The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Get A Ton Of Things Done By Doing Less, Not More

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Davis Nguyen is the founder of My Consulting Offer, an institution that provides invaluable assistance to over 400 people when it comes to getting started in management consulting. He has headed a collection of people from engineering, marketing, and production. One of his most remarkable achievements was when he helped a biotech company identify over 100 million dollars’ worth of cost saving opportunities. In this episode, we talked about time management, public speaking, leadership marketing...

I almost think of time management as priority management because there's only 24 hours in a day. So I almost think of it as not managing time, but managing my priorities. So instead of trying to do more in the same time, I try to do less at the same time. So the first thing I always think about is at the very top level is, do I actually have to get this done? I find that when you go through your to-do list, some of the stuff that you do might matter for now, but they don't really matter in the long term. As in, if you didn't do it, nothing's going to happen. But yet, they take up so much of your time. So I get rid of stuff that I don't need to do. 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. All right, David. So I know you're not in the home service industry. I think our listeners can learn a ton of valuable lessons from your story. So tell us a little bit about how you got started, what kind of business and what you're doing now. I know you're in Thailand, which is awesome. So let's go into some details on where you've been and where you're going. Absolutely. So to take it back, it actually starts off funny enough, my family's in the home

services business. So very, very bottom of the chain. But both of my parents and my whole family, actually, they're immigrants. So they fled the Vietnam War before I was born. So moved from Vietnam to the United States. So grew up in Atlanta. So a lot of home services out there, as you know. And grew up in one of the poorest areas in America, well, still is today, where I think the stats was like, last census was like one out of five living households are under the poverty line. But immigrant parents moved out there because there were political refugees didn't really have a chance so uh grew up in an area where you weren't expected to go to college just to put things in perspective is that we would have a saying that people go to jail not to yale

in our in our community and that was pretty much growing up is that our school system was like called the worst school system in the u.s I always thought, well, education is probably the way out of this. As in my parents who were basically doing home services and so forth, they thought, you know, Davis, you should do something a little better, maybe own a home versus just cleaning up a home. And so they always believed a little bit more into me and eventually would end up getting full scholarships to Yale and Harvard. So there's a whole other story we can get into about how a poor kid from a neighborhood that's called the worst school system in the world gets a scholarship at Yale and Harvard. But I ended up going to Yale.

And at the end of it, decided I wanted to become a management consultant, a career I've never heard of before. But for any listener who doesn't know, very simply, it's basically a bunch of people who go into big businesses and figure out how to solve a problem that even the CEO and his team can't solve. And so I worked in management consulting for two years after graduation, but eventually left to pursue what I really enjoyed, which was education. So I moved down to Los Angeles, worked at a startup called Jumpcut, so education startup. And we were trying to figure out how to make education entertaining. So you imagine combining Netflix with education. That's what we were trying to be. And because we're a startup in education,

didn't get paid as much. So back in 2017, wow, already almost three years, one of my family members had a $20,000 medical debt and I needed to pay it off. So working at Jumpcut at the time, then in education, trying to figure out how to be profitable, didn't quite have the income. So I ended up starting my current business as basically a side business on the weekends called My Consulting Offer, which is very simple. We help people get jobs in management consulting. So the previous job I had at Bain & Company, that's essentially what we do. And why it's so good is that the average industry is kind of like if 100 people apply to Bain, Bain will hire maybe one person. So one out of 100, 1% chance. We at my consulting offer, we've averaged

about 85%. So that's pretty much why I suppose a lot of people want to work with us. Got it. So you go and you fix problems. That's your job. Give me an example of what that's all about. Sure, absolutely. So at Management Consulting, your job can range. For example, I'll tell you some of the fun ones that I had a chance to do. So for example, in Management Consulting, you're working on different projects every single few weeks. The point of it is that you're basically a brain for hire. So for example, I remember one of my first projects was a private equity firm. They were thinking about acquiring a chain of fitness stores. So I had a chance to go and basically work out at various different gyms to figure out what the customer service was like, to figure out

what their pricing model, their business model, what was good, what was not good. And then two weeks later, I was essentially thrown into a school system, very similar to the one I grew up in. And they had a problem, which was they were trying to figure out how do they retain their teachers when others surround these school systems that were a lot wealthier. So think of the neighborhoods where Google, Facebook, and all these other companies are housed. They were paying their teachers anywhere between $10,000 to $30,000 more to do less work. So how do you incentivize teachers to work with students who come from more difficult backgrounds for less pay with more students and more hours? That was the type of problem that we were trying to solve, which was, of course, a hard problem to

solve. Wow. Okay. So when you were going to that gym, how important when a customer, when you look at private equity and for the folks out there that don't know what this is, I suggest you look it up and do some research on what the net promoter score is. Can you kind of explain that, how important that is for when you're getting with private equity? Absolutely.

So net promoter score actually started with Bain as one of our claims to fame. So I got a chance to work on some net promoter projects. For anyone who doesn't know about net promoter project or NPS, really worth Googling for your business, especially for home services. Basically, Bain took a bunch of big companies and they mapped out the company's growth and profits against this one number, which is the net promoter score. So net promoter score, a dumbed down essentially just says, how likely is it for one of your current customers or clients to refer you?

So obviously, the higher the number, the more referrals you get, the better the profits as well as your costs go down. So Bain basically figured out that you want to be able to get your net promoter score to be as high as possible. So think about coffee shops that go out of business because they have bad service, bad coffee, things like that. You wouldn't recommend it. So that's how important it was that we found that the tech companies that had the highest Think about coffee shops that go out of business because they have bad service, bad coffee, things like that, you wouldn't recommend it.

So that's how important it was that we found that the tech companies that had the highest net promoter score, MPS scores, would have the best outcome. So when we were working with private equity firms, we would take surveys of about 1,000 customers to figure out what their net promoter score is. The reason is that, for example, we always thought of recessions coming. So if a recession is coming, and let's say that your gym had a very low NPS score, most likely what that means is that you're not going to refer your friends and that gym is not going to last. But if we're in an economic downturn, and this gym somehow has a really high net promoter score, we think that we

can actually save the gym during recession because they're still going to refer their friends and they're still going to come to the gym because they'd love it. Right. So the net promoter score is how likely are you to refer someone to our business? And I think, what is it? Nine and 10 is a promoter. Seven and eight is like neutral. And then anything less than a seven. It's been a long time, but anything less than a seven means it's not a good thing. You have such a great memory as in all of this. But yeah, so net promoter score, very simple. So if you ever take in like a survey

from like a Comcast AT&T when they call you, they always say, hey, scale between zero and 10, how likely are you to recommend us? That's basically the NPS. So it's very commonplace. But yeah, anything zero to six is what's called a detractor, which basically means that I'm going to talk bad about your business,

which means that I'm hurting your profits. Basically, seven, eights basically mean neutral. And they're basically people who don't really have a strong opinion. They're like, oh yeah, the service is good. But nines and tens are those people who go out there and say, oh my gosh, you have to try Tommy's business

or you have to go and try Davis's service. Those are what we're trying to aim for, the nines and the tens. I'm really interested in this because I just was talking on stage a couple days this past week, and a lot of people have been interested in how private equity and venture capitalists look at buying a company. And this is the rule of thumb when you go to purchase you're looking at a number and there's a lot of different things that play into this so take this with a grain of salt that the listeners out there but they look at first of all the last three years of your ebita which is earnings before interest tax depreciation and appreciation so they look at your basically how

much profit did you make and then they give you a multiple of that. And I want to kind of dive into this a little bit right now to understand from what I've taken anywhere from like under 10 million, you're getting about a three to four times, 10 to 90, you get between six and nine times, depending on cashflow accounts receivable. What's your variance as far as clients. You don't want just one huge client because if that client falls out, there's a lot of things that could go wrong for the private equity. And then over 100 million, sometimes you're getting 12 to 14. And I've seen venture capitalists or private equity come in, buy it for 10 and sell it for 15 times within two years. So talk to me a

little bit about some of the stuff. Are they buying cashflow? Why is it the private equity? A lot of the time they go in, they make a lot of changes, they make it more profitable, but then in my opinion, from what I've seen, they're buying cashflow and then they squeeze it for a few years and then it starts to kind of dwindle because they don't have relations with the employees. They cut a lot of the benefits. I've just seen so many people that the original owner has to come back in and get it for 10 cents on the dollar. I mean, explain to me a little bit about private equity in general.

So people understand who these people are, what their goals are. Cause Bain is it is the monster company. Mitt Romney ran Bain for a while, right? Mitt Romney did. Okay. So let's just talk about how it all works and then kind of dive into that because I think this is huge for the listeners. Absolutely. So for anyone who doesn't know about who is new to private equity, just keep it simple, is imagine a company that their whole purpose is the private, they're a private company, and they choose to buy ownership equity into another business. Of course, their intention is not to own the business forever, but basically to fix it up

and to essentially flip it, similar to how you would flip a home. And that's their whole business model, is that what can we go for a business that's undervalued? And we think that we can have some expertise. So private equity firms can vary from anyone from one person who just has a lot of wealth to what you more know of like the Bain Capitals and so forth, which has a lot more money pulled from some of the wealthiest people in the world. So I'll use actually a small example, which is a friend of mine who actually owns his own private equity firm, but they do it in a very smaller scale. So what he does is actually he buys small businesses. So he buys anything under a million, above a hundred thousand in profits every year. But he comes in and he has this team and similar big private equity firms do the same thing is

they bring in a team, usually let's say Bain, StrategyArm and so forth. And they'll go in and they'll figure out what's inefficient with the business. So for example, let's say that my friend decides to buy a cleaner or two, like a dry cleaner, very simple. But he go in and they'll figure out what's inefficient with the business. So for example, let's say that my friend decides to buy a cleaner or two, like a dry cleaner. Very simple. But he goes in and he realizes, wow, the NPS score is probably really high here. The customers come back all the time and they come back on average twice a month or whatever it is. So he knows that there's constant cash flow.

However, there's a couple of things he realizes. For example, one, maybe the contracts that they have with their employees aren't optimal. They can actually get cheaper labor. Or he might realize that the machines in the back are outdated and then they cost a lot more to run than others. So they see the inefficiencies of the business, go in and fix this. So this could be anything from their marketing, to their operations, to their product, to how they do their HR. And that's pretty much the value of the private equity firms. They're going in, there's this potentially attractive asset that I think I can make within a year or two.

And as a result, a lot of times people don't like it because they go in and sometimes they have to make those decisions, which is basically, let's say, for example, hey, why do we need 1,000 employees where it looks like 700 can do the same job if they work a little bit harder? So they'll cut the 300 employees, give them benefits and so forth. And that's where they get the bad reps, like the Red Lobsters and so forth. And sometimes the owner has to come back and buy it for cheaper because sometimes the private equity firms go in and don't really know what they're doing and they sabotage the value of it. And of course, that's why companies

like Bain, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, the big consulting firms exist, they go in there to helpfully bail them out before their investment goes south, or better yet, in the beginning to do the diligence to see what value we can actually add to the asset before we purchase it. Okay, this is a tough one. I'm just going to ask you one more tough question when it comes to this stuff. Ask me away. Okay. So you have a venture capitalist, you've got private equity, you've got incubators, and you've got hedge funds. Can you talk a little bit, let's start with venture capitalists versus private equity versus incubators versus, let's just go into each one of those. Sure, absolutely. So actually the easiest way to think about it is actually from the beginning all the way to the end of the stage of a life of a business. So I would actually start with the incubator, actually. So incubator as what it sounds like. So a famous incubator would be like Y Combinator, which is one of the most famous. So for example, Airbnb came out of Y Combinator, so did Reddit, Dropbox, and much other companies. So an incubator, basically what they do is they take a small equity into a new forming business. So for example, if tomorrow Davis decides that he and Thomas are going to make a software company and this software company, all it does is remind you to go to the

restroom every hour, but we need a funding. No one's going to fund us except for these incubators because they believe that we can grow. So they basically incubate us and give us a chance to grow. And so when the incubator is done with us and we still have some potential, let's say that, oh, we get like a million downloads, then this is where the venture capital comes in. So venture capitalists, they're looking for basically home runs. So they get a bad rep where they lose a lot of money, millions of dollars. But their whole idea is, can I find the next Facebook? Can I find the next Google? Because it only takes one really good investment to make up for all the...

The statistic is basically 19 bad investments or investments that break even, but one that just becomes the next Google and it pays for the whole batch. So venture capitals are basically trying to bet for the moon. So if you go to a casino, the incubators are basically the people who are giving you a little bit of money to play the games. The venture capitals are trying to basically bet big because if they bet big on a bunch of rounds, they're hoping that one of them will pay off. Then if your company is lucky enough, let's say our app here, we get a bunch of people to go to the restroom. They're downloading it for some reason and continue.

Then eventually, maybe a venture capital company decides, you know what? You guys are good. We need you to sell right now because that's how we make our money. So we've invested, let's say, a million dollars. We need to get like a 20x return. So we need someone to buy it for $20 million. And let's just say in a hypothetical example that our private equity firm here, they decide they have some marketing expertise. They're like, oh, Davis, you two only have done this in the United States. We have connections that can make you in Mexico, Japan, China, and so forth. We're going to buy you out. So let's say that they decide to buy us out. And now we're out of the business, or maybe we're not. And the private equity firm takes over. They

offer us and they're like, hey, Davis, why do you have all this staff? We can do it for half of it. I'm going to cut all this. And also your search engine optimization sucks. We need to do that with your marketing. So they spice it IPO, we make it, we're public. And at this point, maybe a hedge fund comes along. And of course, they're called hedge funds because they want to hedge the fund. So hedge their risks. And they have this fund, usually of made up, let's say, retirement funds and so forth. And they're thinking, hmm, what kind of businesses can we invest in? So unlike an incubator, which only incubates early businesses, and not venture capital, we're trying to swing for the fences, or a private equity where we own the major stock in one company, a hedge fund doesn't want ownership of the business. They just want to see the return. So maybe they invest a little bit into our business, but the rest of it into a bunch of other businesses that's available in the market. And that's pretty much how they make their money and their return. So that's how I like to think about the different stages is you map out where they are involved in the stage of the company's life. Let me know if that makes sense. Yeah, no, we're good. You know, I'm going to ask you, I just want to take one more dive into one

more thing. So IPO is the initial public offering. That's when you take a company public. And the advantages of taking a company public is now you're raising money from a lot of people, especially if you get it on the NASDAQ or the, you know, there's two main ones. And then I remember when Google did their IPO. I remember, actually, I remember distinctly when there's been a couple of big ones. There's Instagram. I think there was the one of Snapchat. And I remember when Facebook did it too, and I should have bought it, it was like 19 bucks or something.

So franchising is a way to leverage, right? Franchising is you pay me to get in, I'm gonna take a percentage of your revenue, I'm gonna give you a business in a box. But it's a great way to raise money if you've got a good idea and you're looking to expand. But there's all kinds of rules, and you've got the SEC on your butt.

There's just all kinds of lawsuits and things happening. I know somebody got really hurt at McDonald's, and instead of suing the franchisee, they wanted to go after the franchisor. Just crazy stuff. So talk to me a little bit about the benefits of franchising versus licensing versus doing an international, or I'm sorry,

initial public offering, an IPO. Sure. So there are all different business models for different businesses, right? So it really depends on the industry that you're in and which one is beneficial. But let's talk about all three of them

at a very high level. So let's start with the franchising, which we know because McDonald's, fantastic franchise. I really like them. So it is like you mentioned, it's like basically here's your company, it works. We're going to share part of the marketing. We're going to make it work.

But you own your part of it and your operations and so forth. But most of it, you just pay us a royalty fee. And every month we allow you to use the McDonald's name or the Burger King name or whichever one you want to choose. So that's the franchise model, which works out really well, very beautiful, scales really well. And for a lot of businesses, that's probably the answer. The second model is the licensing. So it's similar to, I don't really want a franchise. I don't want to have to deal with the SEC. I don't want to deal with having to set all these boundaries,

make everything standard. But you know what? I have a really good name. I'm just going to license it to you. You figure it out. So if you decide to make Davis's Hot Wings, but you go out there and you decide to make the seats blue instead of my red, that's totally fine. You just

pay me for the license. But again, a lot of times if you get sued, depends on the agreement here, could be just on you and I have nothing to do with it. Then you have the biggest one, which is the IPO, which is the initial public offering. So this is when people talk about, oh, I want to own stocks and so forth on it. So just to make clear that you don't have to do one or the other. They're all different models. But for example, you can use a franchise and steal IPO. For example, McDonald's is listed on the stock and they're doing pretty well.

And they're also a franchise model. So yeah, I've seen that. So I remember the Wolf of Wall Street when they got the shoes and they talk about the IPO. And then they ran the stock way up. And then they sold because they had given. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that happens with an IPO. And it's stabilization.

There's how's the market receiving that? How much money? So I've heard the long-term goal of big, big, big companies is always to do an IPO. And there's certain people that specialize in it and they get paid a lot of money. I actually met a guy that was on the team of Googles that did an IPO and it said the lakes in Chandler here in Arizona.

And the guy, he lived in San Francisco but he was dating a girl that I knew. And he had this huge yacht off of San Francisco. I mean, they were going on extravagant trips all the time. And he just got lucky. I mean, he, that was the, that was a gold mine and it continues to be a gold mine. Just like I think you look at Apple, Apple's way up this last 2019. So, and then you got the stock market, you could do a split.

There's all kinds of cool things that could happen and it could go the opposite way. Let's just talk about the pros and cons of doing an IPO. Obviously, now you've got a board of directors. You're not 100% in charge. The stockholders have rights. You've got to do all kinds of stuff above board with financials, which you need to hire an expensive lawyer. You need to hire a really, really expensive CPA, controller, all these things, because you got certain covenants you need to stay above. So explain to me, why would somebody want to do that? What's the big advantage of doing it? Let's just say I got up to $500 million and I have the largest garage door company in North America. How does that work?

Because I hear everybody talk about IPO and I guess I want to get a better understanding of it. And I think the listeners would love to hear about it too. Sure. So IPO is a very, very long process in terms of what you're trying to do. As in, feel free to literally just Google IPO process and it's going to make you second guess if you really want to do this. But when it comes to the benefits, I think there's many benefits, but the biggest two here is one, the exposure that you get. So being listed on it. So for example, let's say that your home service is listed on the NASDAQ. Now you could say, oh yeah, whatever home service of my industry is listed on a NASDAQ. So it's a huge increase in public image. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of brands out there, and you can look these up, who didn't make waves until they had their IPO and were on track to it. So that's one, is the public image. But the second one, and probably the most common one

that people want, is you get access to capital right away. So for example, because you're giving away ownership of the business, you can get an influx of cash a lot faster than if you, for example, toiled away. But the con of it, you mentioned, the big one is you lose so much control of your business. So if you ever look to add any of the Warren Buffett, his announcements, his speeches, his letters, and so forth, it's kind of like he has to review all the numbers, how they did, and so forth. It's kind of like you lose that sense of privacy in terms of it. So a competitor can just come up and say, oh, Davis, your margins. Okay, I know how to beat you. And sooner or later, that information is public for everyone because that's part of the price that you pay for being publicly listed. Got it. Okay. So there's a lot to that. I know all of a sudden the CEO of

that original company just gets a ton of money. And then you can raise money really, really quickly when you want to do stuff to buy out companies, right? I mean, how does that work? So that's true that you could raise a lot of money and it does help facilitate, like for example, acquisitions and mergers and like that. So it's really one of those things where if you really want to grow on a massive scale, it is a quick way for you to get access to the capital. But again, it's like one of those things where if you really want to grow on a massive scale, it is a quick way for you to get access to the capital. But again, it's one of those things where do you really want to grow? So I'm kind of jumping your questions there. I know one of your favorite questions is books that you recommend and so forth. Yeah, no, this is great. One of my favorite books is that... Oh, by the way, I love that question. I love it when guests

are surprised. I'm like, well, if you listen to one episode, you know this question is coming. So one of my favorite books is Delivering Happiness. It's by Tony Hsieh, who is the CEO of Zappos. And in it, Tony Hsieh, he sells his first business, actually. He sells it to, I believe, Microsoft. And then basically becomes an overnight millionaire. He's like 22 or something at that time. And he goes in the journey where he just basically starts partying, plays poker and things like this. He's empty inside. And he decides to eventually become a venture capitalist. It's funny enough, we talked about that earlier.

And he starts investing in these businesses that he thinks most of them are going to suck, but at least one of them will be a home run. And of course, he grows an interest in Zappos and eventually just takes over as the CEO of Zappos and grows it. And then he actually has a chance. He's thinking about, do we IPO and get more capital? But then he realized that once he loses control of Zappos, it's not going to be the same Zappos that he knows

and loves. So one of the lessons he tells his book is that growth for growth's sake, if it doesn't hit your long-term goals and it doesn't make you happier or whatever it does, what's an additional $5 million, $ million dollars if growing just makes more headache and also doesn't add much to what you're trying to do as a business so sometimes the answer is not to ipo or grow as fast as you can sometimes one of some of the friends i respect is that they choose to keep their businesses small again by choice yeah i think uh it's kind of funny i I always say, like Peter Parker, like, what's your goal? I said, with great power comes great responsibility. If you have the power to do it, I'm a big fan that you should do it. So you've had some health issues from what I've read,

and you were running a business, and you started racking up a ton, a ton, a ton of medical debt. Talk to me a little bit about how you're able to adapt to that situation. Sure, absolutely. So I've been financially supporting my family since I was 13. So I grew up in a single parent household. Grandparents pretty much ran a home cleaning business and a nail salon later on from that. And so I've been basically financially supporting my family since I was a teenager. So in the beginning, it was like things like recycling trash for change. Then it's like waiting tables and eventually learning how to play poker. So I ran the table. So that was my joke that I served the tables and ran the tables. So that was always something that came to me.

And then of course, my family, they're immigrants. And their whole philosophy is the opposite of what a business owner I think about today is that for them, it's kind of like whatever money they can save, let's do it ourselves versus let's think about the money that we're spending instead of as an expense, as an investment. So what they ended up doing was they got the cheapest insurance and one of my family members fell ill and needed to go to the hospital. And the bill came out to be about $20,000. And that was money I did not have at the time because at this point in my life, I was moving down to Los Angeles. I was working at an education tech startup, which we just finished our incubator, just got some venture capital. So I love how all this is weaving in. But we weren't profitable yet like a lot of other startups. And I just couldn't ask for the money to pay the bill. So I decided to start a side business, which is my consulting

offer right now. And it just basically grew it. And to your question about how I kept my head in the game while all that was happening was, I guess I didn't really have a choice. As in, during that time, it was probably one of the hardest times of my life because, one, I'm working at this company at the startup because I just believed in what they were doing in education. So I was working like 60 hours during the week. And on the weekend, Saturday, Sunday, I was working another 20, 25 hours just to make this business come up. So to figure out how do we get money coming in so I can actually pay these bills and also meet my rent and everything else. So I was like, that was probably during that year. I gained so much weight.

I ate so unhealthy. I barely left the room. It was just a bad stage. But how I kept it on was I realized there's a greater cause. And it just kept me going in terms of just knowing that my family depended on me to do it.

And at the same time, I also had my first clients who were paying me and I wanted to be able to deliver them what they wanted, which was a paying job. So I just did and I wanted to be able to deliver them what they wanted, which was a paying job. So I just did everything I could during the weekend to make that happen. And that's, hopefully I answered your question

about what motivated me, which is my family, as well as the people who believed in me to sign up for this service. Back then we didn't even have a name. Wow, that's crazy. It's interesting when we're at our worst, sometimes we're challenged the most, it turns into our best.

You know, most homeowners that I know, home service owners, they complain that they don't have the time to work on their business. They're always putting out fires. A lot of them don't understand how to get the right employees. I can remember back, this has to be five years. I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And, you know, you're in Thailand right now, kind of working on probably automating your business. And it's just interesting to think about it

because I see these businesses, there's always been some catalyst moments, but it wasn't like a day. Even when I brought on my number two guy, my number three guy, it took time for them to learn the business and me to mold them and us to get to know each other and worked well together. I'm amazed how many people could run so many businesses, but I think I can go into a hundred home service businesses now,

like literally and change it with my team, with my advanced team here, the C-level team that I have. So talk to me a little bit about how you get optimized and how you work on the business and how you don't get caught in the day-to-day and just get drilled down. And like, you actually make progress and you're like, so many people I hear say, I can get more done at home than if I walk into work today.

So how do we solve that problem? Absolutely. So this is actually a common problem that gets asked a lot is, so our business is for context. We did start with just me. I was doing basically everything. I did start with just me. I was doing basically everything. I was doing the customer service. I was doing the actual product

fulfillment, the sales, the marketing, all of that. And so that was two years ago. And then nowadays, a lot of it does run on its own. And I would attribute it to two things. One is in the beginning, just setting up systems and processes. So by systems, I don't mean like software. Some of it can be. I don't mean software or anything complicated, but it's basically writing down exactly what needs to get done. So the equivalent of it is kind of like if you can write a list down of things that need to get done and it can be a repeatable system. So I think about McDonald's there. Since we talked about McDonald's earlier, is that you literally at the grill, the person who's running McDonald's is not really the CEO or any

of the leaders. It's literally the person who's taking your order, flipping your burgers, and serving you the fries. It's basically high school students who, for many of them, this is their first job, and yet they're running this multi-billion dollar empire for McDonald's. So it's like building those systems in place where you know that a repeatable result can come, even if you're not there to monitor it. So that's the first lesson I learned. The second is you just really have to hire people who can do the work ideally better than you can. And people think that these people are expensive.

Yes, they can be expensive. We're pretty lucky that we're a remote company. So I've been able to find talent all over the world in terms of it. Like for example, our accountant and our bookkeeper, he's from India and CPA certified and everything. But I pay him like one-tenth of what he would have earned if he was in the US,

which is still more than what he earns in India working at any other company for being able to use that talent. So I would attribute our success to like those two things, which is having a really good system in place that has been proven time and time again. So for example, in our case, help our students and our clients get job offers. And second, hiring the right people to be able to manage the process.

You know, one other thing I want to add to that, Davis, is I could do a spring job in less than seven minutes from start to finish. I know guys that I've hired that take over four hours. Now, when you think about that, I had dinner with my cousin in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and she said, you just operate at a higher level. You read faster. And I'm not bragging about myself. I'm just saying that I don't necessarily think I'm smarter, but I just get things done. I'm kind of just like, I've got a task list for today and I'm just knocking them out. And the thing that I got to say is it's all relative. If you're paying $400 for a lawyer and they charge you for two hours, or you go to legal zoom and they charge you for 20

hours, I'm not necessarily against legal zoom or any of these other things. I just think getting the right people for the right thing. I used to be afraid to pay people and I used to not like paying people a certain amount. I've got burned so many times because the people that can't do it want a high, high salary. The people that can do it say, give me a livable wage and give me a hell of a bonus structure. I want a bonus structure that's going to motivate me. And I've learned how to build these compensation programs that really get the business, the owner, and the employees running in the same direction. So I think a lot of it is compensation programs and giving them a way to win the game. Because most of the time when I see businesses that are failing, the employees are on the sidelines that have no skin in the game.

They have no reason to do better. And as you start to mold this, and I'm a big whiteboarder, and I think about what's a fair metric. And if you and I sat down, we'd come up with two completely different things that both might work. But I guess probably when a venture capitalist or a private equity come in, they don't know the things that make people tick because they never lived the business probably. So I could see why it's tough. They cut a lot of the bonuses. They do a lot of mistakes that were the things that kept the people at the company and the great people there.

There was the glue that kept them motivated. So I think it's very interesting. Let me ask you, what's the most important lesson you've learned from just really doing it all, working 60 hours, 80 hours a week? What's your big takeaway? So since we're on the topic there,

is that the biggest lesson I learned is you really need to learn how to trust people if you are going to grow your business, if you decide to do that. So I think the example you used was great. I'll use a similar example, which is that we have customer service emails, and I'm pretty sure most companies

have customer service emails and calls too, is that, yes, I know that all the questions and answers are faster than anyone else on my team. But if you think about, for example, let's say that I can do 30 emails in an hour, but my teammates can only do like 10 emails per hour. So basically, I'm three times as fast. But if you think about if I'm paying them, let's say $10 an hour to do it, to do the emails, it basically costs me $30 to do it versus me doing one hour, which is going to save me $20. But what could I be doing with that time? As in, if I'm negotiating a contract for, let's say, with Harvard University or Stanford or another university for that hour,

I would bet you that it's worth more than $20, the savings I would have. And that's one of the biggest lessons I learned is that instead of thinking about cost as this pure cost, you think of it as a savings. So for example, our bookkeeper is in India, but our accountant is actually pretty expensive because I don't think of our end of year taxes as, oh my gosh, I have to do this. But I think about, okay, if I'm paying him, let's say X amount of $100 per hour, can he find me more than X amount of $100 of savings than the next best CPA? And if the answer is yes,

he theoretically made me money. Similar to our customer service is that if the customer service team can, let's say, take off three hours of my work instead of doing customer service, can I reinvest that three hours back to reaching out to, let's say, a UC Berkeley, a Princeton, Oxford University,

or another university and negotiating a contract with them? In that case, let's say, a UC Berkeley, a Princeton, Oxford University, or another university and negotiating a contract with them. In that case, it's totally worth it. And they actually brought money to us indirectly. So I think that's one of the biggest lessons. Instead of thinking about costs, that's just purely this money I've never seen again. Think of them as indirect investments.

I agree. And I remember when I was young and I was in, I don't know if this was junior college or whatever. I went to H&R Block. I owed $2,000. And then my buddy said, hey, try my CPA out. I ended up getting $5,000 back. So it's all relative.

And I want to talk a little bit about time management because I delegate most of my time. Like you said said you do. The one thing that I do know about myself and I do believe about most human beings is we only have so much time in a day that we could have 100% concentration and focus. And I feel like when we do these mundane tasks that someone else can do, we're eating away at some of our great time that we could be in focus time. So for me, time management is just understanding that I only have, let's just say a 10 hour a day. I could probably focus like heavily focus a few hours of that, you know, but I'm also ADD. So, I mean, but I mean, as far as focus goes, I don't think people can just sit in a room for 10 hours every single day and be at 100% focus. So tell me

a little bit about your experience and some of your tips for time management. So I think time management, actually, I almost think of time management as priority management because there's only 24 hours in a day. So I almost think of it as not managing time, but managing my priorities. So instead of trying to do more in the same time, I try to do less at the same time. So the first thing I always think about is at the very top level is, do I actually have to get this done? I find that when you go through your to-do list, some of the stuff that you do might matter for now, but they don't really matter in the long term. As in, if you didn't do it, nothing's going to happen. But yet, it takes up so much time. So I get rid of stuff that I don't need to do. So basically, just delete it.

The second thing that I think about is, what is something that needs to get done, but I don't have to get? So this is like the delegation part. It's thinking about, is there someone else's time who would be better sent out with someone else? Like, for example, as a kid, I always thought it was interesting

when I would find out that people had, let's say, maids and so forth. Because I thought, wait, I can just clean it and just save myself like 25 bucks. But then later on, as I grew up, I'm like, oh, wow. So I could clean my apartment and it would probably take me an hour or two. Or I can just pay someone $40 to clean my apartment and it buys me an hour back to work on something that's more important. So delegating that out becomes like the second layer. And then the third thing I think about is if it has to be done, can't be delayed, you can't delete it, you can't delegate it,

then it's thinking about how impactful is the thing that you're about to do. And I always think about what is the most important thing? So another book I really love is Essentialism and One Thing. So both speak about the same message. And I think other people have recommended this too, so it's not new to any of the listeners, It just says, there's usually on your list, the most important thing to do. I usually just start with that. And it just makes everything else a lot easier for me. You know, it's funny because I contacted the guy that wrote Essentialism

and his assistant got back to me and said, he's writing another book and he's 100% focused on that. So he's not doing podcasts. And this was like a year ago. But you talked a little bit about systems. I think one of the things that helped you get through the difficult phase of your journey here has been really getting systems involved. And it's really hard to change the paradigm of the way we think because as home service owners businesses systems in my opinion prevent fires you know what's really tough is you start the business you become a firefighter you're saving the day you can handle every position in the company you're a one-man army. Sometimes you get a few other employees. But guess what those employees become?

They become firefighters. And now you've got a whole team. Whenever that siren goes off, you go down that pole, you put out a fire, and everybody does that. So to get out of that paradigm, to shift completely to say, we are a systemized company right now, here's the sad truth is sometimes the people that took you to that level will not take you to that next level. Sometimes these people are actually cancer and they're just firefighters and they're saying,

put me in coach. I'm ready to go put this fire out. And that's one of the biggest things I see in home service companies is they still got their whole team. If you're able to elevate the level of thinking and be systematic with standard operating procedures, manuals, and order of operations, and you get everything down to a T, the problem is the rest of your team was built. They followed you. And they ingrained these habits. And they don't change. So I see that a lot in the home service companies. And tell me how you start to build these systems and these processes to make sure that the system dictates the output instead of the people. Yeah. So another favorite book, if anyone wants to go into detail, is Principles by Ray Dalio. Also,

I think recommended by another former guest there as well. That's a big one. It's a big book. It's a big one. It's one of my favorites for this one. So Ray Dalio, most successful hedge fund manager, I would say in history, since we talked about hedge funds. And he talks a lot about, you can do two things. You can either build the systems around the people, which is really bad, or you can build a system and then find the people to fit within those systems. Or for any sports fans out there, it's essentially what the New England Patriots did for football, American football. Or what the San Antonio Spurs did for the NBA for an entire decade. It's building out these really good systems.

So in the beginning, for me, it was always building in those systems early. So I will tell you, I did have to replace my team as I went on because the same people who were with me when we first started or first hired, not all of them are still here because it's the same problem you mentioned, which is that either you elevate with the company or you just have to find another place because the company doesn't cater to any individual one person. That's also saying for me too, is that I joke with my leadership team. One day I'm going to come in the meeting and then my whole leadership team should say, Davis, get out. You're going to hold our company back.

That is like the goal of where I'm trying to go. And so the thinking behind here is that when I was thinking about our systems, I think about what tasks need to get done and how do we build a checklist?

How do we build a standard procedure? How do we build an order operation from it? And then finding people to fit those particular roles. And then as we grow, like for example, my very first person was my assistant. She did a little bit of everything. She was a firefighter. But later on, we realized there's things that she was really good at. And there are things that she wasn't good at. And it was just playing to her strengths. So eventually we would hire someone over her to manage the process and redo for the strength. So I guess the two things if I had to share it is write down exactly what you need to do. So I think when I talk about

home services I use, sometimes they're fantastic, but the experience is so inconsistent. Just write it down. And then the second is when you have the right people, training them should be crucial. So it's kind of like investing the time up front, even though you know you can do the task faster, but eventually they pick up and they give you a lot more of your time back or leverage, if you will, in the financial space. And you're able to invest that time back to work on your business and not in your business.

Very well said. The e-myth I think about what he talks about at a fast food chain is you got to take the minimum viable product, which might be a $13 an hour person and the systems still get the same output. And, you know, you can't do that when you need a controller or you need a COO. The systems will help, but you need somebody that's creative, that's good at managerial duties and stuff like that. So systems should dictate the output. I think there's two things when I think about

home service that a lot of people miss. I'm a marketer 100% through and through. I love sales, but I genuinely think marketing is my sweet spot. And one of the things we're going through right now in the business is turning on this funnel of amazing talent to just pour through. And that's from recruiting. And recruiting is not putting an ad on a job posting forum like Craigslist or Indeed or CareerBuilder. So we're opening up the gates. And then you talk about training. So I don't know many companies.

And I really don't. I mean, I know a lot. Enterprise is a great company. They invest a lot in training. So I don't know many companies and I really don't. I mean, I know a lot. Enterprise is a great company. They invest a lot in training. I always say we invest at least a hundred hours in each employee, but we could always get more training. And it's kind of like, it's kind of like anything. When you do it enough, it's habitual. You just, you know exactly how to respond to anything. And you practice in the mirror, your eye contact, your body language. But there's very few companies. I went out to a company in Naples and on a Saturday they were role-playing. They were recording themselves and watching the tapes. I was more impressed than I've ever been in a home service company. And you know, these,

these business owners, especially like 2 million and less, they wonder why their life is so chaotic. But the fact is there's no expected results. They haven't taken the time. They go, I don't have the time to show you. In a basic way, they say, because you're stupid and you don't get it. Even though you took five years to be able to do it your way, you just didn't realize it took you five years to do it because you learned from your mistakes. You see, I don't think employees making mistakes is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a learning experience. We record calls that don't go up to par and we use those as learning

experiences. So just all I would say to the listeners is understand you made a lot of mistakes, even though you didn't realize it because you were learning while you did it. You probably, you're the owner of the business. So don't expect, I would tell people if I had lot of mistakes, even though you didn't realize it because you were learning while you did it. You probably, you're the owner of the business. So don't expect, I always tell people, if I had 10 of Tommy, I'd have 10 competitors. So don't expect people to be exactly like you, but at the same time, give some patience and just make sure they're learning. The definition of insanity is making the same mistake over and over and not doing things differently.

So let them make some of the mistakes. It's going to cost you a little bit of money in the front. But I remember, I don't remember if this was a podcast or a book, but this guy said, what if I train them, Davis, and they leave? What if I spent all this time, effort, energy? And you know what the answer is? What if you train them and they stay? I love that. I love the thought of that. So anyway, I just think there's a lot to be said about systemizing your business. One of your most notable achievements was when you helped the biotech identify a hundred million dollars in cost savings opportunities. Tell me how the hell you overlook a hundred million dollars as a biotech company and how you were able to identify that?

Absolutely. So a couple of things to think about. So this is back in my Bain & Company days. So speaking of training, Bain & Company and any consulting firm, they do such an amazing job with it. And they know that people leave because on average, the turnover rate is about two years. So they know that every two years, they're basically replacing most of their staff. At Bain & Company, one of my projects was we were working with a biotech company and our task was to find as much savings as possible. They're a billion-dollar company. And so finding $100 million is like instant savings

and profits for them. And so a couple of things happened. One, the company was pretty old. So we're talking like old, old, old biotech company. And of course, they slowly let costs creep up. Like for example, when you're talking like old, old, old biotech company. And of course, they slowly let costs creep up. Like for example, when you're a small company, you look at every line item every single month to think about, do you really need to spend money on that? But when you're a big company, certain expenses go unchecked. For example, you forget that, oh, wow, no one's really

negotiated the cost of these lab spaces. Oh, wait, wow, our severance packages are way out of benchmark for the competitive competition as compared to our industry and other things. So basically what we did was we looked at every single, and I remember modeling this like an entire weekend for me to do, is their entire billion,

it was like $1.1 billion cost base. And then just thinking about where did all the money go? And then so then what I did was I took our competitors and then did the same thing. And you could quickly figure out, wait, why is our client paying for way more factory space than everyone else? But it's the same quality and yet our buildings are older. That didn't make sense. And we realized, for example, we had some legacy employees who did not need to be in a high cost area. We were just giving them more because we were trying to keep them away

from like the Googles. But really they couldn't leave for the Googles. It's someone's, some manager's idea at some point, VP's idea to up the price, even though we didn't need to. And then taking that away, people didn't leave. As I know people are a little harsh on that one, but it's kind of like,

that's how you overlook $100 million in costs. And there was even more costs, but they weren't willing to cut those costs. So we were able to identify the $100 million out of that one. I had a customer, a client that I'm working with, we talked yesterday, and I asked him his goals. And immediately, I was able to find millions and millions of dollars. I said, what is your call booking average? And he said, well, I get a lot of spam calls, so I don't know that exactly. I said, well, where's your call center base? He said, the Philippines. I said, wait a minute. You've got people answering your calls in the Philippines for home service, and you're in 10 different cities across the United

States. And he said, yeah. So I said, well, let me ask you this. Why are you in the largest cities? And he said, well, there's a lot of work in these cities. I said, well, the cost per click is through the roof and that's your number one source is pay per click. Number two, customers want it done today. You're going to have a lot of issues with dispatching. You're going to have a really low run rate in comparison to smaller cities. Number three, people are willing to pay more for service in smaller areas. So you get the cost acquisition cost down, the booking rates up, more patient on the dispatching and higher tickets. I said, you have no idea. We need to get some key performance indicators wrapped around every facet of your business to know where we need to work today. Because without that, it's like the blind leading the blind. So if you don't have

real numbers to look at, the number one goal when I go into a business is get rid of all the BS. Clear the desk off, get organized, get everything in the computer system, get technology to work for you. Number two, it's learn to use tools that'll help you identify key performance indicators that are accurate. So data integrity is huge. And then you make the list of priorities of what needs to be fixed first. Because why would I write bigger tickets if my booking rate is 42%? Who cares about your tickets? Right now we need to book the phone calls. You're missing half of the available calls. So I think it's just interesting. You went into a company, you take a deep dive. You did something a little bit differently. You saved them money on tenured employees.

You saved them money, I'm sure. We do an audit at least once a quarter. I've been doing it once a month. And there's so many things that pop up. Why are we paying for this? So there's really only four ways to make money, Davis. And it goes into booking rate and stuff like that. But the true way to do it is you get more customers, you keep customers coming back more often, and you charge them more money once you acquire that customer. And the fourth way is to find savings, whether that's through taxes,

whether that's through top grading, whether that's through automation and systems. As you can know, I'm pretty passionate about this stuff. What are some quick tips that you could share with the audience so where they can look at their business to find opportunities to reduce costs and grow their bottom line? Great. So of course, reducing costs, like the other side of the equation. Because my favorite talk, of course, you talk about this in other episodes too, is like increasing the customers, their buy volume and things like that. But in terms of reducing costs, I always think about two things. One, sometimes people look at every single line

item down to like the $2 they spent on Bank of America's checking fees, which I think is like the wrong approach. The first thing is just focus on the big buckets. Like for example, think about where are you spending most of the money? Let's look a little bit closer at that as in do you really need it? I always go through the item and I think, does this really add additional value to our business that is equally?

So sometimes I can justify things. Like for example, if I was thinking about our, we're a remote company, but if I think about like my studio, my apartment space, and I think about, for example, if we're interviewing potential company. But if I think about like my studio, my apartment space, and I think about, for example, if we're interviewing potential employees for our team, is am I likely more to get people

to think that we're a legitimate company by investing $200 more into the studio apartment than just getting away with the bare minimum? If the answer is yes, then it's totally worth it. But if I'm just spending it basically because, oh, Davis just wants a bigger space, probably a wrong investment. And also the thing I think about is, is this a pure cost or is it an investment?

Like, for example, I would not cut our CPA. Otherwise, I would go down to another CPA and then I would probably pay more in taxes than I do currently. That's the first thing. The second thing I always think about doing is making sure that the cost that I'm cutting isn't affecting my revenue. So I'll tell you a story of a company who tried to cut their cost. And so they brought some consultants in, not Bain, but they brought some consultants in and they're like, hey, why are these salespeople getting paid so much? We should fire them. And of course, later on, revenue went down. And then of course, the dumb story is that, oh wait, you cut the best salespeople. That's why

we're making the most money. So making sure that the cost doesn't go. But third, I find I always like to go to the big buckets again and just going line by line and thinking about, do we actually need this? And if we're spending a lot of it, I feel like if it's a lot of man hours and a lot of labor costs, I think, can we just automate it? We live in such a privileged stage where there's basically software for almost everything that is repetitive and can be done over and over again. The stupidest thing in the world is thinking that the salespeople should be in a lot of businesses making more than the CEO or the business owner because the business owner has got the business. He's got equity. They've got buildings.

They've got other things. You know, there's always going to be top producers. And if they're commission-based and your compensation programs are good, when your guy makes a half a million, you should be making millions for the company. Now, if you choose to blow that on expansion and keeping really crappy employees running phone calls, not booking the right phone calls, not with high conversion rates, writing low-ass tickets,

you think you're paying your guys too much at the top, but the problem is you're not making the cuts on the bottom. And 99% of businesses do this. They fail ridiculously. They don't cut the bottom. You know, I think the smartest thing in the world, Jack Welch did at General Electric, was he always cut the bottom 20% in jobs. You know, I had this discussion last night,

Davis. I said, look, I'm going to have a rolling number for the top three CSRs, dispatchers, and techs. And the goal is not to cut them or fire them, but the goal is either put them on the right seat if they're on the bus or manage them up or out. And I'd like to do this on a biannual basis to say, look, you've had enough stats. This is what we started. I'm almost thinking about doing it quarterly, but they don't top grade. Don't get rid of your best. Top grade your worst. And you'll watch your bottom line increase dramatically. You know, one of the things you also discussed was delegating. Let's take a deep dive on delegating is not dumping.

Talk to me about your best strategies for delegating properly until it gets done. You hit timelines and the people actually understand what the hell you're asking them to do. Because if you're like me, I talk in gibberish and then I get mad when people don't understand what I told them. I know the feeling. It definitely costs a lot of time. But so when it comes to delegating tasks, I think about it in a couple of ways. One, I always think, can someone do this better than I can? And if the answer is yes, and it is within the budget constraints, they should probably be

doing it. For example, things like editing our website or creating our marketing materials, brochures, and things like that should be going out to other people. So delegating tasks out that could be done better than you for the time you spend. Second is I also like to delegate out tasks that just aren't my strengths or things that I don't, am not really strong at. And that's the second thing I think about delegating. But remember, delegating does not mean you're abandoning it. So one of my strategies is always trust but verify. So trust that they're going to get it done, but you still need to go in and verify that these things were sent and so forth. So Derek Severs, who runs CD Baby, or used to before he sold it like 10 years ago, had a funny story in his book, Anything You Want, which is another highly recommended

entrepreneur read. I've read that so many times. And so one of the stories he tells is that he used to do the shipments to record companies from CD Baby's warehouse. And one day he hired someone who said they would do it. And it's a very easy job. You just have to basically make sure that the mailman picks up the shipment and box it all up.

And then one day he comes in and he realized it and the record companies call and they're like, hey, we haven't gotten the shipment yet. And then he goes and he's like, what are you talking about? They've been shipping it every week. And he goes to the warehouse and he realizes the person didn't ship it. It was like their one job.

And so the whole lesson there was like, trust but verify and make sure that there's accountability there in terms of how you're delegating it. And then the second thing I think about is, we're talking about books, is there's a book called Situational Leadership that I like.

And so situational leadership just basically says that there's situations for leadership in every situation. So for example, if a task is being done for the first time by someone, then there should be a high level involvement of you training them

because you don't want them to mess up. But if they've done it for so long and they're much better than you, then it's just you making sure that they have everything they need to succeed. Or in other words, they know how to play the game and they have a way of winning it. And that's how I think about my delegation is, is it something that I need to be involved with and then slowly over time phase myself out? Or is it something that I can completely trust them with? For example, if it's my editing team, I have no business being in there except for providing a high-level feedback

of going in there and saying, oh, you should be using Adobe and not using Final Cut or whatever. That's just not my place. So that's how I think about the delegation is where's my expertise, where's their expertise, and what needs to get done.

Love it. Trust but verify, say inspect what you expect, same type of thing. One last thing I wanted to say is with private equity, one of the coolest things about acquisitions is when you understand acquisitions, I want to give a quick example so people understand this. The one thing that I look for is KPIs. I want to know that your numbers are there because when I can log into your CRM, one thing I'm going to say is, what's your booking rate? Holy cow,

I can make 20% here. What do you buy this at? Okay, I can save 10% there. What's your average ticket? Okay, I can increase that by 18%. So when I buy someone, I know what we average and I know what my training can do with me recruiting, changing a few things within a year where we could be at. So I'm buying an opportunity, but also what's super cool, and this is what a lot of people miss, is there's a thing called arbitrage. And arbitrage is basically making money out of thin air. It's like buying it from someone and selling it for way more. So I create money from nothing. So if I buy a small company for 5 million, and it's not small, 5 million is a lot of money, but $5 million I could pay,

let's say they're averaging 10% a year, that's 500,000 times three because of the multiple, that's 1.5 million. The day I buy it is probably worth eight. So I got that five times multiple. So instead of 1.5, I made another 2.5 on it. Isn't that a pretty cool thought, Davis? I mean, what is your take on that, creating money in arbitrage? And just one last thing I wanted to touch on from the beginning of the conversation. Absolutely. And I think the lens that you bring comes with experience. Obviously, you've seen this over and over again.

But I think the point I want to bring is that, so what Tommy just mentioned is you kind of see value where other people don't see value. And I think there's a lot that you can do in your own business. And we can all be consultants in our own business by thinking about that. It's just going through and thinking about, is this number truly as high or as good as it is? So I think when I think about the clients I work with outside of Microsofting Offer, like the clients I do for their companies, I always think, what do you think of this number? Is it high? Is it low? For example, if I told you that this cell phone would cost $900, is it expensive or not? You don't know until you actually inspect it. So I think that there is a power to it. And I think

that a lot more people could be doing this opportunity. For example, the companies that you would be interested in buying, if they knew that they could get a service for 10% less, or they knew that they can get their booking rates higher, or they know that they can relocate some of their offices to get a bigger customer share, they should be doing that too. And of course, I don't think it's... There's a merit to be saying about smart people who go in with these insights, but just developing the thinking and asking yourself, what does this number mean? And could I alter this? And why does it have to be like this number? Helps you a lot with figuring out how to bring that in. Because again, somebody can come in, get a bigger multiple on you

and you make money out of your business, or you can make the business money for yourself and going in and inspecting your own business. I love it. I love this stuff. I love the idea. Do you know how many people I talk to, Davis, and we'll wrap this up here,

but do you know how many people I talk to that they say, I think I'm stretched too thin. I'm right at the brink of where I think I could take this business. And they pull their hair out every night. Their families are just suffering. And it's not a bad thing. You know what I mean? There's so many things that I can't do that I don't have the talent or the wisdom or just

the experience that it's or just the experience. That it's just so much easier. Like I think about managing the Airbnbs. I'm sure I could do a better job if I was in control. And this was a full-time job and I had my own cleaning crew and stuff. But I leave it to the pros. So at the end of the day, just understand if you reach the limit, you're not a failure. You're not a failure if you pull out of an unprofitable market. You're not a failure if you got to let somebody go. In fact, one of the things I expect from my field supervisors is I urge them to let somebody go. I say,

this is going to grow you as a manager. I'm not excited to fire people. I'm excited because if we have 250 people, that means a thousand lives are reliant on us. And if you make one good decision to top grade one person on your team, you're going to find out what that's going to do to everything around. It helps everybody. You see, everybody shares the marketing budget. So your other technicians, when you work with your fellow compadres out there in the field, I'm only going to spend a certain amount, whether it's 10%, let's just say. So as they start doing better, that means I could spend more money. When I spend more money in marketing, guess what happens, Davis? People don't need to drive. They

don't need to drive as far. They got smaller areas and they're in better neighborhoods. So anyway, it's all funny how it works together, but people miss this and how they all win the game when they all work together and they're running in the same direction. So you know the questions I'm going to ask. You've talked about a lot. I love the Zappos book, Situational Leadership. I mean, there's so many good books, but if you had to give us maybe three different ones, and I don't care if they're the same, but just give us ones that really you think will help the audience here move in the right direction. Sure. I'll give you three books I really love. And I always look forward to this question is the three books I recommend and for different reasons. I read my personal or professional life. So I would say that probably the first book that I would recommend is Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Franks, one of my favorite books, if not my favorite book. And it's just about a survivor of the Holocaust. And he goes through all the camps. And he thinks

about the Holocaust camps. And he thinks about how to live. And it's kind of like you read it, and you're like, real life doesn't really suck. For example, if one month my revenue falls, or my cost increased, or a key employee leaves, I don't feel so bad because there could be worse situations. It really gives me calm and peace. Man's search for meaning. That's the first book. The second book that I really love is called The Go-Giver.

And so Go-Giver is essentially one of my favorite book genres. It's fictional business. So it's a fable that's told about business lessons. It talks about the most important lesson in a business, which is you have to give more value than you take. And if you make other people successful, other people will in turn make you successful.

And this is a lesson that I've kept in mind ever since. So that would be my second pick for it. And third, because we want to talk a little bit more about home services as well as just business in general, is I recommend a book called The Goal. So like scoring a goal. So The Goal is essentially a fictional, whatever fictional fable about a man who is in charge of this factory.

And this factory is like the town's revenue source. And corporate is thinking about shutting down this factory because it's not producing profits. So you go through his whole thought process about his journey, about how he saves this factory, reduces costs, increases revenue, and overall saves the factory, expands it. And how I learned it was that I was listening to an interview

by the CEO of Amazon who actually recommends this. And when a new leader or executive joins his team, this is like the book that they have to read as the goal. So those are the three books, Man's Search for Meaning,

to just give a little bit of calm on your life, The Goal Giver to be just a personal lesson in life and business, and if completely business book is the goal. I really like The Goal Giver. I definitely, I just downloaded The Man's Search for Meaning too, but you know, I'm thinking that my next book is going to be fictional. It's going to be made up characters about real life. I like who moved my cheese in those simple little books. Well, you know what I love about them is that they really just go after one main lesson and you could be like, you could have like 10 of them and they could be bestsellers. If you give good anecdotes and it's really like, I love that. Like who moved my cheese? It's just so simple,

but it gives a good perspective on, on stuff or the one minute manager. And all these other books by, I think it's Ken Sheldon, Blanchard, I think. Ken Blanchard maybe. You got it right. Yeah. So last thing I do is I give the floor to you. You talked about a lot of amazing things. I think I understand these things a lot better from venture capitalists to private equity,

hedge funds, incubation, lots of good stuff on delegation, about time management. Let's talk a little bit. Just give us one last gold nugget to leave us here. One of the things I will say is, and this goes back to my grandma. So a little history is that my grandma came out here and her first job was actually home cleaning, home services. And then afterwards, she worked for

Delta as a baggage carrier. And then afterwards, she saved up the money and opened up her first nail salon. And this is in a poor area of Atlanta. And I'll tell you, my grandma growing up, I witnessed some of the worst that you can do in a business. For example, her business was robbed twice. So people came in with guns. They were into money. There was an arson who basically burnt down the nail salon. And they just gave my grandma such a hard time because we were in an epic community and we were like the minority. But yet my grandma would always come in every single day, open up.

She was always cheery, no matter what it was, no matter how bad the business was doing when they had to close a nail salon or relocate or build it from the ground up because of an arson. And one of the lessons I learned is that the reason why my grandma woke up is that she wanted to have a better life for her grandkids. So basically my cousins and I, and it stuck with me when I started my business is to think about what is your why? So something that I always tell new business owners or even current business owners is think about if you have a reason and you can weather all seasons, is that just when you come back, think about why you started the business in the first place. And I think the toughest battle that we fight as business operators and owners is the battle

that's between our heads, not the market or competition or things like that, but literally ourselves and our mental pursuit. But if you just remember why you started the business in the first place, and that keeps between our heads, not the market, our competition, or things like that, but literally ourselves and our mental fortitude. But if you just remember why you started the business in the first place, and that keeps you going, then you're going to be able to weather the lowest of moments. I love that, Davis. I want to say one thing because you really struck a nerve there

about something I heard last week at this convention I was at. It was Josh Latimer. And one of the questions was, how can you support your significant other as a business owner? And he said, well, I'm going to throw that one on a 180. He said, what did we do when we got into business? We wanted to better our lives for our family. We wanted to go on more vacations. We wanted to save for our children's tuition. We wanted to do things to enrich our lives and everyone around us.

And when you think about, we need to keep those promises. We need to keep those vacations we said we were gonna do. A lot of us, we get into business and we're imprisoned. We don't go on vacation. We don't spend time with the family, with our kids. We don't go out to eat anymore. We work weekends. We work nights. And here's the deal. You've got

someone out there that's still riding that horse with you. They're there and they're tolerating it. But you promised them something when you went into this, right? You said, this is what we're going to do. This is how our lives are going to get raised. Now, it's going to take me a few years, but a lot of us get trapped and it's year after year, three year, four year, five year. Before we got on this podcast, you said, dude, time just is flying by

and I agree with you. And all of a sudden you got a business 10 years later and you go, all my blood, sweat and tears are in this. You go to try to sell it, no one will give you anything for it. So I just advise being really, really careful when you go into business and you make these promises to your family

is to think the reason why you started was to enrich your lives and ask yourself, am I really enriching our lives? Because if I'm not, I need to figure out how to do that fast. But Davis, Davis Wynn, this was amazing. Your name is spelled really tough. It's N-G-U-Y-E-N, but it spells Nguyen, right? That's correct.

Cool. Well, listen, I really appreciate you having you on. No, it's a pleasure. It's all mine. Well, let's definitely coordinate another one of these. I love doing some follow-ups. And I'll tell you, the next one we do, I want to hear how your stuff goes in Thailand. Will do. And then, oh, I'll tell you, the next one we do, I want to hear how your stuff goes in Thailand. Will do. And then, oh, well, if you take over the whole world, you might as well have your own next empire out here. Yeah, I've been there before. It's beautiful

out there. We had a blast. I went to a search engine optimization summit, so that was great. Oh, yeah. Is that the Matt Diggity one? Yeah, Matt Diggity. Yep. Yeah, he's basically a neighbor. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, Right on. Well, thanks again, man. I appreciate it. You have a great one. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people

subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, Wyatt's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also when you subscribe, what I'm going to do is let you know the next guest coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here. I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow

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Home Service Expert podcast a success. I hope you're having a great day. And thanks again.