The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Generate Qualified Leads With The Right Approach To Digital Marketing

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Chris Yano is the CEO of RYNO Strategic Solutions, a digital marketing company focused on the home services industry, as well as the host of the “To The Point” Podcast. A former race car driver, he has done countless keynotes, breakouts and webinars on best practices in digital marketing for companies in the home services space. In this episode, we talked about entrepreneurship, internet marketing, search engine optimization, account management...

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. Hey, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today I have Chris Yano with me. He owns a huge advertising agency. You guys probably heard of him. He's from Rhino. I'm going to tell you a little bit about him. He's an expert in entrepreneurship, internet marketing, search engine optimization, pay-per-click ad management, sales, mobile applications, web design, app design, and account management.

He's based out of Phoenix, so he was able to come here, spend some time with us here at the main shop here in Phoenix. So he's the CEO from 2008 to now of Rhino Strategic Solutions. He's the co-owner of the T-shirt shop from 2013 to now. Yano Motorsports race car driver from 2007 to 2016. Sequoia Technologies IMS National business development manager you did that for about a year and AT&T advertising solutions district sales

manager for a couple years you were a former race cars driver who runs a digital marketing consulting business now he's the CEO right now a digital marketing company based out of Phoenix and he specialized in HVAC plumbing electrical but I don't think there's a lot of home services you won't touch pretty much yep and I was on his podcast recently he's the co-host of the to the point home service podcast and he's he's done countless keynote speeches break out webinars on successful digital marketing best practices for all service companies I really appreciate you coming. Yeah man, glad to be down here. It's always nice to be able to do these things in person. It is, it is.

I've only done a few here at the office. We've had Ken Goodrich, we've had Michael Gerber, stuff like that. Pretty interesting, you know I've seen you, done a lot of stuff with Ken, you also had Michael Gerber. Right. We've done a lot of the same interviews and I've heard a lot, you know what's funny is I've heard a lot about you way before I even knew who you were. Just the Rhino brand.

It's pretty cool that you guys have done what you've done in the home service space. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you've built over the last. Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. For those listening, Mark, you've got to check out Tommy's podcast on ours. It was fire. He put on a clinic on ours.

So, I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, so I didn't mean to get into the home services space. I got sucked into it. I've heard that so many different times. And I'll tell this story. I'm like, one thing that if anybody knows me or has listened to me speak or has listened to our podcast, I'm as candid and transparent as they come. I don't hold anything anything back I didn't go to school to get into internet marketing nor would I have any interest in getting involved in in the home

services space so I went to college Indiana State University I was a wrestler I went in there played soccer I didn't know what I wanted to do I wanted to party I knew that I was really good at doing those things I went to college for four years to get a two-year degree in criminal justice and then I got a DUI so I turned 21 so it kind of made my parents real proud of me squashed that that career path real quick and I had to pivot so I come from a big farm family I'm from Indiana so shout out to any of my Hoosiers listening but my grandpa was a retired farmer out here in Arizona and he flew me out to any of my Hoosiers listening. But my grandpa was a retired farmer out here in Arizona, and he flew me out to visit with him.

And I was like, this place is pretty badass. So I wanted to make the move, and I literally left Indiana, moved out here on my own, and started figuring it out. My sister went to go work for this little company called Google back in 2000, so early, early on. Wow. And so she had kind of made me aware of all the internet stuff that was going on.

And man, the first, my first, like, one of my first professional, like corporate jobs, if you will, was working for Dex, which I know you've been involved in, but back then it was like US, West, Quest, Dex, like it didn't change I don't know how many times. That's how I started getting into the advertising space. And once they started introducing online,

the online marketing side of it is when I started kind of getting sucked into it and enjoying it more. So, I mean, the Rhino thing, I've been really 12 years only doing digital marketing, still to this day, it's the same thing except when it was just me then, now there's a little over 100 of us, only doing digital marketing still to this day it's the same thing except what it was just me then now there's a little over a hundred of us only doing digital marketing for the trades more specifically HVAC plumbing electrical roofing so sit here today and it's I'm not doing the work anymore the SEO the

PPC side of it I'm doing all the strategic side of it's just I like the most yeah I saw just earlier I was looking on your stuff and you have an amazing website you guys built for just a little over five grand and that's soup to nuts. Tell me a little bit about some of the services you offer and why somebody should, you know, I'll tell you and I want you to answer that, but so many people are jack of all trades. They do everything. We'll do this, we'll do this. And I've heard so many huge, and you know some of them.

I mean, Scorpion's a big company, and the trades. And they do everything. Tell me about what you do and what you specialize in. Yeah, sure, so great question. This is something I get asked often. And everybody wants to know what's the difference. And on one of our podcasts we shot this morning, the same question had come up again.

I learned one thing, and maybe this is because I have ADD. I can't focus on a lot of things at the same time. So I have to laser focus on what I can do, which is why wrestling was such a great sport for me coming up, is I could focus on what I was doing and not have to worry about what my team was doing. And I've just kind of lived that life of focusing on one thing. Well, once I started my own company,

one of my very first customers was about a $30 million HVAC and plumbing company in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had to go meet with this guy every other Tuesday. And so every other Tuesday I had to go in, talk through what I just did the previous week, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, how many new service leads, install leads, drain cleaning leads, you name it. So it sucked on the Monday night before having to go and meet with them and I knew at that point I learned so much about how to pull in different types of leads in the costs for him that I thought it took so much bandwidth just to just to focus on that and it was just me so as we started to grow now he was also was a carrier contractor and carriers headquarters is in Indianapolis Indiana he was part of

their dealer advisory council. And it was a, what did you do, man? You grew, we grew 3.1 million with him that year, organic growth, that was the stuff that we brought in for him, and they were like, what did you do? He comes to me and says, how big do you want to get this thing? You know, you're in the name of the company.

Back then was called Brickyard Marketing, which is a local name, play off my old racing career and things like that. And I had said, well, I'm in, like let's go. And I decided at that point in time that I would focus only on, really I thought it was gonna be HVAC, but then so many customers were doing multiple services. And then especially today, like today everybody

starts layering in, if you reach back to layering in plumbing or whatever. So it just, you know, I decided if I focus on this, just like in wrestling, if I focus on the same moves over and over and over again that perfected them that I feel like I can never lose if I just always trained on those. And the same mindset came in running this company is if I just did these home services every day, I would be the best at it. And that's how I feel we are today, except now versus being me there's a hundred and five rhinos that's crazy

that's huge success in a pretty fun ride marketing company so what did you wrestle 105 dude I was a hundred pounder 100 pounds nice dude I'm not much bigger yeah it's like phantom weight I had I, yeah. Phantom weight. I had this dude on our podcast who was the first UFC lightweight champion, Jens Pulver, coming on. Oh, wow. And he was like a three-time state champ wrestler, so he accomplished far more than me. But he was a little guy.

And then I'm bigger than him now, but he looks stockier than me. He's a little shorter. Oh, yeah. But he was also a UFC lightweight champ. That's awesome. Now you know by talking smack tongue. No, I don't think so. So digital is the way to go.

I mean, I built my company. I tried a yellow book, and it was right when yellow book was dying. And then I got into mailers, and I'm still a fan of mailers, but they're kind of like, you know, money mailers just kind of went under through the COVID thing, which is crazy. And Valpax still does okay, and you've got all these different mailers, but everything now, reputation management, millennials,

and I've heard millennials bought more houses last year than baby boomers for the first time ever. So talk to me about what's new with digital. Talk to me about SEO versus Google local services versus GMB, you know, that's good stuff. Yeah, sure. I think that one of the questions I get a lot of times is, what should I be doing? Should I only be doing pay-per-click?

Should I only be doing SEO? My opinion is always do what works, but just track it. Make sure you're tracking everything so you know what works, we're not guessing. I'm always a fan of do both. If you can do pay-per-click and SEO and you do it the right way and somebody knows your trade knows your industry what your consumer how they buy and you do a good job at actually doing search engine optimization it's not this fake like smoke and mirrors thing because it can be subjective but it's all about the

rankings man like get me to rank high but the way our methodology is you got to build a page for every service that you offer and every location that you offer it. Like hands down, that's the way you go about it. The majority of our competitors weren't doing that until they've heard your boy Cristiano here giving so many keynotes on saying, build a service page for everything that you do and every location that you offer it. That's half the battle, right? At least you got the page done. What you want to do is when you're running a pay-per-click campaign, somebody's looking for garage repair, Paradise Valley, you want them to go to the page on the website about garage repair and Paradise

Valley. That's the most real that you could possibly deliver up. If you've done a good job with your search engine optimization, you can reduce your cost per click on your pay-per-click campaign, which drops the cost per lead lead down which is what we're in the game and you know smiley's the least amount of money it's been the same thing every business owner has said to me since day one is I want the most money leads for the least amount of money and it's on me to do it but those two things are and what we've learned is you can't cut corners like with SEO you can't I always talk it's like a big jigsaw puzzle.

There's some pieces that are bigger than the other, meaning there's some things that you do that have more value than others. But you've got to put the whole fucking thing together to complete the picture. Yep. Right? So if you leave out a couple of the small pieces just because they're small and you don't want to do it, like tagging an image, you aren't completing the picture,

which then allows companies like us that do a hundred percent of it to start to pick you off one by one because we're willing to we staff so I have that many people is it just takes that amount of bodies to to execute it's it's interesting because I talk about all this stuff like geo tagging making sure the reviews keyword content not keyword stuffing no hidden links yeah you know do follow versus non follow there's so much to it what is your take I've got a book up there called the four-hour work week and he before I work week is Tim Ferriss saying you can work four weeks if you hire VA's you do it right and that's not in a home service business who we kidding but what

is your take on hiring people that do some of that stuff overseas in the Philippines and you know Russia and all these different places yeah I do everything in-house so it would it be cheaper yes but would it be the best would it be the Rhino Lake no so we did it early on and there was too many hiccups so I never did it again and so if I looked at it from how does it impact my bottom line it's you know it's not as great because it costs me more money to bring those bodies in. But I'm looking at it from a long-term play, right? Because I'm not an option for the masses as a company.

Like, we don't work with everybody that comes to us. But we work with those that are part of the Rhino family for a long time. They stick with us because they always know where we stand you know and but i'm but i have to use my in-house team that i can control to move if somebody says chris i need drain cleaning leads you know or one of my sales guys need drinking leads or account managers i need to be able to go right to the team and say uh beef up cost per lead you know beef up your your daily budgets on that you'd be able to do those things now and have complete control over it. When it goes overseas, there are those obstacles. So you, I hate to say it, man, but you get what you pay for.

Oh, you do. I agree wholeheartedly. You know, there's always been these games with Google that I've played. It's just, you know what? Some days they want tons of links. Some days they want local links. And with your main brand,

you got to stay committed and do what they want but seo in their general terms is not allowed i mean there's no such thing as seo they want to grow organic they want links organically so i want to talk about something that's really i've been talking about this this week and today um i talked to one of my good buddies josh campbell he was on the podcast. He's out of Fort Worth. And he was just explaining to me Linux, who you guys worked closely with. You've got Train, you've got Goodman, you've got Linux, you've got Carrier. There's so many. But in every industry, we're trying to get way more involved with charity.

We're trying to go to these black tie affairs and basically auction off nice garage doors. And a lot of times, Linux will go ahead and pay for this kind of stuff, and then you just got to rent the crane, do the install, pay the labor. They're not playing ball with you, my manufacturers. In a lot of industries, whether you're a window washer, HVAC kind of invented, like, let's get involved with charity. And he said, dude, it's awesome because we're sponsoring a great charity. We're getting the attention of all these business owners and people with money on nice houses.

And we're also getting the link juice of local charities. It's just as you're involved in the community. But the question for you is you've worked with a lot of these manufacturers. Enterprise I just went to because I'm just going down a list. And I buy from Enterprise and my vehicles. And vehicles and they said well absolutely get involved with that but do you have any tips because there's this is a multi question so first of all how do we get them to partner with us on different things like that secondly is how's it gonna help that SEO what do we got to make sure to make that yeah sure

no that's a good question so well I can even give our own example. So we have a Rhino service day every single month where we, on a Friday, with the exception of our customer service, everybody goes and serves somewhere in the community. Like, so since we're here in Phoenix, we've been to St. Mary's Food Bank. We've been to, I mean, I don't even know how. Every month we're going someplace new or sometimes we repeat. And the point of that is for us is that we genuinely like to give back to the community. Sure.

So from that, what we will do, though, is we will take our videographer team, or our photographers, and we'll take pictures and images, because we want to be able to promote the organization that we're going and helping in hopes that others that are following us might go and do likewise. But what we will also do is create the images for them, write the story and give it to them for them to post on their own blog and give us the nice little link back.

Now we're not doing it for the link, it's a byproduct of the reason of doing it. Well, it's a bunch of birds with one stone. You got it man. But so it's good because we'd like to do those things. Now I have some, we have some customers that do an exceptional job in the community, and they're doing everything. Because somebody told me a long time, doing good is good business.

And if you are doing a lot of things in the communities, it's okay to ask them to, you know, how can I help you? What can I link to you? Ask to reciprocate. It's okay to ask those questions you're creating partnerships with the people they're getting involved with yeah but the value especially if it's like a dot org or the dot edu or anything like that like it's a school or an organization if you can get a link back from them that's good

that's got some some power to it yeah so so you helping them in turn can help you back if they can just report the write a But I'll tell you this much, you're better off writing it for them if you want to get it done because what a lot of people do best is nothing. So you have to kind of push and do it for them a lot of times. Which is guest blogging in general. You're gonna write the blog and you're gonna find a way to find a commonality of your site so if you had like John Deere you would talk about like winterize your home winterize your landscaping winterize your garage door and find a way to bring

it in so all of it is about winterizing before the winter and then you've got the garage door and that's where your link is you guys do a really good job on your on your podcast page of linking everybody to so I think that's a that's a brilliant way to do because if you're gonna start linking everybody up and sending value to them the hope is that you can get some sort of reciprocation right on that so I think there's that you guys did a great job on that piece of it you know we don't I've never really worked really hard on the blog we're actually starting to do more things with that. I never really looked at the podcast as a revenue source.

Actually, it's guys like you coming on the podcast that I get ten times more value just by sitting here for an hour being able to ask these questions. And I've got a lot more, so this is going to get good. So I love the idea of the charity. So you've been working with these manufacturers. Today you said you had one. You said it went amazing, Bosh. So you had them on your podcast. But you're getting to know these manufacturers.

And what makes them tick? How do you get them to get involved more and give you special deals? And is there any ways that you've found to really make moves with them? Here's what a manufacturer cares about. They care about market share and brand awareness. And if you can accomplish those things through their contractors, you're good. But you've got to make sure they know. So this is where, like, if a contractor like Friends, Linux, we're a preferred digital marketing vendor of Linux.

So we've been a part of that for three years now. The reason they continue to bring us in is we help their contractors buy more equipment. So basically somebody goes and searches for AC installation online. We make sure we pull that homeowner into their site and get them to call. And then it's on the contractor to get it locked up, but it's my job to bring it in. I'm just tracking everything to make sure that Linux knows also, down to the dollar, what we brought in for revenue for ABC heating and air conditioning. So as long as I'm helping their customers, the contractors, grow, sell more, and I'm helping maintain the branding on their site,

then they're happy with me because I'm helping them gain market share and maintaining their brand awareness. So that makes sense to me. And I know, so I always say what's in it for me, WIPFM is what's in it. So what's in it for the other guy? I'll tell you what I'm coming up against is I've got an industry that never heard of asking for charities and asking to get involved. And they've never heard of a rebate program.

They've never heard of sponsoring my advertising to grow brand awareness so you guys don't have co-op it's very very one percent oh okay they've never i'm telling you and a lot of the people listening they're in a lot of other industries i mean i can't imagine that honda's giving away mowers maybe they are i don't know as much about landscaping I know like I used to be involved in landscaping but there's anything from window washing to pavement on redoing driveways there's just so many people that listen to this and let's just say you were in a really uneducated about how co-op and how this can increase your brand or just you know I don't I don't know how to say maybe they just don't know as much on how to benefit them but what was your pitch me because

number one I would shoot a video with just sent me here we make an awesome video we would we begin a link for them we mention them in front of all these wealthy business owners of these black tie affairs we would guarantee them and show them that we $2,000 towards promoting it on Facebook whatever that looks like but what would your pitch be to say because I'm curious for the listeners that might say how do we even approach these people and what's in it for them yeah it's actually you're asking them for money right or you're asking them to offset maybe future purchases for the donate donate stuff that they get for a fraction of the cost so if you so one what Linux actually

does a really great job of donating the equipment right but the publicity that they're getting from it I mean let's be honest is as big it's huge and they called its field of their field of love program and it was wildly successful as past years they're doing it again now. Now, I genuinely believe from knowing the leadership there that that is their heart is to give back and help with that stuff. But there's also this value that they're pulling in because every contractor in this town, in this town, in this town is pushing Feel the Love program. And they're giving away a Linux system. But you have to ask.

So if you ask, but you can't you can't so funny that you said that you can't just you can't just go and ask and not have a plan right like you got to be able to say I want to do this giveaway these are the things I'm going to do would you donate this piece of equipment or part of the equipment like we just did this so rhino my uh my co-host on to the point home services tall paul lives in charlotte north carolina uh linux donated the system and we covered the cost to install it for a for a lady that was there um i didn't know anything about it paul just brought it to me but i was like linux is in i'm in you know and if it would have been carrier i would have been in if it had been anybody sure but i think you have to you have to ask like i believe paul is the one my arbitral paul went and asked them and said hey i met this

lady this situation they're in bad need of a system linux would you and i'm not even buying linux equipment right but we went and asked and said, here's the publicity that we'll do along with it to help promote that for you in Linux. But you've got to ask. But don't ask without having a plan. I like that. Share with them. You've got to share with them what you're going to do with it,

so that way it's not just them passing a piece of equipment to you. So I love that. You heard that, ask with a plan. And I think maybe, I talked to the CEO of a very very large the largest garage door manufacturer in the world and He said, you know, we've never really got it too involved with that But maybe we could help out somewhere and I didn't really have I said look this is really Preliminary at this point and I didn't have a big plan

But I like what you said whiteboard it and say what's in it for them. And figure out a way. You know, you endorse that video. It becomes, look, and I like the way you said tracking. Tracking, we've got KPIs. I'm sitting here with four monitors. I've got dashboards, and I'm just looking at stuff that before I used to, I was like, KPI, is that like miles per hour? Is that like kilometers?

But, you know, it's funny because you were a race car driver. I got you. I'm picking up what you're putting down so yeah so you you've been doing this so long and you've had a podcast you've been talking to these brilliant guys and you must have a million gold nuggets first i want to talk about what what the differences you see with there i'm just going to say three they're small medium and large and i I'm not gonna define what those are because they're different per industry. But what are the differences you've noticed of the small, medium, and large? Customers?

More of the ownership of these home service companies. The ownership and management is just business in itself. Yeah, I think that, well, I would say those who have processes and those who don't. You've got your sales guys, you guys that work in the business still, and then you have your owners that work on the business. And then you've got those that are still doing both. So if I had to tier it out that way, it would be that dude that's like the technician

that's put out and is trying to do his own thing. Right now, he's just trying to sell. He's trying to sell and get his jobs done and take care of them. He might not even think about having maintenance agreements, which is a key thing. With all the M&A talk that's been coming through COVID of these companies buying and selling and all this stuff, I've been through lots of podcasts where I've learned a ton about mergers and acquisitions. But maintenance agreements, service level agreements are key ingredient to you having a higher multiple. But the guy that's like the one truck Chuck, he is just trying to go and sell stuff and stay busy today because he's trying to build his business.

The guy that's doing both who might still be doing the, maybe he's doing some of the finances. He's still trying to run the company, but he's going and selling the big potential opportunities. Right. Is now starting to create processes. So he's kind of half-assed following some processes that work for him, but he's still trying to sell. When you got the guys like our friend, like our friend Ken Goodrich, who's literally a process driver.

He has, you plug in a technician, and this is kind of like your methodology, Tommy, it's where you have the end goal in mind, you work backwards to it. It's how many texts you need based on your numbers to fill in that stuff. It's just a process driven thing. But the guys that I think are a lot of fun to work with for us is it's the guy right in the middle

because he's kind of got it figured out. He just basically needs the fuel to get him going. He needs volume. If you have more volume coming in, he'd really start to focus on his processes because he's got revenue coming in. He starts to add bodies. Those are a lot of fun. We've had a lot of successes taking guys from two to three, three to five, five to six, six to 10 million. It's been a lot of fun being a part of those over the last decade. But I think it all comes down to the guys

that actually create the processes, focus on the processes, and then listen, ask for help along the way. If I've heard anything in the last few months, everybody's willing to help you. So if you find somebody who's, if you find yourself in a room with five guys and you're at the top of that food chain, find a new room. Find somebody that's smarter than you and start asking them questions. People, I think, generally want to help.

Yeah, be the dumbest guy in the room and the top guys. The top guys actually enjoy helping. Yeah, sure. I don't look at it I really don't look at a lot of people as competition and they're more than well I've had I've had 20 companies in here at one point showing them what's on these monitors going look there's enough and I always say this but there's enough water in the ocean for everybody you bring in there five gallon bucket

there's so much customers and I'm attacking so many different verticals I'm hitting it from eight different ways but I heard this the other day a bad system will ruin great people really quickly that's good yeah you know yeah I don't care you might not the system is the only thing that you can take and you know Michael Gerber is big on this but the system is what the business runs on it's not great people it's a great system and that's why we talk about McDonald's yeah Ray Kroc. Yeah, Ray Kroc and you don't have to have these amazing studs in the business. And there's amazing women joining the

home service space now more than ever before. We used to think plumbers, you know, the old conventional guy coming out. There's a lot of women getting in the trades now. We actually have quite a few women customers that are phenomenal. One of them was Bryant Dealer of the Year, Charlene Iorna down in Tampa, Florida. Brushes it. She won like nine Medal of Excellence awards.

She was like a gator, like hunts gators. Oh my gosh. Yeah, she's awesome. She's amazing. She's on the History Channel, I think. She's amazing. Do you know Ellen Rohr? I do.

Yeah, Ellen's awesome. She's super high energy. Ellen? Ellen Rohrer? I do. Yeah, Ellen's awesome. She's super high energy. Ellen? Ellen Rohrer? Ellen. Ellen? E-L-L. Yeah, Ellen.

It's a woman. E-L-L-E-N. I just talked to her yesterday from Zoom. Yeah, Zoom. Yeah, yeah. And Elle Levy and all those. Yeah, they're great. Yeah, so, you know, that's interesting because I talk to a lot of people about M&A. I mean, I've been kind of engulfed in learning about,

because ultimately, you know, my goal is a billion, to get back to that. And I want to understand how to build value before I start building the company into this monster. We've already started, but service agreements are a big piece of that because you're putting a wall around your customers. Your tracking piece of it is huge. I'd love i love the touch on that yeah let's talk about that because because you started to mention it and you and i had this conversation and and the way that we built rhino was on the back of our retention and the reason we retained was because we track everything i mean i am an analytical nerd i love numbers They don't lie to us. So if I work with a Gettle air conditioning out here,

Ken wants to know exact numbers. I can get those to him. I've done it since day one. Here's what that looks like. The largest team in Rhino is our Rhino tracks call listening and reporting team. There's like 55 of them. Worst job in my company because they're listening to the phone calls that come through the site every single one, not 30 days later, not 60 days later. If it's in the summertime, maybe we're on a week delay because there's thousands of calls coming in. The point is, like you do a good job of is I listen to every call so that way I can hear who answered the phone. Now, I don't do call coaching, but I can certainly hear how the CSRs are answering the phone. Oh, yeah.

If they butchered a lead or they missed an objection and kick it over to the customer. But I need to know lead type. Was it a new customer? Like, I'm talking new. This is the thing that probably pisses me off the most with most agencies that are competitors of mine. And it is that what they determine a new customer to me a new customer is a new bookable service or installe that was not a repeat or referral customer that's a new customer so they've never existed in your data not even in your system okay so that's a new customer that's what I'm

being paid to do if I'm not doing a branded effort if I'm doing a direct lead gen effort I mean paid to bring in new people so I report to that number so but if I do that and you use your whatever field management software that you're using, you can tie in the revenue to it. I can see from the volume of people that came in the site that was a lead to the actual closed revenue account to know what our return is every single month. But I'm also catching in there. I'm not held accountable for the closed revenue.

That's not on me. It's on me to bring in the lead you can't close a little bit bring in the lead is 1 tenth of it you got a book the lead you got to dispatch it correctly you got to show up in a running vehicle then you got to earn the customers business then there's a crazy word that some people hate call upsells and it's not bad especially if you sell hvac why not talk to them a little bit about plumbing and electrical and if you believe in it and you believe that's in their best interest it should be a piece of cake conversation if you genuinely care best marketing strategy ever genuinely care then it's okay you should be don't do them a disservice by

not offering it they don't know unless you tell them but it's but i like the tracking piece of it because and if covid exposed anything it was if you didn't have your shit together, like your finances, like paying attention to you, you weren't sitting on cash, you really had to watch all your numbers, watch every penny. Oh, yeah. So we had a huge chunk of customers double down and everybody started pulling back. That's exactly what I, that's funny I say double down. Because if you track everything, you're not guessing what you're getting in return for every dollar that's being spent and that's how we built this company is making sure that every customer knows every month every brand new customer that came in their name address phone number was it booked the CSR book it did the CSR

miss an objection so we don't offer call coaching but they have somebody does at least I can catch it but you got to track everything and leave no no you can leave nothing over no yeah no bricks on Turner so you got something is there's so many questions we're gonna this is gonna go a while um I don't really know this exists but some people say there's this rule of thumb of safe growth and in my opinion that this is something that's interesting it's a KFC Some people say there's this rule of thumb of safe growth. And in my opinion, this is something that's interesting. It's a KFC is opening up every eight minutes. Somewhere around those lines.

And it's hard to believe because they really took over Asia. So that's really where they're attacking right now. But, yeah, it's crazy because these guys came and shot this special about us. They're like, dude, you should have seen KFC. Like, they've got their shit down pat to a science. So, ultimately, there's a book on my shelf called The Ultimate Sales Machinist. I wrote one on the second shelf. And he talks about how quick can you create a system to train guys. So, we were out at my training center.

And I think the biggest misconception about growth is how do I get the leads? I think the lead part is easy. How do you maximize the calls coming I think the lead part is easy. How do you maximize the calls coming in, build a fence around them, and get amazing conversion rates and average tickets when you go out there? And average tickets just comes by doing the right thing. You know, if I'm going to work on your door, I'm going to want to replace most of the parts that I could warranty and I'd have to come back. And anything that's got anything worn out, unlike most guys that are listening, you know, I will say that the people that are got anything worn out, unlike most guys that are listening,

you know, I will say that the people that are listening are actually really, really smart. It's the people that are on the Facebook groups that pride themselves on fixing a 1962. They kept an old blower motor from 40 years ago because, thank God, they have it. And I will admit that they made it better in the old days. But it's like, to me, it's just so much wasted time. My dad's like that. He'll rebuild an alternator that costs $120. bucks I'm like it just took you 10 hours like you make about more than 12 dollars an hour but anyway where was it going with this you know I will be making guys systems that so what's a

good growth strategy how much should you grow some people say 10% and I'm like oh I hate that Grant Cardone says think about growing a thousand times ten times which is a thousand times a hundred percent times ten ten times growth because when you think that way you start to come up with innovation yeah so I think we see it I mean this 10% thing is like if you don't know what to say you say 10% is right what people have been trained to do I've looked at it always different. And my mindset is like summertime is when, I probably think one of my biggest pet peeves is when somebody's like, oh, we're already busy in summer.

If it's an HVAC company, we're already busy in summer. And I'm like, yeah, if you add more bodies, you could be busier and making more revenue because everybody's saying, we're already busy in summer. They might pull back on marketing spin yeah and if they do that as long as it's not it's no longer a leads game it's a body scheme it's who you know because I there's a lot of times with the pause the campaigns because oh they're booked out or do you raise the prices at that point your diagnostic

fees go raise the prices and if you raise the prices and you run the risk of giving yourself a little bit of a bad name you know what i mean like but that's what you have to do to slow it down yeah so i get it but you have to i don't love the idea of saying we're only going to grow uh 15 this year or we grow 13 year over year i like the idea of saying hey what are we going to do this next month and this next month based on current situation because what we have the ability to do at least from our end not with everybody but with most i would say 90 of our customers that aren't already 150 million 200 million like our big guys is we might be on this trajectory of saying okay we're going to use 10 uh 10 this year is our number but what i've learned and how we built the company was it it's not doesn't need to stay the same every month if like with Kovac happening and some of these companies were saying well I need to sell

I need to sell we just onboarded like five new service technicians like that now I know if I was to follow that same percentage of growth they wanted to hit I would have been holding ourselves back from them because I just gained five guys and now we can keep those, if we get those five guys busy, we're going to blow past this 10% goal. It doesn't make sense to try and follow that number. So I'm of the mindset of like Rhino doesn't ever, we've never followed a, I want to be 10 million this year. I've never followed that methodology.

I really follow a retention goal. So that's something that I focus on. My personal goal last year was doubling the profitability bucket for my employees. If I did that, that's because they were doing a good job for our customers and they were producing. So I attached all of my paychecks to performance to do that. But I don't have this goal of I want to grow 10% every year. I did make a mistake early on and that was I was afraid to grow too fast.

And all it was was a mental game I had with myself that I was losing. I don't want to grow too fast. It was I just didn't, I didn't have enough processes in place. I didn't have enough, a plan in place to actually make the growth happen smart. But I had learned the business by being in the business,

so I didn't know. But I don't like this. It's almost like you're in prison. You know, I have a CFO, he came out from North Dakota, smart, smart, smart guy. I mean, he knows how to handle a business our size. He went from 20 million to 420 million. It was an ESOP company owned,

where the employees on the company awesome guy tommy so much we've got these kpis per department like just a master's degree he's got a doctorate he gave me a master's degree right so and so we came up with these budgeted targets and i'm like i can't wait to blow these out of the water because i'm like don't confine me to this stupid budget and now i'm like okay i get it because banks want to see every single private equity company anybody who's really really smart they're not like guys like us because i'm like i'm gonna go ahead write your little numbers down because i'm like that but but now i'm like okay beat budget beat budget then covet happened and i'm like oh crap and then now we're like back in growth mode but we stopped the locomotive like we've got this train I don't know if I could do it on demand here

so we've got this train and uh the train is going so fast and then we had to shut off the train which are the recruiters the trainers and the apartment and the trucks wrapped so I I turned it off and now I'm like okay now, now we're crushing numbers again. And I'm like, how? Don't think. Here's the different, the brain shift. How do you get, like, you're good if you get 20 guys trained a month. How do you get to 50? And I know when I get to 50, I'm going to say, what?

Okay, there's going to be some, I just read this book by Michael McKellar. It's called fix this next and the plan is when you get to 50 guys in a month what else can you do there's something else gonna break maybe it's the marketing maybe it's the GMB's aren't getting done like right now Google can't get my GMB's done fast enough I'm like holy shit you gotta go through Pinkerton you got it and I'm advanced verification I'm like locksmith and garage doors we gotta i gotta show up there we go through pinkerton they gotta see my shirt they look at my id they look at my business card they want to see a spring it's the only two industries that go through this huge advance because those two industries went

through a lot of fake gmbs um so anyway i just think backwards about it and just like, dude, don't put me in this bubble. But ultimately, fine, live in the bubble. But next year, I can't wait for like December 10th when we're like, now what are the goals? And they're like, because he came from an industry that was manufacturing, right? And when you come, that is much more like, what are you going to do? You're going to pick up 20 more machines and somehow rent? You just can't grow that fast. This is different though.

And you're in a different boat. I am. Tell me a little bit about some of your goals in the next, and how far out do you set your goals? And I don't think they need to be percentages, but you know how I work backwards. Are you working backwards from anything or what's your plan? You mean for Rhino specifically? Rhino specifically.

Yeah, okay. So, well one, let me just say this. I have a partnership with a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee, and Gary Vee pushes big time on branding. And the one thing that we did really poor as a company early on was branding. And mainly it was because we had manufacturer relationships that would bring us customers. So when you became the preferred internet marketing vendor for a carrier at one point um when we started when i started the company and then now into linux we didn't have to brand to bring in business this is again was me losing against myself um because

i'm thinking i don't need anything else but then i started to figure out what is my goal what is the goal of rhino the goal of rhino is to only ever focus on the home services but I want to be at the spot where I'm donating a million dollars a million dollars a year to whatever I want whatever organizations that we're doing that is my goal so how do I got to get to that it's just me figuring out what number do I need to hit to be able to get to be able to donate a million dollars a year to different companies and the goal for us would be trying to take that million dollars a year and split it into 10 into basically a hundred thousand dollars 10 charities whatever it might be or even 50 whichever one it is um and that is the driver for me and everybody every rhino knows it um i don't i don't question that piece of it um i don't

have this uh you know this big number in mind like you've got your billion um i don't question that piece of it. I don't have this you know this big number in mind like you've got your billion. I don't have this big number in mind but I do have this. I want to make sure that Rhino is just the is we were Scorpion is massive private equity there's private equity there but Scorpion is massive but I would head to, head to head I win. You wanna know why I win? I've been doing it for 12 years every single day and I've only done this.

Scorpion started in the law firm space and added home services into it. And they do build absolutely gorgeous websites, great websites, but head to head you just can't beat me. I've got too much data to win right out of the gate right so i take pride in that so what i want to do like a perfect example is you know right now i'm in a i'm in uh in talks with two other competitors of mine who i want to purchase i want to buy because i want to build this like i want to build like the dream team remember the

old school dream oh yeah i want to build the dream team not just to be a big company to give a million dollars to be like man the best digital company in the home services space was this company called rhino like they're the kind there's legacy there too there's pride like you've got to do like i got four kids they look at this and then somebody asked me this question they said asking them my kids are uh 20 uh 20 because they got four. 2012, 8, 5. 2013, 2013, 9 and 5. Oh man. That's pretty good. But it's fun to ask them what I do because they're like, oh they help build companies.

Oh that's cool. They do charity. So they don't know I do digital marketing but they just know I help grow companies. That's what they hear. Or you ask my son, he's like, what's daddy do? Daddy talks on the phone. That's what he thinks I do. But my big goal here is to, you know, my big northern star is to just be like this.

If I can donate a million dollars a year, I'm 41. If I can donate a million dollars a year for the next, you know, 10, 15 years, I'm feeling pretty good about my legacy as a human being on the things I was able to accomplish. It's just that Rhino was the tool I had to do. So Gary Vee's all about his personal, build your personal brand and you can use vehicles to get there. He's using his shoes and social media. He started with Instagram, then he went to Snapchat,

I think, and now he's doing probably TikTok. I don't even know. He does all of it, yeah, pretty much. You know, I think that that's super important. I think for me, I have to have a number to work backwards from and it's a big number to hit but what's so crazy is it seems like look if I go to the store I'll be honest today I flew back from Dallas I had to to one of those orange juice and champagne mimosas and it was

that 25 bucks for two of them and I'm cheap i don't know i'm like man this is why we charge that we charge for crossfers because it's a service if i went and made those and people go well if i went on amazon and did this and i'm like yeah but you called us up we're with a brand new truck we got trained guys we're background check drug tested like it's different we can't we love the air conditioning that's working now um but the point is it's like i'm frugal but a billion dollars for some reason $25 was a lot today but a billion for some reason it's just it's like my mate my brain it's like my what do they call it your alligator brain it's like it just seems differently about those numbers so

I like what you're doing though you you've got a bigger cause my cause is is at this point because I think people are going to be better off working with us and there's more jobs and more money created and more financial freedom sure working with us and i say with us because without the team around us we don't exist i mean literally like i can't do this stuff i'm not a celebrity i'm not gonna go do a 20 million dollar show for you know i'm not tom cruise so and you know i'm not Tom Cruise so then you know I'm glad about that and I like what you said about building a brand let's talk about that because Ken's done a good job oh yeah ghetto it's hard to spell you know

and he's got this you know his dog and the flashlight I have my flashlight for my dad and I I never knew the power still and some of these guys even at this company go why do you study 8-fac we're garage drawers and I'm like I study anything that's working. I study anything, and I want to surround myself with that. But why not find the most elevated home service? Is there any other home service space that's more elevated than HVAC? No.

There's not. So follow the lead. Follow the lead. And then tell me about this brand stuff, because this is a great topic. Well, brand's never been more important than it is right now. Like, if you ever listen to any of Gary, brand's never been more important than it is right now. If you ever listen to any of Gary Vee's content, he preaches that. That's kind of where I was going with my last story, is that we did such a piss-poor job

branding ourselves and relied too much on these manufacturer relationships. What happens is if those went away, I might be in deep shit. So I had to make sure I started branding ourselves. That's the whole reason that I even i started hiring a brand manager and you know building out a video team and and gary is a part owner in the social social media side of our company the video side of our company and um so he's been very helpful and that's pushing it out there but branding has never been more important and um and again i'm so sick of saying the cobit word but like it is what it is. COVID exposed you if you didn't have good branding, but you can't say, okay, well in the middle of COVID, I'm going to start focusing on branding. Even post COVID, you have to start, but you certainly can't rely on it right now if

you need leads because you're too late to the game. You had to start focusing on it, but if it did anything for you, if you've not been focusing on it you felt that pain once covid hit things started getting crazy so branding is more important you've done a great job of branding and like i told you man i knew about you before you before we ever met too and i was joking with you today man i felt like the last few mornings i wake up and i see you on my damn tv and then staring at tommy on the damn tv screen you're like you're tired you text me you're like dude get out of my TV I like that I like the strategy to think about Brandon and I think I'm really curious to hear what you learned from Gary Vee on the social side because so often I tend to go Google Google Google and I

remember this guy's name Dennis you he the bomb.com when it comes to social. And he promised me, and I'm exclusive, man. I told him, if you're gonna work with me, we're gonna take over the freaking industry. And he said, I'm gonna show you that I can get you more leads from social. At the end of the funnel, people that want you, then Google.

And I said, dude, it's on. I was like, let's do this. So we're working together. But tell me what you learned from Gary Vee and the social side. Yeah, man. So. Just some tips, it's on. I was like, let's do this. So we're working together. But tell me what you learned from Gary Vee and the social side. Just some tips, some gold nuggets. Yeah, so here's the thing. Don't overthink it.

Don't overthink the content that you're putting out. Like far too many times we'll have customers that are trying to record it and delete and record and delete and say the right thing over and over again. Don't overthink it. Post small clips and just put them out there because social is meant to be social. Like you don't constantly want to cram sales down people's

throat it's supposed to be an interactive form right but you also i think the two pillar things that gary said to me and or his team said to me would be find education or entertainment make those two things your pillar so whatever you're posting make it you'll guide it to one of those whether it's informative or entertainment and then once you've given value like gary will say give value give value give value and then you can make a subtle offer on something it's okay to make that offer because you have a service to provide but you do not do it constantly so the more interactive you can make these videos especially if you're doing charitable type things we're talking about record everything share everything okay once you can connect your connect somebody watching your stuff emotionally you're in you've got that emotional connection now it's what do you do with

it but you don't want to be fake like i think the big mistake a lot of the uh hvac guys made when kobe hit was starting to push indoor air quality way too hard. It was like, wait, now you're just trying to sell me indoor air quality. I understand it. They should have been pushing it. It's just they waited until that came, but that was the opportunity that came up was to sell indoor air quality. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember. All the airborne stuff.

So you have to be really careful on how you put it out there. And it was don't sell it. Educate on it and let them come and ask you because they will come and see if you build it out there and it was don't sell it educate on it and let them come and ask you because they will come it's the if you build they will come methodology but you know the sales by education model is great is works exceptionally well in the social space if you're going to have specific offerings like there's another example guy customer i was talking to today i have a social media team he doesn't use me for social media it's okay he uses a buddy of mine that I know and his tactics are different it's a different lead lead than me you can

actually pull in decent lead volume through social if you do like a financing offers those work exceptionally well like a safe 350 bucks off case the installation is low as $49 a month but you you then you attract that type of customer so you know that it's cheaper don't you expect it to be a big-ticket item because it's not gonna be but if you're not worried about that then it does a really good job of those things so from our from our the way that we do things on social is we try to do as much non-selling as we possibly can and just putting out education

entertainment making it fun building engagement and then when it comes time to make an offer we make an offer we're just not doing it every week it might be you know every other week or once every three weeks so educate and entertain those are my two things and don't overthink the content that you're putting out so do you believe in this is just I just have my brain is going a million miles an hour so it's good because there's so many questions that I'm just so influencer marketing some people there's a guy named Michael Keening a long time ago used to have this influencer finder

and it would find out do you have 5,000 friends are you an influencer what's your social like you know influencer marketing so do you have 5,000 friends? Are you an influencer? What's your social like, you know influencer marketing? So do you go after those people and get them involved my buddy Josh owns snow? It's he's my old partner, you know the teeth when anything and he built the whole freaking company Up of influencer marketing, you know, he's got a Tim Tebow or not Tim Tebow one ground Gronkowski This dude's always on there with his thing. He's visited him down the street from here.

And is that a strategy that you believe in? You know, I think it's a branding strategy, you know, but I think something that's a little bit more valuable for my type of customers, because I would say 80% of Rhino's customers are HVAC. The other 15% will be plumbing. the other 15% will be plumbing, the other 5% will be electrical, roofing, like those types of customers.

But what is a good little tactic that you can do is search for hashtags that involve your industry, okay? Like if you're in plumbing, search for hashtag drain cleaning, or hashtag unclogged drain. Look at everybody that's on there and just take five minutes and respond to as many as many of those ads as you can for yourself when you hit hashtag you know drain cleaning look at the account

whoever posted it and then reply to their question it'll help build your following but it's free it's organic so you do that for every service that you also that's if someone has a real question so I'm just saying like so an audience all you're trying to do is build build an audience organically yeah but if if you have like influencer marketing it's helpful because you just can't expect the cost per lead like there to be a cost for it's a branding effort like you you're trying to build the audience it doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna use you it's like forget the local guy used to use Luis Gonzalez all the time and our Diane Dan Marley for the yes the chiropractic stuff it was you use him to guide them to you but you don't you just can't

have this expectation of as soon as I get this influence around boredom will start getting a lot of business it just helps build your following which then helps if you continue to use your educate and entertain methodology, you will start to build that emotional connection to those people and then when they're ready to use you, they will use you. So our market's a little wonky when it comes to using influencers. You know, I was going to ask you because I think about this commercial I always see like reverse mortgage, Tom Selleck from Magnum PI. Of course.

You know, and he's just like, and I would never recommend it if I didn't believe in it. And you guys think it's a scam and it's not. Give my guys a try. You know, I wouldn't be out here endorsing it if I didn't believe. And what I realized is what they did is smart. They use multiple regression testing to find out the age, the income, the channels. They use a targeted

data approach. And then they said, this guy's going to be affordable because his heyday, I'm sorry, Tom, but your heydays came and gone, but you're huge to that audience. And so you're buying it at cheap times. You're getting in front of the right audience and you're able to get that quality lead. So I just think that there's a huge opportunity there I was talking to someone the other day about this on my podcast I got his information right over there but anyway I do think there's some things to be done and it's thinking outside of the box I think that Gary Vee did you look at Grant Cardone you look at I just know all these guys Perry Belcher Ryan dice they all kind of have the ability to think outside of the box.

And there's this circle that we paint around and say, this has been done, this has been done, and Procter & Gamble. Procter & Gamble's kind of losing what, they're still a monster. Huge, yeah. But they're still, the small guys are getting creative. You're using things like TikTok where people say, dude, TikTok doesn't work for my stuff. And I'm going, wait a minute.

TikTok might be, I don't know what to sell on it yet and i'm not going to spend a lot of time but there's no reason why not you can't post on all these things so your customers are you get get them before they get them before they're 21. okay i'm going to piggyback down this path on what we were talking about earlier there's a there's a gentleman by the name of bobby jenkins probably one of the best human beings i've ever met been on the podcast been to his office he's based out of san or excuse me austin texas he owns a company called abc commercial and home services they literally offer like hbac plumbing lawn care christmas lights pest control i mean he offers so many things now they've got like a thousand plus people on staff and they're also in San Antonio and Dallas

Fort Worth but this guy if you go and look at ABC stuff he's got this little anteater as his logo he does so many things with so many people around town this guy's probably the best networker ever, but he's just a genuine good dude. Part of his deal that he did during all this COVID stuff was he, every day, for lunch and for dinner, would go to a different restaurant to buy food from them.

Oh, I've heard this. And then he would post it. Like, he would take a picture of him posting it, and so he was getting all this, like, but he was just doing it because he was a good dude. Yeah, to help these restaurants out. But but every time he would go he would he would tag all of these people so he's one of those guys that became this weird influencer for them in that industry but just because he has a big following because they're a big company but i like the idea of him because when he tags those people those companies then everybody else that likes them will see his post come up

and know, like, he was a part of this, he's doing good stuff. Ooh, that's smart. I like that. So you're almost reverse engineering. So let me ask you, there's two frame of thoughts here. You got a guy like me that's going into every city in North America with garage doors. I do residential, retrofit. I don't do home depots anymore I don't do new construction I am focused more than I've ever been I got out of home warranties all these things I've made a lot of money on so I'm actually saying no to

money I like all 30,000 on a job nope sorry oh so hard for me I usually say no not now we're not we're not doing that right now because it's so hard to say no I just say no can't do it right're not doing that right now, because it's so hard to say no, I just say no, can't do it right now. But then you got other guys that are like, I own this audience in this area, it's a small audience, but I own everything. And you look at Parker and Sons,

they do $120 million in Phoenix. So the question that I have for you, and there's no right or wrong answer, and you could disagree with what I'm doing, because it doesn't matter. I mean, people have different strokes, different folks. Where do you see, because you know a lot of these home service companies, where do you see the most success?

And someone's probably saying, this is the question we've all asked ourselves. Do I focus and grow outwards this way, or do I own the side ends and give them a bunch of vertical services? Man, you mean, should they they about adding an additional service? Should they live in their population size? So I guess what I'm saying is should I do HVAC plumbing, electrical, garage doors, you know, Christmas lights. That's kind of funny that hits home for me because I had a Christmas light business.

Or should I say I just do this and I'm going to hit this and I'm going to be the best at this thing so I'm either going to own this everything these people do or own this trade and hit a book yeah I got you okay so um I literally had this conversation with a guy named Chris Hunter oh I know Chris yeah so he just started working for Titan yeah yeah man because he he started in Ardmore Ardmore Oklahoma little video I know. So we just had this conversation because it is something that I get asked a lot. I, and this is my methodology, right? It just so happened that it aligned with Chris's methodology. It is, I believe you focus on what you're best at. So if that's garage doors, if it's plumbing, if it's electrical, whatever whatever it is you focus on that first and dial that in that you're really

really really exceptionally good at that you're getting great customer service that and all those things yeah my two cents is if you launch that in Scottsdale Arizona and well let's use a different market because there's so many markets here but if you launch it and Flagstaff sure then you would say, I'm gonna do the same thing because I know the industry and I have my processes in place and I know my KPIs. I know all my shit together on this one. It's easier for me to go now here

into a different location and build it. The reason, that's what Chris Hunter did, he just started adding other services after, but he knew like, hey, there's no way I'm gonna be 10 million in ardmore oklahoma sure so he had to start dipping outside of it but he said he would learn he learned what he was best at and then started going into other locations nail it scale it is what i once he was good with it then he could start layering in the other services and cross-selling yep yep i agree with

that i'm of the same methodology this is why like i is why I've had people reach out to me trying to buy Rhino. Everybody will say, I'm interested in something. I would probably sell if the number was right, but I'm having so much fun building this thing. But I've stayed true to what I've done. I've not tried to dip outside the shit that I'm best at. That's what I like. That's what I like is you're a specialist. And every time, me and my managers, we get into arguments and I'm so much's what I like is you're a specialist and every time me and my managers we get into arguments And I'm so much server than I used to be I'm like no I'm like if this person's gonna come on they're gonna do this thing great, and then they're gonna have two or three tops five key performance indicators of all around their job when you start stacking it and say well

They need to do this. They need to be able to drive here for inventory They need to be able to consult the guys on this they need to be doing HR And I'm like so they're a jack-of-all-trades again They need to do this, they need to be able to drive here for inventory, they need to be able to consult the guys on this, they need to be doing HR. And I'm like, so they're a jack of all trades again. So now when something goes wrong, we say, why didn't you do this right? They say, well, I was doing this, this, this, and this. And when you're small, all of us wear a lot of hats. I mean, you wore every hat.

And what's nice about an owner that's been able to do that is you say, this hat I hate. I'm going to write a job description of who I'm looking for. It's easy to write it because you're like it's got to be someone opposite of me different personality type and these are the people that I find hard to get along with because I'm like like I really love our finance team but we get along great but I'm like don't put me in a bubble but at the same time I'm like I understand why you have to do it we've got to report to banks what you know ultimately i want to have a huge line there we do we've got like seven million that we can pull from

and i always say borrow the money when you don't need it a guy called me the other day he's like dude i got an opportunity to get a hundred thousand dollar sba and i go the sba from this corona and he goes yeah he goes but my wife will kill me i said dude do you know what that interest rate is i'm like if you just put it in a savings account you'll make money i'm like you gotta take the money and because one day there's an opportunity gonna come along and it's gonna be like today you gotta have the money and the for some reason the deal will find you when that money's there trust me and you're just gonna be an idiot not to take it and i said dude i'll deal with your wife

no i didn't say that i'd be crazy to say that i'm not married for a reason but uh but listen i i keep going with this stuff but i want to ask you a few last questions um so we've got the branding you know you're doing something with gary v uh gary you decided you're going about it and you're having a few people attend because you truly believe that a small more intimate gathering is more important to you than just sell it out and make it a bunch of money right yeah so my whole the whole methodology with that is if you if you've listened to what i've been saying even during this podcast um quality over quantity i like to give dude like i want to make sure that whatever we're doing for our customers is the best it can possibly be.

And if you're part of the Rhino family, meaning you're a customer of ours or an employee or partner, whatever it is, you're part of the family, I like to be able to give back to them. And if it means like, hey, some of these guys really love Gary Vee and they've said, hey, I really want to meet him, it's not how it works. He doesn't work that way right you can't just be like I want to meet me carry B and then go have a dinner with him unless you drop like 50 grand to go to one of us like to see him for an hour yeah you know to go and be one of like 15 people in a room I love him but that's crazy to me so but if I could take this partnership and then use that so some of my guys like I invite you to come and hang out with us because if you could ask him two things that unlock something for you on your path to one billion and I was a piece of that, I'm fucking happy about that. Like that to me is the coolest thing.

It's like anytime we get customer testimonials, it's literally the best thing that I get is seeing what people what people are saying about us how we changed this you know part of their business or we saved a part of the business or whatever the most rewarding you ever gets that this just allows me another path to do that with some of my bigger my bigger guys you know I'm your partnerships and I did that I made that happen you know and that's pretty cool good well dude I you know you talk about being the dumbest person in the room. When you surround yourself, I just talked to Roland Frazier this weekend. And he's like, dude, I had to introduce you to this guy. You need to go meet him.

And it's so cool that I can make phone calls now. And it's elevated. I won't say my stature. I'll just say this. I've become dumber and dumber the smarter I get. You know, the world opens up. It's weird how that gets. just say this I've become dumber and dumber the smarter I get yeah you know the world though the world opens up it's weird how that gets I'm like you're like a no he's like you and you downplay you downplay yourself a little bit but you

have like you you also earned a lot of this stuff right and you took the time to say and be humble enough to say I want to keep learning more I want to be around people smarter than me I'm no different like I like being able to the podcast has been phenomenal cuz I've learned so much shit. Oh, dude, that's huge. Like, I've learned so much. And I've got so many notes and I keep everybody's notes.

I'm getting smarter. Yeah. So not only is it helping our, like, the same thing with this podcast is super successful because it's helping those listening have tactical takeaways. Ours is no different.

It's just the guests that comes on are giving back. Well, shit, it's giving back to me too. Like, I'm learning a lot of cool new stuff that's making me better as a leader, making me better as a business owner and even as a human being. And that's the fun stuff, man. We got one go around the sun and I want to get it right. So I feel like as long as I continue to put my employees and my customers first, everything else is going to fall in place for me. I can go, I can lay my head down at night and sleep peacefully.

Yeah, no, that's great. You know, and I wanna ask one more thing because, and then I ask the same three questions after every podcast, but, you know, I've got ideas coming out of my, we're like this, me and you, we're entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs is in the bright light, and we've got really good ideas,

but the question is, is there so many things we need to do? And I think a skill that's kind of evolved over when you get big enough and you learn how to delegate properly is identifying the first big bottleneck to accomplish first. And I've got ideas. They're stacked in my idea. I mean, you see my Google Drive. It's like, dude, this guy's got ideas. But my staff does a really good job of pulling back the ropes and saying, dude, come on. I'm on bungee cords.

But I got a lot of good ideas. How do you kind of handle that? Because I think a lot of the listeners right now, they go through that same struggle. How I have to deal with it is I have an executive team. My executive team, I am a lot like you and where I'll be thinking out of thin air oh I don't have these two data analysts to our team and out and I'll tell our CEO and she's like we don't need those people like we need 18 other people here because of this and so but our all say hey I want to start

offering OTT over-the-top you know marketing because you know I've been watching so much high boo and Disney Plus and all this shit lately like let's figure it out and then they're like why Chris you're like you're not following your own methodology like stick to the shit that you're good it's good if you don't try to if you if you think like you really would do it the moment you're excited about it you need to write that shit down and come back sleep on it come back to it like yeah I am I thrive on instant gratification which is why the digital marketing space is so good for you because i can turn on some ads and i can see what they're doing you know by the end of the day um but i i

always found the practice of don't just jump even though even if i'm so excited and so certain don't just jump into it i will go to and if you don't have somebody that's on your on your like if you don't have somebody to go to that's on your team go to a pier and ask you know And ask them maybe I'm not a competitive winner in your market They go to a pier and ask them I just happen to use in my executive meetings I have two a week and those are the meetings where I bring up anything new that we might potentially do and it goes to a Vote and even though I'm the CEO of the company I can be outvoted and I am outvoted I hate being outvoted I got five on one of the five and I'm like CEO of the company, I can be outvoted. And I am outvoted. I hate being outvoted.

I got five. I'm one of the five. And I'm like, I should count as like three, though. I don't do that. I don't do that. But I'm like, there's some things. And actually, I snapped the other day. And I go, dude, this is going to cost us tens of millions of dollars if you guys don't see it my way.

And I'm pretty firm on this. But go ahead. And actually, I was super like, and they all sensed my frustration. And then I drew pretty firm on this but go ahead and actually I was super like and they all since my frustration and then I drew it on the whiteboard I got this I had one of our digital designers design it I go tell me how this way fails and I'll listen to you know why can't we test it I'm like consisting it'll waste time but anyway keep calling us s that's right that's right that's the best yeah I think that it, man, because that's a lot like how I am, but it's so healthy for good growth that way, because you need to have somebody play devil's advocate to think through the entire deal. And I listen to these guys, and most of the time, I mean, Adam, Adam's my COO, he came in and he goes, dude, I don't think we should be doing property management, home warranties, and I said, well, if it's done's done properly he showed me some on the

whiteboard I go done scratch it get rid of it call him today we're canceling it moving you can't get mad with black and white and what I feel my feelings don't matter in the numbers I'm sorry but your feelings don't matter and that's where the black and white that the the ink that gets printed out if you got a data integrity team and it's right there's a key there you got to have the right data but if you're measuring the right data it will lead you to the right decision yeah so which is perfect so for anybody listening um like i'm you said the keyword feeling i hate the word feeling okay i'll tell you what so i'm uh there's this event coming up

called surface world expo i'm speaking at it down in Tampa. Yeah, I know about it. So I'll be down there. I think I'm flying Air Gettle out with you. Oh, nice. Air Gettle. But we're going down there. I'm speaking, and my breakout is called Stop Feeling and Start Knowing. And it's because I get so sick of people saying, like, I feel like this thing is working.

You know, I feel like this isn't working. I feel like these guys are screwing me over. I feel like these guys do a great job. Stop fucking feeling. Right? Track everything. There's no reason you can't working. I feel like these guys are screwing me over. I feel like these guys do a great job. Stop fucking feeling. Right? Track everything. There's no reason you can't track. Throw a call tracking number on there on anything that you're doing and listen to the phone number. Like listen to the phone lines. Hire an intern to listen to the phones for you because I promise you what you will gain is far greater than what you think you're gonna save and paying for that intern.

But for God's sake, start tracking everything. Call tracking numbers are ridiculously cheap to get. I don't make anything through Service Titan. That wasn't a plug. I don't make any money either. And I got a relationship with Service Titan. And so what's great is that if you throw a call tracking number on, and this is actually a good point you bring up

I'm talking about in this program, is you cannot only rely on your Service Titan or your field management software because it's not catching everything on the front end. So you have to be able to track lead opportunity versus closed lead and closed revenue. You need to understand what the miss is on your cost per acquisition. So if you throw a call tracking number on there, and for instance, my team listens to it the next day, I'm catching all the issues that might be happening with your team well

before it gets into your service type, like you sold a job. So I'm catching all the issues that might be happening with your team well before it gets into your service titan like you sold a job right so I'm catching it early or Something that wasn't even designated as a lead from service titan that used that was still a lead But you have to put these things in place So you can make those good decisions to grow. Yeah, absolutely Based on the black and white facts So stop feeling it's starting. Yeah, stop feeling guys Listen, if you don't if you can't afford somebody to do this stuff and listen to your calls and maybe

you don't have an agency or you don't have the money for that, there's a thing called Call Cap. Susie Boyder, she was on the podcast years ago, but she's amazing. She's got a thing called Call Assurance. They'll listen to the calls for you. They'll grade your CSRs. Tell her I sent you. Maybe she'll give you a discount.

I don't get anything back. But ultimately, you're playing with the big boys once you get over here with Chris. Three things. What's your top three books? So top three books, number one was, of course, E-Myth Revisits, first one I ever read. I know you've got it, too. I got them everywhere, but I got the one they signed. I've got my OG version too. The original. I've got them everywhere, but I've got the one they signed. I've got my OG version, the paperback. Yep, yep, yep.

I've got that one. So I read that one in the beginning just so I could start to learn what the hell I was even doing. And I've read it multiple times. Now, I've not read it as many times as Ken, but I've read it enough. I like another book called Can't Hurt Me. Oh, yeah, yep. David Goggins.

David Goggins is about more the mental game. I love the mental side of everything. It's about basically pushing yourself through the pain, not just the pain physically, but the pain of like fear. It's easy to give up. Yeah. The tenacity and the consistency and it's so easy to give up. And I got living with the, his roommate living with the seal right there yeah Jesse it's like so Jesse it's where's my guy I know Jesse went to me I went to hang out with him in Georgia last I took my executive team with Jesse I like that you're doing that listen he's going to the people that he enjoys being around he's letting them almost soak in to his his team and that's a game. That's the one thing I tell a lot,

at the end of every podcast when people say, Tommy, what's one piece of advice? I'm like, get your ass up, fly out of your comfort zone, bring your wife, bring your kids, bring your husband, and bring your team and get there and just soak in it. Get out of your, you know, it's great to go on a luncheon, but this is a game changer. I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah, your leadership is like extremely important for your growth plan. So I need to pour into them. So I went to Jessie. Jessie brought in a memory coach. She brought in a self-help guy. It was like a physical piece there, but we all did that shit together. So we built that bond. And they all got smarter because the smarter they are, the better they are for our employees,

which is better for our customers. And then what's the third one well I would have would have chose living with the seal that well yeah that one guys give me one more because it went from that to it yeah I would say gosh I'm looking at my book shelf man I'm here my wife would kill me right now too so I mean I don't know I have it I don't know I have a third but listen here's the thing I'm worst at is because I I can't focus on what I have a D if I listen to a book if I start to check out I know it's not a book for me I have to actually force myself to listen to these things there's not been

any plane rides lately that's the thing I just got done with a plane ride so I knocked down a couple yeah you know what let me give you one let me give you guys one to read. It's by Robert Chednady. It's called Yes. And it's 50 Ways of Persuasion. And it's these little chapters. And it's just so cool because here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to read two of them to my team every morning. I'm actually going to play the Audible on my Zoom call. And I'm like, look, if there's an idea that sparks, all I want you guys doing is using your brains just a couple minutes a day that's all you need to do and if you get something sometimes the best goal comes out of this oh yeah you whiteboard throw it on there's a million dollar white board more white board I got a white board in my kitchen I got one right here and just everywhere my offices are all glass see yeah so there we write everything so someone's get all

you Chris give us some websites give us your email whatever the best way LinkedIn I don't know what's the best way sure so I'll give you a couple different ways one if you guys are listening to to the point home services podcast we have our Facebook Instagram pages same thing for Ryan and we have both of those if you want to reach out that way I am a very accessible guy and make myself accessible. That doesn't mean I can, I will respond the same day, but most often I try to make sure I respond within 24 hours.

You can reach out to me through email, which is C-Y-A-N-O at Rynoss, spelled R-Y-N-O-S-S dot com. That's probably the best way to get ahold of me directly, or you're welcome to call our office line too, which is, what is my office line? I have no idea what my number is. It's been a long time. Just email. Way easier.

Or go to our website. So basically, I'd like to finish with giving you the last two cents. I wanted to just tell you, I just had matt michelle on the podcast which is the guy you know hopefully you guys already heard matt michelle's podcast but he is the guy that runs uh service roundtable monster it's just cool it just becomes you know we got this incest of just the top people but you surround yourself with these great people and you push yourself to learn remember readers are leaders. And whiteboard, we talk about a lot of stuff.

I like what you said because I can't beat this enough. Ask. You've got to have a plan and you've got to ask for it. But we're going to give you the chance here, Chris. You work with so many home service companies and they're all successful. And I want to give you just one last thing to think about. The audience here, it's a big audience. They're going to be all over our faces.

They're going to be watching us listen to this. Leave them with some gold nuggets. Leave them with some final thoughts. Yeah, man, for sure. I would say, number one thing you have to do is if you're stuck, don't be afraid to ask for help. If you're planning on going into doing any digital marketing you're currently doing it I cannot stress enough to hold your agencies

that are doing your marketing accountable to giving you the metrics that track new business if you're paying them for new customers don't let them give you a call number or a contact form number and not split it out for you and give you new versus returning and repeat customers. Make them give you the facts because that's how you're responsible for that. You're responsible for asking for those things if they don't give them to you. And 99% don't give you that much detail unless you ask for it. And even then they won't give it to you. The only reason you don't get reporting to that depth is either one they don't want a staff to do it or there's something to hide there's nothing else around there right so you earned that dollar

and you're spending that dollar you need to know without question what that dollar returns and that's how you can make good decisions with your digital marketing moving forward. Know definitively if I spend a dollar, I get X in return for new business. So stop feeling and start knowing what your digital marketing is doing for you. And that can go for like direct mail pieces, put a call tracking number on it, throw a specific coupon on that if you're going to use it. like something you know definitively that leave came from that offer because it was on that postcard all right it's your responsibility you owe it to yourself your family your employees your business to stop feeling and start knowing track

everything and for God's sake find a digital marketing company that actually is legit focusing on your business. Not a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Somebody that knows your business and how your consumer thinks and has been doing it a long time. Do yourself a favor because they exist. And that is my closing remarks. I got one quick closer on top of that.

What I'm going to ask Chris to do for us is go to Home Service Expert, find this podcast, homeserviceexpert.com. I'm going to get a sample. We'll just call it, I can't call it ABC because you have an ABC company. We'll call it, we'll call it D-E-F. We're going to do, can you give us just a sample of some of the stuff that you report on so they have an idea? Yeah. So, so the To The Point Home Services Podcast, the whole reason I did it was, and I was telling Tommy earlier, is that it's been a decade of me sitting in war room conversations with home services companies that are extremely successful going through plans actionable items that you can take tactical takeaways so when we started the podcast it was bringing on leaders in the industry who have perfected this stuff

not just in a leadership game but in how did you how did how do you what's the best type of maintenance agreement to use? How do you really grow a service business? How do you add an additional service like plumbing we talked about or electrical tools? I actually want them to be boxes that you can check along the way to where you said, man, I listened to this podcast and I took away these two things that I can actually implement. And that is the key word. And you and I have talked about this you can't just listen to it get jacked up write shit down and do nothing with it okay

everybody does ambition without action is useless useless okay and guess what 95 percent of you listening 98 98 percent will still do nothing even though the proven methods are put out there in front of your face But guess what the 3% or the 2% that do and the fucking ones that are the most successful Well, yeah, well there's 2% one of them is gonna go implement every freaking thing They just heard the other one's gonna slowly push it through and get with his executive team They're her executive you gotta make it happen. So don't be that guy that walks in and goes dude I listen to one of Tommy's podcast again. We're a plan. We're going to tear it up. So be the, be the 1% that actually has a plan and integrates it. You know, the integrator and implementation.

Chris, it's been a pleasure. Awesome. Thanks. 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 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. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment.

I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.