The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Differentiate Your Home Service Company In A Saturated Market

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Wade Langston Swikle is the founder and CEO of 2 College Brothers Moving, Storage and Franchising, He is also the founder of Smarter Moving Solutions LLC and the co-founder of Moving Titan Retreats, a mastermind retreat that brings together ambitious moving company owners worldwide to uplift the moving industry. Wade started his moving company with $600 and a pickup truck at the age of 21 while a student at the University of Florida over 11 years ago. From there, he grew the company to a multi-million dollar business with multiple locations and is now successfully franchising the concept.  In this episode, we talked about the moving industry, upselling practices, franchising, market seasonality...

As far as the seasonality goes, I mean, I turn the dial up in marketing in the off-season because most companies freeze and they shut the marketing down because they're trying to cut costs. For me, it's an opportunity to gain market share. And then we'll still market in the summertime, but we don't necessarily have to keep that dial turned up once we're booked up. So the goal is that we don't get booked up. We keep buying trucks and we keep hiring because we're always hiring no matter the time of the year. We're always looking to replace our weakest link, especially on the mover side of things. Because we want our guys to have a little fire under them that says, Hey, if you're slacking off, if you come to work on weed, you're gone. There's somebody

here ready to take your job. And that way we can just stay sharp. And a lot of the other companies in our markets, they slow down and their best guys aren't getting the hours that they need. So if we can crank up the marketing dial, and it's giving us a good return, 10x return is ideal or even better, then we keep those guys working and recruit from other companies too, like our competition. 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. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert Podcast. Today I got Wade Langston Swycle on, and he is an expert in the

moving industry, entrepreneurship, and franchising. He's based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Wade is the founder and CEO of Two College Brothers Moving, Storage, and Franchising, host of Grow Your Moving Company podcast, and co-founder of Moving Titan Retreats. Wade started his moving company with $600 and a pickup truck at the age of 21 while a student at the University of Florida. Over 11 years ago, grow it to a multi-million dollar business with multiple locations, and is now franchising the concept. He hosts the longest actively running moving industry podcast. He co-founded Moving Titan Retreats, a mastermind retreat that brings together ambitious moving company owners worldwide to uplift the moving industry. Wade has a master's degree in entrepreneurship

from University of Florida and owns five businesses. Pretty impressive. I'm just trying to be like you, Tommy. So tell us about your journey. Tell us, you know, 11 years ago, you decided moving a lot like my story. Why moving? Why garage doors? And tell us some of the hardships and what the future looks like. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, I was a college student. I played baseball my freshman year of college, came home for the summertime. And my dad basically said, you need to get a job. I had a partial scholarship, but it was a private school that I originally started at small division two school in North Carolina. And he's like, you know, you got to pay for these, uh, these student loan bills. So get to work. And I, it was during the recession. This was's like, you got to pay for these student loan bills so you get to work.

And it was during the recession. This was like 2000, summer of 2009. Not a lot of places hiring. I grew up in Venice, Florida. It's a seasonal town. So businesses go to sleep in the summertime because our season's in the winter, like Phoenix. He's like, I got a job for you folding clothes at a JCPenney department store. I was like, that sounds like a pretty miserable way to spend my summer. Let's see what kind of physical labor I can go do. So I started posting ads on Craigslist saying, young college athlete looking to do any kind of physical labor. I got calls to mow yards.

That sucked. Got calls to help carpet cleaners out. I got calls to help handymen out. But I started to get a lot of calls to help people load and unload their U-Haul trucks because the money was tight. It was the down economy and people were trying to save a little bit of money. They liked the idea of hiring a college student athlete as their mover because the moving industry is pretty notorious for sending out some shady people. And yeah, I spent the whole summer doing that. I made a few thousand bucks, got to choose my own schedule. Mostly got cash, tips.

Got fed most days. They'd buy me lunch. And decided to transfer to University of Florida. I played on the club baseball team over there and continued to do the same thing. I worked a lot of odd jobs, but I would always be posting these ads on Craigslist. I started to dial in the services that I was offering mostly to just be moving. Got picked up by another moving company. Worked for them for a little bit. Graduated with my undergrad, bachelor's in telecommunication, broadcast

journalism. Realized that was not what I wanted to do when the teacher said that if you want to make $19,000 a year for the first five years of your career and go live in the middle of nowhere and work 14-hour days, six days a week, I said, if I'm going to put that much time and effort into something, I'd rather try to own a business. So I applied for a master's degree in entrepreneurship program, really at the time to stay in school, although I knew I wanted to one day own a business. I just wasn't quite ready for the real world. And part of that program, we were told to go out and start a business. It's like the thesis of that program. And I was like, well, this moving thing might have something to it. And all my classmates were trying to start the next Uber, the next Facebook.

These were relatively new at the time. They were these sexy apps. And I'm sitting there in a master's class trying to start a moving company. And so that was Smarter Moving Solutions. We competed actually against two college brothers moving in storage. That was started by a couple other college students. And I love their branding. Saw their truck pull up at a stoplight one day. And I was like, that's exactly what my idea was. That's exactly what I wanted to do.

And I kept one of their flyers on my desk for a whole year, just looking at their brand and just kind of visualizing, I wanted to be like them. I wanted to emulate what they had done. They'd been in business a couple years longer. And one day I'm sitting there, I'm talking to one of my employees. I'm like, how can'm talking to one of my employees. I'm like, how can we scale this thing? How can we grow? They supposedly had like three locations across Florida. And I wanted to open up more locations, even though I was nowhere near to do that. And they called me. My phone rang. It was one of the original brothers. And they said, Hey, we're trying to sell the business. We want to go do some other stuff. And my jaw hit the floor. I was like, no way. I've been idolizing you guys. So I met up with them. They basically were like,

we're trying to sell it. We want $45,000. And I was like, I've got $15,000. And I didn't even have $15,000 at the time. But they took me up on the offer. And they accepted my lowball offer. And I scraped together $15,000. My older brother had given me a three-year loan to be able to cover this $15,000 thing. And I graduated from that master's program. And so this is what I want to do. I'm having fun. I love being my own boss.

I love running a business. And I decided to consolidate the brand into the two college brothers model. I didn't know there were all these other collegiate branded moving companies that are, I guess, are out there. I didn't find that out for a couple of years after that. We had just started to take off. And that was in Gainesville. It was a pretty small market,

like 120,000 people. And I knew that if I wanted to franchise it, I always dreamed of franchising. You hear everybody say they want to franchise. I didn't even know what that meant, but I just knew I wanted to figure it out and do it. And decided to try to open up a second location in Tampa. So we opened up our Tampa location in 2015. Was not ready to do that. If I had to take it back, I would have stayed in Gainesville and perfected the model. And I just spent the next 3 or 4 years just running myself ragged, going back and forth, trying to figure this whole thing out. And it was about 2018. We started to get a lot of traction. I went to my first mastermind meetup. And one of the takeaways I got, we all presented on our

business for 2 days. I'll stay in an Airbnb with some other moving company owners. And one of the takeaways that I had was that I needed to bring my headquarters to a bigger city than Gainesville. So I decided later that year to move our headquarters down to Tampa. We kept the Gainesville branch running. And it was a good test to see if what I had built could continue to grow and continue to thrive in a smaller market without me being there. And it did. And I ran 2 locations for several years. And I started the Moving Company Podcast or Grow Your Moving Company Podcast. In order to just learn about the industry, I was calling other moving company owners in different markets trying to find out,

how do I succeed in this business? And the conversations I was having were just gold. I was like, we got to record this. There's no other moving company podcast that's out there. I didn't really have an end goal with it. I just figured it would open up opportunities and I would learn something on every single episode. And so that's when I started that back in 2017, 2018. And that, along with the masterminds that we continued to do, which we spun off into moving tight retreats. I have a moving company owner who lives about an hour and a half away from me in a different market. We got together and formed that mastermind group where we're hosting these 3-day retreats multiple times a year where we bring together moving company owners, bring together

entrepreneurs that can speak to moving company owners. And every time we do one, just get fired up, walk away with new ideas. And really during COVID is when our business started to take off. And I wasn't ready to franchise until I felt confident that we had figured out the recipe, that we had reverse engineered the perfect moving experience,

both for our customers, but also from a business standpoint that we could be profitable and scale. And for the last few years, we've been growing at 80% year over year and sold our first franchise earlier this year. Back in May, we sold our Gainesville location. So that's a whole other dragon that I'm learning and trying to slay. It's the whole franchising model. But our Tampa location is continuing to grow. And our Gainesville location is growing now that we have an owner up there and we're testing out that model. And it's been a lot of fun. I'm having

more fun now than I've had probably ever in this business. So learning something new every day, though. That's fantastic. I got a couple of things. Definitely read the book, The Seven Power Contractor and study Al Levy's manuals because those are really important with a franchise. And a guy like me, I'd pay you 10% if you said, hey, Tommy, we're moving into this house, but they don't have a lot of storage. In Arizona, they don't have basements. We'll go deck out all the overhead storage. And we just call it a marketing fee. We pay you. And I'm telling you, there's affiliate deals left and right you guys could get into. You could get into probably some pest control, some closet organization.

Any of those things, there's a lot of things that you'll go into and say, hey, moving downstairs was kind of tough because you didn't have a banister. We installed those. I know you don't want to get out of what your core is, but if you could have somebody else fulfill it and take 10% and just by making a phone call and it makes sense and it's economical and they'll treat your clients right, I'd highly recommend. It's free money. Yeah, I love that. We're getting into a lot of the storage stuff now. We've got an 11,000 square foot warehouse. We're busting at the seams. We've got the vaults stacked three high. I think we've got about 280 vaults now here

that we store items in, kind of like pods, I guess you could say. We're looking for some more space with that, which the storage piece is nice because it's passive revenue, passive income. It covers a lot of our fixed costs, our operating costs. And it also allows us to get bigger, more profitable moves. We can do interior design receiving. We work with a lot of commercial projects where we'll receive furniture because they don't have a place to receive the furniture and we'll inspect it, take it apart, and then deliver it once it's ready, once it's all there. If somebody's building a new house, a lot of times, especially more affluent people, they're not moving their stuff. They're buying designer furniture to fill that house.

But if it's being built, they have nowhere to put it. So we can receive that over the six months to a year while they're building it, while their interior designer is picking out the items. We're doing that right now for the head coach at University of Florida out of our Gainesville location. Just started there last year. So there's a lot of opportunities there adding in the storage piece. Maybe I'll get into self-storage one day. I know that's really lucrative. It's also pretty competitive right now. But there's a ton of opportunities. I love the storage piece of it. And we're getting a lot more into the commercial moving side of things as well. If you could go back and talk to 11 years ago, talk to your younger self, give me a list of things that you would have

had a conversation with. I'm sure we both have a list a mile long. Yeah. I'd say first, I wouldn't wait five years to start seeking out mentorship. You know, I thought I could figure it out all on my own. I'm this college kid. I'm supposed to be smarter than the average peanut. And yeah, you know, there's not a lot of college educated people in the moving industry, especially, you know, master's degree. So maybe I was a little cocky, a little full of myself back then. But once I kind of got a little, you know, humble, more humble and started listening

to what people that were where I wanted to go were, that's when things really started to click. And I was able to kind of read between the lines, put the pieces of the puzzle together and knowing my numbers. You know, I had a master's degree in business like you and our podcast that we just did. You mentioned the same thing. You know, I didn't know. I barely passed finance, barely got through accounting. I thought, as long as cash is coming in and my bank balance is growing, that's it. I can just buy what I can afford. But it's just so much more than that. As you know,

and as we grow and get bigger, and we're well into the multi-million dollar range out of our TAMP allocation, our gains allocation is too... It just gets more complicated. You need cash flow projections. You need to have your cost of goods sold dialed in. You need certain metrics for labor percentage, fuel percentage. Claims need to be below a certain level. Your administrative expenses for employees needs to be under 10%. Our marketing needs to be under 10%. So I didn't know any of that. If I would have known where the numbers should be, how to create a healthy P&L, I would have gotten a lot farther along. And then just having trackable marketing expenses. I've read a lot of Dan Kennedy's stuff. And I love everything that he has with the no BS

direct response for non-direct response marketing businesses. I actually found out about Dan Kennedy through the I Love Marketing podcast, which I just heard you do an episode with Joe Polish on. Probably, I don't know, this was probably six or seven years ago when they were like doing it over like a phone instead of using technology to record it. So yeah, getting the marketing, the numbers dialed in, that made a huge difference as well. And do you ever think, I always ask myself, what if I ended up in roofing or HVAC? You know, my average tickets with door sales, I think 1237, I service anywhere from 15 to 18,000 clients a month. And I say, if I was this tenacious about another industry, and I don't really have this what if moment, I just think

I'm really happy with where I landed. I wouldn't change it for the world. I'm in a really good spot. But do you ever think, I mean, I met an HVAC guy that got into garage doors and he said, how do you even do this? And then I meet garage door guys that got into HVAC. One guy, 7 million in 12 years of garage doors, 7 million, he hit the 12th year. First year in HVAC, the 12 million. And this guy told me, I was just in Dallas, he said, it's so much easier in HVAC. What are your thoughts? Is there anything that you ever have a moment of just like, is it juice worth the squeeze or you just, you're all in? At this point, I'm all in. But for the first seven or eight years of my business, I was like, what the hell am I doing? I felt like I was stuck in my business. My business ran me. I didn't run the business. And it wasn't until I started to figure out

the game of business that it became a game. And now I'm having more fun than I've ever thought possible. Every single day, I'm excited to get up at 4.30, 5 o'clock in the morning, go work out, then get right to work. Last night, I was working until 11.30 at night. And I had to force myself to go to bed because I knew I had to be... We work out. We started a 6am six-pack club with our team. So Tuesdays and Thursdays, we all work out together. And so I knew I had to get up.

So I had to force myself to go to bed because I was just so immersed in that flow state, working on a project, dialing in some job costing stuff. We're getting ready to redo our whole pricing model, actually rolling that out tomorrow at our monthly sales meeting. And basically, it's designed to widen our margins by up to 22%. But psychologically, be competitive to the client, better service the client, better track our line items on different revenue streams, and how those tie directly to certain expenses like fuel or labor, for example. So yeah, I mean, there were definitely a lot of those times.

And my mind is always turning. I mean, I've got... I'm at least... I either own or I'm a partner in five businesses right now. I got a wiffle ball league that I just invested in, which is a ton of fun. If you play baseball, try wiffle ball. I mean, I started...

I wanted to buy a boat, but I was like, how can I justify the cost of this $170,000 boat? So I started a boat rental business. I do boat setter. I'm trying to maybe get into that with some Turo stuff to have a way to make toys pay for themselves. I've got the franchising business, the core business with the moving company, and then the retreat business. We're having a ton of fun planning these retreats. And we're basically... I think we have 3 spots left for our September moving time retreat at the end of this month. And we got 37 moving company owners all coming down similar to your Freedom event, I think, in the sense that it's like a 3-day long thing.

We've got speakers and sponsors and masterminding. We're all... We're going to work together during the day. We're going to play together at night. We're going to have relay races in the morning. So we're having a ton of fun with that too. And it's all part of the ecosystem. That with the podcast, we're building this ecosystem within the moving industry so that A, we can attract franchisees. B, we can attract top talent. C, we can learn from one another. We can hold each other accountable and push each other, build vendor relationships. The podcast has opened a ton of doors with beta testing new technology and products. And we're uplifting the entire industry. We're uplifting the service. We want to improve. Even if there are competitors, we want to raise the bar for what

customers expect when they think about the moving and storage industry because it's got a better app. There's no doubt about the fact that most people have had a horror story dealing with a moving company or a move in general at some point in their life. And we're trying to change that so that we can charge higher prices, people pay more, we can make better margins, and we can clean it up. That's ultimately what I'm trying to do with this ecosystem of moving-related projects and businesses. Do you have a timeline and a goal? I don't know, two-year, three-year, five-year, ten-year.

Do you have anything kind of plotted down on what you'd like to see this grow to? Yeah, well, I want both of our existing locations, our core business and our Gainesville franchise, to both be 8-figure companies. I want to sell 12 franchises. We're focusing mostly on Florida and the Southeast because I want to do it the right way. There's some other moving companies out there that tried to scale way too fast. They started franchising and they struck gold in the beginning and they just sold franchises to anybody and everybody. And we've seen a lot of problems with those models. We've had a lot of people come and work with us, work for us that worked there at one point. They're like, yeah, there's no training. There's no... Basically,

pay the fee and you're off. You have a cool looking brand, but that's it. Or they scale across the country where you don't have the brand leverage of moving trucks, driving around, all representing the same brand within the same geographical area. So we've earmarked 13 territories in Florida that I'm trying to self-franchise in over the next two to three years and then continue to grow the core business and become the biggest moving company in Tampa Bay and ultimately in Florida and the Southeast and just kind of scale from there. You know, the way they value this type of industry is it's a multiple of EBITDA. So your goal is to

make sure every franchise is successful and maximizing dollars for the franchisee as well as yourself, the franchisor. And what's nice about your plan of slow growth is you're going to deal with a whole new set of issues. You solve those, you grow your next location. Then you got another set of issues. And once you get 10 of them, the sky's the limit, because I think it's easier to go from 10 to 100 than it is to go from one to four. There's a lot of systems that are going to be created, a lot of recruiting, a lot of branding. There's just a lot of things that go into that. And the more success each franchise or has, the more you'll be able to scale this thing. Exactly. I only succeed if they succeed. I want

them all to be getting 20% EBITDA at the end of the day. And that's after royalties. If they can't do that, then I've failed as the engineer behind this whole project. We use Trainual. We've got every single role from our movers to our salespeople to our managers to myself, to our...

We have a fractional CFO that we work with right now that's basically a member. He's an extension of our team. He works with, I think, two other moving companies. And he's helping us create the systems and processes from a numbers and accounting standpoint so that we can get that organized and all dialed in. We've got a video company on Retainer right

now that's filming training videos. And we're using that content that we're filming for our training videos as cross-promotional stuff. We're building out a YouTube channel and setting up reels on social media, Instagram, so that we can multi-purpose that. But he's coming in here every other week and filming our processes. We've got everything in writing. We've got it in training.

We've got a test for it all. But I'm trying to figure out the best way that we can train on it because you could have the best process in the world, but if nobody follows it or nobody understands it, then it's not going to work. So I'm trying to cover every angle how people learn. Having been to college and all that stuff, I've learned a lot of ways that don't work on how to teach you stuff.

But I found that putting it in writing, recording an audio version that people can listen to while they're doing chores or driving or whatever, making the videos, and then incorporating the hands-on approach, the kinesthetic approach, and then testing for the comprehension on all of those things is starting to work out really well. We have meetings with different departments every day because at this point, my job is mostly running the business and leading the business with meetings and reports. I have flash reports that I look at weekly. I look at reports monthly, profit and loss. We have sales huddles every single day where we go over the bookings, the leads, the missed calls, the talk times,

the outbound dials that we're monitoring through RingCentral with the different user profiles that we have set up there. And we hold each other accountable through those. And so we're using the reporting. We're talking about it at the meetings on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, if not some combination of all three. And we're trying to train and get better every day. One of our core values is honing our skills. And that's something that... One of the questions I ask every new hire, I just interviewed a prospective sales manager today. I said, what was the last book that you read? Or what was the last self-development seminar that you went to? He didn't have an answer for me. And that was... Everything he had set up at that point went out the window. Because if I'm training every day as

the CEO and reading books and listening to podcasts such as your own, if I'm going to the seminars... I think I'm going to 3 seminars for the next 2 months, one being the Freedom Event coming up here in Orlando. If I'm talking to all these mentors and moving companies, then I mean, my team sure as hell better be also. It started to be a punch in the face, but I've realized the people that got me to where I'm at now aren't going to be the same people that get me to the next level where I want to go. And some of them might be. If they're on the bus and they buy in... I had to make some tough decisions this past summer. We let go one of our longest tenured salespeople that was selling $150,000 a month because he just wasn't buying in.

He was thinking small. He was not following the process as how we wanted them to be fulfilled. And we had to make a really difficult decision because it was nothing personal. I really liked the guy. But we need people that buy into the vision and the processes that we're trying to create to get to where we want to go. You know, Ken Goodrich with Gettle told me at a board meeting, he said, he looked at every single person on my team and said, you know, Tommy calls me sometimes at midnight.

He goes, he does five podcasts a week. He's devouring books. He speaks on stages. He's a relationship guy. He goes, Tommy, I'm a little worried that these guys aren't going to be able to keep up with you. And my best advice, if they're not willing to put 10 to 20 hours of self-development after working a 50-hour week, I need you to fire them.

And I was like, okay. And then he calls me up later that day and goes, is that a little much? I go, well, it's a little much. But, you know, I'm glad they needed to hear that. But what I found is with a lot of the guys and gals that work here is I needed to get them. I got so obsessed with learning and they saw me. And then when I invited them to go on a trip without me and go do a, you know, ride along with another company and go visit another shop tour and go to an event. I don't

know if I was afraid to do that because you know, what happens if you train them and they leave, but what happens if you train them and they stay? And now it's kind of part of the culture. It's like, listen, you want to go get training. You want to pay for a class. We're going to pay for it for you. You want to go on a trip. You want to go visit a market. You want to go visit another industry. You know, we're part of Cortex Group. So we've got access to all these other massive companies. And, you know, I will say sometimes you got to give people a nudge. I remember the first book that got handed to me was the E-Myth Revisited by my CPA. And I just became an avid reader after that. Before that was the Kill a Mockingbird or the Flies or something. So I got a question for you. So

there's a lot of moving companies, just like Ross George, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, you name it, pool companies. How do you differentiate yourself? What are some of the things, and a lot of people say we're open nights, weekends, we do background checks. You know, those really aren't competitive advantages. Someone else could duplicate that. What do you guys actually, what are you known for that says, wow, we want to go with you guys because of that?

Yeah. So the book Raving Fans had a big impact on me and I took took it to the extreme like I tend to do sometimes. But I hired a chief of Raving Fans. And then we rolled out the Raving Fan Guarantee. So our chief of Raving Fans is essentially somebody whose sole job it is to turn every single client that we move into a Raving Fan. We made it our mission to create a 5-star raving fan on every move. The back of our movers' shirts have a big QR code on it that says, our mission is to create a five-star raving fan. And they can scan that code and they can leave a

Google review. So everybody better be on their best behavior because if they're not, then somebody can easily scan that even if it's in the back of a grocery store waiting in line. If they're goofing around or doing something or cussing or whatever, that's going to negatively reflect on our company. So we hold ourselves to that standard with our mission to create those five-star raving fans on every move. And then we took it one step further with the raving fan guarantee, which no other moving company is doing this, but it's basically a money-back guarantee. If you're not happy with the guys that we send out to your home, we're going to refund you for the cost of them. We're not going to take your money unless you are a raving fan.

And we're going to do everything we can to make you a raving fan. That doesn't mean that they're going to make a human error and drop something and break something from time to time. I mean, that happens. It's just part of business. It's the cost of doing business. But we're going to do everything we possibly can to make it right. And if we can't make it right, then we're going to give you your money back because we're not taking somebody's money. And nobody's giving a money-back guarantee in the moving industry, at least not in my markets. So that, I think, is probably the biggest thing. Of course, the systems and the training and the processes and the background checks that we have on our guys and the drug testing. But I mean,

that should all be standard. The bar has just been set so low in the moving industry. I mean, almost every company I talk to doesn't even do background checks and drug testing for their guy. Well, they can't because they can't find anybody at the rates they want to pay. Right. Exactly. And to me, that's a cop-out. I mean, that's taking a shortcut. We have people that come and apply to work with us every time. We pay some of the highest wages for movers in the industry, at least in our markets. And we have people that want to work for us. We've got a fun culture. We do fun stuff. And we don't hire... We probably hire... If we have 100 applicants on Indeed, we might call 10 for an interview and we might hire one or two because they just don't make the cut. And then we set those expectations. And if they don't buy

into it, then they're not going to last here long. They have to live up to our core values. Number one is be honest. Number two is own it. Practice extreme ownership. Number three is hone it. We want to always be looking to get better, no matter what role you're in. And then hustle. We want to work harder than anybody else. I want every mover to be the hardest working mover in the room, let alone in the city. The same thing goes for our sales and every other department that we have. And if we can't live up to that, it's not the days of the yellow pages anymore. A lot of moving companies grew because they take out a $250,000 spread in the yellow pages

in a big city. And it didn't matter what service they provided. I think that's why the moving industry got a bad rap. But now you've got social media. I've seen people make YouTube videos about how terrible their moving company was. Not us, but other companies. I've seen... You've got Google reviews.

You've got all the different algorithms that are out there. And all those things. I mean, you got to have a higher level of expectation. And then you got to go above that. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do every single day. And if we don't, then we're not going to take your money. You know, there's two things I think every mover needs is some really, really good deodorant and dark color, because I see a lot of guys, it's sweaty.

You're going to be sweating profusely. And it looks very unprofessional, although you expect it, but you'd think you'd wear colors that just don't show. Like this shirt will not show any sweat. Yeah. Purple and yellow are official colors, but a lot of our uniforms are black or purple. So they don't show up as much. We definitely have to deal with a lot of sweat in Florida. It's fairly humid out here. You can't go without sweating in Florida. It's fairly humid out here. You can't go without sweating in Florida. But we've actually started to, we've taken that into consideration and our chief of raving fans actually put together a, like a welcome backpack for our movers. It's got deodorant in it. It's got like the dude wipes that they can, you know, freshen themselves up. We give them a few different

shirts so that they're not, you know, having to, if they forget to do their laundry or something, they don't have to come to work in a stinky shirt. We've got socks. If they don't show up in the right socks, we've got the right shorts. So everybody's consistently branded from head to toe in the same uniform. We put together these little care packages. So when they start their onboarding experience, it's like a welcome to the team. Here's something that we're immediately giving to them because of course, the law of reciprocity. There we go. You know, if we give something to them on their first day and treat them like they're now part of our family, then we hope that they'll give us the level of performance that we expect out on the job sites. Raving fans is such a great book. And I think about in your

industry, there could be things like you're going to order new appliances. Why don't we go pick those up for you? I don't know. I'm sure you've got a lot of things you guys can do. I met a cleaning lady who used to bake three cookies and write a note about what she did over and above what she was expected. Thus, the fans today do the baseboards, clean behind the toilet. And those little gestures of kindness to go above and beyond make a big difference.

Before we continue this interview, I wanted to remind you about something important. We're a few weeks away from the event that could change your life. Do you have a clear plan for your business in 2024? Do you know who you need to get on board to achieve that plan? Do you have the connections to turn that plan into a reality? If not, the Freedom Event is your opportunity to change that forever. But every day that passes, this opportunity is fading away. And I don't want you to regret not being here because hundreds of other business owners

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my $200 million garage door repair and installation company. So which side of the fence do you want to be on? The one side looking from the outside or the one joining us and shaping the future of the industry? If you're ready to elevate your business, create more freedom for yourself and your family and make a bunch of money in the process, I invite you to join us at the Freedom Event this November. Go to TommyMello.com forward slash freedom and get your tickets today. That's Tommy Mello, T-O-M-M-Y-M-E-L-L-O.com forward slash freedom. Don't sleep on it because tomorrow might be too late. Now let's get back to this awesome interview. You know, once again, I look at your industry and I'm like, man, that is a referral machine,

realtors, brokers, inspectors. Like I would think that a large majority of the business would be referral based. Is that how it is? Absolutely. It's consistently our top referral source. We built out an affiliate program where for every dollar that you refer to us, you get a point. And then we have a catalog of prizes that you can redeem with your points, similar to how a credit card company works. But when it comes to the realtors

and a lot of the people that deal with people moving all the time, they don't care about the kickbacks. They don't care about the referral stuff. I mean, it's there, but they just want a great service provided for their clientele, at least the high-performing realtors. And so we've strategically sought out partnerships with the top realtors in both of our markets. We've worked out a deal. One of them is the number

one REMAX agent in the state of Florida. I think he's like number 13 in the country. He's got a big team under him. He's got his own radio show. So we basically worked out a deal to where we pay him a monthly marketing fee. We get to go on his radio show three times a year. We get to present to his office a couple times a year. They actually send us their leads on a daily basis. So whenever they sign on a new client, they trust us enough as part of that thousand bucks a month or whatever. It's nothing really. They'll actually send us their leads of their customers and their customer checks a box that says, Is it okay if our preferred vendors reach out to you? And we're their only preferred vendor.

And so by aligning ourselves with the top agents, then it makes all the other agents want to come work with us. Because obviously, we've built that trust and there's nobody else that they're referring. So we're always doing realtor presentations and bringing goodies and stuff like that over to them just to stay front of mind. But at the end of the day, all they really want is to be able to recommend a quality service provider to you. And I look at it like when I go to get my car fixed, I'm going to ask my friends, where's the best place to get my car fixed? What's the best mechanic, especially if I'm new to an area? And I usually will go off of referrals because that's another industry that people have sometimes bad experiences in.

And I look at moving very similarly to that. And I put my name out there. We work with a local morning show host that's a local celebrity in the Tampa Bay area that endorses us on a live read every single day. And we've gotten a ton of business from him. Just aligning ourselves with credible sources and local influencers has been really good. How do you handle local influencers? What's the best way to go about figuring that out and getting a contract with them?

How does the pay work? Yeah, so we'll usually provide them a free move. I've got a business development person on our team. Basically, she's our director of marketing. She also helps us with our moving time retreats as well. But she's good with social media. She's always DMing influencers or she'll pay attention to see if it looks like they're posting something, like they're getting ready to move and she'll reach out. And then we get contacted by a lot of them that say, Hey, I'm moving. I've got 100,000 followers on Instagram. Would you mind

doing a free move or giving me a discount on the move if I do a promotional pitch? And there's a company up in New York. I don't know the owner of it yet. It's called Roadway Moving. But they've done a really good job with aligning with New York City influencers. There's probably a lot more up there than there are in Tampa. But it's... Yeah, you just basically reach out to them. DM them. Slide into the DMs, as they say. And sometimes they'll hit you up first and you just, you know, offer them a service. And if you do a good job, they'll promote it to their fan base.

There are tools I'm looking into that basically find the right avatar of influencer for industries. You know, you don't necessarily want a mommy blogger promoting makeup, but you might, you know, I, I think the more the merrier and you, you AV tested to, you know, the numbers are clear. Moving has a lot of seasonality. You said summer's kind of don't do a whole lot. How do you work around that? How do you prepare yourself for a seasonal service like moving? Yeah, well, summer actually is our busy time and moving. Kids are out of school. Families are relocating a lot of the time. Okay? Yeah. Well, summer actually is our busy time in moving. Kids are out of school. Families are relocating a lot of the time. Winter is okay. Yeah. So winter, traditionally, Florida, we've got a little bit of an advantage because people, you know, it's warm all year. People are moving to Florida all the time. We have an older population

where the kids aren't as much of a factor all the time, similar probably to Phoenix. But yeah, I mean, as far as seasonality goes, that's where knowing your numbers and getting dialed in on the financials is really, really important because it helps you set up cash flow projections. It helps you know how much you need to budget for in the offseason. Most of our KPIs and our financials are dialed into how much business we're getting or how much we're producing. So we pay our movers based off of the billable hours to the client. If it's a flat rate move, that's factored in when we're coming up with that flat rate price. So how long the guys are expected to be out there. And then if they beat the time that we projected, then a lot of times we'll let them keep the additional amount. So if we quote a job for 10 hours, give them a flat rate, they finish the job in 7 hours, then most of the time we'll pay

them for 10 hours of service. So that incentivizes them to work efficiently. Maybe they'll have time to go do a second job after that. And then marketing, we always try to keep that under 10%. I'm big into tracking our marketing. We've got, I think, 380 numbers on CallRail. It's nowhere near 7,000. But we put tracking numbers on everything so that as soon as something is costing us more than 10% of what it's bringing in for more than 90 days... 10% is not a hard rule. I'll maybe go up to 20%. But for certain sources, if it's bringing in a lot of work, especially in the off-season, then we'll cut that if it's not meeting those quotas. And if it is meeting those quotas, then we're just going to turn that dial and pump as much as we possibly can into it until it's maxed out. Direct mail is big in our industry. When a home goes under listing,

when it gets on the market, we hit them with postcard. The higher value homes, we'll send them a package. We're getting ready to hire a door knocker to go basically knock the doors of newly listed homes that are for sale and offer some free boxes. It's like the icebreaker. Basically say, Hey, I saw your house was just listed for sale. I was in the area. I just wanted to drop by some boxes for you. If you'd like, I'm happy to give you a quote. We could schedule a quote if you're looking for movers sometime soon. So that's an untapped part in our industry that I think there's a lot of potential in because we know who's moving. I mean, it's public record. It's on the MLS for residential at least. And there's some other ways we can find out for people that are in leases, commercial

leases. We can go on LoopNet and see when a lease might be expiring or whatever. So we can start to get in front of those people too. And as far as the seasonality goes, I mean, I turn the dial up in marketing in the off-season because most companies freeze and they shut the marketing down because they're trying to cut costs. For me, it's an opportunity to gain market share. And then we'll still market in the summertime, but we don't necessarily have to keep that dial turned up once we're booked up. So the goal is that we don't get booked up. We keep buying trucks and we keep hiring because we're always hiring no matter the time of the year. We're always looking to replace our weakest link, especially on the mover side of things. Because we want our guys to have a little fire

under them that says, hey, if you're slacking off, if you come to work on weed, you're gone. There's somebody here ready to take your job. And that way, we can just stay sharp. And a lot of the other companies in our markets, they slow down and their best guys aren't getting the hours that they need. So if we can crank up the marketing dial and it's giving us a good return, 10x return is ideal or even better, then we keep those guys working and recruit from other companies too, like our competition. Have you ever heard of paper performance deals with newspapers? I don't think so. Not with newspapers.

I do probably 20 newspapers countrywide, Milwaukee Central, Detroit Free Press, Arizona Republic, where they'll put me in all the remnant space. And they put me a lot of times in the cover. And I give them a percentage of the revenue that's all tracked through Service Titan with the call tracking number and the schedule engine link. And it reports out to them daily. And typically, you're going to be 15% or more. But you got to ask yourself, how many people see the ad and go to Google to look at reviews and they don't get attribution? So blended, I think you're still go to Google to look at reviews and they don't get attribution. So blended, I think you're still beating 10%.

And if it's something they don't have a lot of it, see, they got HVAC, they got roofing, they got solar, they've got flooring companies, but garage doors, they can't put 10 HVAC ads, you know, that they're looking for things that they don't have a lot of. And they've got an algorithm that runs on the back end that says, this is making enough money to put this in this spot. And I used to think it's an advantage to negotiate with them. But then when you realize how their algorithm tracks, the more you pay them, the better coverage you're going to get. Something I think would do really, really well in Florida. Yeah. I'm going to introduce you to, I'm going to be flying out to Tampa by the end of the year. Name's Jim Rapp. He owns, he just sold the largest Precision franchise. Super smart guy, super connected, really strong, strong entrepreneur. You know, I like to connect people

and it's so fun watching sparks fly and watching people win together. Yeah. I'd love to meet him. What about cross-selling? What are you ableselling? How do you upsell in a moving opportunity? Yeah. So one of the first things we ask is, where are you getting your boxes? We have vendor relationships where we can basically get boxes that are branded with our logos on it at a wholesale cost. That's a big push that we're making headed into the off-season here to upsell boxes because everybody we service boxes. So why aren't we the ones selling it to them? We'll deliver them to your house for free. We have a guy that runs a route one day a

week to deliver boxes. We've got the storage piece. There's a lot we can do with the storage piece. I mentioned receiving, unpacking services, packing services. There's removal services. We're not a junk removal company. We don't advertise that we're a junk removal company. But if you move in somewhere and your couch doesn't match the house, we'll haul it away for you or go donate it somewhere. So there's an opportunity there. Those are a few of the ways that we're doing it. But I know you had mentioned getting kickbacks from other home services that are involved in the moving process. And that's an area that I haven't really explored a whole lot, but definitely something I'm open to hearing strategies on. Yeah, well, listen, you're sitting there moving to an empty house.

And what if you hired us two days before to go put all the storage and we labeled it Christmas tree, everything, the sports for the kids, the golfs, the camping equipment. I think it would make your job easier and say, everything, the sports for the kids, the golfs, the camping equipment. I think it would make your job easier and say, listen, do you want all these boxes spread out throughout the house? Or do you want some of this stuff seasonal that you want it to be in an accessible area, but out of the way you're doing them a favor and you become a marketing channel and it's a win-win. So yeah absolutely. There's a guy... What's that? I said we can store those items too.

If they've got Christmas stuff or if they have something that doesn't match their house, like maybe family heirlooms, pictures, whatever it is, we'll store one item or we'll store your whole house. That's part of the beauty of storage. But are you talking more like other vendors that we would contract out to service them or refer to? Yeah, I'm saying the overhead storage that hangs in the garage or the cabinets. You say, listen, this company will come in and we can actually build it for them to show them what the garage will look like. And they're pretty slick. I mean, you know what they look like. They

overhang, they can go above the garage and the overhead storage and a lot of times people put their christmas tree anything that they're not going to use on the regular they'll put up there and they got ones on cables that we can lower down using the app on your phone so they're really easily accessible out of the way i think they're great i mean i have them at my house and uh i'm a big fan of them and everybody that i show is like, I need those. And they're not expensive. I mean, you get the whole garage done with like tons and tons of space for under a grand. And you make a hundred bucks, but you're making your job easier. It looks better. It looks cleaner. You help the client out. You just go into a stud or potentially you can start selling those. But I think once you start, a lot of the stuff you figure, shoot, I'm making 10% for doing nothing.

I don't need to figure out another business. At what point do you think we would sell that? I think that's probably the most friction that I could see is, does our salesperson sell that with the move? Do the movers sell that? Do we have somebody that comes in after the movers or checks on the movers that is looking for those opportunities? Well, what I would say is, what do you have for storage in this home? Because we noticed that the garage was a great opportunity to put. And you get a company that goes out there that that's one of the only things they do. You've heard of a jack of

many trades, a master of none. You could sell them. I mean, we spent the last two and a half years sourcing them to get them to a sleek, fast install that's affordable. And it's a great upsell. We're in your garage. So I'm looking for as many affiliate deals as I could. You could sell them, but I'd make sure I got a specialist, a department that handles that. I wouldn't have a mover trying to figure out where the studs are, getting a stud finder, now getting on a ladder. You know, what you'll find is you'll really ruin

production. You'll have a guy that's doing stuff that he's just not a specialist in. So if I did that, I'd almost break out a piece of the business and say, I got two guys that just do this all day long. And if someone gave me an opportunity to put, we got these new things, it's called Royal Storage, I think, and you can put all your ranks, all your dustpans, everything, all your tools on a wall. And it's slick, it's easy. Those are all opportunities where it's like, like I told you, there's three ways to make money. More leads, charge your customers more of things they want, but keep them coming back more frequently. For your business, the question I have is, when have is, there's a lot of people that do corporate relocation,

and that's a big company that needs to do that. They charge a lot of money. My question always is, should you have even moved that stuff or just do like a sell? But there's some personal stuff, obviously, you want to bring. How do you get into that? How do you handle that? Do you just partner with another moving company? Sometimes our best referral partners are our competition because we might book up and we want somebody trustworthy that we can send a customer over to, or they might book up and send us leads. Part of the benefit of doing the retreats and the podcasts and networking with moving companies all over the country is when they have trucks that are headed to Tampa, they'll call us to send out some guys to help them unload them. And then we can do the same

thing when we're headed their way. And a lot of times, they'll have a customer that they moved to Tampa, and then they left. And then that customer needs to move again. They had a great experience with one of these other moving companies. And they ask, do you know anybody in this area? As a matter of fact, I do. I've tried two college Brothers. I know the owner. He's a great guy. And then they'll reach out that way. As far as getting into corporate moves like HR and stuff like that, that's... Getting in with the HR departments, the recruiters, that's a big effort that we're making right now. We work a lot with a commercial moving company that only does commercial stuff. So we get their stuff that they can't take on,

or maybe it's not their perfect move. They're very specialized in moving cubicles and stuff like that. So if it's just a normal office move with desks and not anything crazy, they'll send that stuff our way. But we're really trying to make a push to build out our commercial division, get in with the HR companies, get in with the office managers. Once our guys are there on site, walking around in uniform, they see the caliber of mover that is there, that we show up on time. I mean, showing up on time and answering the phone when people call separates us from 70, if not more percent of our competition. And so just, I mean, like I said, the bar is very low in the industry right now. And we're trying to raise that so that we can just have a better customer experience at

the end of the day, but just doing the little things when we're doing a small move and, you know, we get our foot in the door and it tends to just open up a lot more opportunities there. For me, I just want it to be done hassle-free. I don't want to have to worry about people going in my house. I mean, you know, probably like wearing booties would be a good, it's just, it's like, these are my prized possessions. Otherwise I wouldn't be bringing them. And when you, you know, there's a great book by Dan Kennedy, Marketing to the Affluent. And when you figure out where your avatar hangs out, Alex Ramosi, I just read a quote by him. He said, it's easier to sell a massive sale

to an affluent rich client than it is to sell a bunch of small sales to a lot of cheap broke clients. And it really makes you think, I used to think everybody in the garage industry was my client. If you own a garage door, you're my client. Now I'm like, if you want your door to be safe, if you want it to be sturdy, if you

want it to have the curb appeal, if you want the technology, if you want to make an investment, you're our client. If you're a Walmart shopper, and I'm not saying Walmart's bad. I go to Walmart. But if you're just looking for a great deal, we might not be for you. And that's okay. There's someone out there that will do it. But I find the cheapest clients are always the ones that complain the most. And the ones that leave the one-star reviews and the ones that want everything perfect for their $300.

There's an advantage of marketing to the right people at the right time. And I think you're doing that. And I think you're onto the right things. A lot of the initiatives you're pushing towards going into fall is going to pay off dividends. And all I would tell you is stay the course. A lot of things, they don't look good until you do them for a while. It takes six months to do anything to see results. And you just got to have checks and balances in place. And a guy like you, you're networking all the time. You're single-handedly growing the business. The next big thing that'll grow you by spades is finding somebody that's been where you want to go, maybe even from a

different industry. And you bring them on and you're like, holy crap. I just had a meeting with my VP of marketing and he's new. And I said, hey man, you want to hire these two people? He wants to bring on a director of marketing and someone to just handle SMS and email marketing. Roughly $180,000. I said, you got my green light, get our president, Dan Miller, then we'll run it by the board. But I'm not,, no, we need to see a lot of results fast. If you want to spend this money, I'm expecting big things. And it was very clear, but I said, I want to let you run because I think you're capable of doing things beyond my scope. And that's why we hired you. So I'm going to give you some freedom till I can't, or till I can give you more more. It's amazing when you hire people that have been where you want to go.

There's a guy named Kevin Wilson you should talk to. I'll introduce you to him as well. Mosquito Joe's in North Carolina. He sold to Neighborly. He's got another few franchises. You asked me if I was ever going to do a franchise, and I am. I'm going to do several franchises. I'm stacking the deck, man.

I'm building a whole team. I'm going to go visit 10 successful franchises. I'm going to be studying, and I'm going to be finding out all the pitfalls. Now, I still will make mistakes, but success leaves clues all over. It's just those with the – knowledge means nothing. Applied knowledge is everything. And it's out there. And you have grit, tenacity, and just a pure willpower to succeed. And you are going to the right places.

You're networking, you're podcasting, you're having retreats. And guys like you, you figure out a way. You're going to figure it out. And the more you force yourself to network and get in front of these people, it's just going to continue to grow. The fact that you got number 13, number one realtor in Tampa is amazing. And you find those and you just treat them right. And you make it right. And you just promise them things won't always go perfect, but you got my cell phone and

I'm going to make it right. And every time I did that, and I did, they were like, you're the guy. You don't dodge the phone when something doesn't go right. And I showed up at the customer's house with flowers apologizing for stupid stuff, fixing it myself. Now, I can't do that as much anymore. But it means a lot coming from the founder and the owner, that you still care enough to at least acknowledge there was a mistake.

So always stay humble. Yeah. And it's walking that fine line of delegating, but at the same time, that owner's touch. And that's something that I've really been trying to navigate over the last couple of years because at this point, we've got a team. I'm able to delegate a lot of the things, but there's some things that only I can do and the presence can only do. That's definitely something that I think comes with experience, but just trusting your gut, do the right thing. I mean, at the end of the day, what's the right thing?

What would you want if you were in that person's shoes if something doesn't go as planned? I think I mentioned this on your podcast, but Josh from Parker and Sons, he taught me this line that's really easy. Here's what you need to do. Here's what we should do. And if you were my mom, here's what I'd be telling my mom to do. And it's so easy to remember. And any guy can learn that.

But genuinely, genuinely think about if this was my mom, my grandma, my uncle I grew up with, what exactly would I be telling them? I always say sell from your heart. Do the honest thing. Don't worry about the pricing. Do what you would do. The pricing I make to make sure we pay our bills and end up with a profit at the end of the day. That way your job is sustainable and we're going to grow. You're going to have a lot of upward momentum and move up in the company. But regardless of the price, advise what you would do in their situation. You got to explore and ask a lot of questions. A great doctor says, are you smoking cigarettes? What's your alcohol intake? Is there anything's going on with your anxiety? What's your stress? Is there anything

bothering you? They're going to ask a million questions before they're going to give you a prescription. And they're going to get to know the person before they really don't sell out of your own pocket, find out what's great for them. Are they on a budget? What's the plans? Is this a short-term move? I love podcasting. This stuff is so amazing. I've got a lot out of this podcast. I'm going to introduce you to a couple of people. Is there any books, obviously raving fans, is there a couple other books that really moved you and inspired you to grow in the business world? Yeah. I mentioned Dan Kennedy. I know you mentioned Marketing to the Affluent. I bought his entire library of books. I've got every Dan Kennedy book. I've probably read about 80% of them

at this point. But his time management book is amazing, if you haven't read that. The No BS Guide is all the No BS books. And then he's got some other stuff like the sales letter, the perfect sales letter, or I might be butchering that. But all the No BS books by Dan Kennedy, that's probably definitely up there as one of my favorites. Of course, you've got all the standard, like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, E-Myth, Good to Great. All those are great too. But Dan Kennedy, I've been on a big kick with him lately. I definitely recommend looking into all of his stuff if you've not read more than just the marketing to the affluent because he talks

about marketing. He talks about time management. He's got a great one called The No BS Guide to Ruthless Management of People and Profits. And that one is hard hitting. He's brash in it, but it's good. It's good stuff. So yeah, I'd say that's right now, that's the first one, the first series, I guess, author that jumps to mind. But I'm always listening to Audible. I've always got something going. I actually just finished your book, Elevate, a couple of weeks ago. There's another one that I'm trying to think... The Wealthy Gardener. I'm in that one right now. Can't think of the author right now. Donald Miller, building a story brand. That taught me a lot about... I mentioned postcards. We do the direct

mail and the direct response. That one has been really good too for basically making the customer the hero of the story of the marketing piece. So some really good stuff there. We're starting to work. I know he's not there. We're starting to work. I know he's not necessarily an author, but Andy Elliott, I took six people on our team out to an Andy Elliott seminar at the beginning of August or middle of August.

And basically, he doesn't know anything about moving industry yet, but we're looking at collaborating on some training programs with him that we're going to bring him out to our Moving 10 retreat in March. He's going to be doing a whole day of sales training there. And one of the things he said too, to touch on your

point earlier, was it's a lot... A rebuttal when a customer says your price is too high is, would you rather pay a little bit more upfront and have it done right? Or would you rather pay less upfront and then pay a lot more fixing whatever the lower cost company is doing? And that really stuck with me too. So we're doing a lot of that whatever the lower cost company is doing. And that really stuck with me too. So we're doing a lot of that training too. I guess it's not really a book, got a little sidetracked, but yeah, hopefully, you know, those definitely check those out if you haven't read any of those. Yeah. We also use Andy Elliott quite a bit. He's been in here. We did a podcast and I'm a big fan of his, but I also, I get coaches all the time. I read a book, I call them up,

get them on the podcast, pay them to do stuff. I think getting a bunch of different perspectives, every person learns differently and getting lots and lots of different points of view. If someone wants to reach out to you and get ahold of you, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, you can connect with me on Instagram at Wade Swickle, S-W-I-K-L-E is the last name. It looks like Swickle. You can email me. You can send me an email, wade at 2collegebrothers-E is the last name. It looks like Swickle. You can email me. You know, you can send me an email.

Wade at 2collegebrothers.com. I checked that. I'm so happy. Those are probably the two best ways. Just reach out through social media or email. And finally, Wade, talked a lot here. I always give a few minutes to kind of close this out. Maybe we didn't hit on a subject.

Maybe there's entrepreneurs out there that they've had it. And maybe you could just breathe some fresh air into them. Just something to focus on. It could be anything. It could be just about life, but I'll give you a few minutes to close this out. Yeah, I think just persist. There was six or eight years of this business that I was not having fun, but something just told me if I quit this business, I'm going to walk away as a quitter to my next business. And if I can master the moving industry, it's tough. It's a tough industry. You're dealing with movers and you're dealing with people in their third most

stressful time in their life behind death and divorce. And you have to be able to navigate that and be a good people person. You have to be able to overcome the industry's reputation. There's trucks that break down. There's furniture that breaks. There's a lot of headaches in this industry. Because there's successful people that have done it. And so just basically looking to reverse engineer what they've done, get the mentorship, get around people that are thinking on a higher level that aren't going to happy hour every day after work. Or I used to play on a softball team where everybody would go drink before the game. They'd drink during the game. They'd go out and drink after the game until midnight. I had to cut that out because those weren't my people.

That's not my tribe. You just got to surround yourself with people that are going to lift you up, that are going to motivate you, that show you what the possibilities really are. And sometimes if I start to see myself sliding into hanging around some old high school friends or whatever too much that aren't sharing the same ambitions that I am, you just got to audit your time. You got to audit your circle at the end of the day. And you just got to keep going, keep pushing because it gets fun. I didn't know, you know, four or five years ago when I was struggling in this business, trying to figure it out that I'd be having as much fun as I am today. And now I'm just, I'm pumped. I'm excited to come to work

every day. And I've built my team around people that inspire me too. So that, that helps to be around those types of people all the time as well. Well, if you're sick, if you're sick of hanging around with clowns, got to ask yourself why you of people all the time as well. Well, if you're sick of hanging around with clowns, you got to ask yourself why you keep going to the circus. Hey, man, this was fun. I really appreciate you doing this. I had a blast. I think you're going to do great.

And I want to stay connected. So let's make sure we keep in touch. I'll see you in November, but we'll talk before then. I'm going to send you. I got a dip here, but you're awesome, man. I really, really love the tenacity. And you're right. The next best thing is not the answer.

Stick it through. The next best diet. The next best fad. The next best this. There's people that just jump to jump to jump. They want stuff to be so easy. Nothing great in life comes easy. Stay dedicated.

Put your head down. Do the hard work. And, you know, it's the darkest part of night right before the sun comes out. So just repeat from gold. If you're, if you're struggling out there, stay the course you're right there. You're one higher away. You're just stay the course, put your head down, stay focused, hang around with winners and you'll do it. So I appreciate it. Wade. Yeah. Thank you for having me on. This was a lot of fun for me too. Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today.

Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper

to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.