The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Strategically Acquire Businesses to Grow Faster

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Austin Clark is the owner of the Arizona branch of Moxie Pest Control, a pest control and exterminator company that has grown through both acquisitions and organic growth over the years. With his years of experience in the industry, Austin has broadened his expertise in running, expanding, and acquiring businesses. In this episode, we talked about acquisitions, pest control, maintenance, operations, recurring revenue...

Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey guys, we're going to give you a little sneak peek of my man Austin Clark here. He owns an awesome pest control company called Moxie. It's going global, isn't it? It's pretty much, how many states is Moxie's franchise in now? Yeah, Moxie's in about 24 locations today. So in probably about 20 states. So 20 states.

Pest control seems to be an up-and-coming industry. You hear about it all the time. They're getting amazing multiples. He's done acquisitions. He's actually taken over a lot of the operational side of the call center and the bookings. You've done a lot, man. You know what's crazy is I met Austin two buildings ago. So what was that, five, six, seven years ago? I don't know. Probably close to that five six seven years ago i don't know probably close to 10

maybe 10 years ago so he was in the same parking lot of my second building the first the first building was before that and the building before that like all of us was our house but um giving you guys a little sneak peek right now check out this episode you're going to hear about acquisitions operations, everything he does. What I love about what Moxie does and what Pest Control does is they've got a lifetime value of a client that's much longer than most companies. So swimming pools, Pest Control. What's another good one? Landscaping, roofing.

You know, you have a lot of HVAC plumbers, electrical on there. And so it's just, it's the reoccurring, right? It's the maintenance. In your guys' language language you talk about service level agreements and warranties right and and we talk about recurring revenue because it's a maintenance and something that needs to continue to happen every month or every week or every other month or or whatever the you know the frequency is so you if you had to give usually i have the thing is i know austin really well so we didn't have a huge checklist of questions and all the stuff i know him and i knew what i wanted to ask him to help everybody that's listening right now so i guess first of all um

you've really been successful in the door-to-door to to up the business. So, when did you start your franchise? Yeah, so Moxie Pest Control of Arizona, it started in 2011. Moxie has been around since the early 2000, and there's 10 partners. I'm one of 10 partners. Great guys, very competitive guys, very just honored, and it's very cool to work with them and have those relationships. And so we all started in direct sales, knocking on doors, and everyone should do that. Everyone should do that because it's terrible, and you should be doing terrible things because it'll build muscle memory and calluses, and so do that. But it's hard. It's very, very difficult. And so we're all very, like I said, competitive.

And it's been neat to watch this thing grow over the last decade, two decades, into what it is. You know, as far as revenues go, we'll do nationally just shy of $100 million this year. And we'll do a little bit more than that next year. And direct sales is a part of our growth strategy. I think we might talk acquisitions a little bit and some of the more traditional PPC SEO, some of the things that you're really good at, Tommy. But yeah, direct sales, it is a beast. It's not for everybody. Um, we don't necessarily recommend it and that's the business that we're in. We just know our return. And so it's a little more attractive to us having grown up in that industry rather than taking a gamble

on things that we don't quite know the return. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's's a that's a different beast you know i i met the guy i told you about lenny a little bit uh we tested out door-to-door in the garage door industry and we did it for a week and we booked 70 appointments and got our stickers into lots and lots of garage doors so i might be growing the company i'd say 20, 20% to 30% of our growth. SEO is awesome. PPC is awesome. Like, I love every type of marketing. But to own the door-to-door, you're creating customers that never existed.

And I love that. So I called my cousin Michael in Michigan. And I said, hey, I'm looking into more door-to-doors type sales. And he goes, dude, are you kidding me? He goes, I just took chicken off the barbecue. And a guy rolls up in a Segway. He's selling pest control. He had a truck three houses down.

He said, I just finished your next door neighbor's, Russ. And he used the name. And he said, right now I got chicken on the barbecue. We're just getting ready to eat. He goes, can you come back in an hour? And goes the dude sold me 99 right there and did his first spring and i'm like i love that because this stuff still works you know and and you know i don't know uh you know we're not going to get too religious here but obviously um it seems like mormon are door-to-door. I mean, that's what they do.

I mean, these guys will come up to you in a bike, and they're very, very good at bringing up. If you could sell religion, you could sell anything. I mean, that's one of the things they say. Don't talk about religion or politics. And, you know, you guys bring a lot of guys in from different areas a lot of the time. And they're Latter-day Saints usually, not of the time and they're out latter-day saints usually not all the time but they're just i was afraid in scottsdale the first 2012 i moved into my neighborhood and i just decided to go door knocking to invite them over to a party and you should have seen the reaction i mean they

looked at me like i'm a clown they they they barely pick up hello can i help you and i was like i cannot imagine what it's like to be door to door but when you learn the tricks of just hey your neighbor over there we're not here to sell you anything we just wanted to give you an opportunity it's just amazing and that's really the basis of the majority growth of moxie am i right um i wouldn't say majority i think that that's how the company started and it's turned into you know it's it's part of the way that we grow now but there's you know the acquisition the organic growth the there's a lot of other things that are kind of shaken but um yeah i mean since you brought it up tommy the religion we can talk about that for a minute that's that's the other thing that everyone should do even if you're not mormon you should

serve a mormon mission because that is also really hard i i did that between 2003 and 2006 in Lisbon, Portugal. And yeah, like Tommy said, if you can do that, you can do anything. And so direct sales is difficult. Selling religion or sharing religion is difficult. And it's a great way to be able to grow and enter a market. And it really is a neat way to meet your customer at their home, your future customer, right? And so you are bringing value immediately to them, whether it's garage door, past state, whatever, right? We're doing free consultations. We did service your neighbor just next door, the next street over, whatever it is, whatever the truth is, right? And, you know, let me share what we did with with them here's some of the issues in the area you're big on metrics we're big on key performance indicators and metrics and so if you know what problems are and what neighborhoods and what zip

codes it's really easy to be able to go in and say hey the answer really hot here we've had a hundred resurface calls in the last three days from our customers. We'd love to be able to help solve, you know, solve that problem. And so it's just about contributing, right. And, uh, providing value to, to your prospect. You know, years ago, I used to go walk in to, uh, who was the guy that would be coaching and he would be the call center and what was his name uh travis no it was before was it i think it was before travis was it travis uh probably not if it was running the sales crews we've had a lot of sales managers he would walk through the call center i mean when i walked in it was like cube on cube on cube on cube. He had 10 people in a room no bigger than this, but they were all on the phone.

It was Ben. Ben. Yeah. They were all, and I'm telling you, they were all on the phone. They were all smiling. And I remember calling you, and I called Austin, and I said, man, I said, I'm having a hard time getting good CSRs. This had to be eight years ago. And he said, dude, I don't pay what you would think I pay.

I pay a little more than minimum wage but I've got a line of people that want to work for me and it's mostly referrals he goes look I built this referral machine and everybody there was smiling they were energetic they were on the phone and I said I loved it too man because I thought I needed this huge space and we're going to talk about this in a little bit but you really got some key players. Travis is amazing. Travis is, that's another subject too, is we'll go back to marketing, but how important was it to get that key man underneath you, that person that had that drive? Yeah, you know, Travis is, he's one of my best friends. He's my right-hand man. He's our director of operations or COO, if you will. He's your best friend. I mean, I've met him. He's one of my best friends. He's my right-hand man. He's our director of operations or COO, if you will.

He's your best friend. I mean, I've met him. He's a go-getter. He's got drive. He's committed. He sees the vision that you laid out, and he's just, in my opinion, he almost seems like a 50-50 partner. Like Adam is with me in a way even though Adam doesn't have

equity he feels that way I mean how did you yeah um you you know and I I certainly feel that way um about Travis I I feel that he and I are are equals um in in the business we we complement each other really well I know that you know having a great number two is a really big thing for you. It ought to be a really big thing for everyone listening because there's no need to do it all. And you're good at what you're good at and find out what you're good at. And the things that you aren't good at, go find someone else that can compliment you. We don't have to do it all. Most people aren't the full package, but Travis is absolutely positively amazing. Before he and I linked up, he spent 10 years in business banking, you know, undergrad from ASU just up the street, master's degree from ASU.

Incredibly, incredibly smart, 4.13 GPA. I mean, just sharp as a whip. Anything that he doesn't know how to do, he'll find out how to do it. He's just one of those guys. It was probably five or six years ago, I was just so sick and tired of running a crappy business. I'm kind of ashamed to say, but we just didn't know what we were doing. We knew how to grow companies. It's never been a problem of ours to grow them. But, you know, coming from direct sales, if you're good at that, you can make a good amount of money.

Um, and then trading that for ownership, you know, working four months out of the year, making a bunch of money, trading that for working 60, 80, you know, 90, you know, the, you know, the drill Tommy and, and making 40 grand a year. Um, maybe, you know, if, if, if you're lucky, if there's money in the bank to pay, you know, to pay you, I just said, Trav, look, man, I'm going to sell this thing. thing I'm going to dump it and go do something else or we're going to figure out how to run a business and so we did and so we kind of took a break from the growth and we got passionate and just crazy about operations and that's really what we're passionate about today at the time there was probably 15 franchises or locations across the country. And we started to rise to the top of each one of our scoreboards.

You've seen them down at the shop. Profitability, organic growth, whatever it is, right? And me and some of the Moxie partners, we started to put our heads together. And we came up with a model where we could take over or support their operations while these partners scaled their companies. San Diego, Orange County, Riverside, Phoenix, Tucson, and Cincinnati or Columbus, all of that workflow flows through our center just down the road from you. And we will, we call it a contact center, right? It's not just a call center. There's a lot of ways people communicate today. But we will have months where we will have over 150,000 contacts from customers or our service people in the field, whether they're texting us or calling us or emailing us or you name it. And so it's been super cool. What it

does for the group is it drives the cost of the whole operation down. We charge a cut or a management fee, and then we take that and reinvest it into our company here in Phoenix and grow the company in Phoenix. And so we've learned a lot. We didn't know anything about running a call center at all. And so we got to work Googling, right? We went to conventions. We, we just figured it out. And that's what, that's what you've done. That's what your listeners are doing. And so you need to think so big that you get yourselves into problems and issues and challenges and then go about tirelessly and relentlessly solving those problems yeah you uh it's interesting because you hit rock bottom you're ready to sell a lot of people have

to go through the bottom before they can get to the top and i've done it i've always been able to make a lot a lot of money i just never could keep it for a long time i didn't have a good cfo i never knew that profit was important and you've heard me say it uh you know revenues for vanity and everybody you go to service titan you go to these meetups you go to service roundtable any of these events and there's there's so many of them and everybody's like what'd you do last year? How much did you – it's always revenue. Not how much did you take and put away. And I've just really switched – it's a paradigm shift.

And Ross, my CFO, he didn't have to do anything but give me the facts. And when the facts are presented in a way that's honest, truthful, and accurate, instead of a yes man hiding things. It's amazing the decisions I was able to make. Close this. Do this. Fire this guy. Promote this guy.

Get this trainer. Let's get this CSR out of here. And all of a sudden it became fun again. I was reborn almost. And this was just a couple years ago. We were hitting 150 grand a day and i'm like yeah 150 g's then i look in the bank and i'm like how do we owe american express almost a million dollars it got out of control because i growth growth growth so i had to hit the pause button

like you did and really learned how do i maximize how do i start making a good profit i had a good company what's nice about good revenue is you turn a couple dials you could turn that into good profit so people ask me would you rather be 100 million at five percent or or or 50 million to 10 i'd rather be 100 million because i know i could turn some dials really quick but in most cases when you're losing money i don't find that people are making five percent when they get really big i find that a lot of them are losing i watch the profit i watch shark take i watch these movies and these shows and it's like you're losing money you're not making enough money to spend the marketing dollars and the raw materials the cost of goods sold all that stuff uh but i love what you said because you got travis you guys worked together you found the missing pieces You hired for things that you weren't good at.

And that's the number one thing is increase your productivity by filling the voids. You're the visionary. He's the integrator. That's rocket fuel. Gino Wickman. Just amazing. So we'll switch a couple things here. Talk a little bit about door-to-door.

I love when you walk in your office uh the contact center which i love that instead of the call center i had a guy the other day that said he gets more text messages the way he does his marketing on social and they're booking as many sms messages as regular yeah you think about who's coming into the market right it's the millennials oh yeah and this is what i mean we're millennials you know. And so what do we know, right? It's texting. What does the generation before us know? I mean, a phone, we're going to show that to kids here in a minute.

They're going to say, what the heck is that? Yeah. It's all here. Yeah, so you're right. It's a contact center. So you walk in to Austin's place, and that's a good subject, but it's all monitors, big, big monitors with KPIs, and he's always inspecting everything, and they've got a good subject, but it's all monitors, big, big monitors with KPIs. And he's always inspecting everything, and they've got a whole system, and everybody's there very cheery.

But you went from a small place to a big place back to a small place. Let's talk about that because a lot of us, that's the old toothpick thing. We can make toothpaste last a long time if there's a little bit left because we started to get frugal with it. Smaller places are easier to manage. Talk to us about that decision. Yeah, so we, you know, we started our, I think this is the third space or so that we've been in when we started. We started in a small space, didn't need a lot, not a lot of money, not a lot of employees, and we just didn't need it. And as we grew, we saw that we needed more space. And so we made that move. And as we started to really dial things in, we kind of simultaneously started to dial operations in and stumble upon remote working at the same time. And so today we went

from a 2,000 square foot space to a 10,000 square foot space to a 2,000 square foot space again. We just did the lease on the one next door, so it's 4,000 here in a minute. But, you know, we just found that it was just a, we were leasing, it was a sunk cost. It wasn't doing anything for us as far as, you know, an asset long term. And we decided to put that money to better use in different places and kind of infrastructure and technology and better people. But I mean, remote working, we're in the middle of a pandemic right now. We have 65 or so agents in our contact center, 20 of them work down there physically or a third, and then the other two thirds work

remotely. And I'm not talking just answering the phone. I mean, I have key people. Eleni, my admin manager, for example, she lives in Miami, Florida. That is a key. I mean, someone traditionally that you would think would be in the contact center, you know, looking to make sure butts are in seats and that sort of thing. She can do all of that quarterbacking and managing from three different time zones and 2000 miles away, no problem. And so, you know, you think of the gal that does all of my reporting, Leah, Las Vegas, Nevada, not here locally in Phoenix, right? We've got a gal that's one of our leads, works down in Tucson. We've had people that have worked with us from washington hawaii you you name it um and then most of them are here locally but work in gilbert mesa wherever they live right how'd you do that how'd you hire these did they

move after living here or did how do you how do you market for your internal customers you're so um a little bit of both as far as the remote working goes. We had people that were working with us at the physical location already. And when we rolled that program out, they said, hey, is that an opportunity for me? We said, sure. Here's the standards. You've done well on your monthly scorecards, right? You know what? You need to have a good environment. We can help provide the equipment, but you need to have an environment that is good. We don't want dogs or barking or kids or whatever. And so that was part of it.

This last 12 months, as we've advertised on either Zip or Monster or wherever you get employees, we have made that part of the plug. We want them to do 90 days on site. And then once they're up to speed, it's an option for them to work remotely. Now, just because people are unable or don't work remotely, it doesn't mean that they're not a great fit. It just means that they know themselves, they need to come to work. And then when they leave work, they need to leave work. We have A players that are only A players because they're coming to a physical space. So, you know, when you consider remote working, they need to be very focused, extremely disciplined. But it solves a lot of problems.

You know, you think we've kind of done the math and it seems to be about a $2 raise without giving them a $2 raise because of gas and insurance and wear and tear and the stress and anxiousness of commuting and traffic and those kinds of things. And people perform better when they're comfortable. I like it because it can also eliminate an entire level of mid-level managers to say, hey, Tommy, how are your numbers? Hey, Bob, how are your numbers? You can just manage by outcomes. It's just managing by outcomes. Yeah, performance too. Yeah. Yeah. I love that because we're doing a lot more hiring outside of the call center. But you're absolutely right, or contact center.

What I've noticed is the main people I have that are really, really kicking butt, they can work from home. But there's certain people that can handle homeschool. They can handle internet classes i personally like the structure of going in you know what we're doing this expo for service time right now and it's like man i'd really love to be there i need to get out of my zone out of my city out just i need to experience and i've i'd rather come into work through this whole pandemic i'm like i don't care i'm going in i need to be here yeah i can get some stuff done but i'm at home experience. And I'd rather come into work. Through this whole pandemic, I'm like, I don't care. I'm going in. I need to be here. Yeah, I can get some stuff done, but I'm at home.

I'm like, this is my time to be at home. And I get on the phone at home a lot. I mean, this guy knows. I was on the phone all day last night. But it's true. And I think it's really a good start. So you get three months, 90 days they've got to work there before they can earn their way out of there. Yep, yep. And then we want them to be in a position where they can come in at least once a month. You know, we didn't know anything about running an operations center or a contact center. And so we called up GoDaddy, one of the largest contact centers in the world, and arranged a tour there. And they taught us a lot of things. We went to the ICMI or CCW convention.

They're nerd conferences is what my wife calls them. But they're for running contact centers and remote working. And so we went and got that education. We figured a few things out. And we're still making a lot of mistakes. But, you know, kind of dialing things in each day. Mistakes are good. Make the mistakes as fast as possible and change them.

I love mistakes. I am the biggest mistake-er there is. I like what you just said. We found GoDaddy. They gave us a tour. One of the things I always recommend, GoDaddy's in Phoenix, but I recommend getting out of your comfort zone. Visit the places.

If you don't have a very, very engraved vision, I mean, it's like you can see it. You can smell it. You know exactly how it looks. Go find the biggest and best of what that is. Get out of your comfort zone and bring a pad of paper and ask questions. And just say, well, and here's the big secret. Peel back that onion. Say, well, what makes you say that, Austin?

And then when they say that, say, oh, my gosh, really? Well, why is that? And as you start peeling it back back all of a sudden you get to the root and you're like wow now that all and then it brings it 360 you know what i mean and a lot of times i wouldn't be where i am unless i really got obsessed with hvac do i want to do hvac no because every time dick and harry does hvac and you can make a lot of money doing HVAC. But what if you took the principles from one of the top home service industries in the world and applied those to other industries? Bingo. What if you took Moxie's and pest control, the door knocking, and applied it to garage doors? What if you took the SEO skills of locksmiths and

applied that to chimneys? That's why i'm doing the facebook page to get everybody under one umbrella to share what's working in an industry because what it's all about i met a guy that does uh copiers and he said i took all my people in the 80s on this trip he goes it was all inclusive he goes so when i went to cancun i was so impressed all the alcohol all the food they gave us these nice things when we showed up off the airport. He goes, but I said, why am I selling copy machines? Why not just rent it out,

make it all inclusive, service it and have per copies? He's a zillionaire. Because he took something from the travel community and applied it to printers. So when we get you on the podcast, when we get these other people on the podcast they're going yeah he's pest control i have nothing to do with pest control do

you know how much information these people that are listening these amazing business owners can grab from you saying i i've got big then i got small because i realized i can manage it a lot better when people are closer to one another well i've got i've got windows in, not this room, but it's important that you know what's going on. Everybody wants an office so they could screw off. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, you know, I think what you said there, Tommy, is super important, right? I mean, it's past garage, whatever, right?

It's business principles. And every business deals with employees, right? Strategy, cash or lack of cash and all of those sorts of things. And so I think the listeners might be shocked to find that if they ask, they'll get answers to those questions. You know, Tom's been a great buddy for a decade and the ways that he's contributed to me in just if I was stuck somewhere. Hey, Tom, what do you think about this, right? And so I think that it's important that you surround yourself with people that are playing big, that are struggling, that are making a lot of mistakes like Tommy, like myself. No one's

got it figured out. And I think that people would be shocked to find how interested others are in helping contribute to you and your business. I'm always calling people up and bothering people. Hey, I want to have lunch with you. I want to meet you. I want to fly down. I want to, and I'm just kind of annoying about it. And guess what? They say yes, and you meet with them and they share something with you that will add a half a million dollars or a million and a half dollars. And so that's kind of the neat thing about having a community and having a sounding board and having great relationships with people like Tommy or whoever it might be. And don't be afraid to go make those calls and make those relationships. I, you know, for the first decade of running this company,

I think that's one of my biggest regrets is it was just the 90-hour weeks and just, you know, getting the job done that I wished I had made more friends in my industry along the way. So we're correcting that. We're doing that now. And I would be, you know, one of the biggest, four or five years ago, one of the biggest players in Arizona in the pest space called the number that I Googled, the name of the company, found the contact number, called. I said, hey, I want to talk to this person. It was just a CSR with a couple hundred people in their call center, right? And they said, yeah, one moment, two minutes later, the owner of this large company was on the phone and said, hey, what can I do for you? We hooked up, had lunch, and I mean, just such a neat thing. There's so

many people that are ready and willing to contribute to you, whatever your space may be, but don't limit the people that you have contact with to just your space. Go talk to the best in the garage door space, if that's not your space, or HVAC, or whatever it is, and you'll learn things. You know, what's funny is, this is years and years ago, but I saw you at a gas station. We're outside a quick trip. And you say, you just kind of smiled and I said, what? And you said, dude, I started doing email marketing. And I picked up, I think you said you emailed 6,000 people and you just were ear to ear. And you said, I just picked up a lot of past clients. Just this stupid easy thing i should have done years ago

and it works and i had no idea because we're sometimes so busy chasing new clients we forget about the existing ones we don't create that relationship someone asked me yesterday uh or this week actually they said how often do you call your clients up after three months and say how's the garage door working i'm'm like, that's a good idea. I'm going to write that down. Tommy just made a million bucks because of that this year, if you listen. It's the question. And if you listen, right, you're like, and what people say, no, that won't work for my industry.

No, no, no, that's not for me. You know, Joe Polish, have you ever heard of the name Joe Polish? He's a Phoenix local. He started a, what is it, rug carpet cleaning company. And he is, it's $25,000 a year to join his 25K. It's a success group. It's a marketing group. And I'm going to probably end up joining it just about the people you meet there.

But he's become a master networker. Like going out and knowing all these people. I mean, a lot of my managers called me yesterday. They're like, dude, they're like, all these people know you. I'm like, they've been on my podcast. I'm like, and what's cool is I can go visit them. I can call them. We could go to lunch.

We could hang out for three days and they'd love it and we'd love it. And these guys are excited to show us their secrets that they built because I'm an open book. Come see what we've done. Actually, sometimes I toot about it just because no one else toots about it. Might as well get some self-gratification out of it. But, you know, it's just fun. When I saw you figured out the email blast, that was awesome. So here's a really cool topic because I've become obsessed with how growth happens.

And I've got my own theory on acquisitions. The guy yesterday I talked to said, I really would want to buy the workers. That's what I want. I said, I'm buying the phone calls. The reason I buy a company is because I'm literally, I make amazing people here. We recruit them, we we train them we retain them but a lot of people need the workers so they buy a company but i really want their customer list i want their website i want everything to do with marketing and calls and you've done a lot of that

well you you started this started to get the mindset that acquisitions is the way to go um tell me a little bit about your theory on acquisitions and how you're going about it. Yeah, for sure. I think that acquisitions can definitely be part of any company's growth plan. I'm not one to put all your eggs in one basket. Don't put them all in door-to-door,

all in acquisitions, all in. I think that you need to diversify, right? And I think those different ways to improve the top line can be better at some times than others. And so you want to have a couple dozen of them going. But we kind of got into it, I guess it starts before then. I don't think that we would have been in a place or prepared to do acquisitions had we not had the experience of mastering operations, right? No no one I don't think should sell their company to someone that doesn't have strong marketing and

strong brand great reputation you know you look at your company online it's incredible you look at our company online it's absolutely amazing right and so I think that that gave us a lot of confidence and being able to say hey I think that we could do this and integrate these companies into ours. The first one we did was about two years ago. It was totally by accident. We received an anonymous email into our general email database just saying, hey, I have a pest control company for sale. Are you interested?

I get one of those a week. And they're usually not what you think they are it's some sort of marketing whatever but this one I just so happened to reply to it and we got together and inside of 90 days we we did a deal and so we did our first acquisition on March 1st of 2019 and I also too don't think that we would have been able to pull these off had we not done they're certainly not acquisitions but how we not pulled the two markets in california into what we're doing that gave us a lot of experience and then we did it with tucson and then we did it with san diego and then we did it with columbus and cincinnati and so that gave us a lot of experience and databases, integration, and it just gave us a lot of confidence too.

And so we'll probably, as far as revenue, we'll double the amount of revenue that we did in acquisitions this year as opposed to last year, and we'll probably double it again next year. And so you know what they say about acquisitions, once you've done one acquisition, you've done one acquisition. And so they're all different. And I think that the key is to really find out the goals of the owner, operator, or whoever that you're looking to purchase. You know, years ago, I used to think that people sold companies because they were either quitters or they were giving up or whatever. And that's not the case.

People want to retire. People have major health issues. They have something very serious happen in their family, perhaps, that causes them to do that. Maybe they're in financial trouble, right? Or they just want – they've worked. They got it to the peak they could get it to. They want to cash out. Yeah.

They want a job again. Yeah. A job of 9 to 5. They want a job again. And so we've had experience in doing a handful of them now and no acquisition has been the same because the goals of that owner have been the same. And we've had opportunities come to the table that we've said no to because we didn't think we could help them fulfill their goals. Right. And so if it's not a win for both parties,

then it's not a win. You know what I mean? And so there's a variety of ways that you can set those up. You can pay for them all up cash if you want to. I think that's a bad idea. You can do earnouts. You can bring them on as employees. There's just a variety of different ways. But I think if you sought to understand the goals of that owner-operator, you could come up with something creative and together

come up with something that would be better than both of you could have imagined if you were just looking at it from your lens and that person were looking at it from theirs. And so they're fun. Those are the things that I like spending some time doing right now. You know, I talked to you before the podcast and I think yesterday was all the stars started to align for me because all of a sudden this tax structure i talked about which i'm not going to go into detail right now but if it works out correctly i'm not talking about acquiring one or two or three business i'm talking about a dozen a month and people say how is that possible well you got the training center i could handle up to 70 people a month and i'm not if i bought out 10 person companies i could easily scale this up to past 100 but the one thing is it needs to be sexy it needs to be real and it needs to be better

for them so how do you build something that's amazing for them well everybody gets into business at the root of the problem is to make a living and make money now what does money do it gives How do you build something that's amazing for them? Everybody gets into business. At the root of the problem is to make a living and make money. What does money do? It gives you freedom, better family time, better fun things to do with the family, comfort. I think a lot of times people really want... I read this in a book. I'm not the expert of relationships.

Women want comfort. They want to know that there is a place they'd rather everybody I've hired says I'd rather take a salary because my wife did commission because it's not stable, even though I can make three times as much. And I'm like, dude, you don't want to make that. You don't want fifteen dollars an hour like but people will stay at a six hundred dollar a week job when they can make two thousand every single week because they need stability and they need that safety the safety consistency and it's crazy to me and a lot of times people want to sell but what's crazy about it is these people that you know brokers are liars they they say you get a million dollars but you can't.

I've had a lot of people call me up. I'm telling you, Austin, and they say, I've got a book of business. I've done five jobs a day for 300 days for the last 20 years. You are the business. I can't make anything off of those old clients. You don't have anything. You don't have a good website. You don't have any good trucks.

You've got a lot of old crappy inventory. And it's inventory and it's hard because it's hard to lie to people and say wow this is something really special you worked your butt off and your blood sweat and tears went into this but there's nothing i could give you for this because you've paid yourself ninety thousand dollars a year to replace you it's going to cost ninety thousand dollars i don't want to shatter people's dreams and they look at me and they think I'm a prick. And I'm really a lot more gentle than that.

I'm just like, I'm sorry. This probably isn't a good fit. I mean, unless you got something that's creating a lot of good phone calls of not, you know, warranty work. Where are you getting customers? Well, relationships. When you leave those relationships,

kind of go with you. So it's tough. I mean, I'm sure you've ran into ones that you're just like, dude, you're the owner-operator. You're doing all the stuff. But if you could just buy the contracts, it makes sense for you too. Yeah, and it would make sense for you and it would make sense for anyone listening. I think that the value is in the reoccurring revenue, the warranties in your space, the service-level agreements. We've done deals where we've just bought the purchase or the customer list rather. And that's

what I would prefer to do. We've done others where we've done taken over, you know, purchase the vehicles and, you know, different things like that. But, you know, the one-off stuff, there's not a lot of value, at least in my humble opinion, to me in in that, you know, the emergency work, like those are one-off, the bees or the bed bugs, and you can make a bunch of money doing those kinds of things, but we want the reoccurring revenue. It really helps you get a better multiple. Yeah, multiple valuation.

So, like, I'm looking at companies, and the first thing I do is I examine their expenses. I don't look necessarily at the opportunities first. First I say you got a huge warehouse. You're not buying right. You know, I see all these expenses. You've got a guy that worked for you for 30 years that's still just a warehouse guy that's making $110,000 because you moved him up, which he deserves something. When you sell, you should give him something because he built your business but that position not me but it's a 40 000 position so one of the things i ask people is you got 90 days to sell and i had a i had a list if i got to

sell in 90 days i gotta get rid of these three people because they've been baggage i've got to get rid of my dead inventory i've got to cut this out i've got to get new ipads i've got to get rid of my dead inventory i've got to cut this out i've got to get new ipads i've got to get the rest of the trucks wrapped i've got to get a better financial controller and the you know why not do that stuff today think of that you were selling your company and and but i find so many holes in the expenses you said you got back down to 2 000 square feet you're doubling again but you went from 10 000 to 2 000000 square feet, you're doubling again. But you went from 10,000 to 2,000, not a 4,000 because you learned your lesson. And I find out all these expenses and I'm like, I can look at a balance sheet or an income statement now.

And it's fun because I take a highlighter. I'm like, save, save, save, save, save. I got you up to 10%. Then your booking rate. Boom. I'll add 10% there. Double the average ticket. Self-service agreements.

I got you up to 18%. Now the question is, do you want to take this ride with me? Oh, well, I can't let that go, da-da-da-da-da. You're in business. You've got an obligation to every single employee to be profitable and to make sure you've got a future. But you're loyal to these three people that are losing you money? What's wrong with you? Yeah, there's a lot of things wrong with that.

And, you know, you can tell you're excited about that. But, you know, one of the things that I think society, business in particular, doesn't talk enough about is money. I grew up poorer than dirt. I wanted to change the way that I grew up at all. I remember my brother and I, when we were 10 and 8, we used to fight. We had bunk beds, and my parents would keep the house to 100 degrees because that's what we could afford, you know what I mean? And we would fight over the fan. We would have it click all the way up, and then one click down, and we would fight between those clicks because we went anyway. And so we, and I said, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. And when I'm old enough to be

able to figure this out, I'm going to figure it out. But money is important and business owners and people should not shy away from talking about it. You need to tell employees the truth about debt, about expenses, about all of those kinds of things, because it's not going to solve itself by sweeping it under the rug or not talking about it. Back to the valuation though, I had a really, I think people may appreciate this interesting call. Sometimes we'll have brokerages or private equity groups or whatever interested in purchasing Boxy, which is not in the plans right now. But I take those calls because I want to, and I don't waste their time. I let them know, hey, we're not doing this, but- Future. Hey, if you're a good partner. Who knows, right? I take those those calls i've talked to 50 of

them yep a mentor of mine he said you know what yes always means yes and no always means maybe and so there you go right just keep after it but i said hey you know it's not in the cards for us right now but i'd love to learn from you how you evaluate companies why um and he said a lot of the same things that you said he said um yeah you'll want to cut expenses. You'll want to raise prices. You'll want to get people in warranty type services and service level agreements. You'll want to upsell, cross sell these sorts of things. And he said, oh yeah. And by the way, Austin, all of those same things that will make you more money one day, if you choose to sell, are the things that will make you more money right now. If you're going to dump that, it's just like you said, in 90 days, if I'm going to sell in 90 days, why didn't you do that a year

ago, three years ago, 10 years ago? You know what I mean? They're difficult decisions, but make them and your company will be better off for it. You'll be better off for it. You owe it to your customers. You owe it to your employees. Why are you running a crappy company when you're capable of doing better than that right and responsible companies are extremely profitable companies because they'll then take those profits and reinvest it in better people space more technology marketing to expand your reach of accomplishing whatever your purpose is right ours is to improve the quality of life for our customers team and community and so the way that i do that is try to spin off as much cash as we possibly can to reinvest it in them. They have MacBooks that they

use. We don't use crappy computers. Why is that? Do I want to spend four times the amount of money on a computer when another one could do the job? Yes, because I don't want to have our CSR sitting there while our thing's frozen, waiting and sounding dumb, talking to a customer. We want them to be serviced immediately, right now. And time is money. And so we take those profits and reinvest just like you do into better people, better technology, better processes, better everything, right? So that we can compete and so that we can contribute to our communities and provide value to our customers and teammates. I love that. I bought all these used trucks, and I decided it's so much better to buy new iPads. We've got a company taking over the iPads.

I've got a company professionally outfitting the trucks now. Like, I learned what I do well as garage doors, and I'm becoming a master. And one of the things is when I go present myself, my company, or someone else presents my company, one of our upper managers, I want to say, I think about it. We beat you. We charge more than you. We offer a better warranty than you. We've got better parts. We buy our guys better tools. Our hiring process is better. Our vehicles are better. Our brand awareness is better. One thing you said earlier, there's 10 guys and they're all really really competitive that

is awesome and i'm competitive i don't like to lose at anything like if if you beat me at anything i want to say how do i up that stand how do i compete and it's important to be competitive but i don't i'm not competitive anymore with any other garage or company because i can't they're not their expectations are not high enough i The only person I can compete with now is my own company and continue to better our best because there's no one else left. I look out there and I say,

what's your profit? They're like 18%. I asked my CFO. I literally called him up on Monday and I said, I want you to take every balance sheet, every income statement, every P&L. I want you to research said, I want you to take every balance sheet, every income statement, every P&L.

I want you to research it. I want you to identify how to get to 30%. What does our marketing percentage need to be at? What is our cost of goods sold? What is our rent? How much air conditioning can we afford? I want to know for shits and giggles how to hit 30%. And then I want every single person at the company to understand how to hit that number. If we don't hit that number, I'm not going to be upset. But I want to show everybody what needs to happen to hit that number. There's income and there's savings of operations.

So it's hard to do both. And I love this stuff because I'm curious, what did he tell you, that guy? This is going back a minute, but what did he tell you about valuation? Because unfortunately, a lot of the people listening don't understand how their company should be valued. And I'd love to hear your take on valuations. Because I've got it down to a science now, but it's different depending on the industry and you've got repeat customers and contracts.

Yeah, for sure. You know, I can speak for, well, I'll tell you what this gentleman said. And it went back to reoccurring revenue. This was a bigger private equity group. And so they were looking at size. They're not looking to do any acquisitions under $10 million. And so if you are looking to get your company evaluated and evaluated, right, you'll just want to consider your goals and you'll want to find different brokers that could possibly help you with that. Whether you're selling or not, it would be good to understand how you can improve the value of your company.

And so what's important to me, higher ticket prices right it's valuable to me to look at companies that don't provide all of the services that we provide because then we can immediately start to provide more value and more service segments to that existing customer base we we like taking employees on right the employees are the face of the company. And so we want to bring them on. That's usually a good thing because if they work at a million dollar company and it's a 10 person shop, they're,

they're coming on to a much larger company. And so they usually get a raise. They usually get a signing bonus. They usually, not usually, they get healthcare, right? That we contribute to. And so for the employees, I think that it's an easy thing to be able to see, wow, and then they're a part of a much larger. They go into something bigger and better. Oh yeah, and then it just raises their sights. You know, they've been doing the thing, doing the thing, doing the thing. There are eight

players in a C player company. Yeah, exactly. And you raise them up to an A player company. And maybe they start with us as a C player or a B player, but it quickly, it's really neat to see the ones that are hungry, right? Humble and hungry. They get it and they see that there's growth. And I tell our people all the time, I say, look, my number one problem right now, my number one problem right now is that we don't have enough capable people to keep up with the work that we're generating. And so bring me your capable friends. Bring me your capable family members, please. We did this in a quarterly meeting two months ago, and we got 25 referrals and hired about half of them.

And it was, yeah, well, it was incredible, right? And they were compensated, and their friends were. And A, players aren't referring. C, they aren't. Referrals, baby. You know, HH, humble and hungry, I thought it stood for happy hour. That too. So I just interviewed a guy for my questions for my new hiring process,

which I've got to bring you back in here. It's freaking crazy. But he's already, he's already got over 15 people to come work for us. How about that? And mostly all technicians. And I'm talking some of these, the guy had his first day yesterday. I think he did six grand on his first day. And you're not upset about that, right? Oh, well, no, I handed him a book in front of the whole, I mean, he sold a lot of doors, but he's learning how to sell doors. And I said, this book, I read a bunch of the book, and I said, this is for you.

I gifted him with a book, not a gift card, but go study this book, because if you study this book, it's only going to make you sharper. You're going to have bad days, but the one thing I want you to think in your mind, the mindset, is nobody, nobody on this earth could have done better than I did. It doesn't matter how good your ticket was. It doesn't matter conversion rate. You earned that customer's business. You did whatever it took. And I gave a lot of examples is when you fight and you're the only fighter fighting for their business. They can see that and they know it and they want to work with you. And it's so important. I met this guy the other day. I'm just going to switch because

we'll close it up here soon. But he wrote the book, The Private Equity Playbook. He's going to be coming on the podcast. And what I've learned about myself is I'm a six out of 10 CEO. I'm obsessed with operations. I need at least two more years under my belt before I can move to his level. He manages over 2,000 technicians. Never once been in a meeting with a technician. They hired him. The private equity company hired him to 10 times the company. So you know what he's doing all day long? He talks to investors, potential acquisitions. And the dude is like, it's amazing when you learn there's another realm of business out there. You see most people listening, a lot of people, they're like me.

They want a job. It's a job. They're a technician and they think they could have a business. The next level is to become a better leader, build a better culture, get good at operations. There's a level way above there that hopefully the management can handle the day-to-day and you're working on because when i buy a company at three times and i'm worth 12 times that because i'm a platform company i created four times of what i just bought so i spent 300 000 i get 1.2 million valuation i created 900 000 out of nothing and that's what's so nice and the people who understand this concept are dangerous dangerous in a good way they can create money and it's it's almost like it's not fair and i've always said it doesn't it doesn't make sense to

me how's that fair but i don't want to invest in something that's been around a long time that's guaranteed to make it through recessions and as we make it through covid and our companies do well that's that's just another notch under our belt to make us more viable. And there's people that have hit rock bottom, and that helps you become better. But the real value is, for me, is you're at a multiple of how much profit you make. Because the profitability in a year, for especially the last 12 months of rolling 12, is if I said you made $500,000, most companies, I'm not going to pay more than three or four years to break even. Even if I find a bunch of ways, and people have sat at this very table and said to me yeah but you're going to fix all that so you want me to pay you for what i'm going to fix

you want to be i'll tell you what i will do is i'll hire you as an employee and you can make commissions and some type of performance pay on the way we fix it but i can't fix you my price cannot be as i fix you because i have the ability to do that and we're one of very few companies in this industry that can do that and your companies are going to go to a better place so what's your philosophy on that when you're looking at somebody and they come up with a number and you you've had a lot of low hanging fruit i'm sure they're just people just like hey you're good and until you start getting into a few companies a a quarter um and you've gotten into it what for the last year and a half yeah last year and a half two years and you know i think that uh you know it just uh again it's

it's back to their goals and just shooting straight with them right out of the gates right and if you're not the buyer for them then you're not the buyer for them, then you're not the buyer for them, right? People are looking to sell for a reason. If their company was squeaky clean and running like your operation, they're not looking to sell because they're doing fine. You know what I mean? And so you are usually purchasing distressed or broken assets. Sometimes.

Sometimes. Not that company buying $10 million companies. See, that's all, it's recognizing your avatar. See, you're buying that kind of company. See, what I'd love to do, this is an idea right now, spontaneous, no plan, this has just popped in my head. But I'd love to look at a company that's not selling. And I'd love to go to them and sign a n-disclosure agreement and say, I know you.

I've studied you. You like to hunt with a bow and arrow. I've studied your social media. I got a gift for you. Let me just, if you play ball with me, I want to design a picture for you that can not only give you a better life, but I want to know what you want out of life first. But imagine if you could create a scenario that gives them a bunch of cash,

gives them a bunch of yearly fee, and gives them a bigger, bigger structure to make way more money, and that's what Jim Abrams did. And that's how he rolled up hundreds of millionaires at one time. They go from city to city to city, and the fact that it's been done before

is the fact that I know it could be redone and done again. So I'm just thinking, how could I, without you wanting to sell, sell give me access let me paint a picture for you and if you like what you see we can talk but it's hard to get those numbers so it's kind of nice because you could get a really good company but when you're really good when you're really really good what makes it really really what makes a good company a great company? Well, unfortunately, it's the law of numbers that they don't have the buying power and they can't have the buying power unless they scale throughout the United States.

So that's one thing, better buying power. So I'm paying less for cost of goods sold. Number two is you've got CSR, the person that handles your phone calls. If there's more calls in that hour, there's less downtime. You're getting more output out of them. So the more calls per hour, you don't need as many employees because you're covered. So I feel bad for companies that have two CSRs. They can't get to the extra calls and it doesn't make sense for that company to bring on a third CSR because maybe you'll call them back. But when you've got a big company you're maximizing so we look at how much production are

we getting out of each hour how long are they on the phone what's their booking rate these kpis the law of numbers i really don't know how there's a david and goliath right i don't know how david could win against a company like us. I just don't know. There's no way David, I'm going to use just David and Galat, there's no way David could start a door-to-door team. They just can't. There's no way they could have the buying power we have. There's no way they could afford the technology we can afford.

There's no way I spent, these guys are trying to mess with us, I just spent $60,000 last month on an attorney. I will spend $2 million because nobody will beat us in court in court in fact they'll like to settle out of court because i've got more money to spend with than them it's to david and goliath and i still unless you know how to throw a slingshot or something and hurt that guy it's tough i mean how does a small guy come but yet again it happens all the time and i think there's a change in um like for example this is for example if i had a son but he was growing up with a golden spoon i didn't have any money at all when you bring up air conditioning the fan i always talk

yeah cold air conditioning because i love cold ac uh because we can afford to keep it cold in here in the summers but if i had a son that didn't grow up with the same uh wants and maybe they don't need to but i'm definitely hungry and you know when it changes you just watch companies fall apart slowly diminish and dissolve and another that hungry person rises to the top but i think there's a change of hands when you pass it on and that's why you watch great companies fall apart over time is because the leadership doesn't get passed down and that's there's a good book called built to last it talks a lot about jack welch but anyway we've talked a lot about a lot of stuff i'm gonna let you close us out here in a minute you've read a lot of books we've always talked

about books what are a few books that you'd recommend to the audience that that have helped change your life yeah um i think that probably the for me the most well-rounded um business book i've ever read is uh scaling up by verne harnish and uh it is it's the business bible it's important read it a dozen times read it read it read it, read it, read it, read it. We've been able to exchange with Vern. He's incredible, and he's consulted and just provided value to so many firms and companies here in the Valley, nationally, globally. It's a big brand. Sign up and go to their summits.

Hire one of their coaches. Figure out those business principles. It will change everything for you. So scaling up is definitely on the list when it comes to overall business. Seven Habits, it's a great one, right? Stephen R. Covey, that one comes up a lot. Just read Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I had never read that one. Oh yeah, we did that in our book club. Yeah, yeah. Here at work. I thought that was pretty cool. That was good.

So that book is really important because it explains. We tend to focus on our own groups rather than the whole holistically. And really what it's all about is how does the company do better? All of us would say, I want my department to get this. And we become greedy. You should be looking after the whole. And I think that was really cool. It was a good book.

And then probably lastly, Michael E. Gerber's E-Myth Revisited. E-Myth is great. That's a little more fluffy story, right? Read that one too. But the nuts and bolts, some of the best answers, they're just not really that sexy. But I think what will separate good companies from great companies, from incredible companies, is the process, right? Is documentation, documentation, documentation. Manuals, checklists, etc.

Manuals, the McDonald's. Yeah, you want to have your customers and your prospects have the exact same experience every single time. You want them to become addicted to that routine and getting serviced fast. And you can only do that. You know, you take a hundred service people or 200 or 300 service people or a hundred CSRs and to have them just go willy nilly and provide the best customer service they know how, it just doesn't cut it. You have to have systems and processes for how to answer a phone call, end the phone call phone call qualify leads show up to an appointment i mean it has to be written down and inspect what you expect checks and balances yep yeah and you're taking that to another level with the videos right and this is what you look like this is how your

uniform needs to be this is how you approach the door this is how you do this install and you got to beat it and beat it and beat it again. Adam used to say to me, you say the same stuff every time just differently. Why don't we talk about something new? I'm like, because, do you realize all the people, all I need is one person this week to get the aha. If one person, every meeting gets the aha, we're doing great. Yep, that two

minute speech paid for itself. You know what I mean? I'm telling you and I'm like, look, this, and I try to wave the carrot nine out of ten times and every every once in a while I'll pull out the stick, and I don't like to do that, but I'm like, guys, here's what's so great. There's one of two things that are going to happen very soon. Either you're going to get the opportunity to become an installer versus the technician because you're not as great with people as we thought, or I'm going to give you the best opportunity in the world to go work for my competitor. Because you can't follow direction. It's very, very simple.

And the reason we've got a routine is because we want an expected outcome. We want you to stay safe. We want you to drive safe. We want customers to become raving fans. And you guys are important. The one thing I'd say over the COVID that has done to me is I love the staff.

We're making lots and lots of money. And I can buy nice things and cater in and get car washes and buy new iPads and buy games like Duck the Trainer where you throw the softball and they fall it. We're having so much fun here. We went to this hidden room thing. We got the limo bus.

We're taking the guys out. You know, Giuseppe will make us something Italian for dinner. And we just do the most. It's fun because it is like a family. And we are like the parents sometimes as owners. And we're like, good job. You know, and it feels good. So you got some amazing books scaling up.

It's awesome. How does somebody want to, if they want to reach out to you, Austin, it's Austin Clark. He's a busy guy, but he makes time for people uh how would somebody go about reaching out is it linkedin is it facebook is it email what's the best sources to get ahold of you yeah call or text me or email me uh my cell phone number is 480-254-9730 would love to talk to you love to exchange with you. And then you can email me at aclark, A-C-L-A-R-K, at moxiepestcontrol.com, M-O-X-I-E, pestcontrol.com. And like Tom, we're an open book.

Come down and visit us. Come down and see us. Love to learn about the big things that you're up to and see if there's ways that we could contribute to you in any way. You know, maybe what we could talk about is, this is crazy, but I've got A1 here. I've got my vehicle wrap company down the street. I've got the, which I'm not really involved in,

but the Christmas light business is right next to your pest control company. It's right next to my buddies, Sean with the it's called 4 Energy, but he does energy savings, solar, stuff like that. And it's all within two miles, so if we do want to get a group of people,

what I like about getting people here is everybody's got to be on their toes. We've got to make sure it's clean. We've got to be top line, and I enjoy it. It's a good thing. It actually sharpens. I like constructive criticism. I like people to say, hey, that's a good thing it actually sharpens i like constructive criticism i like people say hey that's all good and danny i'm glad you're impressed tell me the bad stuff one day a guy said you guys all have different colored shirts now we don't one day

you know there's all kinds of stuff i've learned by just look tell me what we could do better and it really does and when when you hear you know those people who walk through they were really excited about this but you know what they said? Those watermarks, they just look unattractive in the tiles in the ceiling. Like, why don't we get those fixed? And they're walking in from a brand new perspective. They're not in the bubble. Yep.

And so have people come out to your shop. Say, what can I do better? Have qualified people. Al Levy ripped me a new one when he walked through. He said, I could have stole your whole warehouse with your own forklift. You wouldn't know about it. What I'd like to do to end Austin, and hey, by the way, I really appreciate

you coming on, brother. Yeah, thank you. You give the audience something. It could be about acquisitions. It could be about being a better leader. It could be about culture. It could be about giving back to the community. Anything that you want to end with that's motivational, that gives some gold nuggets of what they could do today to the community. Anything that you want to end with that's motivational, that gives some gold nuggets of what they can do today to get started.

Think about when you were a smaller company, when you needed more direction. Try to speak to their hearts and souls for a little bit. I'll give you a few minutes to end it for us. For sure. I think I'll go with the H&H, not the happy hour, but the humble and hungry.

The problem with knowing everything is, is, you know, everything, and then you're stopped, your progress, your progression is, is stopped. And so I think that it's important to be humble and to be hungry, develop confidence in yourself. How do you do that? The more confidence you have in yourself and feel good about you and your employees feel about what they're doing, you're going to do great things. And so if you can be humble and hungry, always a student, always a student, you've always got to be learning. And then the people that you're working with make their dreams come true. Because if you'll do that, there is not anything that they won't do for you. They'll run through walls. You can buy someone's back, but you can't buy their brain and their heart.

And you want the best parts of them coming to work every single day. You can go and hire anyone you want for $12, $15, $20 an hour. But you want the most capable parts of them coming to work. Their brain, their spirit, their heart. parts of them coming to work, their brain, their spirit, their heart. You want them to be in this business with you. So humble and hungry, contribute to all of those that you possibly can to be nice. Um, and, uh, you'll probably be all right. Hey, I want to say one more thing. And I always do this, but, um, there's a study I just read the Russia put it together. together um it's an old study but there was four studies abcd they worked with athletes the the a a group they did a hundred

percent focus on physical you know whether that's uh if you're basketball they focused on that the next group they did 75 physical 25 mental the next group they did 50 50 The next group they did 75% physical, 25% mental. The next group they did 50-50. The next one they did 25% physical, 75% mental. Which group do you think did the best and won the most? The one where it was split. It was the mental.

It's the psyche. That's true, muscle memory. A lot of us just need it's up in here we need. We need to be able to be more confident with ourselves. We need to be able to make eye contact. I just was doing videos with Giuseppe before you came in. And some of the people have a hard time looking into the camera.

And I remember my first time. It's like the first time public speaking. And I still get a little jittery, never in front of the camera now. Now I'm like, but in front of a lot of people, sometimes you get in front of a couple thousand people. And you're like. I remember one day I had every employee come out. And it was like crap. It was nuts.

But cool, man. Thank you very much. It was so much fun. Nice job. Yeah. You too, brother. Anyway, thanks, guys. Hey, guys.

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