The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Do Branding The Right Way and Save Millions on Marketing

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

David Litwin has been in the branding and advertising industry for over three decades, working with notable Fortune 500 companies like Hewlett Packard, IBM, Sony, Pacific Bell and Sun Microsystems. He started two agencies, the second of which generated over 3M dollars in revenue in its first 24 months of operation, and authored the books Cre8tve Success, MLK2.0, Mission, Parables & Parallels, and The Wonder Story. In this episode, we talked about brand strategy, marketing, digital and print design...

If I were to say, who are you calling at three o'clock in the morning? It's Jake from State Farm. We all know that because it was perfectly drilled into us. It was an advertising, but it's great branding as well. So your brand has to basically create an emotional attachment and what I would call energy. So you have to create effective action out of your branding. So anytime we work with a company, that's the first thing that you have to do, because here's the reality. You know, if I'm looking for a plumber, hypothetically, okay. And I go to their website and I look at their brand and I look at their websites when everybody does, whether they know it or not, I am basically making snap judgments on their success. They can be the best plumber in the whole country,

but if they don't have an effective brand, I've already prejudged them. I say it this way. I say perception equals reputation, right? And so it determines whether the look that they see in that present moment gives them an idea of who you were in the past, which decides if they're going to work with you in the future. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. Today, I have a special guest visiting us here locally from Phoenix, David Litwin. He's an expert

in brand strategy, branding, marketing, digital design, and print. A quick bio about him, Pure Fusion Media CEO from 2000 to present. And he also lit wind Brink Advertising and Design. He was the co-founder of four years back in the 90s. A leader in the branding, advertising, and design industry for over 30 years, working with notable Fortune 500 companies as Hewlett Packard, IBM, Sony, Pacific Bell, and Sun Microsystems. With his first design department and internal design operation of California-based profession exhibits and graphics, he took the trade show display company from $1 2.0, Mission, Parables and Parallels, and The Wonder Story. David, it's been a while, but tell us a little bit about your history,

what you're up to these days, a little bit about the books. Just give us everything in a nutshell. Sure. Yeah. First of all, let me say thank you for inviting me on. I'm really excited to be here. So that's awesome. There's a phrase that a business course I was in was on before and really what you're doing. It's called altruistically selfish. And it's basically doing things for people where you're giving them a benefit, but there's something also that's helping you out as well. And I think that's what's really cool about what you're doing is that, yeah, it's benefiting you, but you're giving a lot of great advice to a lot of great people. So thank you for doing that, man.

That's awesome. I listened to three podcasts today. So I got filled up on Tommy today. So I originally, when I was 17 years old, I wanted to be a marine biologist. So I realized I couldn't make any money at it. And that ended that really quick. So I got into design. I was about 19 years old. I got my first

break as a designer and was so stoked because here's a great opportunity. And I lied my way in because I didn't know anything about design. I was an artist, but that was about it. So I get in there and my boss, he was a very temperamental artist. He was 26 years old. I'm 19. And basically he gave me just the simplest jobs. You know, my first print thing was cassette singles, 99 cents. It was a record company. And man, I was so happy. I took it home, showed my parents, you know, look at this. It's on, you know, this yellow astrobite paper meant nothing, but I thought it was the greatest thing ever. So I realized that I was never going to get any better unless I pushed myself beyond what he was giving me because he wasn't giving me really hard stuff. So I'd go in two hours early and I would just fake work, you know,

whatever I could to make anything harder than I was doing. He never saw it. But that way, once I got to a place where he was ready to give me something harder, I was already prepared for it. So I kind of put myself in that position, stayed there for a couple of years, went to another company. That's where the trade show display company that I turned into $4 million. But what happened with that was I had another boss, that guy had left the company and they brought in a new guy. And I thought he knew all about me. And I was getting really excited. And the guy looks at me and says, okay, who are you? And what do you do? And I'm like, crap. I'm like, I'm in a position now where it's like, I can either make my own way or I can like cower

and just say, well, I'm one of your employees or whatever. So I said, look, I'm the greatest thing your company's ever seen. I said, I'm going to basically take this company to the next level because branding is so key and you're going to need this. So here's the deal. I so confident in myself, pay me a Burger King salary, man, pay me minimum wage. Back then it was like seven dollars an hour right i'm like but anything that i do i get half of from your company and so he's like all right because he has all he's thinking about is a burgeoning salary man he's like shoot this guy doesn't do anything for me and i made like a hundred thousand dollars and i'm like 20 years old and so i did that for a while then i started litwin brink which is the other agency that you saw and then i moved to nashville to write movie scripts of all wild things. But I started a company out there called

Pure Fusion Media. And first month, $25,000. Awesome, right? But I realized at that point, that's my threshold, man. It's by myself. I'm only going to make $25,000 a month, which you can live on comfortably, but I didn't want to live on twenty five thousand dollars a month so i very first person i hired was not another designer was not another advertiser i hired a salesperson because i knew he could help me grow my operation and within a year and a half or two years we were at like three and a half million dollars so it was like just we were off to the races now here's where i messed up i thought i have all this money now i need to hire a bunch of people. So I brought on like 10 people who sucked all my money away.

So I went from like $3 million in top line revenue to like $250,000 after I paid everybody. So don't do that, everybody out there. Don't make that mistake that I made. But from there, moved back to here, moved to Tucson for a little while, and took Pure Fusion Media and just realized that we were a great design agency. But I was a good brand strategist. And so I pushed the company into like new levels of understanding really three things like story, design and meaning and how essential those are to the development of a really, really effective company. And so that's really what I preach. That's what my book, Creative Success, which you referenced, really kind of talks about is those three areas. Now, for me personally, I'm going to

use a metaphor here because I'm a script writer. I just saw a movie, and if you haven't seen it, it's called Momentum Generation. And it's a story about the surf kids from the 80s, like guys like Kelly Slater and Rob Machado and all these guys that were like, you know, Surfer Magazine. If you were an adrenaline junkie like me, you were like following everything they were doing. And they had one guy who was a couple of years older than them. And his name was Todd Chesser. And Todd was kind of like Bodie without the freaking criminality, right? Like he was just a total soul surfer, but he also pushed these guys and he never let them believe their own hype. And so these guys like never got into the drugs.

They never did any of this type of stuff. And he was like the moral compass of the group. Then he passed away surfing one day. And it's like in the movie, you see it. And like the whole group falls apart. And he literally was the glue that kind of bound everybody together. So for myself personally, I want to be the Todd Chesser of my life, my friends, my business, you know, whatever it is,

I want to be able to do and say the right thing and be the right person. Like all the time. So that's who I am. Yeah. So we had met, I believe, was it Justin? Yeah. So Justin is one of my technicians was out at your house. You give him a book to give to me and signed it. And Justin just called me today and he just had a baby boy. He just got back to work today. His first day back. And he says, Tommy, he goes, I'm having an amazing day. I feel high on life. Literally. He goes, I just want to tell you, he goes, I know you don't have any kids yet. He goes, my life has a whole new meaning. I can't explain it to you. But the minute I saw my baby boy, he goes, my whole life changed. And it, it reminds me of that Pearl Jam.

So I just heard the news today, you know, that my life was going to change. And I know you have kids, but it was pretty cool. So he came out to your house. It's Creed, by the way. It's Creed, because I love that band. Creed, not Pearl Jam. Yeah. But anyways, I hope you had a good experience with Justin.

I did. No, I really did. In fact, actually, when he came over, you know, obviously he's here to help me with my garage door. But we talked for like an hour and a half. And I had a buddy of mine in from Nashville who's another kind of deep thinker. And we just sat there and he he's 20, what, 22, 23. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was a moron at 22, 23, you know, and he's got his life together and he's talking at our level. I'm 51 now. And, you know, I'm listening to what he's saying. I'm like, you know, I think this is what it is. He was hungry. Right. And I surround myself with hungry people. You don't have to be the smartest person to be the best person.

You don't have to be the wisest or richest person. You got to be hungry. And I saw that in him. And I was like, wow, this guy's pretty cool. And he's the one who said, man, you need to meet Tommy because I think you guys would really connect. And, you know, we just shared together. But I poured into the guy for like an hour. Right. And that's the reality.

I wrote a Medium article one time and I said, the reason why you miss your wisest opportunities and the reason why is wise people don't have time for you. They just don't, man. They're doing their own thing. They've got't, man. They're doing their own thing. They've got their wise friends. They've got their important friends. But they will test you to see if you're worth hanging out with. And the way they do it or you're worth pouring into, they'll insult you. They'll say something to you that pisses you off because if your character isn't there, it's going to piss you off. But if your character is there, you're going to go, that's

great. Thank you for giving me that advice. And if they find somebody like that, they'll pour into them. And that was the thing with Justin. I was like, this is a guy I could pour into. And then he told me about what you were doing and how you got all your guys on Dave Ramsey and just putting them in a better financial place. And I'm like, I need to meet this guy. So, you know, I just got done telling you, I did this presentation that I do to all the new people. And it's supposed to go two hours. I went two hours and 45 minutes. And I'm writing down on the board and I'm getting into it.

And I go, snowmobile, RV. And I'm writing down everything. I'm writing down Harley, new gun, sports car. And I'm like, guys, look at, what do you think all these things have in common? I said, I don't own one of them. I don't have a boat. I don't have a used vehicle. I said, and I'm not bragging to you guys. I'm 37 years old, but let me write down some other stuff. I erased it. I said, two apartment complexes, four houses, a couple of big buildings. And I

kept going. I said, Roth IRA, regular IRA, investment, the Bitcoin stuff, everything. And I said, if you guys think I'm bragging for one minute, this is not at all what this is supposed to be. I'm 37 years old. I said, but I decided a long time ago because I met somebody way smarter than me that said, put your money into appreciating assets. I said, just Phoenix alone, I think we're up 23% since last year in real estate. And I said, guys, the meaning of all this right now, right here, right this minute is that you guys are going to become homeowners. You guys are going to invest in yourselves. Every Wednesday, when you've made enough money for the rest of the week, you're

going to work harder on Thursday rather than say, I've already made my nut. And I said, I'm going to show you what losers say. And I pulled up 20 words. They got lucky. They get better jobs than me. This batch hates me. The weather is not fair. And I pulled every single excuse. I said, write this stuff down and remember this. And here's the difference.

Read these notes before you go to bed. I said, you go two houses ago and you still fog up that mirror. I don't live there. I don't know anybody that lives there. The house has been sold, but two houses ago, if you fog up that mirror, it's got a hundred million dollars still that'll fog up and show where I wrote it down in a marker. And I, and guess what? This year I'm hitting that goal. So I told somebody, I said, I'd never do this. I didn't talk one time.

I'm like, I'll never do this. Cause this is incredibly rude. But one time I was, you know, if i was ever at like a mcdonald's type place i won't use mcdonald's a fast food place right and i get someone who like is just rude and you know messes up your order and just kind of screwed you know just doesn't care you look at them and say do you want to make fifty dollars an hour you know and of course they're going to say yeah absolutely you know and their eyes will light up and they'll get excited. And I'll say, well, you never will with that attitude. That's why I'll never do it. I promise I will never say that that's rude and whatever. But the idea is if you want to make

$50 an hour at a $22 an hour job, give them $50 worth an hour worth of service, man. You will get there. The bar is so low, especially for younger people. If you know there's a bar, you're already ahead of the game. So it's interesting because I literally, I went on Facebook live to a group of mine with about 1500 people. And I said, guys, one thing I could tell you, and you're all business owners in the home service space. I said, I've been doing this 15 years. And I said, every single day I've learned to focus harder on what I'm doing. I don't divest in my company. I don't divest in my people. I never became a huge real estate investor. I've read the one

thing by Gary Keller and another book by McGiven called Essentialism. And I'll tell you this, it's called continuity. It's called every single day giving my best. And if you think it's going to happen overnight, it's called consistency. And over time, it starts to build into this massive, massive thing. I said, if you think working out for two weeks, two hours a day, I'll get you in shape wrong, but work out 30 minutes for two years in a row every single day. And you'll be in the best shape of your life. And that's what business is all about. Cause these kids, especially they say, I want to make millions on the internet. I want to become into Bitcoin. And they want it today.

And I say, guys, this is like the long play. This is going to be a long play. But guess what? You're going to make more money than you ever imagined. You're going to let that money work for you. And when you work for me, what's so nice is I give you unlimited potential. That's exactly it. Yep them up and you know i made this statement and it wasn't a diss test it was two deaths ago one day adam walked in here and

he goes hey brother he's my coo he goes it's time to uh give yearly bonuses and yearly um we used to do these things called yearly one-on-ones and um we'd give everybody a raise basically tenure and one day i'm sitting there and i go adam this is bullshit and he's like what do you mean i go i had a guy a technician made four grand but he he got to eat what he killed i got excited when i finally made four grand because that means he got a lot of reviews he didn't have any warranty calls he did all the stuff right he sold right right. You know, his driving was right. And I said, why are we giving tenure to these people? Why don't we have them have any skin in the game?

So ever since that day, we came up for pay for performance. And I get excited when someone makes a lot of money. And they, you know, I've got CSRs that answer our phones and make 32 bucks an hour. It's because they booked over 90% and they booked over five calls an hour. Right. And it's a Collins's book, good to great. And he says, I hire five, work them like eight, pay them like 10 or something like that. Maybe it's 10 or, you know, and that's, that's the reality, right? Like it's not hard.

I was talking to a company today and he was talking about how to grow his business. And I'm like, the vetting process is the key. Like you have to vet those people. That's where all your energy comes in because you got to make sure they're not going to crack. And if you can find the right person that can get on your team, the non-wise play is like, I just need to get people in my company. The wiser play is I'm going to spend like three months or three weeks with this person to make sure they're the right person for my team. I dumped 20 grand in every one of the technicians. And here's the deal. I used to have what I call

the fog test. If you could fog a mirror, you can work for me. Now we do personality profiling. Now I go to dinner with them and their significant other or my managers do. I want to see how they treat their significant other. I want to see how they get reciprocated. I want to see if they open their door. I want to know how they deal with financing. If you're not happy at home, it's hard to be happy at work. I do ride-alongs. I look for how much are you on social media? Did you ask great questions? Did you smoke cigarettes the whole time?

There's all these things. And you're totally right. I'm not Captain Save-A-Person. I can't take somebody and say, you need to smile when you look in the mirror and love yourself. Because that takes a decade. I want to find somebody that already loves themselves that i could teach the whole lesson upstairs i said look you got to go for no you can't make decisions for the customer you got to give them the opportunity to make their own decisions and you need to give them the best that

you would do for your own home or if your mother was there right fix your mother's door right and i tell them the story about what i did for my mom but you know we're gonna have the best conversation in the world because you know one of the things we don't talk about enough on this podcast is creating a brand and a story brand and usually there's a villain um if you think about a disney movie there's a villain there's a plot and then there's the hero i really want to take a deep dive and really pick your brain on how to create a message. You talked about creating a story, designing and creating meaning. And I want to really pick those apart and talk about where does someone start?

So we'll talk about home service since it is a home service expert podcast. And I love your story that you shared with me. I'm not sure if it's time to share that with your plumbing experience, but it would be great. I want to hear if you took somebody, maybe like the guy you talked about, where to start and what do we need to be thinking about? Awesome. I will share that. I promise. Remind me if I don't get to it. The first thing is that branding is visual and visceral storytelling. If it's good branding, it sticks in your psyche. If I were to say, you know, who are you calling at three o'clock in the morning? It's Jake from

State Farm, right? We all know, we all know that because it was perfectly drilled into us. It was an advertising, but it's great branding as well, right? So your brand has to basically create an emotional attachment and like what I would call like energy. So you have to create effective action out of your branding. So anytime we work with a company, that's the first thing that you have to do, because here's the reality. You know, if I'm looking for a plumber, hypothetically, okay. And I go to their website and I look at their brand and I look at their websites, what everybody does, whether they know it or not, I am basically making snap judgments on their success. They can be the best plumber in the whole country, but if they don't have an effective brand, I've already prejudged them. I say it this

way. I say perception equals reputation, right? And so it determines whether the look that they see in that present moment gives them an idea of who you were in the past, which decides if they're going to work with you in the future. And if you don't have that, you can be the best looking brand or you can be the best service company. And I think that's kind of the key here is that you talk about it from a service standpoint. Most service companies, if you read their Yelp reviews, are not known for their services, right? They're not known for the fact that they use XYZ wrench when they do plumbing or they do every single service that other people do. They're known for the experience that the person has with that person, like with Justin, right?

That was what that was. That was the experience. If you don't recognize that every aspect of your, and this is where I talk about it from the design standpoint, every aspect of that engagement with your customer has to be carefully and calculatedly designed, then you don't determine the referral message. You don't know. I know exactly what somebody is going to say about my company when they put me on Yelp or they tell somebody at a party, hey, you got to use Pure Fusion Media, because I've crafted the message. And the message isn't about service. It isn't even about design. It's about inspiration, understanding that I get there faster than anybody else,

and that I know what they're going to say before they say it. Those are the three things I know anybody's going to say about me, because everything's been designed that way. So yes, we need to have a good looking logo and you got to start there because if you don't have a good looking logo, that's the first thing somebody's going to see on a truck or it's first thing somebody's going to see in an ad or it's the first thing somebody's going to see. And they're going to make those judgments. but ultimately you got to recognize your brand is everything about your business because you can have the best looking logo if they walk into your office and it's all disheveled and the person on the phone or the person at the front desk is rude to the person walking in and it's like on the phone going hold on just a second that's branding

right so what do you do that's interesting you bring that up because I got a buddy in Florida and every quarter they get this wristband and one of them was defend the brand years ago. They're very creative but they try to get the buy-in

because there's nobody. Look, I walked around the parking lot for an hour yesterday and I just picked shit up that I saw. Little things, like nothing. And I've got a guy that goes with the magnets every day. But I did that at Cheesecake Factory when I worked there. I used to work at P.F. Chang's. Like, I cleaned the bathrooms.

I took pride of ownership, even though I didn't own it. And I just, I always used to get these green tickets for free food because they'd always catch me doing something when no one else was watching. But how do you instill that? I mean, the hard part is, like you said, you got to hire the right people. But what I hated the most is when I get back and I notice little things like the door is not shutting all the way or two fans are going at different speeds or the little things that it's the 1% that no one else notices. Exactly. For you is how do you really get people to live, die and breathe by the brand? It comes two ways. It's the character of the leader and it's the message that leader develops for his team, right? You've got to have a vision without vision that people cast off restraint. So you can't just run your company and be like, you know, at the top and sitting in your office

and not being like William Wallace and getting everybody charged because they will live and die for you if they believe in what you're doing. But you got to have the character to withstand it. Like if you're negative, that's one of the things I talk about is ethics. Like if you ever tell a client you're in a bad mood, you're done. You know what I mean? You never want them to agree with your bad mood because basically nobody has to know you're pissed if it doesn't show up on your face or it doesn't show up in an email or you don't

say anything about it. You could have a horrible day and nobody ever knows it because it doesn't manifest. You know what I mean? So yes, you have to always be positive as the leader of your operation, but it's possible. And so you got to look at it from the standpoint of like, look, if I'm negative today, I've lost power, I've lost reputation, and I've lost money. Is it worth it? Right? Are those three things worth it to just go, man, I'm pissed today? You know, whatever that is. So it's vetting your employees as well. you were talking about that already spend hours if not days with people that you're going to hire before you ever put them on on your team because you want to know how they react in all sorts of different circumstances so i remember in the book stealing fire uh he talks about how i think it was google they were looking for a new ceo or a manager you know like a top level executive

and so they took in a burning man. Yeah. See how he'd react at the burning man festival. And I think they took a few of them actually. And like the one guy that rose to the top is the guy that they decided to use. So it takes a lot, but it's worth it. If you're really trying to develop your operation. You know, and here's something that I don't think many people talk about. You take that time to invest in these employees. It works both ways. All of a sudden they got an owner or a management team that's actually taking time to learn about them and their wants and needs in their personal life. And you could take somebody that used to be a six for their last employer. Here's the best way to say it. You've got these brand new quarterback.

And I mean, he's coming out of college and he's an ace in the hole. He might go play for the Dallas Cowboys and shit the bed. But with the right coaching, when he trades over to the Detroit Lions, per se, all of a sudden he is in his glory days. And that means with the right coach,

the right mentor, the right person to listen, the right person to train, the right person to train, the right person to adapt them to his surroundings. He can be such a better player. Right. And we've all been there before. And I just think that's such an important thing is most of the time people say, I got crappy employees. I go, well, you're a crappy leader. But you can actually have the best skilled employee and he can be the biggest rain on your company because he knows he's the best skilled employee. Right. So it's not easy. That's why you got to have hungry, humble people. Right. We talk about it like, you know, you look at it and go, oh, you know, humility. Yeah, I know you got to be tough. You got to be whatever. No, you got to be willing to take, you know, there's a proverb that says like a wise man loves rebuke, which sounds like completely antithetical to everything you see on television. But the reality is the more you learn

from the people that are stronger and greater and wiser than you, the more you actually can become wiser than them because they can believe their own hype. And in believing your own hype, you just accelerate beyond them. And so I always tell people it's like a Ferris wheel, right? As soon as you're at the top and you think you're at the top, you're automatically coming back down. Well, it's funny. I tell people I'm a PhD. I'm poor, hungry, and determined. So when it comes to branding, I love this talk. Like I said, is I see all these mistakes. There's this great company called Kick Charge. It's a buddy of mine, Dan Antonelli. And he does a pretty good job with, with logos and just kind of making everything cohesive. And I see these boards and I'm in everything from HVAC to window

washing to chimney sweeping, you name it, I'm in everything from HVAC to window washing to chimney sweeping. You name it. I'm in these groups. And he goes to a rap company and I'm like, what in the hell do you even do? Like, I'm like, what is this? And they're like, they think it's so cool. And I'm like, you know, there's this garage company called Well Hung Garage Doors. And it's kind of funny. But I'm like, dude, I don't know. I'm like, you're not going to be a big company. And I don't know what to

tell these people because I don't want to shoot their dreams. But I'm like, Oh, man. And I gotta tell you, I've been through my days of crappy raps. I mean, I used to go try to get a deal for a van for 1500 bucks. And it was the worst blurry picture crap i mean it's better than not having anything at all but it's still crap so what do you tell people like that i mean they got to go to the professionals no that's a really good question because i have the rap side i just had a conversation today with a guy who's got a concierge service for dealing with car maintenance issues so like oil changes and stuff like that will come to your house, right? But he doesn't want to come to residential people's houses.

He wants to go to commercial businesses, right? Like yours. And he wants to basically service a hundred cars at a time. His problem, and he's got a great logo. His problem is that the logo is the only thing on the car. So when he's driving around on the road, people that have residential homes are going, no, maybe, and it's not even really that good. So he's not getting that much business because

it's not targeted. But let's say somebody does call him. He's got to drive an hour out there to work on one vehicle to come back to the office to work on maybe 10 others or whatever. He lost probably $2,000 worth of business because he doesn't have his messaging right on his vehicle. He's got a great brand. The brand's good. And so I told him, I said, look, here's what you need to do. You should say something on the vehicle like we service the service industry. Anybody in the service industry understands what that means. And the people who are looking at it, that isn't his target market. And that's what great branding does. Great branding weeds out the wrong market. Okay. So for example, IBM is a great example of this. They did it on accident, but they have

weeded out the creative agencies. Very few people are on IBM computers that are graphic designers or fashion designers or anything like that. Why? Because the brand looks like a, first of all, it looks like it was like 10, 15 years ago, which it was, but it looks left brain and stoic and boring, right? Apple's so much hipper and funner. And so in that case, if they're trying to reach the creatives, good luck, right? You missed your market. So, yes, they've done a good job of kind of alienating themselves, but they alienated themselves out too far. So when you create like well hung, I don't want to be the guy whose house I go to because the frat house likes the name.

Right. You know what I mean? You're not getting a 35-year-old housewife with two kids that goes to church on Sundays and Wednesdays. And that's exactly, you got to understand who your avatar is. And I was talking to two managers last night, pretty late actually. And I've always been the Ray Kroc mentality of when your enemies are drowning, stick a hose in their mouth. Because I'm always like, take market share. Because take market share means I had to bring myself back to reality and say, look, I don't want to pick up cheap apartments that are wanting

the cheapest thing possible to barely get by. But when we were talking, I said an apartment could be our avatar if they want high-end doors. Because they're charging $2,000 a month for rent and they want to charge that. And people want pride of ownership. They want to feel good. The reason they go to a high-end apartment or condo community like that is because they don't want the maintenance, but they want to live in luxury. And that could be, so it's really defining. We actually went through 200,000 records and we got all these reports on who our avatar is. And believe it or not, it's actually more females than males. And it tells us exactly where they live, what their credit card score is, how much equity they have in their home, where they congregate.

And I do want to shift our clientele a little bit because they're definitely on the upper side of the money. But the mega wealthy are the people that want the crazy stuff, which I like, but those also could be a nightmare. So like I talked to Ken Goodrich with Gettle, with the big company, 150 million. And he said, we don't want the rich people. We want the dual income, $120,000 household.

They could spend 15,000 on an HVAC unit. They get financing and they get in and out. We carry two units. It's a five ton. It goes in. There's no fancy stuff to it. There's no different speeds of the motor and all that shit. He goes, that's cool. I have that in my house, but I don't want to give that to my customers. And I said, dude, that's awesome. He figured out what to do. And I do retrofit, garage door repair and service. And I don't like to do new builders. I don't like any accounts receivable. I don't like the wham bam, thank you, man, cheap HOA door, because it gives a lot of problems. And if I look at even automotive shops, the guys that

make the most money are we work on BMW only. Yeah, specialized, and they've learned to take out a niche. And I had a pest control company in here earlier and i said guys i was pre-dental i took anatomy physiology organic chemistry biochemistry you name it 65 credits and i said the dentist said one thing to me he well he said two things he said go to business school before you become a dentist but he also said make sure you specialize because that's where the money's at yep and as long as we have a specialty that we're known for, we can be great. And that's what you've done with your agency. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. No, you're absolutely right. And that's really where

you look at the beginning of your company and you go, what is going to make me the most successful? That's why I hired a salesperson, right? My threshold, you can get inside a demographic where you reach a threshold. So you either have to, you know, hire more people and that may not be the right move for you, right? It may be switching the market a little bit and deciding, okay, if we move over in this area or move to this demographic, I can keep the same amount of employees and I don't have to like hire 10 more people to deal with the growth that we have because you can price yourself out of the game. Right. And so ultimately that's what I try to do is I try to be a non-commodity market.

Right. And services, guess what? In service, if you don't think this way, you will become commoditized because it will go to lowest price. So for you and for me, I'm not known for my services really. Right. I'm not known for great design. Although we are great designers, I'll toot my own horn. I'm known for that inspirational model and those other things I talked about. So that when the economy goes bad and everybody else is charging $35 an hour, I can continue charging my large rate because they can't get what they can get anywhere else. Yeah. You know, I talk about commoditizing all the time in Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, they're trying to come in

and commoditize as much as they could. But the difference is they can't have brand new trucks that are set up like mine with a great employee. I mean, they could try to buy trucks, but what we've built was, I think it's pretty special because we recruit. We've got a huge training center. We've got a learning management system. We get great people. And that's the hardest part to figure out in the home service space is, I say, step one out of my eight-step process is contact the customer ahead of time. We text message them a video about the technician.

And then they call up and they say, you know, what I'd like to do is I'm going to be stopping off at 7-Eleven. Could I grab you a coffee, Gatorade, anything for your kids? Yep. Right then and there, I made myself different than anybody else in the industry. That's right. That's before I even got to the home. And that's, you know what, that's what they put on Yelp, right? Oh yeah, it's the little things that break the mold of anything they've ever seen is, holy crap, before the guy even got here, he made a positive. Exactly, exactly. So I talk about in the Creative Success book, I said, if I wasn't doing what I was doing,

and I wasn't a marine biologist, I'd want to be a seller of high-end homes. And what I would do was it would be a three-day process where I would basically give you an entire two days at a spa, right? I'm selling multi-million dollar houses. So it's not costing me that much compared to the amount of commission I'm going to make. But you get two days at a spa. The first day is all yours. Second day, I meet you at the pool and we sit down for three hours and I get to know you completely. Everything about you. Then I go find your house, right? You get that next night, spend the night. Now, am I going to be known for

the fact that I sold the house or am I going to be known as the spa guy? And everybody starts passing out their business. Do I get every single sale? Not necessarily. So I'll tell you, this is an example that you asked me to bring up today. So you have to be about the referral, not the job. And so many people are about the job because they're so worried about collecting the money that they don't recognize the referral. So I had a guy come over here today from a company and I won't give the name of the company to deal with a plumbing issue that I had because I couldn't get the bottom of my, where you have the dial to turn it to get the water to come in, wasn't working. So I called this guy up and he wasn't like the most professional guy anyway. And that's why I hired him. So I'm

like, oh, perfect. This is a great guy for my business. And so he comes over with one other guy and he goes, I think I know what the problem is. He pushes the thing in instead of twist it. And the whole thing starts filling up. And I'm like, wow. Okay. That's all it was. Right. And then he goes in the other room and he gets out his iPad and he's writing this whole thing in and he charges me 65 bucks. And I paid it. And I'm like, okay. And I gave my book.

But I'm like, you were about the job, not the referral. Because you never know what's going to happen after that moment. So had that been a good example, not only would I be sharing this story, I'd be telling you the name of the company, right? I'm not going to tell you the negative name. I'm not going to do that to him. But I would be telling you, I had this great example. Here's a perfect example of what happened. And he has no idea that could have happened for him. So if you focus on just collecting money, you will never be as successful as what you're talking about, which is getting him a cup of coffee before you go or whatever it ends up being known for that separates you from everybody else.

You know, my eighth step in my process is sell the job right. And here's what I mean by that is I've collected the money from you. Now I bought every single technician, a blower, they blow out the garage, they go over warranty information. They run the door five times. And here's the deal. I'm getting ready to hire secret shoppers because I want to make sure that every step to the T, the process is followed. And for me, it reduces buyer's remorse. It makes them feel good. It reduces warranty calls. I always say, listen, if you hear anything that you don't like, let me know. If I can lubricate it or tighten it or at least explain it, we're going to go over your safety eyes, your manual, how your phone works with the new garage door opener, all these things.

And if these steps are followed, I said, guys, here's the biggest problem. Do you know that most pilots that die are 42-year-old males? And I explained that to these guys earlier. And they said, what do you mean? I said, well, what I found out was that usually males come into money in their late 30s. They've actually made it. They started making money in their career. And what happens is there's all these tests that you have to go through.

There's a series of checklists, air pressure. They got all these little gauges. And we get up. It takes like 45 minutes. 45 minutes and we start skipping steps and what happens in steps that's why they die and here's the deal if you don't skip my steps if you do them right every single time yeah you do them exactly the same you will be super successful it's when you get cocky and you're gonna skim a little step you know that's when you get cocky and you skim a little step. You know, that's when it fails.

You try to do anything. Skip an ingredient. It moms the lasagna. It won't come out the same. Okay. Do not skip steps. Right. And that's forward thinking versus like shallow thinking, right?

It is ultimately about the referral because you can spend thousands. So I'll give you a good example. Okay. So Nordstrom, and I know Nordstrom's suffering now, but I gave a story in 2016, so I was doing better. I said, Nordstrom, when you walk into a Nordstrom, you dress a little nicer. You are a little more friendly with people, right? You walk into a Walmart, they've got websites

of like making fun of people's outfits going into Walmart, right? That year, Nordstrom spent $30 million on advertising. Walmart spent $1.8 billion. It wasn't about the advertising. All they needed to do was improve their service. They could have saved $1.8 billion because all Nordstrom spent was 30 million. And everybody walks into Nordstrom with a better attitude and dressed finer and realizes they're in a place that respects them. As much as I respect and love, I actually love the Walmart. And in my master's program, we've actually did a lot of case studies. I just feel like it's so bad because here's what Walmart does better than anybody. They negotiate better with their vendors, way better, number one. Number two is they get people with government assistance to be able to employ people that are making below average funds. And as much as I'm

impressed by the way that they've been successful is they did go into it as the discount one. And they're the only company that I know. You look at Enterprise, you look at all these great companies, the Waltons, it's just so hard to emulate that model. And I hate it because a lot of business owners in the home service space say, look, I'm more of a quantity type person. I can do 10 garage doors a day.

I fixed the only problem. They call me back in two years, it's continuous flow. And I'm like, what do you have to show for yourself? I know a guy in town, you know, he does springs for really, really cheap. And he works his ass off his employee. He's got two employees at any given time total. And he works, he doesn't take any time off. I mean, he's getting fatigued and he can't keep this up and he's got nothing to show

for it really. And I'm like, but people go, how could this guy afford to do that? And I said, he can't keep this up and he's got nothing to show for it really and i'm like but people go how could this guy afford to do that and i said he can't he owns a job he can't afford to do it he can't afford to take vacations he has nobody watching his back his wife works for him his daughter answers the phones for him and i'm like that's not the kind of life you want all right because they never really calculated the cost of doing things and it's actually quite sad if you ask me and And I'm like, guys, we have a nice office. We've got a nice training center. We've got trainers. We've got

field supervisors. We got air conditioning in the summer here. I imagine they keep it at about 79 degrees or 82 degrees in the summer if that. And that's just not something I want. I want nice things. I want Dave Ramsey. I want homeownership. I want to pay people a livable wage. I hate the minimum wage bullshit too. I can't stand that argument. I had a minimum wage when I was 12 years old. I made $4 and 5 cents an hour. That's what I started with when I was 12. You know what? I know there's a lot of people that depend on money and they didn't get the chances that I might have had. They can get free scholarships. They will teach people, single mothers, how to do a lot of things. So I don't want to hear the complaint because you and I both know if they move it to $15

an hour, guess what's going to happen? Rapid inflation. The bananas that they bought two weeks before that are $3 now are $7. The ones that get hurt the most are the minimum wage people. Right. Well, I mean mean it's the whole thing about forward thinking versus shallow thinking and i don't want to get political but it is thinking that way it's like from the standpoint of like okay so my college just got

taken care of but everybody else just paid for it including me So I'm going to get taxed higher though. Like my money got reduced today, five years from now, I'm going to be paying three times more. It doesn't make a lot of sense. So yeah, I mean, I get it from that perspective. So I'm curious, you do a needs-based analysis system with your customers. And it's so funny because I always explain this. You sell me a pen. I went out with one of my biggest customers for Christmas. I took him out to dinner and he goes, Tommy, sell me a pen. And I said, that's a great question, Lauren. What kind of pen are you looking for? You go underwater, you're traveling with it. He goes, actually, I work for NASA. I traveled out to space. And I said, okay, tell me a little bit about what you do. He goes, actually, I work for NASA. I traveled out to space.

And I said, okay, tell me a little bit about what you do. He goes, well, there's no gravity in outer space. A lot of times I'm writing upside down. So I said, oh, you're probably going to need a pen that could write upside down and actually have the ink move up. He goes, exactly. He goes, Tommy, out of 500 people, you're the first one that actually asked and got it right. He goes, cause you got to ask questions, right? I get to know the person. Do you walk into the doctor? They go, boom, here's your prescription. And they go, let's get your weight. Let's get your height. Let's get your blood pressure. How are you feeling? Tell me what your energy is like. You smoke cigarettes. Are you drinking it to get enough

sleep? They diagnose the person before the problem. And it sounds like to me, that's what need-based analysis systems all about. Yeah. Yeah. Good point to what you said. I was in a business course in California and the guy held up a glass with water in it or it was just like this. And he goes, what is this? And we all said, well, it's a water bottle. He says, is it really? And he goes, imagine it's a windy day out and I got papers right here. And I set that thing down on those papers. What is it now? And they said, well, it's a weight. You know, it's preventing those things from going. He said, stop selling products. Sell what the product delivers. And you have to know your customer before you can do that.

So what the needs-based analysis questionnaire does is it helps me understand the culture, the capabilities, the mission, and the customer of my clients, right? Because I want to know all that stuff. And one of my biggest questions on there is, where do you want to be in five years? Because in five years, they say, well, I'm a million dollar company now. I want to be a $400 million company.

Be more realistic. I want to be a $40 million company in five years. I will design their look like a $40 million company. So they can walk into it that much easier. And usually they get there two to three years before whatever it was that, you know, they requested that they're hoping to, you know, achieve because they look like it, right? It's that whole thing about vision. It's like without vision, people, you know, cast off restraint. They can see the vision and then they

gravitate to it. And that's where your message has to be so solid. So the needs-based analysis questionnaire just helps us really understand who you are and then who your customer is, what their pain area is, and moves them along so that I can craft a visual and a linguistic message for that client. So when it comes to determining a message, there's other things, but print and digital seem to be the big two. You've got Yellow Book, which is kind of obsolete, but you still got Money Mailer. You got different mailers. The mail gets opened. You got print and then you've got online. You're an expert at both. Talk to me about how the cohesion works and really what you recommend to someone just getting into business in the home service space. Here's how I'd say it. Know your market, you'll know your medium. So you find out that predominantly who your client is, is going to be homes in Sun

Lakes, which is a kind of a retirement development, right? You're not going to invest all your money in social media because they're not on social media, right? And you're going to go, well, no, I need to be here. This is where everything is, Facebook and all that type of stuff. Well, they're not on it. So it doesn't make any sense to use that as your strategy. So in certain cases, you got to go, I got to go back to postcards, you know what I mean? Because they're reading their mail. You know what I mean? The thing that I think is becoming obsolete is magazines, newspapers, that kind of thing. That's not where you're going to necessarily, because they're not getting their information from there anymore. So avoid that, I think. Then the next thing that I would do would be understand what your market is and then begin to address, if it's social media, if you're a plumber,

you don't need a big social media presence unless it's kind of funny, meme-y sort of stuff, right? So it's really recognizing for the service industry, I think, is what are the pain areas of our customers, right? So an HVAC company, right? What is it that is the most frustrating for a person? And maybe it's like two months before it gets really cold or gets really warm. They want to know that their air conditioning unit is ready, right? So in that case, you're basically sending out two months before, have you thought about be ready for the summer or whatever it ends up being? And so you are addressing these needs, but you know the need. So you're automatically getting into what I call getting inside their nervous system. You're automatically relating to whatever it is you've realized they need. And so for you talked about it as well, but take your top 10 customers out to lunch, pay for lunch, get to know everything about their business and about

the needs that they have, and not their business, but them personally and about their needs that they have, and then use that as the way to market for the next year. Oh, yeah. You know, I talked to a guy yesterday who's very, very successful in the, he does everything from kitchen remodel to decks to, he's got all these divisions. And he said, you know, Tommy, what I've done is I find out where all these companies fall short. Like they don't get done in time. They took a deposit. They never finished.

He figured out every single thing that happens that they're notorious for like kitchens and remodels. And he goes, that's what we attack in our marketing. And then we, the hero is, you know, and I don't necessarily agree. I always think the customer is supposed to be the hero. A lot of times we make ourselves the hero and say they did right by picking a one, but you know, I learned this from a really smart social media guy. If you can make the hero, the customer, like, look, we're out here with Gina and Gina is

a mother of three. Not only is she a realtor, but now she's a home mom that's teaching her kids why the teachers are out of school. And how much does it mean to have a mom that cares with her three, her five and seven year old? What an amazing lady. And she happened to call us and my God, her door looks so beautiful, but all of a sudden it's about her and she wants to share that. And she feels an obligation to share the good word because,

you know, how to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie is they want to feel good about themselves. Right. And that's kind of the, I've been learning a lot more. Are you familiar with the book blue ocean? Uh of i haven't read it but i know the book yeah the greatest example of blue ocean is they talk about the benefits of a blender and they talk about some of the features and neither of them matter in blue ocean so they talk about this blender it's beautiful and it washes very easy it chops and dices and just, it's got the better. But the real deal is what sells the blender. And this is what I love about the book is it takes the fruit and vegetables and it cuts them in a way that releases the vitamins from the food source. They give you

a longer life that help you sleep better, that give you vibrant skin, that give you really, when it comes down and you peel that onion back, nobody's doing that to say, I want to have vitamins every day. No, they're not taking vitamins from vitamins. They're taking vitamins because they want all the things that could happen from a vitamin. Longer life, more vibrant skin, more energy, better time with their grandchildren. Yeah. And that's what we got to figure out is what's at the root of what people, people don't want a sexy garage door. They want a house that's valuable that their neighbors say, holy crap, your house is amazing. Exactly.

They want their door to open and close every time safely. And you know that people keep up with the Joneses and we got to figure out for the customer what that is. Right. We're giving it to them. It's interesting. Well, I'm going to throw a tangent in here because I keep hearing you say this, but I really want to get this out. The reason why you are a multi-million dollar operation is because you have been listening to people that make a heck of a lot more money than

you do and you keep applying what they've done. Right. You as a collective individual or a collection of Daniel Pink and Collins and Timothy Ferris, all these guys that you have books and books and books on, you know, people always look at Oprah

and they're like, oh, Oprah, she's this, you know, multi, multi, multi, multimillionaire. And I'm like, she has a show called Super Soul Sunday where she puts all these people on that are all wiser than she is. And she just graphs all that information into her. And everybody goes like, everybody looks at the short answer

is, oh, Tommy's so smart and he's done this and he's got the ability and the look and whatever. It's like, no, man, it's that bookcase behind you that's made you who you are. Or this. Or that. Exactly. Exactly. So if there's anything I can say that has nothing to do with branding, it's literally you have the capacity to be the next Lee Iacocca or Elon Musk or Cutler,

or Bethos or anybody really. Or Musk. Yeah, absolutely. Because all you have to do is be the next person to carry what they carry. You know, I tell people this and I don't know where I heard this, but it just stuck to me is you are the exact same person you were five years ago, unless you meet new people or you read more books. Right. You need to be involved with self research and development.

And without that, we're the same exact people. We've not matured unless we're feeding our mind and our soul. Those are the only two ways to grow. And the people always ask me, I'm on probably three to five podcasts a week of other people's. And they say, give me one thing that you would do different and that you would tell your younger self or that you would give to the audience. I say, here's the one thing. You find the company that you want to become and you do some searching and you find the best of the best of the best, the biggest best, and you fly, get out of your backyard and you bring an empty ass notebook and you ask a billion questions and you fill that thing up

and you determine what your company needs to look like to become that. The greatest news of all is this company will want to feed you. They'll want to give back. Oh yeah. That's the whole thing about that wisdom thing, right? You bring the notebook in and they're like, oh, this person's humble. They're willing to learn. So my wife worked, we lived in Nashville and my wife worked for Alan Jackson in the management department. And one day they said to her, they said, we're giving you the fan club because it's floundering. This, he was the biggest guy in country music at the time. They had a 15,000 people in the fan club and so they said do something about it so she didn't go she decided she got on the phone she started dialing people

she didn't dial other country music artists she dialed prince's fan club president she dialed michael jackson's fan club president she dialed you know madonna's whoever it was all these different people because they all had these massive, massive fan clubs. And she just asked them questions. How did you do this? What was this all about? How did you provide this service or what happens at a at a meet and greet that you do differently than the country music artist did? Two years later, he was like one hundred and fifteen thousand people, the biggest fan club in in all of country music, because she just listened to the people that had done it and she went to the right people. It's the biggest fan club in all of country music. Because she just listened to the people that had done it. And she went to the right people, right? She didn't just go to the

people in her circle. She said, I'm going to step out. And they were willing to give her the time. Because here's the reality. There are moments when you're meeting with somebody else that you will say something you never would have thought of yourself to somebody that is asking you the question that is your way ahead of them financially, your way ahead of them, wisdom wise, your way ahead of them, whatever, not arrogantly, but I mean, you know, they're, let's say they're, Justin would be a good example, right? There were a couple of things I said to Justin that I was like, that was really good. I got to write that down. You know what I mean? Like you want to have that notebook for you and they're, you know, they're writing down and you're like, shoot, I didn't write that down because I was really good i got to write that down you know what i mean like you want to have that notebook for you and they're you know they're writing down you're like shoot i didn't write that down because i was really like what i said i did the same thing i'm in front of my class

literally 25 guys and i started whiteboarding and i don't know what i did and i started going off and i took a picture of it and i'm like look guys let do this. And it's the first time I've ever done this. I said, it's called the Benjamin Franklin. I said, pros and cons. I said, let's go over some pros. Lifetime warranty, financing available, curb uphills, 40%, 102% return on investment, a smile of your home, electricity savings,

safety, protection, convenience, peace of mind, opportunity costs. Then I put in the cons. I put price, then I crossed it out. And I said, no investment, move it to the pros. Yes. And I can't come up with anything. Absolutely. So that's exactly what I tell my clients, right? So you can find my services on Fiverr for five bucks or 20 bucks or whatever it ends up being, right? And I tell people, I'm like, look, you can go to somebody for $100 and get a logo versus what I'm going to I tell people, I'm like, look, you can go to somebody for $100 and

get a logo versus what I'm going to charge you, but I'm an investment. I took a $3,000 investment one time for one of my clients and they're making about $10 million now in two years after I rebranded one part of their operation, right? Are they thinking now about the fact that they spent more than they could have spent at Fiverr? No, they're just raking in the dough. So you have to look at it from that perspective. There's an evolution of thinking that really is a business owner. I was super frugal when I first got into business. I didn't have a lot of money. And if I could go now, I think I could create 10 brands because I know how much to get the right people. Once you learn to build a team, you find a lot of millionaires that lose it all. They go right back to where they were

because of the lessons, the experiences they've learned. I had this guy, the private equity playbook, Adam Coffey on my podcast. And he's the largest private equity CEO. They put him in place of a commercial HVAC company, the largest commercial HVAC company in the world now. And what I've learned is the game that I used to play was home service. These guys in private equity are playing a different game. So now I'm learning this new game and I'm like, holy crap. If I buy a two and a half million dollar company, do you realize I created 25 million net of arbitrage because I'm a platform company and what I've done? and you know what when

i talk about this in the podcast it's the most fun thing for me in the world because i used to play this game of higher technicians train them get good dispatchers get good csrs now i'm like arbitrage baby like this is better than drug dealing it's nuts and it's fun and now i'm like i used to be so like go greenfield grow organically now i'm like, I used to be so like, go greenfield, grow organically. Now I'm like, I'm going to buy so many freaking companies. It's going to be disgusting. And I'm going to give them all kinds of upside. And I could create hundreds of millions of dollars in a year with arbitrage. And now I'm like, this whole time, I've got a master's in what I would consider home service.

I've got not even an associate's degree, not even a GED in arbitrage of what this is. So now I've got to hang around with a whole different crowd and learn how to do acquisitions and learn how to raise capital. But now I'm like, I'm back to being a student. And I'm like, I've got this piece down. Once I get this piece and I marry them together, holy crap, look out. This is like a billion. And then here's where the humility comes in. You're the low end on the totem pole again.

The worst, the smallest in your market right but you're only going to be the biggest fish so i said it this way once on a facebook post i said you know why just be the biggest fish in the biggest pond grow the pond and let everybody develop together right stop swimming around your pond and just being like i'm the greatest greatest one in here. Frickin grow the pond. And yes, you won't be in that situation. You will not look like the biggest fish anymore because the pond's bigger. Oh, I'm tiny. I talked to 40 private equity companies. One of them just raised another $7 billion. I'm like 7 billion. Holy crap. And I'm like, this is good though, because you know what? In my mind, it's so weird. I still think, I still think when I buy a steak dinner and it's 60 bucks, I'm like, holy crap.

But then again, you know, we'll do 260 grand in a day. And I'm like, ah, these, you know, it's so weird how your brain starts to make these synapses and axons and dendrites and all this. It's just, it changes like, like 10,000 a day, 10 years ago to me was like holy crap and it's just crazy how our brains change and now i'm starting to see these numbers and i'm like a billion's not what a billion used to be i mean we're borrowing 1.9 trillion dollars right now i mean right you're about the fastest inflation you've ever seen but it's all about money i mean here's the reality so i have a friend of mine out of nashville and he's got a kind of just a business development mentoring program. And he said to this one guy, the guy had multi, multimillions, probably a hundred million dollar operation. And he was like, he asked him, he goes, what matters to you? And he goes, well, money, you know, and he's like like what else matters to you like who are you like who do you want to be when you grow up and the guy couldn't answer the question he'd just been

so busy with making money that he didn't even know who he was and who he wanted to be so i have in my own life i have a lot of the things i want to have i'm 51 years old i've got the vehicle i want i've got the house i want i live in the I want. I'm not out there trying to create $100 million for the sake of myself so I can get $100 million in an operation. I want to do stuff for those other people out there that I'm like, that is something I can invest in or that is something I can believe in or that's going to change the world. That's my MLK 2.0 book right i want to basically take people and like fulfill their destinies because they can't fulfill them themselves because i've been there before right and i've been around people who like they've gotten in their own arrogance and they haven't helped me in whatever i'm trying to do and i'm like i gotta go around that mountain again this

sucks but i'll go around it again i'll come out the other side well you know you said something pretty incredible which is basically people are asking me so you got 100 million in the bank then what is then i could go help 10 companies do exactly what i just did and i could give them the money and then all of a sudden i can bring a lot of people with me and build relationships and build people like to me it's just a stepping stone to the next level and i don't have a destination i'm enjoying the ride and the ride is going to continue i'm hoping that i'll be 92 and still enjoying the ride because the destination for me doesn't exist yeah you will never retire so to speak because you're enjoying what you do

so many people are like waiting for that moment of retirement because they're not happy in their position. So you brought this up at the beginning. You talked about how you have some of your team go through their personality profiles. Yep. I highly recommend this, that you go through strength, that a company takes their employees through StrengthFinder and through Myers-Briggs.

And the reason why is you're going to figure out exactly who they were designed to be and what they were designed to do. And in certain cases, you may lose an employee or two because that may not be where they're supposed to be, or they may shift into another realm, right? But they don't even know who they are. And when they can figure that out and you can begin to mentor, that's the whole mentoring aspect of it. When you can mentor them into who they were designed to be, because it's all based on their genetics and their conditioning and their history and all that type of stuff. Now you've got your entire team working together. So for example, I was going to do this a number of years ago, but I wanted to basically go into schools

and into literally the education system, governmental education system, and say, here's what you need to do. Sophomore year of high school, before they ever start taking their first class, go through those two things. Then plan out the next three years of their lives based on their aptitudes and their personalities. Now, here's who I was going to sell it to. I wasn't going to sell it to the education systems. I was going to sell it to Apple and Musk and Amazon because I was going to say in the next five years, I will bring you the happiest, best employees you've ever had. Yeah. Because they know who they are and they know who they want to be. So I'm just telling you, you know, you're following do that in state. I didn't do it in the university. So I didn't get a chance, but do that with your

employees. And now all of a sudden you've got the most excited because they're running in their lanes. I call it getting in your flow. And I know you know this. I'm in flow, which is basically your optimum state of being, so to speak, about five hours a day, right? Like from the minute I get up at say four o'clock in the morning till like 10 o'clock in the morning, I am just going. And whether I'm writing a book or I'm working on something else, or I'm doing some design work or whatever, I'm just in flow because I know who I am and I know what I have the capacity to do and be, right? Most people never get into flow. They're nine to fivers. You know, they're frustrated at their jobs because they might not even be in the right job. Well, yeah, you know, it's funny because as I started to get into predictive index and personality profiling, what I found was, and I work with the CEO of the company, is he showed my top management team on a quadrant scale, four quadrants. And he said, Tommy, what I do with private equity and big companies is

I research the executive team. And what I do is I place somebody where they're missing. And it could be anywhere in the quadrant. But when I find that missing piece, usually they grow 100% at a minimum from that very person coming in. Because here's the deal that I know. You can't get me to sit still and tell me when Brian learned who I was, one of my managers, he goes, holy shit, this all makes sense. Cause he wants to tell me an hour long about what he got accomplished. And I'm like, does it work? Did you do good? Great work. Keep it up. But he goes, that's it. I mean, he wants to tell me a story. He's a seat type and he's going, well, this is how I did it. Do you want to know more? I'm like, no,

I'm not, I don't want to know the details. I want to know, does it work? Does the plane fly? Put me in it. But I want to ask you a few more questions. So tell me a little bit about the creative success a little bit. Okay. So creative success actually came out of another book that I read. I won't tell you the name of the book because we'll do that some other time. But I ended up telling the author and the author kind of blew me off. And I did the same type of thing you do. Like I wrote him and I just said, really impressed with this. And so I gave a talk on kind of his book. And I was like, this is so much bigger than just a rehash of somebody else's book. So I started writing Creative Success. And essentially what Creative Success talks about is that in the last 40 years, so much bigger than just a rehash of somebody else's book. So I started writing creative success. And essentially what creative success talks about is that in the last 40 years, we have moved from

a left brain society. This is good for service industry, which is all about your products and services to a right brain society, which is always about story design and experience. Okay. So because that happened, it took a few years for it to happen to the overall general marketplace. It started in arts and creative and music and that kind of thing. But in the last 10, 15 years, it's shifted over to the creative side. So if you think about it, the artists and the poets and the designers and the script writers are not the richest people in our society always, but they change how you view the world, right? They are world creators, perception skewers. So I basically take all of

those right brain strategies and I show you how they operate. I say, here's what a script writer does. Now apply it to your business of pharmaceutical sales. Here's what a graphic designer does. Now go take it into the medical field. You know, I talk about the high concept. So one of the things I always do with my clients, the first question in my need-based analysis questionnaire is, imagine you're at a party and somebody comes up to you and says, what do you do? Give me your perfect one sentence answer.

And they go, well, I, you know, I sell widgets. I go, no, everybody sells widgets, right? That doesn't work for you. I said, here's the reference point. I said, it's called a high concept. And when a script writer goes in to pitch a studio, that studio says, okay, what's your movie? They want two sentences. And those two sentences have been crafted for the last two years. Because if you say it's a movie about a car crash, they go, well, there's a heck of a whole bunch of movies about a car crash. Who really cares,

and you're out of the door. But if you say it's a story about a woman she's a single mom who has a 17 year old daughter her daughter gets killed by a drunk driver in a fluke she goes to the prison to be angry at him and slowly develops a relationship and they become fast friends and she begins to forgive the man who killed her daughter there's a a story, right? There's something you can get behind. Two sentences or so, but it's still a movie about a car crash. I love that. That's a good story.

Well, not the best story, but it makes sense. I love it. So I've been through the book and actually what I like about it is the pictures are more for the right brain. They explain everything, and then if you want to read a chapter, and the way that you put the whole book together is really creative.

It just makes you think outside of the box. I wrote it like an infographic. So the beginning of each chapter is a one- to two-page infographic. So literally you don't have to read the book. You can read the infographics if you're a right brain person and get the general dynamics of the whole book. Plus talking about altruistically selfish, if it's sitting at a store like Barnes and Noble and you don't want to sit there and read, but you can read an infographic and go kind of like that. That makes sense. You're going to buy the book. So it just made it easier on the

person and it made it easier on me to sell. Yeah. I got a buddy that works on this medical, it's called like Picbonics. And he teaches people through pictures to remember 10 things about diseases. And it's crazy that the people that are right brain can get it. I'm not as much on the creative, but as long as you can remember a picture. So let me ask you a few more questions here. I always ask if the audience wants to reach out to you, get help from you, maybe some creative help, just get ahold of you. What's the best way to do that? Purefusionmedia.com is the website.

And then you can reach out to me directly. Just send me an email. It's david at purefusionmedia.com. I love to engage. So I will always engage somebody if they reach out to me. Because it's like you said, man, if I can learn from somebody else,

I'm going to do it. And I always ask this every single time. If there's three books that have changed your life, you've already given us. I've got a lot of notes. Stealing Fire. I know I've got that book,

but I want to go back through it. And I've got your book and you mentioned a couple of books, but what would be the three books to go through? Anything by Neil Postman. But Technopoly, especially as what's happening today in our life, is absolutely essential, I think, because Technopoly really talks about how when technology rules society, it's a dangerous place to be.

So it's a really good book. I read a lot of kind of strategy books from that perspective. A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink is a good one on understanding the creative process. And it's kind of that recognizing left brain, right brain kind of thing. And then probably I would say Malcolm Gladwell, Tipping Point. A classic, but a really, really good book. And one of the things I love about that book is the connector, right? And anybody has the capacity to be a connector. You just may not utilize it, right? You may know five people, but if you can connect those five people to another five people and those five people to another five people, you are a connector. The problem is most people won't do it they want to hold their own cheese instead of giving it out

so to speak i love connectors man you can grow a business with a couple good connectors i'm involved with um send out cards and it's like all those people are connectors yeah and then a couple send out card meetings you've been to some of those? Yeah, I've spoken to a couple of them. Yeah. Yeah. Cody Bateman's an awesome guy. So last thing I do here is I'll give you the floor and I try to give you an idea of something to talk about that's some type of action, some type of takeaway that these listeners that usually own home service companies can do or meditation or something to improve

their lives. Okay. Awesome. In fact, actually, that's one of the, you know what, that's really interesting that you say that because that's what Justin asked me when he left that day. And I think what I told him at that point was that humble play. But I think that for service industries one recognize it's not about the service control the yelp review control you know the referral if you can control the referral you can walk in confidence every single day because if you can't then you don't know what people are saying about you that guy that came over today doesn't know what i'm about to say on Yelp about him. Right? I talk about it in the book. And I will, for the first 10 people who email me, I'll give them a free copy of Creative Success. Just send me your address and dialogue, and we'll get that out to people. But

one of the things I talk about in the book is having a genre around your company. So for example, if you go see a romantic comedy, there is a pre-set of rules to a romantic comedy over a horror film, right? So if you can create a genre around your company, then they can start knowing you by that genre. So mine is the inspirational genre. So everything I do is trying to inspire my clients, trying to get them to be more excited about their lives, trying to pour into them. And it's all calculated. It's all on purpose, right? It's not fake because that's who I am, but it's all calculated. So in the book, I talk about three genres, the future vision genre, the education genre, and the inspirational genre. Find one of your own, whatever that ends up being, and run with it and begin to craft that referral for yourself. I love it. Well,

listen to that. So if you're one of the first 10 people, we'll have a page here on the Home Service Expert. If you find it, you'll see the email address to reach out. Just go ahead and email David and you'll get a free book and the book is awesome and i definitely recommend reaching out if you need help with your and they can find it on amazon too just search it's creative success with an eight so c-r-e-8-t-v-e success but yeah i definitely want to give out books to your audience and again thank you so much man this was awesome i know we didn't talk too much about branding but hey look Hey, look, I love these. You know, you can just shoot the shit and have a good time with somebody.

And it's not exactly, exactly. Reading from, we got great questions, but there's a lot here. So thank you very much, David. I really appreciate it. Of course, man. You got it, buddy. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me.

And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review.

It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences. Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is

actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it. Thank you.