The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Get Five-Star Customer Reviews By Applying Rooter Hero’s “Five Keys” Philosophy

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

John Akhoian is the founder of Rooter Hero, a plumbing and rooter service company with 14 locations across California and Arizona. Initially widening the reach of his business through old-fashioned marketing techniques, John now utilizes various media platforms to reach a broader audience and increase brand awareness. Before establishing Rooter Hero, he owned and operated a home service franchise for over two decades. He is also the author of three books: Creating 99 Millionaires, The Secret to Real Wealth, and Values First: Principle Driven Leadership. In this episode, we talked about negotiation, business planning, coaching, team building, mergers & acquisitions, customer service...

My thought on that is that it's been a great career for me. This is the only thing I've ever done my entire life. I didn't really have to relearn a new business because I live and breathe this every day. And my take is that the future of the trades is going to be basically in the hands of the young people. I mean, look, after a while, you can't crawl under houses anymore, right? So you're going to either have to move up into management or get into something else. And I don't think

this is like sports. It's not a lifetime career. There's a certain amount of time you have, and you have to advance. And that's what I push all of my guys to do is whenever they start working here, I go, hey, it's a great place to start when you're coming in new, but it's not a great place to stay. You got to constantly get better. You have to constantly understand the trade, know more about it, and you have to constantly move up into management, move up into teaching others and getting really, really good at what you do. So you're not crawling under houses when you're 50, 60, 70 years old. Welcome to the Home Service Expert,

where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. Today, I have a very special guest. I've heard this guy's name all around the industry for the last five years. He's an expert in negotiation, business planning, coaching, team building,

mergers and acquisitions, which I'm going to go deep into today. Customer service, he's based out of Granada Hills, California. He's the CEO of Roto Hero Plumbing. Great big social media following. He's the founder of Roto Hero, a plumbing and router company relying heavily on old-fashioned marketing techniques to promote his business. Roto Hero has 14 locations across California and Arizona. Prior to establishing Roto Hero, he owned and operated a home service franchise for over 20 years. He's the author of three books, creating 99 millionaires, The Secret of Real We and values first, principle-driven leadership. Listen, John O'Cohen, I'm going to mess that up.

You got it. No, that's good. Thank you, Tommy. I appreciate the introduction and thank you for having me on your show. Yeah, that's going to be great. You were just on the Service Time podcast too recently, weren't you? I was. I was.

Yeah, that was a lot of fun. They put you second and me third, so I know how they feel about me. So listen, I love what you do. I love your story. I listen to the podcast. First thing I'm going to do when I get off of here is buy these books.

I usually buy Audible, but I also have a ton of normal books. So you started out running a franchise more than two decades. And I really want to just hear about first to let the audience get to know you, where you've been and where you're going and what the plan is. Sure. Okay. Thanks, Tommy. So I was a plumber. I started plumbing when I was 17 years old and I got into plumbing like most people do. They kind of fall into it through hardship. So at the time, my dad being a truck driver was the breadwinner of the family and he had a sudden heart attack and passed away. I was 17. I was

in high school, not doing all that great in high school. I was not the best student. So when that happened, we had bought a house about a year before that. My dad was paying the mortgage. My mom was the stay-at-home mom. My older brother was in college. He was getting his architectural degree. So we had to replace his income. We sold his truck. We had enough money to pay the mortgage for a while. And I basically needed to replace my dad's income so I could continue to pay the mortgage. So I got with a family friend who was a plumber and went to work for him day one, started crawling under houses, learned that there's crawl spaces under homes I never knew there was before that. And I just fell in love with the trade. I really enjoyed it. I didn't

really mind the hard work. And that's how my career started in plumbing. It started basically by getting into plumbing to make money. So after that, a couple of years after working with a family friend who was a service plumber and he was doing a lot of services on apartment buildings. I learned how to re-pipe. I learned how to do drains and I learned a lot about the plumbing world. And I was roughly about 19 years old when I started my plumbing company. I started very early and went out there with just some hand tools and an old truck that my mom let me money to buy that was left over from my dad's truck, the semi that we sold. And I started doing plumbing. I started knocking on doors and I started making relationships

and continued to do just old-fashioned marketing, going door to door, knocking on doors, leaving door hangers, walking into restaurants, leaving cards, and eventually just built my first plumbing company then. What is your ultimate goal? I hear this question a lot, and my goal, I told you, is to get a billion, and it's probably going to go up from there. I think entrepreneurs are never happy. They're never satisfied once they hit their goal. What is your plan? What are your goals for their

business? Well, my goal is to create a nationwide brand and I don't know how much in revenue we'd have to do to do that. I do know that it involves acquisitions, opening up centers that involve, you know, doing a lot of proactive work on the business. However, my goal is to open up or be part of a brand that goes nationwide. And after that, being a global brand. So that's what drives me. That's what wakes me up every morning and motivates me to keep going. So the average plumber, I've heard this, is about 48 years old and there's not as many people entering the trade. There's a lot of unions involved. There's journeymen, there's apprentices. What's your take on the future? Because I think there's going to, guys like you and me are getting people into the trade, but what are your thoughts

on that? My thought on that is that, you know, it's a great, it's been a great career for me. This is the only thing I've ever done my entire life. I didn't really have to relearn a new business because I live and breathe this every day. And my take is that the future of the trades is going to be basically in the hands of the young people. I mean, look, after a while, you can't crawl under houses anymore, right? So you're going to either have to move up into management or get into something else. And I don't think this is like sports. It's not a lifetime career. There's a certain amount of time you have and you have to advance. And that's what I push all of my guys to do is whenever they start working here, I go,

hey, it's a great place to start when you're coming in new, but it's not a great place to stay. You got to constantly get better. You have to constantly understand the trade, know more about it. And you have to constantly move up into management, move up into teaching others and getting really, really good at what you do. So you're not crawling under houses when you're 50, 60, 70 years old. I was working with a guy about 10 years ago and a really good plumber. And he was in his mid seventies and he was still

in a plumbing truck and he was hauling equipment out of a truck and, and he was working for us really good guy. And I said, man, I go, have you planned for your future? And he goes, no, John, I really haven't. He goes, I've been doing plumbing my whole life and this is where I'm at. I go. And it was like to a point where he didn't have the skillset to manage or get into other arenas. And, and it was a very difficult place for him to be. We sat around and we thought about what we can do to help them. We put helpers with them. But eventually, your body's not going to allow you to continue to be good at the trades unless you start moving into

a higher position. Yeah, I agree. I think the future is going to look bright. So you used to run a franchise for a long time. Number one, what's the difference now between your business and the franchise? And what I learned a lot about franchising. I learned about first, you know, I didn't have really formal education, so I didn't have any business education. I didn't really understand how the financing worked. I didn't really know how to read a financial statement. The way I read a financial statement was, if your bank account was growing, then you're doing good. So I learned a lot about finances. I was a commercial plumber back then. I did residential as well. I learned a lot about marketing and other aspects that I had to learn in order to grow my franchise. And I also eventually learned how to run a platform company. Okay. And basically right now I consider our company as a platform company where we can actually expand into multi-locations. We've already went from one market to the second, to the third. I eventually bought and opened up more franchises and I was up to four franchises before I decided that I wanted to sell and basically get into my own business. And that's what I did. And we eventually opened up

more and more. We sold some off. We don't have 14 locations anymore because we sold some of them off. But now we're opening up more. And we've learned how to become a platform company. I learned how to read a financial statement. I've become a better marketer, you know, understanding marketing and the changes that occur. So there's a lot that I've learned while I owned a franchise that I've been able to apply the skills into continuing to grow Rooter Hero Plumbing. Cool. So there's two things I always really think of myself as is I've got to get the leads. I think I'm a pretty good marketer. I can make the phone ring off the hook. For the first time in history, we shut PPC off,

pay-per-click. It's turned off, except for our own keywords. I've never been so busy in my life. And the other half of that is being able to get great technicians and market to great people to come work for you. So you need people to run the jobs, get high conversion rates, good average tickets, and you need good customers that fit your perfect profile of a customer calling in. So let's talk first about the beginning one, the grassroots marketing types that you've used to grow Rotor Hero. In your podcast, you said, I give out business cards to everybody all the time. You're always that handoff. What else are you doing to really kick butt in the marketing and keep those customers coming in?

Well, we started branding. I'm the voice of the company. So a lot of our marketing pieces, our radio, our television, is just stories about how Rooter Hero started. It's stories about my childhood. It's stories about our customers and what we've done for them. And so we have a particular voice. And in order for us to differentiate our brand, we use the same voice, which is my voice for all of the marketing that continues for the company so we build a story around our brand back then about 20 30 years ago you know marketing was just really simple I used to spend maybe a day a year on marketing field but one figure as a dealer and then you're done right but today it's multiple things. It's not this or that, it's this and that. So we do a lot of stuff. We do television, we do radio,

we do a lot of web, we do a lot of social media advertising. There's just a lot of layers of what we're doing today. We have a marketing department and many people that are in our marketing department that are tracking what's working, what's not. And like you, we're having some of our highest marketing months that we've ever had. I mean, after the pandemic, our call volume doubled, right? We've been very busy. We've been hiring people. Fortunately, people are being laid off. So I think it has a lot to do with our brand. It has to do with us accelerating our brand and making the awareness out there so the public knows who we are. It's our vans. It's a bunch of our vehicles that are driving around the whole state of California and Arizona. So it's them seeing our brand multiple places. So that's what we've done. And that's what we continue to do is continue to get our name out there. Now talk to me a little bit more about the social media. How do you view social media? Is it TikTok? Is it Facebook? Is it Instagram? Where are you making an effort?

And what is your goal on social media? Well, it's all of it. It's all of it. And our goal on social media is to continue to keep our brand in front of many people. The goal for social media is the same as what we do for radio and television. It's primarily the brand to get our name out there and get our message out there to people. Facebook or Instagram, it's Facebook and Instagram, right? And TikTok and all of the other platforms that are out there that could keep our name out in front of people. So the hardest part, I think I always hear people say, man, I wish I could get a few good guys right now. And they can't. Most people that I know are trying to steal guys. It's almost like an incested pool where you try to steal a guy from another

company and you try to get more guys from that company. And I'm like, at this point, with all the training I've gone through with consulting and books and podcasts, I'd rather get somebody green that's never done it before and teach them my way. That's just the way I prefer it. What do you think the best way to get great employees are? Do you get them with experience or do you make them from scratch? Or what does your success combo look like? It's both. We have Hero University that we started and we have the ability is a 8 to 12-week course that we have young adults go through and learn plumbing, both not only classroom style, but also on

mock-ups and even going out in the field. So they do all three of it. They get some classroom. They get to work on some mock-ups that we have. And they also go out in the field and get real hands-on training with instructors that we have in the field and then we also look for experienced guys as well so we're also looking for guys that are looking for homes the people that want to join our our company and help us build the nationwide brand that we're aggressively building out there so

it's 8 to 12 weeks. You get them. Where are you recruiting these guys from? Is it through social media? Is it through Indeed, Craigslist? Where do you find the best spot to hire these newbies? We're hiring them through multiple. Yeah. It's Indeed. It's through social media. A lot of it's coming from referral from our own people, knowing that we have this apprenticeship program going on and we have a lot of people just coming in.

It's coming in from our own people now. And do you pay your people? We do have an incentive program for bringing in some talent as well as bringing in people that they know. So I give my people $1,500, $750 the day the person starts and $750 after. It's six months, but I'm going to switch it to three months. And I don't know if that's aggressive enough or too aggressive. What are your thoughts on that? And what do you find the magic number is? What we've done is we've also related it to a given time. But what we're doing is we have different kinds of incentives. So one of the incentives we have, Tommy, is that because we

want them to sort of also be a mentor to that just coming in, we give them a piece of the revenue that that person's making, or the check that that person's making, which is sort of like royalties over a certain amount of time. What this does, it really helps them kind of mentor them as they come into the company. They have a friend, a buddy they could call that they could lean on and go, hey, what about this or what about that? So that's really worked for us is having that incentive of if the new guy you brought in wins, you also win. So the person that brings them in kind of puts them under their wing and helps them for a while. Gotcha.

No, it's a great idea. And I've got my own mentorship program too. Let me ask you this. You guys have five keys philosophy and it has to do with good customer relationships. And that's kind of one of your philosophies. Can you take me through the five keys? Yeah, absolutely. I'll take you right through the five keys. So the first key is the key of ask. Okay. And there are certain questions that we ask the homeowner when we go in, you know, since you owned a home, has this happened before? How long have you owned the home?

How did the last company fix it if there was another company that came out? So we ask certain questions, okay? Because we have to gather information and that's our first key is ask. Second is listen. Okay. Listening is an art. Okay. It's very attentively listening, listening to how the problem affected them, their family, their health, their investment, their time themselves. So it's basically listen, listening to how the problem affected the homeowner, right? And having our guys training them to really listen to the homeowner, how it affected them. And the third key is to diagnose. Diagnosing is investigating, finding out why this happened, what caused it, to figure out the cause of the root.

You know, as we're diagnosing, we don't only diagnose the existing problem going on. We look for any problems that are tied to the existing problem. We do a home inspection. We look around. We make sure that we can find stuff that we could prevent from breaking. And then the next key is key number four is, you know, this is the key where the plumber becomes the teacher. Okay. Now we teach our customers about plumbing. One of the

things we tell them is, you know, you're about to learn why this happened and we're going to give you a lot of information. You're going to get a lot of plumbing knowledge today. And this plumbing knowledge is going to help you make a better decision on how to fix your problem. And we give options to customers. We fix the issue. We give them options. If we find out there's other things that need to be done, we give customers six options. We put it on an option sheet and we present it to the client after we educate them. And the last key is wow. Okay. And wow stands for way over wonderful. Okay. And this is where we wow the customer with our performance. Okay. We call the homeowners, the king and the queen, and we do everything we can do to serve the king and the queen.

Okay. So after we wow the customer, and this is while we're doing the work and as we're doing everything, we ask the customer for five-star reviews. There are certain things that we do in the house. We put floor protectors on. We make sure we respect the customer's home. Okay. And there are certain things that we do where the customer looks at it and goes, wow, your service was great. And we hear it in the voice of our customer. I get a lot of phone calls from homeowners and our customers that want to praise our technicians for what a wonderful job they did. And the fifth key is wow. So that's it. That's our five keys. I love it. You said quite a few options. Now, I like options, but I'll tell you, I've learned a little about options is a lot of people do good, better, best. I say, start with

the best and you anchor at the best. And then you could always go down. I find that when you start with the lowest, the people say, oh, okay, that's not bad. And very rarely do you sell the best when you start with the option starting from the lowest first. Tell me what your whole plan is with that and how it works. Okay. So when we leave the option, typically we have two different types of people that enter the house. So first responders are service technicians. They're the ones, the drain cleaners, the plumbers that show up to the home. And they're the ones that go through a lot of these steps. But there is a given time where we have teams and we have our specialists that go out to jobs as well. So for every three to five service technicians we have, we have one plumbing specialist or sewer specialist that goes out.

And he's typically the one that's educating the customer on the options. So when he does show up, we do things in steps. Okay. So if a customer has a plumbing problem and that problem, you know, they call in and they say it's a, for example, a drain cleaning problem, right? We start with cabling the line. It doesn't always mean that the cabling fixes the problem. Sometimes we jet the line and sometimes we do a repair on the line. And the technician is able to do all of these based on whatever the problem is. But once it comes to doing the whole home inspection

and leaving options for multiple services, it's typically our plumbing repair specialists that show up to do those. And they have a camera on their truck and they have more diagnostic equipment. And they're the ones that leave the option. We like leaving six options. We put the smallest, the Band-Aid option on the bottom, and we put the premium option on top. And we educate them from the bottom up. Some people choose to do a Band-Aid and we're happy with that. We're just looking

for long-term relationships with our customers. So we're not always going to get the premium option on every service call. And we understand that. And we're happy with whatever fits the customer's budget at that time. Because not everybody can buy the premium job at that time. So that's the reason we do that, because we understand our homeowners have different budgets and different abilities of what they could spend right now. And right now, through the pandemic, you know, we're doing, instead of putting a lot of the prices on what the repairs are and the investment totals, we're putting the payments so they could take a look and see what fits their budget when it comes to how much they want to finance. Yeah. Financing is one of the

most unused things, I think, in the home service industry. Who do you use? Service Finance and Green Sky? Yeah. We use Green Sky, Synchrony, Service Finance. There's just quite a few of them that we have, and it all depends on the customer's credit level. I mean, the worse the credit they have, the different finance company we have to use, you know, because not all finance companies, they have certain credit scores that they're looking for. Right. Okay. So let me ask you something. This is just something that's kind of on my mind. You do plumbing. Now, a lot of people match up plumbing with HVAC and a lot of people add electrical to it. What is your thought on that? So my thought on that is we're good at plumbing. So we've been expanding outwards right now with one service,

but it doesn't mean that we're going to stay that way. So we have some plans to add HVAC in some of our centers and we're aggressively going to be, you know, working on those plans. We have some of our managers that want to add, you know, those in their service centers. So, you know, I believe it's not one or the other. I think it's both. I think it's all of the above. Yeah, we have certain markets that probably will do better with it than others. You know, we have some of the coastal markets that may not be the best place to start HVAC. So we recognize that. We understand that. Yep. I agree. Sometimes it just makes sense to do it. I have an opportunity to go into a lot of other things like commercial and I've been just, why not do something really good and

expand upon that? So you really take a lot of time with your employees to teach them about financial planning. We, we subscribe our employees to Dave Ramsey. We have a person that comes in and talks each year about home homeownership and getting people pre-qualified. I'm a huge fan of that. Tell me a little bit about what you do with your employees to teach them about financial planning. Yeah. So we've had multiple meetings and we continue to put on more where we bring in not only the employee, but also their spouse. And we have financial planning meetings where we talk about budgeting. We go through creating home budgets.

We have tools that we're using right now that we share with our employees that helps them figure out where their money's going. They make a laundry list of all the expenses they have. And then we go with them line item by line item and help them figure out what are the needs and what are the wants, right? Because some people don't understand the difference between the wants and the needs. And we always put the needs before the wants. And then we start creating a personal budget, figuring out how much more the employee needs

to make, what they can do to earn more money, and what they have to do to buy a house. I mean, a lot of them want to buy a house. We've had several, several of our employees that are homeowners now that they weren't homeowners before they started working here. And we've even signed up a lot of people to Dave Ramsey as well. We've signed up for continuous education with the Ramsey group. So it's doing a lot of that, you know, and we have our own designed program. It's a full day class that we

run on financial planning. Yeah. I don't think we get enough of that in school. I love talking about just saving money. You know, they say, I think it's your house payment should not be more than 24%, I think, of your monthly income, something like that. And it's important to know these key performance indicators when it comes to your own financial life. I want to talk a little bit about M&A because a lot of theories on this and a lot of people get a lot of questions. Is it better to buy big companies and tuck them in, or is it better to grow organically?

And I think it depends on the industry, and it depends on how good you are at marketing and hiring and training. So tell me your philosophy on mergers and acquisitions, and tell me about one that went well and one that didn't. Sure. Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. We've done both. So most of our companies, we started organically. A lot of our markets, we went in there and organically started by leasing a building, putting in all of our computers and warehouse equipment, ordered everything, hired a manager, trained them and started hiring plumbers and one by one filled the trucks and created a market. So that's how Rooter Hero has traditionally grown over this last nine years. But we've also done some acquisitions in the way as well. One startup that went bad, I remember when we started up Houston. Okay, so we went into the Texas market, started up Houston. We did kind

of understand the state licensing requirements there for plumbers, but didn't really understand it really that well, the licensing, the master licensing and everything else. So we found a master licensor that came to work for us and we started hiring people. And about, I'd say about eight months in, nine months in, maybe a year in, we just had such a hard time finding licensed plumbers over there. It wasn't as easy as California where we could hire somebody, train them and have them go out there. Over there, you have to have somebody that's licensed that actually even drops a trap. We've seen the complication of that and we weren't really ready for it at that time. So we ended up closing that center down. We opened it up and we closed it down about a year later. We brought the vehicles back and we took it into

one of our other centers and tucked it in. Now, another market I remember we started through an acquisition was in our San Diego market. There was a plumbing company out there that we looked at and acquired, and they were doing really well in organic marketing. They really had a lot of call volume coming in. Their average ticket was extremely low. The owner, it was their second location, and they were just tired of going back and forth. It was just too complicated for them. So we acquired that location. Over time, we rebranded it and we quad grew it dramatically over a short period of time

through using our traditions of how we train people and how we do it. So that's two examples, one of an acquisition that worked out, one of an organic startup that didn't work out. So let's talk a little bit about what do you look for? What do you look for when you buy a business? I know service agreements, great employees. Me personally, I don't love a huge structure when I buy a company because I want to add my structure into it and bring a lot more profit to the picture. What are you looking for when you're looking for an acquisition or what should the businesses that are thinking about selling the next five years really focus on? Yeah, what I'm looking for is I'm looking for

opportunity. So what I do is a lot of times during an acquisition, I will compare our averages with whatever company we're looking at acquiring. If I see that their averages are a lot lower, their conversion rates are a lot lower, their marketing costs are a lot higher. I start peeling the onion back. I start looking down and seeing where is the struggle and is there something we can do to turn it around? And then I look at the culture. I look at the people that are there and I interview them. Are they trainable? Are they even looking at getting better? Are they hungry to learn? Are they lifelong learners? I look at a lot of people and the culture and what they're used to doing.

And then I look at the market and I see if the market is aligned with the markets that we're already in. Is it a market that the homes are a certain age? Okay. What's the household income ratio over there? Okay. What is the plumbing like? Is there a lot of older homes? What's the household income? Just look at all of that.

Are they owner-occupied homes? Is there a big rental market there? Right. So we look at those numbers. We compare it with our numbers and all of our centers. And we look for those numbers, we compare it with our numbers and all of our centers, and we look for similarities. If I could find a market that's similar to a lot of the markets that we're already in, that we're succeeding in, that have a lot of commonalities, however, there's a lot of business opportunities because of just the way the business is being managed, then I see that as an opportunity for us to acquire and grow. I also look at how well they're doing things and what can we learn and apply in our existing markets, okay? Because there's just so much you can learn from an acquisition.

There's so many great things that they're doing that we look at and go, man, why aren't we doing that? Okay, I just learned how to do this or that. So there's a lot of different things that we look at and go, man, why aren't we doing that? Okay, I just learned how to do this or that. So there's a lot of different things that we look for. We don't only look for what we can add, we look for what we can also extract from that acquisition. And if we see that there's a lot that we can extract and we can add, and it's a give and take, we're going to be able to benefit the people of that organization, and they're going to work a lot better under the structure that we have, then we look at that as being a great acquisition for us.

Talk to me a little bit about Service Titan. I got on it now about four years ago. I pleaded, I don't know if you know this story, but they didn't let me in. They said, nope, sorry. I talked to five different sales reps. They said, we only do HX plumbing and electrical. So I reached out to Ara on LinkedIn. He gave me a call. I said, dude, I will not let you down. He sent in seven people to get us going. And the rest is history. Since then, I got the first painter. I've got the first roofer. I've got the first gutter company. The whole company is expanding their horizons. But I think it's a secret weapon. And a great CRM is always a secret weapon.

But talk to me about your experience and how it's transformed your business. Yeah, I remember when I met Vahe and Ara, they were just starting their company. I think back then, Vahe's dad was his only customer, if I'm not mistaken. And it was a great relationship. I mean, they're really good guys and really honest and hardworking. And they know the space because they grew up in there, right? Their parents are contractors and Vahe's dad's a plumber. And they're Armenian as well. So we were able to connect in several different ways. So I was looking at a competitive software before I met him. I met him through a friend who owned a large electrical company in the LA area.

And I remember having the first meeting with them and I was super impressed with how hungry they were, how willing they were to create a amazing software. And I was just, I just bought in immediately. So back then they had this software called Lynx Logic, which was a server-based software. So I bought the server-based software and I, and we put it in our closet. And I remember how hard these guys were working. I mean, Vahe would stay up till four in the morning sometimes developing code and writing code for something that we needed in our company. And eventually, back then I had a franchise and the franchisor came up with the software as well. And they're like, hey, we need all the franchisees to get on this software. And when we started comparing what we were going to give up to get on the franchisor software, I'm like, absolutely not.

You guys need to meet Vahe and Ara. You guys need to see their software, Lynx Logic. And that's right around when they rebranded it to Service Titan and made it the cloud-based version. And eventually, you know, the whole franchise system got onto the software. They're like, wow, this is super duper. The first thing that, you know, they developed for us, there was two things that was very major. One of them was that I had several people doing a president's report for me. Every evening, I would look at this report before I went to bed. I had to read all the numbers. What is our call

center conversion rate, our booking rate, how many calls came in today, what was our field conversion rate, and all of this stuff. And it was inconsistent. Sometimes whoever was closing would get busy doing something. I would get the report halfway. There was errors in the report. That was really frustrating. So I went to Vahe. I said, Vahe, we got to automate this, dude.

I'm tired of getting these reports that are halfway done and they got human error in there. Can we automate it? He's like, absolutely. And he just, you know, went to work. And like two days later, you know, had this auto report that was scheduled. And he's like, I could schedule any report and have it emailed to you anytime you want. I'm like, perfect. That's exactly what I needed. So we went in there and started creating our own reports and having them emailed to us. The next thing was our marketing. It was a very big flaw because my call center

would book marketing in different slots. I really didn't understand which marketing piece really was driving the revenue. So that was another big thing. I remember we were up in Northern California at one of my offices and I called Vahe and I said, Vahe, we need to create, it was one of our managers, you know, back then, Mike West, who was one of the founders of Rooter Hero that said, John, it would be great if we could just link the phone number right into the market. We don't even have to have our agents ask anymore who called them. We don't even have to ask. We'll automatically know. We just get unique phone numbers. I'm like, perfect. Called Vahe? No problem, John. We'll have that done soon. And he started working at it and created the most efficient marketing report that you can get. Now

we can track our marketing by phone number, by any marketing piece we send out there without even having to ask anybody. So they played a significant role in the beginning of the Rooter Hero days on creating a lot of this stuff that we really needed in order to run our business and make it automated and get the reporting we needed to make sure that it's working the way we want it. So it was so good that even the franchise we were with, that was the national franchise that had hundreds even maybe thousands of franchisees said that we're going to use this software as our their platform for all of ours because it's just so good so i'm happy to know them and know that they've

done a great job creating the software you know and you were part of that in the beginning yeah you were a big part of that i've heard the stories that without you i mean you're a big part of that. I've heard the stories that without you, I mean, you're a big piece of it coming up with what they think we need because they don't come against the problems we have. And I'm one of those guys in my team that we're pushing them every day. You know, I go visit businesses, John, I visit a lot of businesses and they're like, when I first started, most of the businesses I visited that were on service side were still on the old release. They didn'titan were still on the old release. They didn't even switch over to the new release. I know a couple of guys that were on ServiceTitan for years still using paper invoices. And, you know, we're always pushing them going,

we need this, we need this, we need to push harder with this. Guys, we need this. This inventory management system needs to change and we need custom reports in this and this. And it's so funny because they make it happen. And, you know, I've gotten pretty close to them just because I'm a huge fan of them. And I think we've gotten a lot of customers for them, but ultimately I don't do it because I work for them or anything. I do it because I think it's the best system. But here's what I tell people, you're driving a Ferrari, but most people get stuck in second gear. And until you get help, until you really learn the system and you need somebody that's advanced,

because it's an advanced system. It's going to get down to the details. Like I can tell you right now, you know, I've got 4,300 call tracking numbers. I think I've got the most, I've broken the, what do you call it? The price book, like, hundreds of times. They've had to expand our price book and our server. I'm one of the few people with access to the internal API because I want to develop faster than they can build it. Like, we've already built text apps into it so we can text message whenever we want. You've got to be really careful with that, by the way, because there's certain federal laws against text messaging people about promotional things unless you have them sign off. But we built some stuff into SQL Server. A lot of people use

Power BI. That's what I started with. And then I switched it to something more advanced. So I have fun with it. And I think it's the core of every business is the system and the software you run. What do you say to somebody that says, hey, man, I've looked at service 10 is too expensive. Cause I hear that all the time. Well, what I would say is find out how much it could save you and how much revenue it could make you instead of looking at what it's costing you. Because like you said, it's an investment, right? And the investment is that look, they're always at the cutting edge, right? And the investment is that, look, they're always at the cutting edge, right? They're

constantly putting more and more people and more and more things in the pipeline to make this run so well for a home service company that they can actually give their customers the best service. And I think that a person needs to really look underneath it to see how much money it could save them, not how much money it's costing them. You know, just a few things that they did in the beginning days, to me, it paid for the software fivefold. I mean, I had manpower that I was putting on certain things that were process oriented and the software just eliminated that. Our field-to-office ratio shrunk tremendously, and our biggest expense is payroll. So the amount of payroll that saved us paid for the software so many times over. I would say that the person really, really needs to look

at how much it could save them and not what it's costing them, right? Because that's ultimately going to drop to the bottom line. Yeah. Payroll for us takes us a half an hour. It used to take us, every week it used to take about 40 hours. Now bi-weekly it takes about a half hour. And that's just because we let the system, we've got checks and balances and we're systematized. I just recently saw this post. It basically says the system, a bad system will beat a good person every time. A bad system will beat a good person. So systematize your business.

John, I want to ask you a few last questions to close us out here. I always ask the people on the podcast here, what are three books you'd recommend? It doesn't have to be about business. It can be fiction. I mean, whatever you think. The first few that I wrote, I recommend people to read our books as well.

I mean, I have some really great stories about our company and growth and how we did it. That will give really a lot of good insight for people that are looking to grow a service company. However, some of the other books that really shaped me, I would say How to Win Friends and Influence People. That's been a really big read of mine. I keep going to that over and over and over again. In fact, I have two teenage boys and we do a daily book club together. We read about anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour a night together. And that's our next book again. We just circle back to it every so often. Another one that's really good is the slight edge. And we use a lot of the slight edge principles principles in our company. And the Slight Edge is

how the small things make a big difference, right? It talks about the little habits, the make it or break it kind of habits, right? That'll take you so far. And it's just a really good book. It has really good illustrations in there. It's an easy read. And I really enjoy good to great. I mean, I just like the level five leaders and good to great. I like how, you know, just the comparison of the different businesses and how it all points back to leadership, right? It points back to being a level five leader, which I continuously strive to better and better my leadership skills. So I

could be worthy of that one day and how it affects growing a company. So, you know, those are the few that I really like. And I go back to over and over again. And also the books that I wrote are really good. And Tommy, I got a copy of your book and I heard it's really good. I've got it from a really good source and they highly recommended it. And that's going to be one of my reads as well. Yeah. Well, let's go over your books too. So you've got the Creating 99 Millionaires. You've got The Secret of Real Wealth and Values First, Principle Driven Leadership. Yeah. Values First is a book that every new hire we have in our company, we send them the Values First book with a welcome letter from me with an ID badge of them

with our company because we like everybody having ID badges. But the Values First book talks about our company values, faith, integrity, service, teamwork, and respect. So it's the five values that we actually use every single day. And there's stories about how our people use the values in people's homes, right? We have some really significant stories of how we make the values come alive by doing certain things when we're interacting with our company customers. So that's a really good book that talks about values and how to use values as integrated into your core culture of the company. Creating 99 Millionaires is my personal goal of opening up multiple locations and helping people create wealth while we're doing this.

And all of these books are 50 pages long, 50, 55 pages, maybe 60. I don't know. They're quick reads. And I have them on audio book as well on our website. It could be easily downloaded. If you go to a rooterhero.com forward slash books. And the other one, the last one is the secret to real wealth. It's how a career in plumbing or in service can actually help you create wealth for you and your family. And it's what it did to me when I got into the trade. And it's just encouraging people to not only use going to college as a source of going out there and finding a career path, but looking into the trades as a career path as well. Because to me, you know, college wasn't an option. I wasn't, you know, I didn't really like the way school taught and I wasn't

really one that was going to continue to go and enjoy the process. And I know there's a lot of individuals like myself out there that really don't like school and would rather get into the trades and how the trades, you know, some of the things in the trades that really taught me that I also learned from my dad was just the hard work, you know, rolling up your sleeves and just going in there and just working. I mean, there's a lot of lessons that people could get from reading about the trades. And it talks about the statistics and everything out there as well. So those are the few books I wrote. I just recently finished another book called How I Built $50 Million Company in Nine Years. And it just talks about all of the things that I've done to build a multi-location

$50 million company in the matter of nine years from scratch. So there's just a lot of information. And that's my newest book that just came out about a week ago. Cool. How do people get ahold of you if they want to reach out? My email is johnjohn at rooterhero.com. R-O-O-T-E-R-H-E-R-O.com. My cell phone number is 818-925-6096. Call me, text me, or email me. Three different ways to get a hold of me. Awesome.

And then finally, I want you to kind of end us. I'm going to give you the floor. Maybe one last thing for the listeners to really think about. Maybe some cues to grow their business. Great. Thank you. So the last thing I'd like to add is, look, I learned a lot by taking a lot of risk and making a lot of mistakes and learning from my mistakes right so my life has constantly been screwing up okay screwing up and learning from the screw-up you know John Maxwell says when you fall down stay down for a minute to analyze what brought you down before you get up so be a student don't be afraid of making mistakes,

okay? Because it's about the journey. It's not about arriving somewhere. It's about the destination. It's about getting there. It's a lifelong process, right? And because it is a lifelong process, just don't give up. Just make mistakes, learn from it, dust yourself off, get up and keep moving forward. And that's what I've been doing my entire life. And the more risk I take and the more mistakes I make, the more I learn and the more I grow. And it's just a matter of making a lot of mistakes and learning from them. So if you're out there and you're afraid to make mistakes, hey, don't be. Just get out, learn, be a lifelong student, and go out there and try things

and learn from them. Awesome. Well, this was a good time, man. Next time I'm in California, I'm definitely going to come take you to dinner and see your place if you wouldn't mind. No, not at all. I appreciate that. Thank you, Tommy.

Great being on your podcast, too. I appreciate that. Thank you, Tommy. Hey, listen. Great being on your podcast too. I appreciate you inviting me. Yeah, thank you very much. 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, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is

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