The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Make Your Business More Profitable And Find True Financial Freedom

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Meaghan Likes is a small business accountant & consultant, speaker, teacher, and volunteer with nearly two decades’ worth of professional experience. She founded Bookkeeping Academy, and owns five businesses in Northern California. Meaghan's mission is to educate and empower other business owners across the world to find financial freedom in their own lives. In this episode, we talked about leadership, financing, bookkeeping, growth, and employee retention...

most people won't be able to tell you what their capacity is per person per truck. So how on earth could you have a CSR fillet? How can you have a dispatcher fillet if you don't know what you're capable of? And I think it comes down to one of the things that we love to talk about, which is pricing, right? You're not priced right. Or if you don't know where you need to be priced, if you don't know what your break even point is, then you're never going to get ahead every day. You're just starting over. It's like Groundhog Day. And I feel like there's so many business owners out there that can relate to that,

where you're like, at the end of the month, there's nothing left. At the end of the week, there's nothing left, and you don't know why. 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 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. Today, I have a really good friend of mine. She's an expert in a lot of things that I'm going to go over. Megan visits us from Davis, California, and she's absolutely killing it. She's got a lot of stuff to talk about today. She's an expert in small business, consulting, tax preparation, payroll, bookkeeping, and all kinds of good stuff with HR.

She's the co-host of Fight Club for Business Partner Podcast. She's the founder from 2017 to present, Bookkeeping Academy Online. She's the owner at Lykes Accounting Company. She's part owner with her and her husband of Jeff Lykes Clean Windows and Gutters. And Meg Lykes Balanced Books owner. She's a small business accountant, consultant, speaker, teacher, and volunteer with nearly two decades worth of professional experience. Founded Booking Academy, an institution that teaches small business owners how to use QuickBooks online to capture and organize their expenses so they can understand how their business is doing financially. She owns five businesses in Northern California. Her favorite is now window cleaning business. She's the third

fastest female window cleaner in the world and spends about 10 hours a week volunteering and 20 hours a year traveling around the world. Megan's passion is educating and empowering other business owners across the world to find financial freedom in their own lives. She will teach you smarter ways to make money, save money, inspire you to give back in meaningful ways. I never know where you find this stuff. Like I tried to write you a shorter one,

make like balance books. That's like in the closet, buried like a long time ago before I was even a light. I like it. Well, tell me what's going on. What's new with you. What's the plan here? What

do you got going? I think we're going to talk about profitability. I think we're going to talk about financial freedom. I think we're going to talk about leveling up and elevating. What do you think? There you go. Well, that's the good word. So what's going on as far as just new with you? You're killing it in the window gutter business. I know you're coming out with some new stuff, some new trainings, and you're just trying to give people a good foundation. Financials are the most important thing in a company. I can't tell you enough about it. I didn't know that until I worked with Alan and Gail, which she contributed to my book before I met you, The Home Service Millionaire. But it's just, without great financials, a good CFO and a

controller. I found it really hard. A good bookkeeper is okay if they give you the right stuff, I guess. Yeah. I feel like that's something I've struggled with over the past couple of years. So what's new with me, we came to Vertical Track in May and I think that was a game teacher for the window cleaning business. So I don't know how I feel about a plug for Vertical Track, but a plug for Vertical Track, October 13th and 14th, because my husband, Jeff and Tommy just became friends like in the past six months and seeing your shop really helped Jeff be like, wow, it's just about being in a room with bigger minded people. Right. I think when you get stuck in your industry, like at our window cleaning conferences, it's pretty common to be

under a million. Like it's really rare to get to 3 million. And then when you sit in a room like vertical track, you're like, well, why not a bigger number? Why not 10 million? Why not 15 million? Why not 50 million? Like, how do you get there? And so I've been thinking a lot about what do I offer to the industry and how do I offer it? And I got some clarity over the past couple of months. So I used to talk about bookkeeping because what you just said is so true. Without good data, you can't make good decisions. So I felt like my service to the home industry world was to clean up those financials. And we can absolutely do that at Lykes Accounting Company. We can help you plan the financials.

But what I'm realizing, the secret sauce is really putting financials to work. And a lot of business owners, even when you have bad books, you still have good data because you probably have a CRM. And even if you're not on Service Titan, even if you're on something smaller like Housecall Pro or Java or something like that, or I don't know, there's a million of them out there, depending on your industry, you likely know how many customers you served last week, how much money they paid you, and you can figure out some basic metrics from that information. So I don't know, I've been nerding out about a bunch

of other numbers that are outside of regular books. That's what I've been doing. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to talk about profit and freedom. Pat Clark was in town. I spoke at his sales summit and he kind of gave me the lowdown. I just was interested in kind of soft washing, power washing companies, trying to get the scoop of why there's really not been much consolidation in it. And then he told me what a good company looks like. It's a million dollars. And for me, a good truck is a million dollars and I'm not belittling any industry. But when he told me what Christmas lights were like, that's where I was like, no, because my second year we did 5 million in Christmas lights. So what I figured out is for

them, it's a marketing problem. They don't keep their trucks packed each day. Their conversion rates where it needs to be past one of the best sales, sales boost is amazing. So I figured out certain industries are weak in marketing certain of them are weak in sales and conversion rates you know they feel like most people won't be able to tell you what their capacity is per person per truck so how on earth could you have a csr fill it how can you have a dispatcher fill it if you don't know what you're capable of and i think it comes down to one of the things that we love to talk about which is pricing right you're not You're not priced right. Or if you don't know where you need to be priced, if you don't know what your break even point is, then you're never going to get ahead every day.

You're just starting over. It's like groundhog day. And I feel like there's so many business owners out there that can relate to that, where you're like the end of the month, there's nothing left at the end of the week, there's nothing left. And you don't know why. And I think Tommy addressed it in two ways. I did a spreadsheet that I'd be happy to share with any listeners if you wanted it. That was like, how do you take a pressure washing company to 15 million? It's just a math problem. Like, how many leads do you need?

How many texts do you need? How much do you spend on advertising? How much do you spend on recruiting? It's a pretty simple exercise. And I think you're right. I think we need to think bigger. And for me, that was a huge thing about vertical track. Like Jeff just came away and we brought our field supervisor, we did training and it was like, huh? Yeah. Our industry has been thinking too small. And I feel like you had a similar epiphany

with garage stores. Didn't you like five years ago, 10 years ago. And you're like, huh, where were HVAC was 20 years ago? Right. Well, HVAC 30 years ago, 91. I feel like we're ramping garage doors up too. And I'd love for you to show that $50 spreadsheet with. Yeah, I'll get it to Hannah. Yeah, we'll get that on this podcast. So if they go online to home Service Expert to your podcast. So the problem I have with garage stores back in the day before I really got into it, and right now window washing and power washing and gutter cleaning, is people go into it to make a living. They like $200,000 a year. They don't understand this simple concept of they're allowed to make six figures and the company should still be making 20%. And then they don't understand performance pay and they don't understand the principles behind it.

And it's not because they're stupid. It's because they've never been around it. They've never seen it. It took me traveling to every HVAC shop in this country that does over a hundred million, literally, to get the principles and the fundamentals. But I needed to dream bigger and I needed my mindset to change it. This isn't for a living. This is to build an incredible company, to build a lot of people up that are allowed to make a lot of money. One of my guys just bought a sixth rental in Wisconsin, six rental houses, and he's a senior tech here. So it's important to understand this concept that people need to make six figures when they work for you. You need to make six figures and the company still needs to make 15 to 20%.

Now people are like, that's not possible in my industry. And I tell them bullshit. I tell them you're wrong. You're dead wrong. And I'll prove it to you. Any industry, I can find a leader that's doing amazing things. And I'm not trying to be condescending. I just, I don't like the victim mentality and I'm not okay with it. This podcast is about financial freedom. It's about finding the Rolodex to help you grow. You know, some of the people you've had on it, Alibi was a big mentor of mine, but you've had people on Darius Livers, just king of financials. Oh my gosh. We got to go visit him. I wish we would have recorded it, but Fight Club went to go visit Darius. It was so fun.

He's a hoot and he's done amazing things at FHBird. Have you ever seen his Rocky video? No. Okay. I feel like we should text him and ask him to send it to you. It's amazing. Okay. So I want to back up just a second because I know you've got a lot of listeners. Like there's a lot of people that look up to you. And if you just heard that, like, we're not saying you're a victim. We're saying you have a poor mindset. We're saying you're thinking too small and you've got to get in a room with people bigger than you. I mean, I feel like that's what I love about vertical track. And this is not a commercial for vertical track, but it was the first time that Jeff, my husband, he grew up poor, right? His first goal in business was to make a hundred thousand dollars gross. And then you killed it. You can do that. We just watched Brandon Bond

do that in his fourth month. You can do that in a month. So then it was like, okay, let's do it net. No. Okay. Now let's do it owner salary. No. You just have to keep stretching what's possible, and you have to get around people who have already done it. And you start to realize, wow, this is achievable. This is a math problem. We just have to dream bigger. We just have to think bigger. And I like this fixed mindset comparison. I think you and I both love this book called Mindset by Carolyn Dweck. And it really separates like those who want to be learners and those who just, like you said, get stuck because, well, nobody else is doing over 3 million. So how could I? It's impossible.

It's not impossible. It's actually quite easy to do. Well, Megan, our second year in business, I told Johnny we need to double our prices in the Christmas light business. And he said. I got to meet him. I think I texted you. I got to meet him the other day. It was so random. And I could not meet him for you.

It was so weird. You know, Johnny's grown up. Like, I'll tell you what before we thought man this guy knows christmas lights but he's amazing and what they've done with the business is remarkable like there's no credit for me but what i will say is looking at the stuff i realized we were losing money but one thing i know i could do is i could bring leads in like nobody's business and you know we used day one is we recruited there. We trained there.

It was a tough business. I thought Christmas slice, well, it could be easier. And it wasn't, but. Right. It's like get off the roof or something. Stay off the roof.com. Yeah. That's right.

It's a super cute name. But the fact is what we needed to focus on. And I just want to be very clear because there was a question about what you would do in marketing. Number one is where are the people? They're on Google or they're on social media. So you dominate those two things. And I mean, completely dominate.

You're a $10 million market in soft washing. No one's ever heard of it. So next year, I might take it upon myself to prove it. But I'll tell you this. I want to get rid of the naysayers because I can do it in garage doors. I can do a $30 million business in one market. I'll do a $50 million market in Phoenix next year here. And there's some certain things. Marketing is three levels. It's recruiting for people, customers, and partnerships. You get good at those three, you're a multi-multi-millionaire. But let's dive into really what we're here to talk about, and that's profitability and

freedom. And I think this is a great subject. So you have five businesses and they're just in accounting. So number one is why start your own business? What caused you to say, I'm sick of working for somebody? It's a lot of work. Most businesses don't survive. The majority of businesses will fail, period.

75% of businesses fail in the first 15 years. 75%. That's just haunting, right? And I agree. It's not easy. It's not fun. Why do you do it? I feel like everybody starts a business for probably the same three basic reasons, right? They want to make more money because they think that it's easy or they want more time freedom or and they go out and they start a business. We started Jeff likes in windows because Jeff had been cleaning windows over the course of the

summer. And he was looking for a new gig when he moved down to where I live. Cause we, it's a fun story. We won't tell it on the podcast, but he moved here. He needed a job. He started a window cleaning business. I bought a book written by a guy named Steve Wright that said how to start a window cleaning business. And we just did it. We went off. After 10 years with Jeff likes clean windows, I was still working as a corporate CPA. I had a normal W2. I would not say nine to five because I worked a hundred hour weeks, but I had a big job with a big paycheck. And I said, I need to go out on my own. I want more time freedom. There were two weddings in France. I wanted to be gone for six consecutive weeks. And essentially the shortcut is my boss said, if I don't need you

for six weeks, I probably don't need you. And I said, okay, here's my notice. I gave him four months notice and I left. And I built an accounting firm around me being able to be wherever I want to be. Last year, we traveled 30 weeks and it really made a scale. Jeff likes clean windows because it's hard to clean glass and make money if you're still on the glass. So we got Jeff out of the truck, we got Jeff out of the office, and we were able to start having some true freedom in our lives. Now, likes accounting, I thought would be easy because I'd already started Jeff likes clean windows. It's a piece of cake to start the next one, right? Well, every business has its challenge. And I think I'm figuring out ways to hack it for other businesses. So like,

how do you do this easily? Like, how do you protect your time? So you're not working nights and weekends. How do you recruit people? How do you delegate? I think these are things that you're really good at. But for me, I felt like I had to relearn in a whole new industry. But yeah, that's why I started with, I wanted to go to France for six weeks. So I started likes accounting. So what do you think it takes? Because I'll tell you, a lot of people become really good technicians. I know a lot of guys that literally make a couple hundred grand that work for me a year, but they're not going to make a great manager. And I've learned that the hard way.

They're not going to be a good sales coach. And they also, I don't mean to belittle anybody, but there's a lot to it. There's tax planning. There's management. There's HR. There's trucks and insurance. There's marketing. Lots to do with payroll.

I mean, I don't think their best position would be to go out and leave because they at least read a lot of business books. I know this because I had to do it. But what do you think it takes to be ready to take on a business to be successful? Because you throw me into any business today in home service, I promise you, I could fast forward to 10 years. So what is it that you think that makes somebody ready? I think pricing is going to be number one. Pricing right from the beginning. I think systems is going to be number two. So that's where Al comes in, right?

Then we go to marketing. And I think if you've got, well, maybe you go to recruiting. What do you think? Then you go to recruiting, then you go to marketing. I mean, I think sales cures everything. If it's not priced right, I disagree. So pricing first and then sales. You can't outsell an unprofitable business.

And I have to always remind you, you're really good at math. And the people listening to you are not good at math. Tommy is like crazy good at math. I've seen you do math in front of hundreds of people from the stage. But most people, they think like, eh, the neighbor next door is charging $100 an hour. So that's what I'll charge. That seems reasonable. And the neighbor next door is going bankrupt in the next six weeks because he's in the 75%

of people who fail. Well, I guess I talked to a lot of businesses and they're like, I'm not a good salesman. And then I look at their conversion rate. And if they can't sell at this price point, raising the price point's not the solution for them. I guess from my perspective, it's conversion rate I see kills a lot of people, especially I look at conversion rate at Christmas lights even, and if it's below 30%, you've got an issue. You're not advertising the right avatar. You see, you can't advertise to McDonald's customers filet mignon. It just doesn't work. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. Most people are priced wrong, but also you can't advertise on Craigslist and expect to get the $10 million

houses to buy from you. So they all interrelate. I think the biggest thing that I see, Megan, is there's no money. They're living check to check. They're under stress. It's called sweat equity. They're underfunded. They can't pay people. They're too worried, worried making this week's payments to even focus on the business. It's so tough. I've been there. It's really hard to make sound decisions when you're trying to figure out how to make your rent at your facility. I feel like if you're starting off as an owner operator, it's pretty easy to make money. Like it's pretty easy to go out there and hustle and you can probably even do the Craigslist thing.

Now it's not sustainable and you're going to blow out your shoulder and you're going to blow out your back and you're going to blow out your knees and all that. That's not a good way to grow. But what I noticed with the owner operators is they're robbing the piggy bank. The second they make money, they spend it. Right. They're constantly chasing their tail and they don't set up good habits. So when somebody comes to work for me at Lykes Accounting and they say, Megan, I'm not profitable. I need help. What I say is like, we need to put you on a budget. So tell me what the family needs to live. And that's all you get

to take out of the business this year. That's it. So make sure you do your math right. Because that's going to be your salary. And we're going to set it up on a weekly basis, whether you're a sole proprietor or an S corporation, I don't care. You're going to get a weekly paycheck and that's all you get from the business. The business is not your piggy bank. If you want to grow it and you set them on a budget and then you and I, we kind of bonded over profit first. I feel like that was when our friendship first like went off. What I love about profit first is is Profit First makes you wait. If you want to rob the piggy bank, you can't do it till the end of the quarter. And I tell Jeff, Jeff's a pretty sophisticated business at this point.

He works five hours a week. We travel 30 weeks a year. He makes significant income off of the window cleaning company. He tells me, he says, I feel broke all the time. And I'm like, yep, it's working. Profit First makes Jeff feel broke 89 days a quarter. And on the 90th day of the quarter, that's when he does his distributions. We run it on a super tight budget. And I feel like it's way more fun that way. I mean, you explained Parkinson's a lot better than I do. And the last time we were together, we did the whole, you know, going on a diet and putting it on our plate. We could talk about that. But I think at

the end of the day, your business is not your piggy bank and you keep robbing the piggy bank and you'll never be able to grow because there will never be any money left. You're right. You've looked at a lot more financials in your life than I'll ever come close to. So you're right. People do. And they say it in the fact, number one, it's bad habits. Number two is that they feel like it's deserved. They feel like both in life, they deserve a new car. They deserve a huge vacation and they live well above their means. I know a lot of people that do this because the money's there, but the business suffers. And I do believe in profit first. I do believe in my size. It's hard to have seven bank accounts. You need a really good CFO, but you got to have a budget. And the budget for me set me free

our budget this month, I've literally had five meetings before this podcast about hitting budget. And one of the things we're coming out of the woodwork, it's the 12th. And what I'm asking people is how do we get more doors installed? Because we're on accrual accounting. How can we get the 20 doors from door 48 installed faster? They're like, well, we can't get ahold of the clients. I'm like, then text message them. Let's get resourceful here. So I just talked about a bonus program for the people booking the installs.

Because when you set a budget, your brain starts going, what do I need to do to make this happen? How do we get there? You start thinking outside of the box, just like 10X Grant Cardone. How do I grow my business a thousand times? It's not just this simple stuff. You start getting way outside of the box, way resourceful, partnerships.

I feel like I'm going to pause you because the word budget, most people listening to you just ears turned off and they're like, yeah, I know I need one. I don't know how to do it and I'm never going to do it. Budgets aren't sexy. They're never going to be sexy. I've tried everything I can to make them interesting and they're not fun. So what I like to do now is we don't call it a budget and you break it down, set a goal. So like there's a target and you just need a couple of targets in your business. So conversion rate target, an average ticket target, a daily sales target. And then the thing we were just talking about getting more doors installed. This was an epiphany we had in our window cleaning company recently. So I want to just verbalize it on this podcast in case it helps anybody else.

There's a huge difference between daily sales, daily production, and daily receipts. And a lot of business owners really struggle with that, right? So you've got somebody who's selling every day, but it's not going to be produced today. It might be produced six months from now or three months from now. And then you've got a bunch of people out there who are producing. Your technicians are out there hustling, doing the work every day. And then you've got hopefully credit cards on file for everybody and you're getting paid. But if you have commercial work or if you've got longer term or larger projects, you're not getting paid every day. So understanding your business, what is the sales goal every day?

What is the production goal per whatever makes sense to you? For us, per van, that makes sense to us. So what's the production goal per van every day? And then what do we need our daily receipts to be? And then you plug in the people in your company who are responsible for that. And you do your performance pay like Tommy just said. So the person who's selling, they have a sales goal now, and they need to report on their daily sales every day. The person producing or who's in charge of your production manager or field supervisor, or maybe it's you. I love when Tommy's like, maybe your name's in all these boxes. Maybe you're wearing all the hats. But you need to look at these from every angle because they're not the same dollar amount. And most business owners think that they are. Most business owners are like, yeah, I just need to make $10,000 a day and everything's fine. And I'm like, you need to receive it or you need to sell it or you need to produce it. Which one of

those do you mean? Well, that's what we did. We reverse engineered on how many calls we're getting our conversion rate. The way that you build a budget is you have to have one leading indicator and ours was driving phone calls. So we put it back because I'm a marketing guy. I knew over time, the guys have almost the same paycheck, right? Their paychecks are very similar. So our conversion rate is not going to change 10%, not when we have 10,000 clients a month. Now I'm working on something that will help that. And I don't think our average ticket's going to jump 20%. So I said, what's the big variable here? It's phone calls. How can I drive more leads? And you can do that through expansion or just taking more market share.

So obviously we're working on every KPI always, but what's the biggest ones? We built the budget. We back-ended on how many leads we needed. And then obviously there's other things on there, like training and recruiting technicians. You're only as strong as your weakest link. But here's the secret sauce. I'll tell you, Megan, something that changed my life is when Dan Miller started our president. And he said in my last company, the HR person gave us some secret sauce. And that is to build a six month org chart. What does this company look like in six months? Because I'll tell you this, Mike Bailey's come up to me, our COO, Luke now Martin has come up to me and there's certain people that aren't cutting it, but they

have no choice, but to keep them. And how many times have you heard that Megan? You know what they're filling in right now? They're the best we've got. Well, if they can fog a mirror, they could get a job type of thing. But ultimately for me is it's the fear of having to do it yourself is what causes people that are not good at what they do to stay on. And when you set up a six-month work chart, the goal is that you start looking for the best of the best. There's one thing I've realized over the last month. It's the best of the best. They're always hiring as well as doing their job. They know how to build a team, coach a team, and keep the good people happy.

And the difference is a lot of times you get people that can build a team that just want to delegate or you get people that are good at what they do, but they don't know how to build a team. It's so hard to find a person that can grow the business and find great people and learn to not do the work themselves. Now, I want somebody that can still be in the meetings, I want somebody that's still going in the meetings, right? I want somebody that still could get dirty, but they don't get in the weeds as much. And they learn how to build and coach a team. And that to me, just keeping somebody on saying, hey, they're the best I could do right now. You don't understand. I'm swamped. I got kids. I got a wife that's not

happy or a husband that's not happy. Right now they're filling in. It's the best trainer I could get. It's the best league tech I have. And I know he's a prima donna, but I need him. How many people are slaves that can't have hard conversations with people because they've got B and C players? I think I have a really good idea of the working. I don't know if I can talk about it yet, but I will talk about a couple of pieces of it because you can relate to a couple of these pieces. Yeah, let's go back to that. No, you're taking notes. Can you put down labor efficiency? We have to talk about labor efficiency today because I'm very excited about it. Got it.

Okay, good. So I hired a company recently called Bergflow. And Bergflow, their idea is building out leadership teams. So they say, where's your company today? Where do you want to be? So for you, six-month org chart or one-year org chart, right? And their whole thing is your org chart needs to be divided into servicing, operations, and growth. They're selling features. You are three hires away

from infinite possibilities with your company. Three hires away. You have a strong person in servicing, which for us, let's talk about window cleaning. Servicing for me is a production manager or field supervisor. That's the person who's in charge of the technicians who are producing all the work. That's your servicing department. Operations at our company is our office manager. That's the person who's in charge of scheduling, dispatching, over the phone sales. Growth would be a sales manager. In our company, we don't have a sales manager yet.

We're not there. But we do have marketing, right? We have a marketing person who's working in the growth division. If you can get each of those sections of your org chart autonomous, like they have their own budget, they have their own freedom. They know how they're moving this KPI tracker. They know how they're moving the needle in the company. Then this is how you get out of the way. This is how you get to start acting like a CEO. Like Jeff this morning, I love my husband. He barely works and he comes in my office. I'm in the middle of meeting at 930. He's like, Hey, I have an interview right now. Can you? And I was like, what? What do you

mean? He's like, well, cause we have a whole automated recruiting system. He had three interviews today. I'm like, yeah, this is going to be the last week you ever do interviews because we need to delegate it to somebody else. It's time for us to move it on to somebody else. But I like this idea that you can build a company very strategically, very thoughtfully. You're only three key hires away from it. And you're a big fan of Breakthrough Academy. We're huge Breakthrough Academy fans. They help you figure out what are the deliverables of each of those positions?

How do you set them up for success? How do you measure the success? And then they get to run with it. And we can talk about Jonathan Wissman if you want, but there are like really cool tools out there now that can help you predict in advance whether that's a good hire. Berkflow likes a company called Acumax.

That's who they're predicting through. But I think this is going to get way easier in the next 12 months. I think we're going to be pretty much guaranteed to make good hires at 90% effectiveness very soon. Yeah, I will say this. Tony Robbins said it the best. He said, I don't bring family in because they don't live up to my expectations. I got sick of watching people learn on my dime. He goes, so now what I bring in is I make sure they've got the skills at a leadership director or VP level. Now, what

that means to a small business is any type of leadership, anybody that's meant to coach and build a team or manager. So too many people, Megan, they hire people that are there to learn with them. You don't bring out a good controller that knows to set up billpay.com and get you on the right credit cards and understand the tax laws that's conferring with a CPA. You don't bring on the right people that understand what the business needs to do. So they're learning alongside of you instead of helping you grow the business. So now my one goal is to find the best winner. And so here's what I call it. I called my president earlier and I said, listen, we've got this amazing gal.

Her name is Blair. She's the best recruiter I've ever seen. And I said, we can't afford to have her recruit for some of these positions. It just doesn't make sense. So I want to pay her really good money to sit down with her and our exec team for two hours and teach us how to recruit the right people. Because if you think they're going to come to a Craigslist or Indeed and the greatest people are sitting there waiting,

you're wrong. To get people that are going to grow your business faster than you ever could, they work somewhere else. And you need to actively pursue them to get the A-plus winner. Because A-plus winners are not on the sidelines looking on Indeed, and Monster, and CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn. They're out there working. We've got to go after winners, right? Here's the thing. I think most of the people listening to this podcast, they wouldn't know if a winner showed up in front of them, because we are recruiting for ourselves. And something that you learned early, but you're more advanced than most of your listeners is that you built a team around you of people who played to their strengths, right? People who were better at it than you were. And that's how you complimented it. I think we need a system. And that's what I like

about BirdFlow is they'll actually like hardwire personality profile who needs to be in each position. So for likes accounting, we're hiring an operations manager and they profiled it. And then you send out an assessment. And now I only have to do, well, I don't, but my executive assistant only has to do phone interviews with 10% of applicants, right? I'm only meeting with 1% because they're hardwired to perform in that position because we can be thoughtful about what does this position take? What are the core responsibilities? You can also build out a training and onboarding program. So if you're listening to this and you have a less than million dollar, I'm sorry to keep bringing up window cleaning, but it's what I know, window cleaning, pressure washing,

soft washing company, your next key hire is probably an operations manager. It's probably a field supervisor, somebody who can manage the technicians because you're not doing it. You're still got that technician mindset. Jeff is not a natural leader and we've leveled him up as far as we can level him up, but it's time to bring in people who are even better at it than us. It really is. And that's really, really hard for a lot of people because when you bring in someone better, you got to be willing to say that you know more than I do about this. And that's giving up control. And a lot of times for a business owner that's pigheaded like I am, you just need to realize you hired somebody that's better than you at their position, but you need to have checks and balances, but you need to give

freedom. And you need to just say, listen, I'm giving this to you. What's the expectations? Let's just make sure we're clear that the expectations are to create profitability and growth. Now, how are we going to get there? And those discussions should happen before that person gets hired. And if the person is looking for you to design a plan, then that's not the right person. That might be a really good technician, right? But that's not a good leader. And I did not plan on bringing up Birdflow because we're still learning how to be friends. But I like that they helped me figure out what are the top five tasks that we're going to delegate first. And then you build out the first one. And you're just taking chunks of 80% of your time off your plate in that first 90 days.

And my sister-in-law, she just started a new job. I never really talk about my sister-in-law, but she just started a new job. And she was not set up for success. She almost quit in her first week because everybody's too busy to talk to her. So she felt like she was a burden. She didn't feel welcome. She didn't feel like warm and fuzzy. She didn't feel like she was being helpful.

When we bring on a key hire in a leadership position at our company, we do need to organize, you know, you don't have to have everyday plans, but you need to have enough space in your calendar and enough set up for them to be successful in those first 20 days. Otherwise, you're going to lose them, even if they're a good fit. So I feel like there's so many things we can, I'm not even staying in my lane, like we're talking about recruiting, but it does. It's good to have this conversation because you're at a point in your career that you've changed a lot over the last two years but you also are asking valid questions because the biggest mistake for listeners would be to listen to everything i have to say you know this isn't condescending by any terms because i was smaller than anybody at one point but it's so hard for me to go back to a million dollars or five million or even 20 million at this point so these are the things that i it's

hard for me to go back and say unless somebody somebody before Adam or before Lou, like, well, it's hard to remember because, you know, my life is, doesn't live in reflections. It lives in forward thinking. So it's hard for me to say, sit back and try to get at that place. I was lost and I don't even want to talk about it because if I go back and talk to myself, I would tell myself a lot of things. Mostly the biggest thing would be is find somebody that's better than you. That's very, very good. But the difference was I got blessed with Adam in 2014, but if I would have read rocket fuel in 2007, which it didn't exist, I would have found Adam a lot earlier. So the books I've read, the things I've done to find the right people is the best thing you could do is build your team and focus on team building and focus on all your weaknesses and replacing the weaknesses first.

And I'm going to take a step backwards and say, first, I want you to focus on money because I'd say not to be condescending to a listener, but 90% of your listeners still aren't profitable. They're still not paying themselves and payroll still stressful for them. So until we can fix that, we can't talk about taking on more payroll because you've got a bunch of B players, C players, D players there. So we've got to fix the money. We've got to start stacking some cash. And I have to tell you, I'm hiring this operations manager for likes accounting. It's so exciting because the money is there. Like now I just need the right person. The money was there to hire the coach, which was

insanely expensive to help me find the right person. Just like you're talking about recruiting, like all of that takes money. So the reason we're here is step one, you got to find yourself some more money. So first half just in the podcast is profit first. They got to read profit first. Yeah, I agree. When you have no money, you're literally a victim to staying in the truck. When there's no saved money for payroll, when you can't hire people to help train, you can't hire. You know, we separated or didn't separate from Jody, but we basically said we're going to hire some internal recruiters and be less dependent on him. Jody came back two weeks ago. We fired all of our recruiters and he took back over because to be able to bring on these resources. So that's rapid hire, but ultimately that's the only person that could get us to 50 new technicians a month

right now. We would like to be a little less dependent on them, but at the end of the day, he's a buddy of mine. They do fabulous and they've got resources and they've got contingencies. They've got plans if a person is out. So I think you're right. A long time ago, there was a guy listening to the podcast. He hired Dan Antonelli and he spent a dozen grand. I don't know what it was. He spent all of his money branding, but didn't have any money for marketing or hiring. So you're right. Without money, without sales, without pricing, right? You don't have a leg to stand on and it's almost like you're handicapped. And I get that. And Tommy was there. I think if you're listening to this, you're listening to it for a reason. But Tommy's at, what are you going to do now this year? 150,

200? What do you got? These deals, I got a couple of deals, people coming in the town of the next week. If these deals go through, we'll do a little over 200. Okay. So Tommy is sitting here going to do 200 million this year. And there was a time when he had a giant Amex bill that he didn't know about. He didn't have any money to pay it off. And that wasn't that long ago. How long ago was that, Tommy? Well, when we moved into this building four, four and a half years ago, I got a SBA loan that wasn't approved. So they did a bridge loan and the SBA loan didn't go through. And I remember talking to my neighbor and he's a controller. He's really smart. He looked at our financials and he goes, oh my God, this is bad.

I was just talking to him on Friday night. And he goes, I just remember it was like yesterday, you came in and said things weren't good. And then I had my buddy Keegan flying to town and he goes, you need to close these four markets. And I said, no, no, no, I can fix those. He said, Tommy, close these tomorrow. Without these four markets, you're making 20%. You are bleeding. Your heart's about to stop. This is bad. He goes, give them a relocation package and close them tomorrow. And he goes, I'm not bullshitting you. These four markets are bleeding you to death. So what did I do? I closed those four markets the next day, turned ultra profitable. Now it's in the rear view mirror. Can we stop there? Because I just, I love that so much. And I know you're interviewing me,

but this is how we are. This is our friendship. Welcome to Tommy and Megan's life. We just talk over each other. It's crazy. Okay. So five years ago, Tommy was like almost, it was a bad breaking point. And now Gary is like very comfortable profit margins going to do 200 million this year. Now five years is a long time. Billy Klein just commented. So Billy, I'm just going to call you out for a second. Billy was at vertical track in may, Tommy and I wrote a class on pricing for profits in may. And it was really cool. You built this awesome calculator. It was really cool. Billy sat there and in six weeks,

he increased his net profit margin from Vertical Track by 30%. 30% on one month sales is cash in the bank. And that's what Tommy and I are talking about. This doesn't have to be five years from now. This doesn't have to be one year from now. We can fix your problem if we can fix your profitability. And you don't even need a friend like Keegan to tell you to close down some markets.

You just got to look at a couple key metrics, do a couple key things, and you can fix your problem. I believe that I can fix your problem in six weeks. If you give me six weeks of your full attention and you do your homework, I can fix your problem in six weeks. It's pretty cool, right? It turns around like that. There's a couple of key things. Yeah. What you're going to teach is you need to know, like it's the most important thing. One of the things that I spend a lot of time now is I go spend a lot of time with the guys next door. There's 50 of them training.

So my job has completely changed recently. Like I ask hard questions to a lot of people, but I'm not involved in day-to-day. I mean, look, I won't be involved in any of the meetings at all this week. I'm gone the whole week. And me and Jim are working on some stuff in San Francisco. So ultimately, it changes dramatically. But now I'm asking the main questions of how much money made it to the bank. I found out our EBITDA is at 23.8%. That's EBITDA. So I'm happy with that, but we're trying to get it to 30. Now, I realize that I have some

unrealistic goals here, but I've got a clear path to get to 30. And one of the things, look, Megan, you're right. Without confusing people, first get money saved. But there's so many other little things like what an A player could do for your company. And the first time I met an A player, I met a lot of A player technicians, but I remember Robin. Robin coming on and this guy just, I didn't think it was possible until I did a ride along one day and I go, oh my God, this guy, he set the bar so high in our company and it's ridiculous what he's been able to teach me. So sometimes what I do is I study the best performer in a CSR dispatching technician installer. And that's how I help come up with the manual and the training.

And you watch, he's a disc trainer. Like we got Robin disc certified and he always talks about it. He's like, I zip myself up before I go into a job. I recognize what kind of person they are and I know exactly how to deal with them. And now one of my top technicians, all he talks about is personality profiling. That's the kind of level we're talking about here. And we're talking to people who like, they're like, disc what? You know, what is that? And that's okay.

But first, let's talk about top technicians. So now I'm going to bring in labor efficiency. Do you like how I came up? Yes. I've been doing some really nerdy service titan things. And I've been meaning to call you and Adam to tell you about them. Like, it's been very fun to play with service titan reports. Like, I think I'm breaking some stuff, but it's been really exciting.

Most people cannot tell me what their labor rate is. And most people cannot tell me what their labor efficiency is. So what I'm talking about here is when somebody calls to schedule whatever service you sell, there's gotta be a formula somewhere that says, okay, a technician can produce this much per hour

and the job's going to take this long. So let's schedule it for this long. I mean, some people who are listening are like, what, what did she say? What I'm saying is when a job ends up on your calendar, who decides how long it should take? Usually it has to do with the labor rate. And usually the labor rate is determined by you as the owner, when you used to be out in the field doing it. So you used to be like, okay, I'm going to look at this house and that would take me four hours to do, I think. And I think I can make a hundred dollars an hour. So I'm going to bid this job at $400. That's stupid. Okay. It is stupid. I agree. And you're going to tell them why in just

a second, but let me get through this. So you go out and you, you teach somebody to answer the phone and that person has the phone and they look at it on Google earth and like, okay, $400 because that's what Jeff said. And it's going to take four hours and they put it on the calendar. Most home service companies never go back to look. How long did it actually take? What happens if it takes technicians six hours because they're not like you, what happens if you have a rock star and it takes them three hours, but then they have crappy quality. Nobody looks at it this way because it's called job costing and it's too much math. It's too labor intensive and nobody really cares. But I feel like this is week two of the six weeks to financial freedom, but it might be

the lowest hanging fruit in your company is figuring out, are you charging the right amount per hour of your labor rate? So now tell the story of how much it costs to turn on a van and what a basic labor rate should be, especially at A1, because I love that. Well, it's pretty simple. If you take our price book and you can redesign our price book very simply for California, Florida, Chicago, and New York into sold hours, and you can reverse engineer exactly what you need to make, you should figure out your total expenses to be very nice, kind, and a very good person to your company and pay yourself well and then reverse engineer into

your price book so when you're talking so fast they're not going to keep up with you so total expenses he's saying like how much let me just explain the formula real quick if i'm sitting there and i'm a window company if i'm a window company paying for windows, I'm reverse engineering by the window how much labor I'm going to pay, whether they finish in four, eight or two hours. Number one, I'm going to make sure they are motivated to get done fast and efficient. So I put checks and balances in place that I'd have a checks and balances checklist that each guy goes over with the client, and there'd be pictures of it and signatures from the client. More importantly, if I'm going to pay by the window and I'm going to pay a labor rate, I've got an expected fixed labor rate instead of being variable. So now I say this window costs $35. I pay seven. I know exactly what I'm paying on it. I pay 20%. And therefore,

I'm able to create a simple mathematical equation. So the price book should be based off of labor to make it as fixed as possible. And all my labor is fixed. All of my labor, now that depends on what they sell, but I can tell you exactly what my labor rate is after they sell a job. I don't even have to guess at it. You tell me what technician, I can tell you my labor rate minus material costs. Material costs will vary. But I hate people that build a price, their pricing book. It has to do with time. And time, you can't motivate a guy to take less cigarette breaks unless he has a stake in the outcome. I see guys double their efficiency when they switch to my type of price book. And most people are like, I don't have a price book. I

don't know what that is. And the reality is you do most people are like, I don't have a price book. I don't know if that is. And the reality is you do. If you are selling services, you have a price book. Whether it's organized or not, you think in your head, this house will take this long. This job will take this long. And so we need to figure out, is that math good? And have you included everything in it? Have you included the cost of the gas and the cost of the truck and the cost of the insurance?

Have you included your salary? Have you included all of your costs in it? Jim made that beautiful, we can link to that too, that beautiful breakeven point calculator. He basically took, Tom used to have this really old school worksheet and you would have to like handwrite it in and Jim turned it into like a program, a computer program. You can put in all of the expenses of your company and it will tell you what should you be charging for hours? What should your labor rate be? If you want to cover all those expenses. And Tommy says, when you're filling out this calculator, he says, dream big. Like they deserve a nice truck. They deserve a good salary. You deserve a good salary. Include all of the expenses and then charge accordingly. You know, it's interesting. You deserve a good salary. Include all of the expenses and then charge accordingly. You know, it's interesting you mentioned Jim Leslie.

I'm a fan. He helped me out a lot in May. So I'm a fan. I'm looking at this next year going, how do I become a magnet for A+++. Dan Miller and Jim were the two best hires in a while, in quite a long time. And these guys are moving the needle so fast. And so now, and I'm just telling people this because I think it's important to understand, how am I going to go from 200 to a billion in less than four years? I'll do it before 2025. Look, Jim Collins said it the best. You get the right people on the bus, they'll help you decide where to go. And listen, I'm not going after a billion. I'm going after two and a half billion because I know you get fatigued out just like pushups. And I told you to do 50 pushups. You're going to struggle at the end. You want to blow past your goal.

So we set a bigger goal to be able to build the systems that will fly by that goal. Are we doing comments or no? Yeah, you could go ahead and read some. Somebody just has Facebook users. So I don't know who said this. And I'm saying it because I think that a lot of listeners are going to relate to this. He says, you have to hire these roles when we're buried in lease debt. Things are super slow here for the next few weeks. We need to get into charge more. I think even though we're on the high end to begin with. So I feel like you, Facebook user, whoever you are, are very typical of most people listening. So Ellen Rohr says, if you don't want to do the math and the pricing for profits thing that Tommy

and I did at Vertical Track in May, we said you had three options. You could figure out your break-even point using Jim Leslie's calculator. You could figure out your labor rate, which is super hard to calculate, but you can do it. Or you can triple your prices, which is Ellen Rohr's hack. Tommy's expression, you can outsell anything. Well, Tommy couldn't outsell those four markets that weren't priced right or weren't producing. You can't outsell everything unless you triple your prices. And when I say triple your prices in front of a live audience, everybody turns green and is like, she's lost her marbles. So Facebook users are not saying go triple your prices. But I am saying that there are a couple of ways that you can fix

your profitability. One is raising your prices, but then Tommy's going to talk about conversion rate. Then you've got to work on how are you going to sell at the higher prices? How are you going to work on your perceived value? How are you going to articulate your perceived value? And I think we met a great company through Tommy, Power Selling Pros. They've done a huge thing helping us with that. I know you love Uncle Joe. He's done a huge thing helping with that. There are ways that you can work on communication to enhance perceived value almost immediately, like almost tomorrow, I think. Well, yeah. The idea of that they're already the highest price in town, and I'd like to know how they know that. But ultimately, what I'd like to see is I realize conversion rate is killing

people and does not have a rehash team going after old leads. We talk about build rapport, educate, and follow up ref. A lot of people skip the third step. They don't do any follow up whatsoever. And the conversion rate is the number I see, but they're also not open nights or weekends, so their booking rate sucks. So I think understanding financials is so important. You hear me talking about the same things every single time. I need to know how much you want to do this year. I need to know your average ticket, your conversion rate, your booking rate, your cost per acquisition. I'll go through that a little slower because I talk fast. How much do you want to do? Pause for a second. So Billy Klein mentioned my spreadsheet. This is another spreadsheet I'll get to you, Tommy. If you know those numbers that he's going

to repeat to you, I can show you how to get to any number if you want to get to 100 million 2 billion whatever we can tell you exactly the roadmap and we actually break it out by year it's fantastic okay real estate and i learned this from jim kraut kramer as he built built this calculator for real estate agents and all you do is divide into each number. So you take, forget the revenue, let's just take your average ticket divided by your conversion rate divided by your booking rate. And then you find out how much it costs you per acquisition. That'll tell you how much marketing you need to spend. Now, if you want to do $10 billion, you put 10 billion, you divide it by your average ticket divided by your conversion rate it by your average ticket, divide it by your conversion rate, divide it by your booking rate, and then you find out how many leads you need to get that

number. That's all it is. And every time, Megan, every time I go into a business, number one, the biggest problem I see is there's no true number. They say me and my wife are booking all the phone calls. We're probably at 92%. But it turns out they don't book phone calls on the weekend. It turns out they're not counting all those areas that are out of service. Oh yeah, that's out of our service because they're marketing to the wrong areas. So they're not counting it. And there's always these gray areas. So first, systematically, they don't have the right numbers. They don't know where they're at. And then number two is I find one that's like, holy shit, how are you even making money? How are you not paying attention to this? And then we fix it and they're like, oh my God, I'm making so much damn money.

Why didn't you come in here before? But that's all it is, is that simple formula. Dan, we made a calculator for you. So everybody's asking for it. We will get it into the chat or that we'll figure out a way to get it to you. But basically you don't have to do all the math that Tommy's talking about because he can like do it in his head and nobody else can, it's weird. But you do need to know a couple of key things. So conversion rate is, all it is is how many people ask you for an estimate

versus how many people actually turn into an invoice. That's how you figure out your conversion rate. And you really could do it as simply as possible, meaning look at yesterday. And if you want your booking rate, and Tommy and I, sometimes we don't always speak the same language, but we try. Your booking rate is how many people reached out to you yesterday. How many of those turned into estimates? That's the difference between those two. Now there's something that nobody counts and there's

abandonment rate. So if you don't have call center software to tell how many calls you're not answering, those are abandoned. Those should be counted as not answered. And those should be counted as an opportunity. Yep. And it's an opportunity that didn't turn an estimate. He can also talk to you about web traffic. So people who start to fill out a form or an estimate form who abandon it, right? But we call that lead slippage. So you've lost that lead because you never even got their name and phone number, right? It never turned into an estimate. So that's the first one, which what were you calling your booking rate? So that's your booking rate for the estimate conversion rate. You explained booking rate. Yep. And so now average tickets, the last one I want to explain, and you can do

this again for yesterday. So you look at yesterday, how many jobs did you do? How much were they worth? That's your average ticket. You include zeros, you include zeros, you include zeros. Because everybody I know, don't give your damn average ticket and they don't include zeros and they're lying to themselves. You need to include the estimates that are not closed. Even if you think they're going to close, if you got zero on a service call, every single opportunity you add in there, and you'll find that every company I walk into lies about these numbers. They've got this gray area. Oh, we didn't count that.

They're not lying, Tommy. They're not liars. They just don't know how to find it. They don't have good data. They don't have service Titan, and they don't have your math brain. So we're not calling you liars. We're telling you that you're not. Listen, I don't have good data. They don't have service Titan and they don't have your math brain. So we're not calling you liars. We're telling you that you're not.

Listen, I don't know if I'm talking to you, I'm not calling one person out. If I'm talking to you, you're lying to yourself because you give excuses. And like I did. And then when I started counting zeros in my conversion rate, I mean, obviously you got to count zeros, but you better count every single opportunity. And if you're not going to count it, there better be a very, very good reason. Now on a booking rate,

what happened is we didn't use the counter if it was out of our service area, Megan. And then what I realized is, why are we getting calls out of our service area? Why are we spending money? So if you don't count those, you can't isolate the problem. Okay, and we're not trying to scare you with counting.

So what we're going to have you do, and he doesn't even give homework, but we're going to make you do this because it's going to change your life. You need to just write it down. Get out a piece of paper. Jeff's like terrified of a computer. He's terrified of spreadsheets. Just get out a piece of paper and write down everything that happened yesterday. Hopefully you have software because this is really painful.

That's why you can only do one day at a time. Hopefully you have software that will tell you, but you need to be realistic and you do, he's right. You got to write down the zeros. You can't avoid, you can't hide from the zeros. You got to write them down. So if you went out and did a callback because of quality yesterday, that was a job with $0. If you went out to give an estimate and they didn't actually, you didn't sell, you still got to write it down. You write down everything that happened yesterday. And the last thing that you were talking about, Tommy, was selling marketing dollars outside of your service rate.

So the client acquisition cost, I think is important. So I'm going to go through that math with you really quick also. This is your advertising spend divided by total customers. So this math isn't terrible and you can do it for one day, you can do it for one week and you can do it for one day. You can do it for one week. You can do it for one month. If you don't have fancy software like we do, get your business profitable enough so you can get more software, right? Because you won't have

to hire as many people, but do the math and start today. And if you'd start today with these numbers, it becomes a game against yourself. We do the exact same math a month from now. And you start seeing cash in your bank account. You start seeing how you improved things. You start seeing that, oh my gosh, my business is getting better. Because we're focusing on just a couple places to look. And this is how you move the needle forward. Sorry, Tommy. I just like, the math's hard.

And then they won't do it. And then they get scared. And I don't want you to be listening to this and be scared. No, no, you're right. You're right. I forget sometimes. The thing is that there's going to be one of these four things that really stick out to me. And if you include the revenue, the scary thing for me is the fact that they're starting at a million instead of five or 10 million.

They're starting at 200,000, Tommy. Like these guys are at 200,000, 600,000. They're not even... Yeah, think about how to get to 500,000. That's not real numbers to work with because what I would tell you is it's not even a dream. I would tell you that the way to get to make money is to get to feel uncomfortable.

That's what makes me move. Listen, if I tried to get a million dollars more per year, I would still be where I was 10 years ago. All I'm telling you is the mindset is dream for a big number, write it down, have a decent goal, shoot for the stars, you land on the moon, you're still doing good. But if you just want to do $2 million, look, you need to walk before you run and crawl before you walk, whatever, something like that. Well, in our industry, I would say less than 5% of people in window cleaning, pressure washing, soft washing are

doing over a million. So you're going to have to go. They need to go to other industries. They need to go to vertical track. They need to meet people like Tommy and think. They do. You know what? Here's the deal. I'll give you a tour of the facility.

You can meet all my trainers. To realize who you need, you need to be able to meet these personalities and say, oh my gosh, now I see what they're talking about luke and adam and you know like you just need to get around people who think bigger and we can't describe it you got to feel it for yourself for jeff we've been friends like what three four years i don't know a while and it wasn't until jeff got to a1 that he finally got it right he saw it he felt it so and i felt that before at different shops and when you get that, everything becomes easier because you start to learn where you need to go. Right now, it doesn't need to be this black forest of what you don't know.

We're doing it here. And there's 50 technicians training. There's a bigger class coming in next month. 50. My goal is a million dollars per truck. So $50 million producers. I'm making $50 million worth of revenue in the next 12 months.

Not to say we're going to get that. I'd be happy with 40 because there's some fallout and stuff like that. But ultimately you started a business, hopefully for a lot more than just making money. I hope you want to give back to the community and really give back to your people. Because when you figure that out,

it gets a lot easier and a lot more fun. So profits to freedom. Tell me a little bit about it. your people. Because when you figure that out, it gets a lot easier and a lot more fun. It's true. So profits to freedom. Tell me a little bit about it. I think this is my best work ever. So I have an accounting company. I'm a CPA. I've helped like between two and 10,000 business owners a year build more profitable businesses. And I met up with a guy named Ryan Lee and he helped me put together, I have over 50 classes that I've taught in either big group settings or small group settings. And it's like, I do something with a client one-on-one with five different clients. And then I turn it into a course. That's my role. So I'll do it one-on-one five times. I'll find the commonalities and I turn it into a course. So I took my top six courses that made the biggest difference in,

you know, these tens of thousands of businesses a year, and I put them in the right order. And we're going to go through it in a group setting starting next Tuesday. So September 20th, and it's called Six Weeks to Financial Freedom. The first week, we're going to show you how to double your profits without increasing any expenses. So you're not going to spend any extra money. And we're going to show you how you can double your profits. The next week, we're going to show you how to actually price for profits. We're going to use Jim Leslie's calculator, and we're going to show you where's your breakeven point in your business every day. You need to know that number every day.

Then we're going to save some money. So I have this expense saving hacks that used to be a fan favorite. I gave this talk like a dozen times or two dozen times. And I show you like all the places that you should be saving money in your company, because that will help with your profitability. Then we're going to set some goals and we're going to use those fancy spreadsheets that Billy was talking about. And I'm going to show you how you need to think bigger than $2 million. You need to think like Tommy said, if your goal is 2 million, you need to set it at five and we're going to go bigger. And then we're going to talk about profit first, because that's the secret sauce to stacks of money in your bank account. And at the very end, I call it creating financial freedom, but here's the spoiler.

We're going to make a budget and we're not going to make it scary. And I'm still not going to be sexy, but we're going to try because you're going to have enough confidence. I always say, I have enough confidence for the two of us. You can borrow some of my confidence. You're going to have enough confidence to actually get a budget done. And we're going to show you how to track it. Now it's being done in my membership group because you have to keep doing this stuff. It's not a one and done. You've got to track it once and then come back to it a month from now, come back to it three months from now. And I feel like I've made it not scary. I've made it fun and easy and accessible. And in six weeks, we can see at least like Billy Klein's results, 30% net profit

increase. So that's what it is. Six weeks to financial freedom. And the website's profits to freedom.com. Super simple. I'm going to see Billy here soon here in Dallas. I got a couple of people. And the deal is, is he's killing it. He's making more money than he ever has. But ultimately, what I think that I realize now after meeting, I mean, Ryan Davis is amazing. You know, Pat Clark. I see these businesses and I'm like, the real deal is how do you make the phone ring off the hook? The whole formula that I just explained to you, Megan, is really once you get that formula to where you need it to be, conversion rate, average ticket and booking rate, then you're just pouring fuel in.

It's like putting gas. And sometimes you've got to dump a lot of gas in there. And that's the phone call machines. You've got all your KPIs dialed in. Then you're just pouring gas. And I remember the day that Tommy had that call and he's like okay you're ready to like light it on fire aren't you and i'm like i am it took me a while to build it but when you build it then you just pour gas on and here's what's beautiful is you can pour gas on this thing and you're going to come up with new problems but you can continue to pour gas and then you realize oh my gosh i put enough gas on to renegotiate my gosh, I poured enough gas on to renegotiate with my vendors. I poured enough gas on to renegotiate with the trucks I buy and the uniforms I buy. And now I can buy tools on a discount.

All of a sudden, when you pour enough gas, there's all these whole new horizons of new opportunities. You can hire good people. You can pay them good money. You can take time off to be with your family. When you get to a point, you can breathe. To me, that's what financial freedom means is taking a deep breath. And if you're listening to this and you're feeling stressed or your shoulders are sitting high, like we're talking to you, you can fix this. This is very fixable and it's not going to take you five years or 10 years because Tommy and I have done a lot of the pain and suffering already. And we're here to help. So yeah. So where do I go to sign up Megan? How do I get here?

Profits2Freedom.com and use Tommy's code Tommy50 for 50 bucks off. I'm practically giving it away, but I learned early on in my career. I can't give it away because then nobody treats it with respect. Well, I give a lot of stuff away. And's the problem is when they don't have an invested, financial invested interest, what happens is it goes out one ear and in the other. I mean, the fact is now, I understand now why I pay for what I do for Al Levy. I didn't at the time until I'm like,

he should have probably charged me three times as much. I don't tell him I said that because they'll figure out a way to back charge me. But ultimately, you know what I find is is I think his stuff is like 10 grand, something. I don't know. I paid a thousand times more, so much more, but yet people don't do it. They don't stand up for L.E.V.E. They don't stand up for years. The biggest problem I have right now is they know it's there, but they also know the gym's around the corner. They don't want to work out. They've chosen not to fix it. The people that are listening that know they need this, it's not about the money. It's about an investment. And I don't care.

Literally, to me, I'm not going to lose sleep. I just feel bad because the answers are right there. It's like, look, you know you need to get on a diet because the doctor said it's not healthy. You know you need to do it. This is your business health. And I think there's nobody better. I think you and Ellen just share a stage. And I know you guys have shared a stage because Ellen was like old school. Don't ever tell her I said this, but you're like the new school.

Make it fun. Ellen Rohr is amazing. The way I became friends with her and Tommy is very similar. She was a keynote speaker at a conference. I ran up to her and I was like, you have to come to my class. We are going to be friends. And then we became very good friends. And her book, How Much Should I Charge and Where Did the Money Go,

are books that I read over and over and over again because they are so simple. She makes it stupid simple and yet nobody does it. So we've got to do it. Take action. I can't tell. Do it. Take action. I can't tell you guys enough. Take action. Listen, call Megan up and tell her where you're at right now. Listen, she's a really smart, but she's a very considerate person. She'll help anybody who asks her one way or another.

If you give out my cell phone number, I will I'm not giving out your cell phone number. I literally Thank you for this. ProfitsToFreedom.com Tommy50 out your cell phone. I got it. I literally got it. Go catch a plane. Thank you for this. ProfitsToFreedom.com. Tommy50 is your discount code. And we'll get those calculators in these show notes. Oh, by the way.

Yeah, we'll get them in the show notes. So Gianni, I've pretty much told everybody that I want to get. I'm working on the best books that I've read and getting a discount for the books too. So appreciate you, Megan. Thanks for doing that for us. And great conversation. Literally, I've got a lot of notes of things I want to do. I want to find out a little bit about this bird flow, but I will talk to you later. Let's connect later on this evening. Okay. Bye Tommy. Thank you guys. 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 to do to become a billion dollar company

and uh we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically and people say why do you give your secrets away all the time and i'm like you know the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them so we also create a lot of accountability within this program so check it out it's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club it's cheap it's a monthly payment i'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.