the wind out of your sail. And I think that the antidote to that is understanding what it means to make a decision

and what a decision actually is. And saying, once I've made the decision to do this, I am doing it. That's it. And that's really, I think there's a lot of discipline involved there. And I think that's a loaded statement. But I think it's a point of failure for quite a few people when they set goals is they set goals until they get really difficult. And they set goals until they, quote unquote, find it impossible. They can't do it. Sorry, a little bit of a rant, but that's what hit me. No, it's good. I love this stuff because goals are one of those things

where we all get distracted. And I think the biggest thing when you set small goals is to accomplish those goals and stay. In a book that I really love by Chet Holmes, it's called The Ultimate Sales Machine. He talks about pig-headed discipline yeah and he talks about that all the time and it's about pig-headed relentless discipline and focus and organization and you know i go in some people's offices and do some consulting here

and there and i look at their warehouse and i'm like how could you be functional do you have no order in your life? You have no order in your home. And I think that's the first element is to get organized and the org chart and the processes. And typically, it's not a people thing. McDonald's doesn't believe that they're going to hire the perfect person. They've got a little machine they push a code in. It's a four-digit code. And then the soul comes out. If you didn't put your code in eight times during a shift, then you get written up. So that's a process that's hard to be broken. And they understand that going in. And I think that's a little overboard, but it's scalable, right?

And it's just checks and balances. And some people think you shouldn't treat humans like that. Well, how would you like it? How would their... There's another book I read and it said, what would their parents feel like? You know, if that's like what you've got to do to get people to do their job. But I'm like, I never really was offended when there was checks and balances at any place I did.

You know, it's just, it keeps everybody honest. Yeah. I just had a conversation with somebody yesterday about this, actually. And he said, my coworker gets all offended and weird and defensive when I pull up his accounts online or when I work with his stuff, like look at, talk to him for me, do my things for me, add notes for me. And there's a difference in mentality of the totally open person has, the person that's doing really well has no concern about being watched over. The person that is insecure, uncomfortable, or doing something totally deceptive and wrong, those are the ones that tend to be uncomfortable being watched over. And I think it's a growth mentality versus this insecurity, which I don't think either are right or wrong. But I think that the insecurity leads to some other things and there are healthier approaches. Yeah. And speaking of which, for all the home service people out there, the way you set up your office, my door is locked right now, but I can see into both offices outside of me with my general manager and my door staff. people out there, the way you set up your office. My door is locked right now, but I can see into both offices outside of me with my general manager and my door staff.

My door is clear. And everything I do is in a smaller space that you can see what's going on on everybody's screen. And there's actually a lot to be said about how you set up your office to match your hierarchy in the org chart for success. And before, I used to have these huge cubicles, and it was so much freedom. And I'd walk in, and everybody's on Facebook or YouTube, and just stuff's not getting done. And now, I mean, we ran out of space. So it's actually a really small area. But there's a lot to be said about that, and it creates accountability. Me, I love accountability. I was talking to my buddy last night and he goes, why do you love accountability so much?

I'm like, that's why I have a trainer at the gym because I show up. And that's why I got a ping pong coach and a golf coach and all this other stuff is because it makes me better and it holds me accountable. And I did pretty good on my online classes when I take them, but I preferred to show up to class just because there's the Parkinson's law that just explains you give somebody a longer window

and they're still going to wait until the last minute to get it done. So shorter windows work. But you once said how a person does one thing is how that person does everything. How does that relate to entrepreneurs who are always doing a ton of things at once? Obviously, that's a little bit of hyperbole, but there's a lot of truth in that.

And I think that the through line there and the intention behind that statement, how you do one thing is how you do everything, is we are creatures of habit. And the way that humans are designed is to compartmentalize things and create rules so that it makes it easier for us to make a decision the next time. So, for example, if every time I crossed the street, I was concerned about what these big moving things were coming at me. And I had to assess whether or not it was safe to cross the street. What a car was, if it was going to hit me, my life would be horrific. I couldn't make those decisions all the time. So we create rules that are, hey, if cars are coming, don't walk.

Really simple rule. But through that, you build habits, right? You internalize these things because you create a reference point in your life that your brain goes back to the next time you're in that situation. So for me, when I'm training, when I'm doing physical training of any kind, I have rules that are, one is I don't stop. And I don't stop. I have friends that run and they'll stop at a drinking fountain, get some water, or they'll stop and talk for a little bit and stretch for a little bit.

And my rule is I don't stop because specifically when I'm really tired. Because as soon as I stop once when I'm really tired, the next time I'm tired, that becomes an option for me. The next time I'm tired, I think, oh, well, I could just stop here. But my rule is, I don't stop when I'm tired. And that rule applies if I'm telling myself that constantly when I'm running or pick an exercise. I have the decision then when I'm doing any other activity, if I live by how I do one thing is how I do everything. I can be at the office, be really tired in the middle of a contract review or in the middle of a meeting

or in the middle of pick an activity that you've been grinding at for a while. My brain needs to go to the same place and my brain needs to go to, I don't stop right now. I don't stop because I'm tired. And that's a massive self-taught component. But those reference points you create play out in every vertical of your life.

So that's my general philosophy on that stuff. I think that's really good information because there's so many times... The best way to relate to that for me is the snooze button. Yeah. And sometimes I might miss out on my morning. I've got this Bowflex M3 that we do 14 minutes and then I do curls and then I do pushups. And the mornings I do that, which is the majority of the time during the week, I fill a million bucks when I show up to work. The time that I don't, it's like, oh, because of the darn snooze button. And I just, it's really about self-control. And I think that that's not, it's easier said than done. I mean, people struggle with the food they eat. They struggle with going to the gym. They struggle with spending time with family. I think there's a lot of healthy things that come out of what

you said is just don't succumb to the temptation, or you will all the time. Yeah, well, the shoes button is such a funny example. I've got a very good friend, Hal Elrod, that wrote this book, The Miracle Morning, which is all about morning rituals and routines. But he routinely speaks about this. And I don't know where this came from, but he's like, if you don't like when the alarm goes off in the morning, the worst thing you can do is hit snooze because it just keeps going off in the morning. So instead of subjecting yourself to it once,

you subject yourself to it three times every morning. And that was a comical way to look at it. Did you say The Miracle Morning? Yeah. Oh yeah, that's a great book. I've been doing that. I want to say I haven't been doing the journaling as much. I know that Joe Paul just came out of a book for The Miracle Morning for addicts.

He was author of it. And that one just got released. I saw it on Facebook a while ago. But yeah, it's a great concept. My sister, she's an amazing woman. She's got a good career, mother of three. And she said it changed her life. She started doing it this year.

She lives in Milwaukee. And it's definitely something that mornings are so important, whether it's your first meal, your exercise, your journaling, your meditation time. I mean, that's what it's all about. And you know what he said is don't put your snooze button anywhere that you got to get out of bed to hit it if you're gonna hit it and you're gonna get all the way up and hit the snooze to go back in bed you probably got more issues

yeah no question about it i actually uh hal just released the miracle morning movie in sedona and i saw joe Polish up there during that. But there's no question that there's this massive following around it. And it's because it's something that everybody deals with. And there's clearly an effective system to change the way that you wake up in the morning. Yeah, well, I think there's that. And I think it's changing the way I'm a night person. And of course, that's an excuse. But I think you can be trained to be a morning person. You just got to change your sleep patterns. It's just there's a lot to it. And there's a lot of psychology behind it. But it's been a game changer as far as productivity for

me during the day. And really being able to self-reflect on the day before, which is something I've never done until recently. And breakthroughs come out of it and actually self-awareness, you know? Yeah. Can't agree with you more. And I think for me, that's kind of the meditation component and the writing component is this opportunity to reflect and gain clarity. And it's really just dedicating the focus and the energy to that part of my life. And it's very easy to ignore that when you're running a million miles an hour in 15 different directions. And yeah, you got to make time for that stuff. Yeah, it's a good topic. And I definitely want the listeners to go check that out. You know, one of the biggest things I hear, sometimes I coach, sometimes I do some public speaking,

I do different things, is they always say, how do you get such good people? How do you hire? What's the secret? And I don't think it's a secret. I think it's about a numbers game. And the best companies I've ever seen, they never stop hiring. They never stop posting one ads. They're always recruiting.

And there's always room on the bus or on the boat or on the ship or on the plane for one more key player, one more great person. And there's always room. If you get five a week, you can make time for it. Tell us a little bit about your hiring process and what you do to attract great people other than just a lot of money, because I don't think money is all of it. Well, I went through quite a bit of that with creating the mission, the specific outcomes that we need from that role, the competencies, defining them,

the right questions to pull those out, standardizing the scoring. In terms of attracting them, one of the things that I'm becoming more aware of and spending more time and energy on is culture. And it's something that I think specifically when you're young in business, and I mean young as a company, not as an individual. I guess it's potentially both. But when your company is young, it's very easy to push that off and say,

Well, culture, core values, blah, blah, blah. And you kind of, it's easy to go through the motions of, hey, these are our core values. And, you know, this is our mission statement. And then really never do anything with it and have it be empty and meaningless.

And so one of the things that I'm consistently, that is a huge focus for me right now, is making an effort to consistently go back through the systems and breathe that stuff into the systems and the lifeblood of the company. Because ultimately, if your culture is reflected in your job ads, in your hiring process, in your onboarding process, in the day-to-day, throughout the entire company from beginning to end, even exit interviews, right? If all of that is consistent, you're able to create an environment that is very authentic. And if people resonate with that

particular environment, they'll be really attracted to it. And if they don't, then they won't. But you will find people that are much more in line with what you're after, the more clear you get on that and the more you really inject it into the company. And that's, again, I'm not going to pretend to be perfect at that. That's very much an ongoing process for me. But it's become really clear exactly how important that is. It's one of those things where most of the people, I promise a lot of the people listening, and I hear culture a lot, and I'm a big culture fan, and I think we've molded a really great culture here, and it's a work in progress. But how do you get to that point where you start focusing on culture?

Because some of the people are working 14-hour days, and they're really trying to just figure out, you know, and a lot of us, we say, we just, there's always problems. There's always fires. We become firefighters. And it's like, I can't get anything done. I'm going to work from home today. I'll get more done than I've ever had.

They don't show up to work, but they get a lot more done. How do you get to that point? How do you overcome those obstacles? Because I'm sure you've had those when you first started. Yeah, I still have them in. And this goes back to what I was, I can't remember if we were talking ahead of time, or I mentioned this on the podcast, but I've turned into a very much a phase one, phase two kind of person. So I might have this grand plan of, I want to make this thing and I want to make it perfect. But instead of aiming for perfection, what I aim for now is just getting phase one done. In phase one, just so there's no confusion, phase one is not a shitty version of the final product.

Phase one is a scaled down version. It's a really good, but very scaled down version of the final product. Phase one is a scaled down version. It's a really good, but very scaled down version of the final product. And so that's my goal of phase one. And the same thing is true of culture. Take the small steps. Don't worry about, hey, we're gonna have a perfect employee handbook. We're gonna have a perfect hiring system. We're gonna have a perfect exit interview process. We're going to have perfect reviews. Don't worry about any of that. Worry about what are the baby steps that you can take and take a baby step every day. And that might be, put one extra sentence into one part of your business every day that reflects your core values. Look at an email that goes out and make sure that you have

something in there that reflects your core value. And if you don't know what your core values are, spend a couple minutes a day doing it. Or just spend 5 minutes writing down 5 words that you think describe your company or what you like about your company accurately. But the underlying component there is baby steps, right? Do little things because those little things compound. Yeah. I think what Dr. Marvin wrote that book. And what about Bob? I agree wholeheartedly. I just thinking about that book like a week ago, I'm like, somebody should really write the book, Baby Steps. Just take little, I always say progress, not perfection. Keep the ball moving forward. I love it.

So I just want to talk about a couple other things. And then I'd like to talk about this Fiji trip too. So marketing is by far my favorite thing in life. I just, I love to market. And every day, I don't care if you're meeting your wife or some of the other meeting your husband or meeting strangers or networking or whatever we do, we're marketing. And we've become salespeople, believe it or not. We're selling ourselves. So I guess my question to you is, Brad, when you're out there and you're growing your business, and you've done a lot, you've done, in my opinion, a super stellar job of networking. And you know a lot of great people. I mean, you told me earlier, your circle is fulfillment for you. And you've got, no matter if you lost everything, you'd still be rich, not in money-wise, but

just the people you surround yourself with. As far as marketing tactics go, I think that that grassroots approach is unbelievable. And I think that it's what makes a company successful. But give us some good tactics and maybe some strategy behind building a good marketing. What do I want to call it? Just a great marketing campaign through every source. Man, I mean, that's a huge question. I'll give you a specific one. And I'll tell you one that I just really enjoy and think is fun. When EasyBidRx started, we were incredibly

undirected. We were doing feet on the street sales, literally walking into businesses, getting whatever merchant accounts we could. We were doing... I didn't have money. I bootstrapped the company. So when I started, I put a bunch of money on a credit card to sponsor an event and had a booth at an event. And part of that was that I knew what I wanted to do was focus on partnerships. And I think strategic partnerships are one of the best and one of the most logical ways to grow, sort of organically. And it's not really fair to use that word, but partnerships keep going

when you are not actively doing things, right? If you have alignment with somebody that's sending you business, they can just keep sending you business as long as you're doing a good job, as opposed to, you know, knocking on doors, cold calling in any capacity, which is a much more calculated dollars in time in, dollars out situation. So strategic partnerships, I've always liked.

They both have their pros and cons, but I've always liked that reason. So I'm a huge fan of shock and awe and doing something to impress somebody on the front end that's a possible big client or a possible partner. So one of the things I did really early was... And this ended up being a very long process, but I really wanted a partnership with digitalmarketer.com. And they are actually in Austin, Texas, which is funny because I wasn't at the time. But one of the verticals that we serve online are people that are selling information. And that is their business model. And they also are an influencer in that space.

So at the time, it was two people that I knew that ran it. There are actually four, but Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher. And what I decided to do was sponsor their event because it was the center of influence for us and it was the first event we had ever sponsored. Again, I didn't have any money for this, so I threw it on a credit card, but sponsored the event. And the other problem I had was that

the event was running simultaneously to this guy, Mike Filsaime, who is now a good friend, but he ran the marketers cruise and it was a cruise that a bunch of marketers would go on for seven days and hang out in the Caribbean and socialize and connect, network. The problem is they were happening at the same time. So in order to get to sponsor the event, which was Traffic and Conversion Summit, it was like their second or third year.

In order to sponsor that event, I had to get off the boat in Jamaica, get off my cruise ship in Jamaica, take a cab across the island in Jamaica to the airport, and fly directly to San Francisco for Traffic and Conversion Summit and meet the only employee that I had at the time to run this event. So this was like a big thing. So that's a good story, right? There are kind of fun elements to it. I've got to do all this stuff. So I thought, all right, well, it's fine that I'm going to sponsor the event, but I want to meet Ryan and Perry and I want them to know. So the iPad mini had just come out. So I bought an iPad mini and this is like, I don't know, six years ago, maybe. So rewind to the tech clock quite a bit and recognize the first iPads and how cool they were when they came out. And I also hired some videographers to shoot a quick video for me. And again, rewind the tech clock. I couldn't just pick up my iPhone and shoot a quality video. So I shot this video and had it edited. And basically, it just told the story. I was like, look, Ryan Perry, I love what you guys

do. We are in such good alignment with this that not only are we sponsoring the event, but I'm literally getting off a boat in Jamaica to fly my ass over to see you because I think that we can do something really cool together. And we did a custom backdrop on the iPad. As soon as you turn it on, the video is already queued up. So you push the button, the video is right there. And that told the story. But that shock and awe package to them made them aware of who I was immediately. And that was the foot in the door to build that relationship, establish that relationship.

Which ultimately, they ended up being a client. We ended up doing some partnership stuff with them. And that was a fun, unique marketing campaign that kicked things off. Yeah, I've gone to some of their stuff. I was invited out a couple years. I'm really good buddies with Jody Underhill. I've worked with Roland Frazier. Roland's amazing. Yeah, he's a very, very smart man and a very shrewd negotiator. There's no doubt.

They're all great guys. They're great marketers. I've learned a lot. Frank Kern, it's a small world of what they do. They've done a great job. I do think that, you know, I met with all those guys in vegas one year and we were talking afterwards having drinks and and this is good for this podcast because they said dude of course we come up with material and we make money i think the one that i

went to in vegas they were doing these uh suit they're like the uh cuffs they were selling suit cuffs yeah out of china that they first started and then i think perry might have had a new suit on from china and he was working on a deal with that the first one just came in and he was like if but they are always working on stuff but they go dude you got your own software you created for and it's not the crm it's a simulator and they're like you've got your own patents on a lot of stuff. They're like, you want to public speak? You want to be like us? They're like, go out there and own that freaking industry.

You know, they really pushed me to say, look, this is great. We love what we do. But at the end of the day, you're already doing it. You're already doing it in a real industry. You got real employees. Scale the shit out of that. And it meant a lot to me to talk to guys that were on stage all day and everybody admires them they're like it's not a bad thing they definitely didn't say don't pursue your dream to be on stage or

whatever and that's not really the goal it's to go there and help people i mean at the end of the day but really meant a lot to me meeting those guys we sat down with roland for several lunches and just got to know them we were going to do some projects but um like i said sometimes when you don't know a ton of stuff as far as marketing uh digital products sometimes i feel like you get taken they make a lot of deals with a lot of people and a lot of them take off it's kind of like a shark tank they're like a mini shark tank sure off and some of them don't i It's kind of like a shark tank. They're like a mini shark tank. Some of them take off and some of them don't. I can only say great things about those guys. I admire them. They do great work. They build

great sales funnels. They're very up-to-date on social media. I'm personally a huge Google guy. I still believe that Google will outdo... I mean, Facebook just got hit with a lot of things on... The platform is going to get a lot weaker next month

because they can't use the people's data. Facebook just got hit with a lot of things on the platform is going to get a lot weaker next month. And because they can't use the people's data. I saw this thing the other day. It had a kid pointing a gun in two directions. It said, when you mentioned something to your friend on the phone and it pops up on Facebook, but yeah, that's great,

man. I really appreciate this. I want to talk a little bit about your trip. Explain to me what all this, this huge trip to Fiji is all about and what these, if someone's listening out there could get out of that trip and what they're going to meet and learn and everything. Oh man. I mean, I'm beyond excited about the trip and I'm,

I very rarely speak in extremes. Like you won't probably will never hear me say it's my favorite thing ever. It's the worst thing ever. I just sort of am even keel all the time. If something really bad happens, my response is, okay, I'll make another decision and do something differently. But nothing really hits me hard. But this trip, Unplugged Fiji, is super exciting to me for so many reasons. But I think at the core, it's because... So sorry, the brand is Unplugged. And this trip is unpluggedfiji.com. And it's exciting to me because the general concept is I believe that relationships are the foundation of literally everything in life. Whether it's personal or business, almost everything that you do in life starts with a relationship. It wouldn't have

happened had you not met somebody, had you not learned from somebody, etc. So Unplugged is an opportunity to unplug from your day-to-day so that you're in an environment that allows you to connect with people on a deeper level. The bullets of the events are that I charted an Airbus 330 and we're flying 250 curated entrepreneurs, so people that we've heavily vetted, from LA to Fiji for a five-day event. And it revolves around five tracks. So growth, social, adventure, culture, and rejuvenation. And the idea with that is, instead of having a bunch of educational tracks where people are sitting in a room the whole time, growth is just one of the tracks. And so we've got some really amazing people that are speaking there. But you know what? If you don't want to sit in a room and listen to speakers,

then don't. Somebody else wants that seat. I want you to go be you on the trip. Or try something out that's new, that you don't know if it's you. If you want to go scuba diving and you never have, do it. Or if you want to sit on the beach and get shit-faced, then you can do that too. I'm sure that there will be people there doing that in fact we actually uh rented a private island to do a day party which is super cool and super fun so there's definitely stuff like that but we blocked out the entire intercontinental in fiji for the event so it's just there's so many neat special things about it from

the chartered plane in the beginning to the experiences when you're out there to just the quality of people that will be there. It's hard for me not to get excited. Yeah, those events are life-changing. I think it takes the right person to go on that and actually be open and just willing to talk to people and really embrace new ideas. And if you're that type of person, I think this is a great opportunity because it really is. I mean, I look at a guy like Joe Polish, who does I Love Marketing, and he started cleaning carpets. I mean, that was his business. And he met people and he introduced people. And then he teamed up now with Dean Graciato.

I always screw up his name. Graciato. Graziosi. Graziosi. And they got their 20K group. And it's amazing. He's got people like Richard Branson on there. He's got one of the Sharks, I think Barbara on there.

I mean, it's amazing what he's been able to do. It just has amazing people on's been able to do. It just has amazing people on to talk about marketing ideas. And I think the most of it evolves around, like you said, strategic partnerships. And I think that's something that the great businesses, I had a guy that had 300 franchises. He said, Tom, you know, the ones that kill it are the ones that get involved with the local community, the baseball sponsorships, the door-to-door stuff, the B&I groups, and just really learn about the community, the HOAs, and they're just involved people.

Those are the franchises that kill it. And a lot of times people just think, hey, I'm going to do some Google, some PPC, maybe some Facebook ads. I'll do a ValPAC and I'll do well. It really takes you getting out and knowing the people because that is a lot of a hundred percent of what some people do. I've met, I met a guy the other day, he came out thinking about buying his company. He's not ready to sell though. I really don't think, cause he doesn't know what he's going to do when he sells. He's like, this is all I know for the last 30 years. When I sell it, what do I do? But

he didn't spend any money in marketing. And I go, dude, this is nuts. And he saw my advertising, how much I do. And he goes, you're nuts. How is that even possible you spend that much money? I go, I haven't been doing this for 30 years in a city. I'm like, you built this name over a long time with stickers and word of mouth. And I'm like, imagine starting up again in a new city

with no marketing. What would you do I mean you have to do some guerrilla marketing and some grassroots and but it's tough but you should never forget that the main thing that I want to just remind people when it comes to marketing is just where did you start what did you start with and why did you stop doing that because you started making some money it doesn't make sense but uh Brad thing I'd like to do is talk just at the end. I'd like to give you the opportunity to tell people how to get more of you. Maybe talk about a book that you really like.

And then at the end, we'll talk about something we may have not discussed that we could talk about right here at the end. Yeah. I mean, more about me. You can go to bradweimer.com, which I try to keep up, or you can probably find me on Facebook too. My world pretty much revolves around those three things that I mentioned right now.

It's some crazy adventure activity that I'm doing. And I go on adventure trips all the time. Right now, they tend to be revolving around running, rock climbing and skydiving and snowboarding are typically in the mix as well. Easy Pay Direct and then unpluggedfiji.com. Those are the three core things that I'm focused on and working on. In terms of a book, Principles by Ray Dalio is without question the best book that I've read

in recent history, if not ever. And again, I'm very careful to say things like that. But I've been really, really impressed with the thoughtfulness of the book and the structure of the book. And for those that don't know, Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Capital, which is, I think, the largest hedge fund company in the world. Certainly one of the most successful. But it's about this aggregation of rules that he has defined to run both his personal life and his business life. And he just kind of breaks down the logic of this set of principles and why he lives by them. But it's been really, really tremendously helpful for me

in both business and personal life. That is awesome. I'm actually a big Audible guy. And would you say, I've heard that's a big book. Is that, you know, like there's a Phil Knight book that's called Shoe Dog. Yep. You got Tim Ferriss' New Tools of the Titans.

It's a monster book. How big is this book? So it is a thick book. I don't know pages, maybe 600 or so. But I'll tell you this. Shoe Dog, 100% you can listen to and audible because it's a story. And you'll get... It's super entertaining also.

And you get lots of stuff from it. Tools of Titans. I also... The only podcast that I listen to ritualistically is Tim Ferriss'. entertaining also. And you get lots of stuff from it. Tools of Titans. I also like I'm a, the only podcast that I listened to ritualistically is Tim Ferriss's. And I think you can digest a lot of that. I don't know if he actually has that one on Audible, but you can digest a lot of it that way. Principles for whatever reason for me, when I listened to it, I found myself thinking, man, I really want to take notes on this, which is a very different way to digest something. It feels a lot more like studying, but I get completely enthralled in the book. I sit down and I underline and I make notes and I underline and I drink more coffee and I underline and I drink more coffee and, I get totally wrapped up in it. So for whatever reason, for me, it was most effective for me to sit down and read it. And I'm just not even concerned with

how long it takes to get through because I get so many of these like massive nuggets as I walk through it. I love those books. I mean, I read too much, I think, and I'm actually getting ready to go on a deep sea fishing trip. And I'm, I want to bring a lot of books. I mean, I fly through books on Audible because I listen to them at super fast speeds, but I digest it and I really try to outline everything. And they allow you to bookmark on that. And then I always bring about four or five real books. And it's just a three-day trip.

It's two nights, three days. But I love those getaways. And if that's what it takes for me, it's like a refresher for me so that's great stuff as far as maybe something we didn't discuss that you think would be great for the listeners out there is there anything you wanted to touch upon possibly no come come check out austin sometime it's an awesome city or don't i don't care yeah no it's great look we covered a lot of great stuff.

I love these podcasts because I always learn a lot from them. And it's nice hearing people's perspective. If you can just take one gold nugget out of every podcast that's from somebody that actually knows the stuff like Brad that's actually lived through it, that's built a successful company

and hangs out with winners all the time. I mean, I think it's so true. Hanging out with people that are going to bring you up and elevate you. It's like every time I shoot pool or play ping pong or go golfing or, or shoot darts or bowling or anything that I do or work out, I try to work out with somebody that's stronger than me or a little bit better than me, or sometimes way better than me. And they can get me to that next level so much faster. And it's so nice to feed off of people that actually have a very good idea of

what they're doing. You know, I don't ask my accountant how to golf, but I'll go to them and really ask them tax strategy and my CPA and different things. So having that, just that culture around you and those people are so significant and you've done it. So I admire you for that. And I've had a great time and I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, I really appreciate you having me. All right. Well, listen, for you guys out there, I hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you on the next podcast. 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 Home Advisor to the CEO of Valpak and of course, Ara, the CEO of ServiceTitan. 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