The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Transform A 28-Man Operation Into An 8-Figure Business

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Adam Cronenberg has had over a decade’s worth of professional experience in various industries, with a specific focus on relationship management, process optimization, and negotiation. As A1 Garage Door Service’s COO, he has played a critical role in shaping the business’s success and growing it from the ground up. In this episode, we talked about consultative selling, relationship management, prospect contract negotiation, closing the deal...

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 my next guest, Adam Cronenberg. He's an amazing guy. He's a great friend and he's my number two guy. I can tell you this, he's an amazing person and you're definitely going to want to hear this one. He's consultative at selling, relationship management, prospect, contract negotiation, closing the deal. He works as A1 Garage Service as a COO. He used to work at U.S. Airways, the international pricing analyst, strategic forecast analyst, and the corporate sales manager. And then he worked for Unishippers, a shipping consultant.

12 years of professional experience in various industries with focus and relationship management negotiation, process optimization, and done it all. He went to Arizona State University and he has helped grow A1 from 28-man shop to well over 200 employees. And he's once again, my great friend. Welcome, Adam Cronenberg. Adam, pleasure to have you on today. Thanks. We've been talking about doing this for years and now it seems like a good time. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what's going on right now in the economy with this Lyris, but most of all, what we're doing as a company to grow in general. So Adam handles all the operations. He handles everything with our CRM updates and really oversees pretty much every

other role. I focus on marketing and sales, and he focuses on pretty much everything else. So Adam started with me in 2015, and we were small. We were about 30 people back then. And pretty much he was very essential for our growth. I needed, you know, we talk about the visionary, the integrator. He's my integrator. Why don't you introduce yourself, Adam? Tell everybody where you came from and a little bit about your career before and what you've seen the company grow to till now. Then we'll get into kind of what's going on. Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I'll say that. Never in a million years thought I'd work for a garage door company or in the home service business. My background, I have a finance degree

from Arizona State University. Out of college, I had a couple of different jobs. First one was as a freight broker, was a sales position. Went around and sold freight solutions to kind of small to medium sized companies. Didn't really love that, wanted to get into something I had a little bit more passion about. So went to go work for US Airways at the time. Had a friend that understood my love and passion for travel and thought it'd be a good fit. Spent almost eight years at the airline. Had a couple of different roles there. Started off as a pricing analyst, pricing the flights from the U.S. to Europe and the

Caribbean, and then moved into a corporate sales role. Was doing a ton of traveling all up and down the West Coast, visiting the biggest Fortune 500-type companies, Nike, Adidas, Cisco, like that, doing a lot of travel. Met my wife. We shared our passion for travel, and we made the decision when the merger happened with American Airlines and U.S. Airways to take a buyout package. So I volunteered to get laid off. We decided to rent our house out and took off for six months. See, when you work for an airline, they give you this thing called flight benefits. So I called it kind of my first

retirement here and went and traveled the world for about six months. And a really interesting thing happens when you take off, you quit your job, you rent your house. You get two very different reactions. People either think that you're absolutely crazy and they worry about what you're going to do when you get back. I had people telling me like the day I left, I'm all excited that I should start applying for jobs now just so I could have something in the future. And I was telling them, I don't know when the future is going to be. And then you get that other group of people that are very excited for you. Some have done similar things. You find out a lot about people and what they want out of life. And they kind

of almost live vicariously through you as well. So it was an incredible six months, went on six cruises in six months. It was kind of me and a bunch of the retirees. We used to joke. Half the people, I think, thought we were part of the production theater staff on these cruise lines. Went to Brazil for the World Cup for about a month. Just had a really tremendous and incredible experience. When I came back, I was ready to start my real career, even though I was already 10 years into my working life. And so I had a mutual friend that Tommy and I share, still a really good buddy of ours that was telling me, and I was actually in Brazil with him for the World Cup for about three weeks, you know, you should really get into garage doors. You know, our friend Tommy is really

doing good things. And I kind of chuckled and just said, thanks, Aaron. I appreciate it. And I appreciate, you know, everybody telling me here's the place that's hiring, you know, the state farm buildings are going up here, but it's like, you should get a job there. You know, I just said something, I wasn't worried about it, but it was over Thanksgiving in 2014. I was done traveling, was back on, we came in on a Saturday. You were at a house party. I had something to get together.

Yeah. We discussed it briefly then. Yeah. And so I came in. And in the world's either longest interview or longest conversation over three days, I think about 10, 12 hours, kind of got an in-depth look at what the business, what Tommy's visions were for the business. Found out there's a heck of a lot more to a small home service business than just being a technician and going out and fixing people's garages. I was really, really intrigued. I remember going home to my wife saying, I don't know what this looks like. I don't know what the opportunity is. Heck, I didn't even know

what I was getting paid for the first six months, but I knew that I was attracted to Tommy's vision and his passion. I said, I want to take a shot on this. Literally, as Tommy mentioned, I think the exact count was 28 employees when I started, kind of towards the very tail end of 2014. Now we're up over 200 employees. We have grown this business immensely and it's just taken off in new ways.

And I couldn't be more excited about what we've accomplished, but yet still what we are going to do into becoming North America's largest, most trusted garage door repair company and excited and thankful. Tommy, I don't know if I tell you that enough, but we're both thankful. Yeah, we've become really good friends through this process. But yet we work really hard and it's just been an amazing journey and excited to be on it. And that's kind of my path and what led me here. So there was some catalyst things. I always tell people you were one of the catalysts. It's really the one thing when I started the business is I needed somebody I could trust. And that's why I got my mom and Bill.

They retired last year. They're 66. So makes sense. Bill's 67. But you came in, you were somebody that worked hard. You went out there as a tech, kind of as a joke. Me and you knew you weren't going to be a tech. We knew you were

going to be the manager, but you found out the intricacies of how garage doors work. Spent a few days in the field, which I thought was a really cool idea. Learned which guys go home and go to the bathroom for two hours. What guys don't run out of gas happens to be the same guy. I think we've learned a lot

over the years. There were some catalyst moments. When we started, we were on a company called Aptura to run the company. Pro business tools. Pro business tools. We switched to Aptura together and then you became an expert at that.

I hated it because literally Adam's mentality was software, software doesn't make mistakes. But this one was rounding off by a penny and just not reconciling right. And it was an all-in-one. But it was around since 1994. So we found Service Titan and Adam literally put that under his wing. Literally, I think one of the hardest parts about service time was changing the way we paid, changing. But I think maybe about a year ago, we really said, fine, we're going to embrace everything service time has.

Tell me a little bit about the journey from the price book to just really creating a lean, zero time investment. Instead of doing payroll, you spent 10 hours a week. Now we're biweekly. How long do you spend? Less than an hour. Less than an hour. Less than an hour. So go through that process with me about just because I think service titan was one of those catalyst moments too. Service titan was definitely a catalyst.

And, you know, I think I used to tell Tommy, software is software. You know, we have a people problem still and needed to fix some of these things and make some better processes, really get our roles refined. But software should make your life easier. And I literally have embraced Service Titan. And we listen. We listen to the community. We've been fortunate through this podcast with Tommy, through the larger Service Titan community, through contractors to listen and learn from the best and brightest.

And we embrace a lot of what they have to say. And we are really trying to never settle. One person that's had a really big impact on my professional career is Ryan Meacham. He's a podcast from a couple years ago was on. But you know, he really taught me some of these concept of lean continuous improvement. You know, two second lean book by Paul Akers was also on your podcast. But really finding these things that bug you and working out a fix to it. I remember thinking back when payroll was taken 15, 20 hours a week, which was on nights and weekends, not during business when I was answering phones. I mean, my wife one time told me like, man, I feel like all

you ever do is payroll. And I felt like that was the case. But I used to say, well, I could probably figure out a better way to do this, but I don't have the time to figure out a way to save time. And I think that mentality is just what was broken at one point. And I can tell you, I've completely embraced it. Some people take the lean concept a little too seriously, maybe combining the salt and pepper into one shaker. You know, I still enjoy a little bit of a balance on that. But, you know, really looking at and saying, how can this process be improved? And when something breaks, it's not, hey, this person messed up. It's how did our process allow this to happen? And what do we need to do to fix it? So everything

that I've really focused on over the last probably two, two and a half years is looking at what takes a lot of time, understanding what we can do to make improvements on that process, to make everything better, allow us to run our business and scale more efficiently. And we were making these decisions when we were 70, 80, 100 people. You know, obviously, we're 200 people now. But I would ask myself this question, is the process that we want to put in place scalable for 1,000 technicians? And if it's not, what is it going to take to get there? And we had to make some difficult decisions.

I remember we used to do payroll weekly. And I would tell Tommy, look, there's a lot of motion that needs to used to do payroll weekly. And I would tell Tommy, look, there's a lot of motion that needs to happen to do payroll weekly. What do you think it'd look like if it'd be biweekly? And, you know, we discussed it and obviously understood that the impact it'd have on people and their budgets. But we said, okay, let's commit to doing this. Let's find out a timeframe that's going to have the least disruption. We happened to launch that in a payroll month where there were three payroll Fridays on biweekly pay. So we weren't really taking from people's checks.

It was a long, drawn-out process. But, you know, we've taken that same sort of approach of how can we make this better? What is it going to be? You know, and you mentioned kind of making ServiceTitan not work for us but work with how it's designed to. And ServiceTitan works with the biggest and best shops. We count ourselves fortunate to be among them. But the software was designed by people who are using best practices in the industry. And I talk to all these companies all the time that say, well, yeah, but we do it this way. And efficiently you can run your business, how many less people you potentially need, and more accurate. I can tell you most of the time I spend on payroll now is explaining to our installers and our technicians why something paid the way it did because they misunderstand it. The computer doesn't make the mistake.

And I just, you know, really encourage people. A lot of times people like to hoard power, hoard knowledge. We are an open book here. We share. We learn from each other. But if you're saying, well, this needs to be this person's task. If we don't have Susie, this is going to fail. You need to figure out how to automate that, how to have backups, how to have processes.

Because relying on one person or one department, and sometimes that's yourself, you're really going to set yourself up for failure long-term. So, you know, we've had a lot of good things happen. I think another catalyst was Al Levy. He came in and he walked our shop and he said, I could have stole half your warehouse with your own forklift and you wouldn't have known. We have counters on the wall. He tripped on the way going back because it was an extension cord. Little things that me and't know i didn't come from the home service space i was more in hospitality in the restaurant industry bartending and

the young guy when i started early 20s so you know i think that i get a little overzealous on growth and i think one of the biggest mistakes was not having good bookkeeping. Me and you used to struggle. Your mom came and helped. We had tons of people, different accountants. Until we had somebody good, which is Ross, I had no idea how much impact about the financial quick checks. Alan Rohr, who was advised through Al Levy, told me a little bit about what this has done for us and the financial quick check and

knowing what's in the bank and having projections, which you knew I hated. You know I hate. I always felt like a budget was a limited belief, but it really is. If we beat budget, we change it next year. So let's talk about that for a little bit. Yeah, I mean, that was definitely a challenge. I think you can see just in this interview, the visionary integrator relationship that we share. You know, Al was a big part of the fundamental success of this business. Really taking the vision that Tommy had for it and putting it down in a playbook. I wrote pretty much all of our operating manuals with obviously Al's help. It's kind of like writing a college term paper. It's not the most fun thing, but it really helps you to understand every situation, the scenario, kind of that 80-20 rule.

It allows people kind of the playbook for what they're supposed to do on a day-to-day basis. Same thing with the budget. You know, obviously I budget for my own personal family, but budgeting on a business is on a different level. But it really tells you, if we do this, here's what we need to do. Here's what we can expect. How does this work? And really, you know, not with getting tied down too much on the nitty

gritty details, but it just kind of gives you that guideline to be able to make informed decisions. At the end of the day, business leaders need good data to drive and make decisions to make these visions happen. And really taking that pause, you know, we worked with Al for about 18 months, I want to say, taking that time to work with him, get all these things down. And, you know, we were a pretty big shop at that point. I think we had a hundred something employees, so it wasn't a small shop, but really put it into practice of what does this role look like? Who's responsible for this practice? Who's the backup for this? How do they interact? Because we'd have people coming to us. And luckily, Tommy and I, we talk pretty much every night. So we were in pretty much lock and step on our decision making. But you never want to get into a situation in your business where a technician goes and asks mom if they don't like the answer, they come back

and ask dad. Hopefully mom and dad's answers are the same. I know in my personal family, it's ask your mom. But you know, the playbook, the budget, the operating manuals, they really allow a consistent set of objective criteria of how you're going to function and what a role looks like and who's going to do what. And it's one of those things, especially obviously we're filming this in the midst of the coronavirus.

A lot of times people are having a little bit more free time. I encourage each and every business owner on this to spend this time to one, be with your family, really reconnect when you can't be as busy. It's nice to spend time. I got two little girls who've been going on bike rides every day while the weather's nice, but then also spend this time to work on your business. While you don't have customers and employees and all this stuff to deal with, focus on when this is over, being able to come back stronger. And that does mean operating manuals. That does mean handbooks. That might mean refining your skills. And sometimes you got to put yourself out of that comfort zone. But I can tell you,

it'll be much, much worth it when you get the payoff for it. So one of the things we all added that as we came up with a really detailed org chart, stay in our own lanes, depth chart. One of the things that we had a struggle with, and Adam still and I, we're a big enough size now to where we need to have one person in charge. And Adam's the type of guy that can do five things and do them all well. And sometimes you take that for granted, I feel like,

because you say, well, they're not going to do it as good as me. The only thing I'd say about that is when you have somebody in charge of four different roles, none of them get done to your liking. And when you're a small business, you have to wear four hats. And luckily for us, we've grown to the size where we can get somebody that your job is our fleet manager. So you're in charge of this. But we used to have a fleet manager that did this, this, this, and this.

And I feel like there was a lot of stuff thrown in the air and we drop a lot of it. And so one of the things we do is specialize. Talk to me a little bit about how I think there's a paradigm shift now for you to say, I don't want to be involved in as much. I want to oversee it, but I'm not going to do the work anymore. I'm going to teach somebody else. You've probably learned more than anybody I've seen how to delegate properly and how to relinquish a little bit of control, but still be the decision maker. Yeah, I think it really came to a head where it just wasn't sustainable. Yeah, I can run every role here. I wrote the manuals. I've had every role here as we've grown. But if we want to get

this business to where Tom and I both want to take it, the TNA shows, we joke a lot, Tommy and Adam, for those of you guys on the podcast, but it can only take us so far. And if that is going to be the case, we need to have a great team around what we're doing. We're very fortunate. We have a great team from Ross to Brian, to Luke, to our other managers, Mike Bailey, the rest of our regional managers. We've really developed this amazing team and it almost makes us better than the sum of our parts, but it takes time and it's hard to kind of relinquish that control. But again, if you learn to be able to maybe inspect what you expect, I hated that phrase when I first started with you, but instead of taking the hour to do it, maybe you take the five minutes to make sure it's done to your liking, but you have to also set up

clear expectations of what you are wanting. This is what this type of project looks like. Here's the expected outcome. Now go and do it. And a lot of times it takes a lot of prep, you know, and it takes being involved in a lot of meetings. My calendar is always jam-packed with department meetings. I try to make a big point to really not skip them so I can be involved with what's going on. But yeah, I am able to kind of say, let's go down this route or, you know, this department's working on something similar. Here's how we can tie these two together. And what I found is I'm able to work on way more projects concurrently than I ever was able to when I was saying, hey, I got to do these all on my own.

I mean, it's really incredible what we're able to roll out with that. And you just got to realize that, you know what, it might not be 100% to your liking. You got to understand what percentage is good enough and, you know, what percentage can you go in and fix and ensure that person's on the right path, but you're never going to scale and own a business. And, you know, I think this is an important distinction. Many people own a business, but they also own a job, you know, and I don't own this business, but I also realized I don't want to own a job. I want to focus on the fun stuff, the growth, what the company's doing. I want to be able to go to Pantheon and service Titan, not worry about being that person on the break. That's got to get out there and return these customers, phone calls, order these parts,

pay these bills, do all that stuff. And that really, it goes down to being able to trust and let people handle, you know, and Tommy, when you first started this podcast, I remember, I remember who it was. We used to have the question people ask, if you walked away from your business for 30 days, couldn't make a phone call or turn an email, what does your business look like? And when you can say, I can walk away for 30, 60 days, not return anything, and the business runs just fine, that's when you know you own a business and you don't own a job. And so I think that's an important distinction. And listening to podcasts like this, really reading books on business help you get to that level of owning a business. And it's a great

thing. And most of the time when Tommy leaves, we actually have a better week or month or whatever. It's kind of a running joke, but we're real proud of what we've done here. Yeah, that's really important because I would say it's not that I have all these brain cells that are just functioning at a higher power. I would say that I talked to a company. We got invited to a really successful company the other day and they taught us stuff that's actually improved our revenue, I'd say by 15%, which I think between the turnover and kind of our goals with the sales department, we're going to see 30 to 40% as it's fully pushed out. And I didn't come up with that. I didn't come up with any of that Levy stuff. We just executed it. I'd say, I feel like my position now, I love sales and

marketing, but there's two things that need to happen. You need phone calls and you need text to run those calls. Now, Adam fills in the in-betweens there. He says, we got to have dispatchers. We got to have a call center. We got to have a system that works. We got to have a price book. We have to have ways to get it. And I'm thinking the whole time, how do I generate more phone calls with better customers? And how do I generate great technicians? Because that's recruiting, but to recruit, you need marketing. So recruiting is not hiring. So I feel like my main goal is go out there and figure out how to get more jobs and get more sales and sales or technicians. So that's what's fun to me. You know, one of the things that Adam, we decided, we said, we need our five. We've got an executive team of five.

So it's me and Adam Ross, who's in the finance department, the head of finance. We've got our head of doors, which is Luke. And then we got Brian, the head of service. Those are our five. So once a month, Adam usually picks it. What have we done here in the last, I don't know, four months? Frisbee golf. We went to bowling. Yeah. I won bowling, by the way. You won one game. Soccer golf, you won that. Let's not talk about that one.

But, you know, we really we try to get together once a month. You know, we found that we were having a lot of these discussions. We were talking in the evening saying, yeah, that's a good idea. We should talk more about that. You know, and we let weeks, sometimes even months go by. So we decided to once a month have an entire day dedicated to the executive team. We clear our calendars. We don't let people interrupt us. We basically lock the door. So unless the building's on fire, they know to leave us alone. But we get together. We make decisions based on the data. We put a hard and firm date that we're going to come out of here with a unified front. We're going to make this decision.

If we need to modify it, we can. But instead of kicking the can down the road, we're making decisions today. And then we try to do something fun. I think that that's really helped with the team building. I think we have a really strong bond as an executive leadership team that, you know, I can tell you in those meetings, we don't always agree. And sometimes they can get a little heated, but, you know, we know that everyone has the best interests of the company with our vision in mind. But then because we have those personal relationships, we never take it seriously. If

an argument where, hey, I might see one way, you might see the other, you might completely disagree. We might decide to go with Tommy's way. Sometimes we'll go in my way. Sometimes we'll go with Luke's way. Sometimes we'll meet in the middle, but we really trust each other on that. You know, one of the things is if you run your business, like it's a, it's not a democracy. If you're just as authoritarian, it's my way or the highway. If nobody buys into those decisions and they don't have input, you're going to find a lot of failure. You're going to find people that don't believe in you. You're not a good leader. And you're never going to be able to grow your business.

There's so many business owners that I talk to that are like, yeah, I keep a separate set of books. I don't share. I'm the only one that could open my mail. I'm the only one that looks at my email. I'm the only one that knows our revenue. I've got a separate set of books and I don't turn in this money

and no one should know what I make. And I'm like the opposite. I don't open up my own mail. I mean, I'm kind of books and I don't turn in this money and no one should know what I make. And I'm like the opposite. I don't open up my own mail. I mean, I'm kind of a little bit too much lax. And that's why we got into some probably financial issues last summer, which that's kind of where I was going with that is last summer we did a massive expansion. And I don't think it was, I think what happened was poor leadership and other like the market managers. I'm glad we did it when we did it because we went to Houston and Dallas and we found out the cost per acquisition or the cost per closed lead was so much more expensive. And to crack a market like that, we're better off acquiring and building it.

I'll tell you what, I can't stress enough how much how the ability to read a balance sheet, ability to look at the p and l per market the ability to look at the exact same numbers across 17 markets and circle ones and say what happened here why is the cost of marketing why is the cost of uh doors or whatever that might be so let's really talk through that because my eyes are so much more wide open now we were losing money is a lot of markets, a couple hundred grand a month. Yeah, I think it kind of goes to what I said earlier is taking that time to focus on the business and not in it. And we were so busy with this market's opening.

We're looking at this market. We got these guys here. You know, we didn't have our executive team. We were busy on the minutiae and not taking the time out, looking at the numbers and saying, does this make sense? And talking about it. And when we took that pause and started looking at it, a lot of things didn't make sense. So why are we doing them? You do have to have good data and Ross was a huge part of it. And when you were saying, hey, we hired Ross from a half billion dollar company, it reminded me of that Tony Robbins

clip he sent out maybe a year, year and a half ago. And I'm sure a lot of you guys relate to this, but it says, hey, yeah, I started my business and I didn't know what to do. So I hired my friend and my family because I could trust them. And I'm paraphrasing here. And then we grew a little bit bigger and I hired this person, but they were learning on my dime. And now you know, and now when I hire somebody, it's because they've already been there and I'm going to learn from them. And I think Ross perfectly parallels that as we've hired a guy that has already been at the level we want to be. And we're saying, hey, help us not.

Well, this guy can do accounting. He's never been in a company larger than 10 people, but I'm sure he's the right fit for us because he seems like a good guy. You know, and sometimes you got to make that decision to go in and basically it's not admitting that you don't have those skill sets, but to bring in somebody that you can supplement that has already been there and say, bring me up to that level. And I think that that's what we've got. And we've been able to get the right financial information to make the critical business decisions and then be able to not only make these decisions, but measure if they were the right decision or not, and then adjust accordingly.

And I just can't stress how often I see people just running around with their heads cut off, their phone, they can't leave it in the other room. It's got to be on their hip. I'm talking, they take five phone calls. Just taking that time to focus on what you're doing, building that foundation is instrumental in growing a home service business. So there's a few things that we've done in the last two years. We went to two trucks. And you know what? Look, you got to start the business somewhere. A lot of things, if I had a million dollars to start the business, it'd be another story. We were driving around Dodge Dakotas because there were $2,000 trucks. There's a lot of mistakes we've made, and I'll take the grunt of that. But same trucks were smart.

We don't carry inventory anymore. I don't want to go too much to detail, but we decided we're not in the inventory business. We'd have to go into a city and spend $75,000 with racking, set up two guys to get a warehouse guy. We'd get a trailer. We'd get theft insurance. We'd get spoiled stuff, all the stuff we've learned,

the expensive camera systems. Like we've learned, we don't have to do that now. So our business has become so much easier to expand. And then you've really helped me say, we're not going to do commercial because I used to be, shit, we can make 20 grand on this deal, but then we'd have one guy that could do it. And then he'd be sick. And then he'd ask for this. We'd have to have a completely different truck set up. And then, you know, just, just in January, December,

January, we decided no more home warranty because you showed, you know, you broke it all down and said, we're not making money here. So it's easy to make a decision if it's just like, this is black and white. So focus, I think, has been my big thing this last few months is essentialism. Like,

look, we're going to do this. We're going to do it great. We're going to have a plan when we go in. We're going to execute it. And even more importantly, we're not going to continue to expand when we've got four failing markets. We need to make everything profitable or don't expand. It wasn't tough, but it was tough for me, and I think it was tough for you mentally to shut down a market because it kind of looks like we're losing the game.

And me and you are very competitive. It's our second main core value is to spread to be number one. So talk to me about what happened. It was tough. You know, it was tough. And obviously when you're running a business and you have to make those tough decisions, like I'm sure some of you have had to make in this economic crisis, you develop relationships with people.

It hurts your pride. I mean, forget the money, forget all that. It's, hey, I went here and this isn't working. And you got to kind of get over that and realize that, you know, we have this phrase on our wall is revenues for vanity, profits for sanity. You know, it's one of the ones I look at.

And really making sure that, yes, you need to owe it to your employees to give them the best effort. But, you know, at the end of the day, you owe it to the company to make sure that the company is the best for the most people. And sometimes that means shutting down a market. Sometimes that means making a tough decision. But, you know, you can do a lot of different areas. But I think what Tommy was also saying is trying to make sure that you're laser focused on your core competencies. And, you know, if you're a multi-trade shop and you're thinking,

well, you know what, I'm going to add, I don't know, water purification because I'm in plumbing, HVAC and electrical, and I think we can get into this. Great. I hope that works out. But if it's based off of one guy who at another shop happened to be halfway decent at it, I mean, from epoxy to storage solutions to, you know, a lot of different things that we've tried. I think we could do it, but where is your time best spent too? And I think that's the other thing that we've really learned. I could spend all the time in the world. I'll give you another example. We were in Yuma. Yuma is a small city in Arizona. It's about four hours from Phoenix. It's got about 80,000 people. We thought this is great. It's one of the bigger cities in Phoenix that we're not in.

We can support it pretty cheaply. We just really couldn't make it work. There wasn't enough population base. There wasn't enough advertising sources. There's a big, I think, military base and a prison out there. It's tough. And we looked at it and went, we could probably really focus and make this market great for two people. Or why don't we really focus all that time, effort, energy, resources, capital on, let's say, Phoenix and make Phoenix 40 people instead of adding those extra two. And I think that's the mentality we've taken.

We've learned from all of this. And I think that's the biggest thing. Everyone's had failures. They've had setbacks. But if they don't take a look at those lessons and learn from them to kind of shape how they're going to improve in the future, they're doomed to repeat those same mistakes. And I'm excited about what we've done. You know, obviously it was painful closing those markets. We still from time to time have to deal. We're still paying for the lease. Hopefully they rent that one out in Atlanta here pretty soon. But, you know, we're learning from those lessons. But, you know, we're making sure we don't make those same mistakes and trying to be more calculated as we make decisions in the future. You know, the way that I look at it is

you could do 10 things. I look at the biggest, best companies in the world, but they've got department heads. So if we were going to really focus on storage, what I would say is here's the plan. We're going to, and I don't mind selling a storage job here and there. Our guys can do it. And if it falls in our lap, we'll take it. But the fact is, if I really wanted to do this, I'd have a separate building and I'd say, here's the handoff. Here's how it's going to work.

Here's a separate marketing department. Everything's got to be departmentalized. It's like completely different. It can't just be, we're going to be a jack of all trades

and all of us are going to do everything. So we're going to focus on resident. If we did want to do commercial, I'd hire five guys to do commercial. We'd have a whole team.

We'd have a separate truck. We wouldn't combine them. And I think that's the mistake. We do HVAC, plumbing, electrical. You name it, we can do it. We're a jack of all trades, but a master of none. It's a big mistake. So focus.

You're a handyman. The handyman. But yeah, that's the mistake I see. And the reason HVAC had to do it is because they had a seasonal business. So they said, what can I do when I'm slow and I can't keep my technicians or pay the bills? So they went into plumbing. And it was good because you can kind of lay off plumbing when HVAC is heavy. So I like the play that it does work, but it's got to be focused on.

I would add in that, that most of the companies that we talk to, they have HVAC divisions. They're separate business units. They have plumbing divisions. They have air conditioning. Separate managers. It's separate, completely separate. And it's gotten that focus. Separate dispatchers. We've seen that here with us.

You know, we have our team that's all really busy and focused on our training and development. But a couple months ago, we brought in a guy to literally run training. And in his first two weeks, just solely being focused on that, he got more done in those two weeks of getting our comprehensive training program put together than we did in, I don't know, months. I mean, and it was not because we couldn't do it,

didn't have the ability. We just were not lazy and focused on that. He owned it. I mean, I've been getting a lot of phone calls lately of, see, we're an essential business, and we haven't been hit as hard as other companies, but it's never easy. But I'm the type of guy that you throw me lemons, I'll make lemonade. We're making some tough decisions this week. Layoffs are tough. We're renegotiating. I'll tell you this. I've talked to a lot of people, probably 25 in the last week.

And some of the things we're working on is making our website stronger, building more links. We're calling the bad reviews that we've gotten, trying to turn those around. We're really top grading. We're saying this. If we were to shrink the company down to 10 people, we'd only have the top 10 that's going to produce money and keep this company around for the future. So what does that look like? You know, for me, it looks like our best technician that gets the most conversion, creates five-star customers, and takes advantage of every broken part on that garage that should

be replaced. It means selling a bottom rubber even when they hate doing it because they're lazy or they're not fast at it. It means getting the dispatchers that know how to dispatch correctly to minimize time. You get the best person for the opportunity. So let's talk a little bit about just what's going on right now. I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty, which is the scariest thing in the world for people. We go back to our primitive brains.

And we go back to, I need to hoard toilet paper and canned food and buy everything in the store. And God, you know know everybody's quarantined it's like they think this is like i mean we're all at work right now not everybody but we let people work from home we're not we're not contributing to the problem but if i get it i'm still gonna work from home for 10 days and be back in here so i gotta tell you i'm excited because i can control what i can control i can can't control this pandemic. But between you and I and our team, we're like a lot of tough. We've been on the phone with the lawyer every day. Let's talk about some of the stuff that we're optimizing right now.

Some of the stuff that you talked about, a great time to be working on things. Yeah, I mean, it's a great time to realize, you know, they say scarcity is the mother of all invention or something like that. But it's a great time to focus on your business, the core elements of it, whether you're allowed to stay open like we are, whether you're not, you know, and thankfully, I think most home services are considered essential operating, you know, your toilets flooding or your heating or air condition is not working. But we're finding ways that we're going to come out of this better and stronger. Yeah, we are going to have to make some tough decisions, but we're making those for the betterment of the company. And I think you'll find, you know, one of the things I was talking to somebody last week, we started to allow most

of our staff, if they want to, to work from home. That's freed up a lot less people in kind of our call center so they can spread out and make sure they're doing social distancing and all those precautions. But what we're seeing is that our agents, due to how we have their compensation structured, really pay for performance. It's working with having agents at home. Performance pay. I really think that alone, that was one of the catalysts.

Not only inventory, not only you, not only ServiceTite and Al Levy, but I really want to dive into performance pay because we didn't know that we were going to hit this the economy was the best it's ever been and all of a sudden we're like if these people are straight hourly and we had to send them home we had no way to check their performance no way of rating them we rate everybody everybody's number every CSR every single person in the company pretty much has a number as far as the non-executive team. So talk about that because I can't tell you guys how great in the last two weeks when we said everybody's got to work from home. They're checking out a computer.

And we know everything is getting done. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just changed the culture around here. And when we're winning, we're all winning together. We've had CSRs make over $35 an hour because they were booking a boatload of phone calls, high conversion rate. You know, we have variable pay on the tax as well. It really allows the company to win together. And when times maybe shrink a little bit, you're not hamstrung by having promised higher

hourly salaries or base salaries. You know, and we have staff at home now with the technology that we've implemented to be able to make sure that they're doing their job effectively. And trust me, they're letting us know that they're not getting enough phone calls to make their booking bonuses. They're fighting tooth and nail. We've seen conversion rates go up. Whereas I think a lot of the time you have companies like, I remember I had a job in college. I was looking at financial statements and literally the internet went down one day. We didn't care. We didn't run over and tell the boss, by the way, the internet's down. They figured it

out. We hung out, got to chill and play catch and get half a day's pay. We didn't care. We didn't run over and tell the boss, by the way, the internet's down. They figured it out. We hung out, got to chill and, you know, play catch and get half a day's pay. We thought it was the greatest thing ever. And now when we have an issue with our phones, within two minutes, a CSR is telling me, hey, my phone's not working. And that means I can't make phone calls. That means I can't, they have skin in the game. And it's completely changed the business. And, you know, we are wanting to fight for these people as we want to make an opportunity in an environment where everybody can make as much money as possible. You know, there's parameters around that, obviously,

but we want to make sure that, you know, with performance pay, we win together. And if we are losing as a company, we're all losing a little bit. Which is great to understand that I can cheer for people at any goal it's not like i do an annual review and go great i gotta give this person a raise because i've been here for four years now i'm like this person earned it every single week every single bi-weekly and i don't believe

in tenure i don't believe you've been here 10 years you deserve this yes i believe in having a building a family around the people you work with but everybody's earned it you didn't work here 20 years from a janitor and now you're the vice president of the company just because you were here 20 years. That's just not the way I think in this day and age to run a company that can run from anywhere. If I can get back to the point that we used to have agents that worked from home. We didn't have performance pay. We didn't have the technological tools to really monitor them like we do now. But literally, we would miss phone calls in the evening. We had the gal that worked till 10 o'clock at night and it never failed. She never answered the phone. It was always, I had to run to the restroom or I had to go get

something for my kids. She wasn't set up on performance pay. We were missing calls. We were just paying hourly. And with that change in structure, and that's kind of, it was a necessity. We were really against work from home agents for bad experiences, those reasons. But it's kind of, it was a necessity. We were really against work from home agents for bad experiences, those reasons. But it's kind of showed me that we're getting an even higher level of performance. We have employees that are happier. They're willing to work split shifts.

They're willing to pick up extra hours. And who does it open the hiring field to? Any stay-at-home mom. You get better clientele. You can work part-time. Any relocation person. Exactly. Wife or husband that doesn't have a job.

Boom. The opportunities are endless when you build your company like this. The cumulative hole is what you got to think. So whether you got to lay out people, fire people, whether you got to cut certain things, when you start thinking, we've got an obligation to a couple hundred people. Now, are we going to let five people ruin it for everybody? It made it so much easier for me to stomach the fact that we got to let somebody go. And forget the bad times now.

Even in good times, one of the things I'm really proud of in the last six months is we said, economy's great, but let's get lean. Let's cut out crap. What is this software? I cut my gym membership because we got a nice gym out there. The deal is we started making tough decisions way before this happened, and now we're making really tough decisions. But we started making cuts, the things that weren't working and started making decisions and letting go of the bad apples. And I think it's so important when I was able to change my paradigm to go,

why would I let five to 10 people? Cause you know, I always tell you that you're feeding another three to four people if you cut your mother-in-law. So you add it all up. If one guy is responsible for four other people, we've got 200. You're looking at 1,000 people. So we've got to let 10 people ruin it for 1,000? I don't think so. Going through this, there's going to be a lot of losers. Trust me, a lot of losers are going to come out of this because they're going to sit home.

They're going to drink and get high the whole time. They're going to say, poor me. They're going to say, this shouldn't ever happen to me. I wasn't prepared. I let everybody go. Or they're going to be working on their marketing, their website, making it faster. They're going to be getting reviews from their happy customers. They're going to be doing things, sticking outside of the box. They're going to be renegotiating marketing efforts. I mean, we're doing more. I got to say, and this sounds really bad, but like I said, it's out of our control it's a blessing in disguise because we're clipping stuff that we shouldn't have even though we've been

doing a great job we're gonna come out of this thing like superman like we're gonna be explosive and i'm not hoping that this lasts but i've prepared for it to last i'm not hoping anything but i'm going right now we're gonna make the the cuts. We've got phase one, two, three. And what I love about it is that I literally last week talked to Adam first, and then we talked to the executive team and said, you understand you guys have to have my back. And I want to know what you would do in this. You know, obviously the grunt of it's going to fall on me unless they have my back because I don't want to go against every other manager especially Adam so in my opinion everybody in the executive team had our back and

that was so such a big deal so a lot of it was getting the support from the upper management and every day I wake up for me you know I'm always a half full type guy but this to us is going to be we're making the cuts because we have to literally the company's got to exist this thing could be six months to a year and i just i hate the idea of saying we ran out of money completely all of us are left empty-handed hopefully the government will bail us out that to me doesn't sound like fun so what's your take on all this stuff going on right now? And obviously, you're in here working, we're doing a lot of stuff. We were on conference calls all day.

So let's talk about the opportunities. And like you said, work out the business. Yeah, I mean, it's obviously a tragic pandemic, just an awful situation. Nobody wants this. And you know, I think first and foremost, our hearts go out to all those and their families that are affected by this both, you know, with the actual illness themselves and then obviously with the economic fallout. Yeah, we're here. We're practicing, you know, safe practices. But I think people have two choices. They can either be a victim or they can pick themselves up, dust themselves off and go out there and make the most of it. And what I do know is that when this is over, however long this lasts, whether it's a miracle drug that cures it over, however long this lasts, whether it's a

miracle drug that cures it in two days, two weeks, whether it's two months, it kind of gets killed out over the summer, whether this drags on six to nine months, we've done a good job at A1 of building a company that was built to last by making these decisions with data and looking at how we're going to play this out. But I also know that when this is over, we are going to come out so much stronger and we're not going to have sat around during this time and said the woe is me. We're going to work and focus on all these things

that we should have been doing. And I ask myself a lot every day. I go, what is my objective today that I want to achieve? I keep lists. And then I look at the end of the day, did I get to these things? If so, great. If not, why not? And if you're not getting into the things that you need to, to make the improvements

on your business day after day after day, you really got to look yourself in the mirror and say, why am I allowing other things to hijack my day? And this is a great time to not have as many of those distractions. I can tell you my calendar is a lot less full with a lot of external meetings. I'm typically topping at companies, service tight all the time. But that allows me then to focus on what I want to do. I mean, I'm literally looking at it going, man, maybe next week I could redo our price book. A huge undertaking. Two years ago, you used to have this phrase, when I work from home, I get way more done. Now you don't let anybody hijack your time, number one. Number two is you're much more organized on a schedule. You know what you're coming in to do. You separate that time on your schedule. Two sales meetings ago, I said the lady

that sits there, she doesn't have her phone around all the time when she's sleeping. She wakes up in the morning, she brushes her teeth, she grabs her phone. On the back of her phone, she puts a list of three things she needs to get done that day. And number one, why is it, Adam, that we always put off the most important big things we need to get done? Does that mean it happens? It's just sometimes there's a lot of work. You don't want to get to them. You just have that. I always have that one thing for whatever reason. It's just this project I don't want to do. find any excuse not to do it. But you know, when you schedule yourself, when you make your priority list that determines where you want your company to be, most people that are listening to this podcast, they're running their company, you know, and you guys need to look at and say, here's what I want to achieve

with my company. Here's what I need to do to get that. And I need to make sure that this happens. And I tell people a lot, I will give you all the time and need in the world, but it's going to be on my time. It's going to be scheduled and you're going to adhere to my schedule. You know, and I used to have the, you have a minute guy and I used to not get anything done. And so when you take that time, really plan out your day and then hold yourself accountable to it, you're going to have that kind of pseudo meeting with yourself and say, did I get to what I needed to get to this week? And if not, why not? And I can tell you, it's not always about putting in more hours because I've been that guy where I was staying up until one in the morning, getting up at five, trying to cram 20 hours into a 24 hour day.

It's not sustainable and you're not going to perform at that high level. You really just need to focus, use the tools, leverage. And, you know, it takes time. It takes, as we talked about earlier, getting rid of some control, potentially maybe delegating, leverage. And, you know, it takes time. It takes, as we talked about earlier, getting rid of some control potentially, maybe delegating some tasks. And sometimes that can take longer. You know, I'm in the process of handing off some of the inventory functions and it takes a long time to train somebody.

But you got to be patient, make sure you have the right procedures and manuals and helpful guides and stuff like that. The learning management system. But, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of times people just never start. They i'll get to that tomorrow it's not that important that's going to be a big undertaking instead of breaking it down into an achievable goal and holding

themselves accountable to make sure that they dedicate and make the time to do something and to basically have bullheaded determination to not let anybody uh interrupt that time i mean there's times tommy's called me and i'm like i'm in the middle of focusing on this project i'll call you later can't talk to you you know i still normally there's a lot of times there's a lot of times that happens because he's busy yeah and i remember the first time i gave you a daily log tell him the daily log and what you've done with a lot of the managers and i asked luke to do it and we were like wow well this is perfect for training so let's talk about that a little bit i think that was like what like five four years ago a long time ago yeah i went through my phone and i'm like, wow, this is perfect for training. So let's talk about that a little bit. I think that was like, what, like five, four years ago? A long time ago.

It was. Yeah, I went through my phone, and I'm like, how do you expect me to even have time to take this daily log? I took 100 phone calls, returned 232 text messages, had dropped by. I mean, I think about that. It's kind of funny because we were not that big comparatively. And then we did this exercise with Luke recently,

not to have Luke be on any sort of performance improvement plan or anything like that. But just to say, man, you're performing at a high level. What does your day look like? What does your week look like? About 15 minute increments. Who's stealing your time? Yeah. I think that's, it's not as much about what you're getting done.

It's about who's stealing your time to not get it done. So what did you have to get done that day? And why didn't you do it? It's such a good thing to do if you could do it. You carry it around for a week and you look at it and you go, I had all this have to get done that day? And why didn't you do it? It's such a good thing to do if you could do it. You carry it around for a week and you look at it and you go, I had all this stuff to get done. I had goals this week. And you're right.

Some days I come in and this was so cool. Now we're begging to grow because we're like, we just don't have enough going on. And the more it's getting simpler. It's like before with 40 people, we used to run around with our heads cut out. We're constantly busy. We'd have to go fix jobs ourselves. We'd have an angry customer. We have a department for all this stuff now.

It's just amazing. You know, how much do we want to do in the next three to five years? Because he used to laugh at me. But what's our goal? $1 billion. How many techs do we need? We need 1,000. 2,000.

How much do they need to do? We need 2,000 techs each doing a half a million dollars a year in revenue. So I think our new goal with this new sales process we're working on, and really it's about optimizing and capturing every customer and getting them on a service agreement and taking care of them for the lifetime value. But I think we can move that number down to probably 1,500 techs. So with 1,500 techs, let's just use 2,000 because I've done the math. 50 techs a month. So if we hire 50 techs a month for just use 2,000 because I've done the math. 50 techs a month.

So if we hire 50 techs a month for a year, how many is that? 600. And how many years do we need to get to right around 2,000? I mean, if we do three years, that's 1,800 techs to go with a couple hundred. Sure. Which is crazy. So here's the deal. When I look at that and when we looked at it together, we said, how do we get to 50 techs a month?

So this month we had 15, even though the pandemic hit. So 15, how do we get to that next month of 20? How do we get to 25? But really what we've got to think is how do we have a system sustainable to get to 50 to 100 techs a month? We've got an apartment complex. We've got the rat. The trucks are coming out awesome now. We've got to have amazing trainers.

We've got to go through sales technical operational. That's an LLEV thing. So when you think about where do you want to go and how to get there, I know we're going to have benchmarks. There's going to be peaks and valleys that we're going to have to get through it. And what's so nice is we can say, wait a minute, our booking rate's slipping. Let's back up a little bit. Our conversion rate's slipping. Our average ticket's falling. Our turnovers are slipping. Our advertising acquisition cost is turning over. So I love the fact that we've got the data to make. It's not even a question.

It's not like, hmm, I think we should do this. I hate that. That's what we used to be like. Now we're like, this is what we're going to do. The data leads us this direction. This is what we have to do. What's going on here in Kansas? Well, they didn't turn the PPC off when we fired those two guys.

Well, shoot, we should have got that quicker. That't happen again the difference is we make changes we're always evolving and once we make it once we don't make it again and i think a lot of people they keep doing the same things over and over and then they go well how come this happened to me again how come i don't have any money in my account at the end of the year the this account's telling me i made three300,000. I only got $20,000 in the bank. Where's all the money? I can't tell you enough how I remember talking to Aaron Evans, and he'd be like, dude, you guys did pretty good. I'm like, no, that's not in the account.

Not what I'm seeing. I think there's a mistake. And now it's like, boom, every cent's accounted for, and it's so nice to have that. What I wanted to talk about, and this is really recent, is a couple of weeks ago, Travis called me. Travis is our lead trainer. And he said, me and Rob have a different mentality, but I've seen two sides of it. And I want to hear your take on this because we talk about technical and sales. Obviously, there's the operational aspect, which is learning service tight and showing up on time, leaving, following a process. But sales is important because you've got to be able to communicate with a customer.

You need to be able to smile, eye contact, body language, making sure that you're saying the right things and actually conveying the right message and being confident. You're the doctor when you go in the garage. But also the technical side, I'd always kind of just say, I can teach a monkey how to do the garage door stuff. But there are a lot of guys that take four hours to do an opener. There are guys that'll take forever to do a bottom rubber and they need to be in their next job. There are guys that won't touch a spring pad because they have no idea how to do redheads

into concrete. So I always used to say, I want to hire a sales guy to teach them the technical because it's hard to be charismatic and eye contact and have the confidence and talk bold. But now I'm like, I want a guy that's just has a firm handshake, makes eye contact. That's a good guy. And he wants it. And as long as he can make eye contact with me and tell a good story and get along with me, I think it's more important to learn a 50-50. What's your take?

Because I used to have a mentality on it. Now I'm like, obviously, you know, you want a person that can do both the technical and the sales. That's kind of like that unicorn technician that we're all hoping we have. Thankfully, we've got a few of them. But I do think that you're going to find people that have an aptitude towards one or the other. I don't think that you can take the most technically competent person that has no personality, can't look someone in the eye, and teach them how to be successful in the home service business. I also think that you can't take the guy that can sell ice to an Eskimo, but doesn't know the difference between a Phillips and a flathead screwdriver and teach them the technical aspect. And I really think that we can take anybody with our training and our systems

that we've developed, as long as there's somewhere in between those two, teach them the technical side, make sure that they're doing it and have the training really catered towards that to say, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again. You know, nobody comes into this life knowing how to tie their shoes. It takes practice. Some people pick it up a lot quicker than others. Other people, you know, I can tell I got a young daughter who we're trying to teach this to, but you know, you know, it's one of those things where you got to understand where each person is at in that continuum. The same token, as long as you can get that person that's excited to talk about something in the interview process, you know, you don't have to say, hey, it's sales to say, what are your hobbies? Oh, you like soccer, you like baseball, you like ballet. And if you can see

that they get excited about that and have that energy and that passion, I think you can teach them to get excited about your particular trade. And, you know, that's where people really buy. They buy that passion. They buy that belief. And so if you can get people to think that way, that maybe you're not the world's greatest talkers. They're not going to go into a big crowd and be the ones like, hey, look at me. You know, we have some of those guys, but we also have the quiet guys that when you get them into that garage with that customer, they're like in their domain. They know how to fix everything. And they're like, no, here's what we're going to do.

We got this. Here's why. I mean, I remember- And they believe in it. And they believe in it. I remember we had this guy, his name was Ed. He's probably 70 years old now. At least.

He's been in the garage door industry for 40 years. There's literally nothing that guy couldn't fix. Had a big old grizzled beard down to here. Love the guy. Send them to all my family and friends. And I remember we developed our max life springs. He goes, what are you doing in the industry? Oh, this is terrible. But towards the end, he understood and believed so much in the product and what we were doing and how it was helping customers that he would sell the most out of anybody. Definitely not the smoothest talker, definitely not good on the tablet. He's missing some teeth, you know, prototypical kind of, you know, good old guy. But, you know, I think that it's somewhere in between,

obviously. And I think that owners that get focused on one or the other, I'm with you 50-50. If anything, I'd probably lean maybe 60% technical, 40% sales, because I think once we get them knowing that expertise and that knowledge, they can become excited and passionate about the sales side. But it's really simple. It's just relating to customers. It's making sure that they understand why they need the repairs that you're recommending, getting their sign off and understanding that and demonstrating it. We really believe in an educational approach here at A1. And if we have guys that can't display that, you know, we encourage our technicians to educate, demonstrate,

use their senses. We have the customer feel the garage, maybe not taste, but, you know, use all their senses and explain why these parts are bad, what it's going to look like when we're done and then show them how it changed. And I think that that message can be portrayed by a lot of different people, regardless of whether they're smooth talkers or not. Yeah, one of the things that I look for is I don't care that you're not good at installing an opener. I don't care that you're not good at speaking to the customer. But what I always say is BYB, better your best. And what I care about is seeing that you did better than last week if you've got a will we'll find a way that's my famous line as i say if you got the will to get

better but when i see people that just get stuck and they say i don't want help i'm going to do it my way i can do this on my own because we offer you know we've got a really really good person right now in the sales department who understands the right things to say no matter what and any company that's large has somebody. Sales is not a bad thing. What do I always talk about church? You know, Adam goes to church every Sunday. What do I always say?

The pastor's up there selling. He's up there the first 15 minutes saying, you need to give 10%. We're going to pass around these buckets pretty soon. The more you can give, the better, especially because we use this money to help. So these people get cliches, sales, sales, sales. All they talk about is sales. We talk about doing the right thing for the customer what would we do if it was my mom or my sister or some part of my family and i'll tell you this everybody that you sell to you sell max life to 100 000 cycle rollers you sell them the better opener bill my stepdad he

bought new parts for his garage the best the of the best. Still back doors, not fan doors. I mean, literally, but yet so many people, here's my biggest problem, Adam. You know, I'm online a lot. I'm on these Facebook groups. I look at it and they get so happy when they can fix the 1962 opener. They act like they're King Tut, like the king of the jungle.

They just fix this old opener. You guys are ripping people off. You work out of your house. Your wife answers all your calls. Your son runs half the jobs. You don't have insurance. You're not a company. When you leave, no one's running your calls.

You're the cheapest guy out there. And you brag and think, what do we do for our employees? Let's just talk about the difference between what we have versus 99% of the other companies out there, especially in garage doors. I mean, it's night and day difference. We hear from our vendors all the time. Our staff is super professional. out there, especially in garage doors? I mean, it's night and day difference. You know, we hear from our vendors all the time. Our staff is super professional. We offer paid time off. We offer sick leave. We have Dave Ramsey financial smart dollar coaching. So we really want to make sure that our employees are well taken care of both in their work environment and at home and financially.

We bring in guest speakers to talk about buying a house, mortgage, retirement. We give our guys wrapped vehicles, brand new vehicles. We're not giving them jalopy. Pay for their gas. Pay for their health insurance. Yeah. We even have pet insurance. So we have a few people that take advantage of that.

Last week, we had pizza. We had potlucks. We went to a ballgame with 25 people. We've got the Big Buck Hunter. We've got the soccer. What did we do two weeks ago? We went to a soccer game with 25 people. We've got the Big Buck Hunter. We've got the soccer. What did we do two weeks ago? We went to a soccer game. Season tickets to the soccer. The thing is, we could do nice things.

And people go, well, yeah, the customer is paying for it. They're also paying for 24-hour service. They're also paying for drug tax and background tax. They're actually paying for people that care that they can trust around their family. And other people say, well, geez, you've got to charge a lot more than us. Yes, we do. And to keep our guys busy, we we got to pay more per the call and remember that article that came out that time in the garage door magazine door and access or whatever the tom article that said he really pushed that guy that

worked from home and said i'm able to do these things way cheaper than anybody that really got on me and your nerves because we're like that poor guy he gets sick his company's done hopefully he's saved at a time like this or his company's done any of the employees that he had are done i mean i guess the lucky part is you know his office is his house hopefully he's saved enough not to lose it but i don't think sales is a bad thing you know we really like happy customers and we get happy customers by having great employees that we do great things for. They go out and take care. We call them our internal customers or employees. They go out and take care of our external customers, you know, and the customers love us.

They just rave. And I use this example all the time. And, you know, I apologize, but there's a really nice steakhouse here in town. There's also the local 24 hour breakfast joint that you can get a steak at. So they're not created equal, even though they're both serving up a piece of meat. And it's really that experience with the customer. And again, we talk a lot about owning a business. Most of these guys own a job. They don't own a business. And it's not our fault that they are choosing to be that way in the marketplace. The ironic part is when I talked to a lot of these guys, when they decide to raise their pricing, I mean, 20 years ago, they had the same price,

or maybe it's $20 more. They don't realize that the customer is willing to pay more for a different product and experience or warranty, making sure that the company's there for them. And they think that there's no way I could sell rollers. And you know, the other thing is, it's really interesting to me with pricing. When I talk to people, it's kind of like driving on the freeway, everyone going slower than you is an absolute idiot. And those people going faster, you are a moron. You're the one that's got like the perfect speed, whether it's five over seven over 10 over hope it's not 25 over, but everybody thinks that anybody who charges less than that is an absolute idiot undercutting the market. And anybody charging more than them is ripping people off. How about you actually just figure out where your price point is,

understanding your cost, what you want to pay, what you want to pay yourself, and then set your pricing accordingly. And I do think there is a difference when you start to go to a customer and you walk up and you go, you know, this guy's got a Ferrari. You know what? That spring job that we do for 300 is 3000. is $3,000, actually. A lot of companies do that. We have a flat rate price book. Our technicians cannot change the price. There's absolutely nothing they can do.

They can apply a lot of coupons. They can discount like Walmart discounts. Walmart does price matching. Fry's, Elderson's, anywhere you go. Meijer back in the Midwest. Anywhere you go, any place could discount differently. Yeah. But, you know, here's the deal.

Do you know how many times we hear that you guys weren't the cheapest, but the fact is the way you guys answer the phone, the way you guys have the technology to send us a picture of the guy on the way, the way that you back up your warranties and the reviews out there, we've got a system that we pay for to get real reviews from customers, but it's automated. It sends a text. How do we do? And that's another thing.

People are like, where'd you get these text messages? How many customers did we service last year? 67,000. 67,000. Then they wonder how we get so many reviews all the time because we outspend you in marketing. We're better than you.

We've got the number one guy in the world doing our SEO. We've got the number one guy in the world doing our social media We've got the number one guy in the world doing our social media. And people are like, well, how come there's so much better than us? Because you guys can't afford it. My question was, if we didn't have any more jobs, how come we only have like 10 times as many reviews? I'm like, we should have thousands more.

It's crazy to me. Well, I think, you know, the fact is that people say anytime that someone's jealous of us, here's the real deal, Adam, is I found that everybody wants to copy us and they're so jealous of our success. And they spent half the time focusing on their business and what they could change in their lives and their family's lives and within their business. They'd be way more successful than going. So many people chase and just say, I want to take them down. Brett, why not fix your stuff?

There's so many things uncontrollable. Get reviews from your customers. Do you know how many garage door companies I've invited in here? You see people, this place is a zoo for people that we show. And you used to say, why are you showing them all of our stuff? But what's the cliche I always tell you about weight? Yeah. You know, I can tell you to how to get a good body. And obviously I don't heed this advice myself, but you know, I can tell you to eat right, get lots of rest and make sure you go to the gym and get plenty of exercise. And you don't have this great high functioning body. We can tell you the same thing about your business. Here's how you run it. Here's what you need to do. And you don't have this great business, but

knowing what to do and bookcases full of, you know, business books or latest diet fads are two different things than actually going out and doing it. And, you know, we can't make people go and do it. All we can do is say, here's what we're doing. You know, and honestly, I think that people have this philosophy, you know, that wealth or business or customers, there's only so much of the pie. And if we're getting a certain percentage, that means they're not getting their percentage. And, you know, that couldn't be further from the truth. You look at economics, velocity of money, people that create wealth actually help create wealth for everybody. Yeah, the Starbucks effect.

It's called the Starbucks effect. Every single coffee shop doubled their profits because of Starbucks. But they hate Starbucks. But they hate us. You know, there are a lot of people that listen to the podcast in the garage industry, and I'm really happy about that because we plan on making a change. I want to be more part of the idea and everybody says you guys get leads from we buy leads from a thousand different places anywhere that i can get a lead from we buy any

person that's willing to give us a review like a realtor that's using our service you know how many times we get a review from the realtor that advised us and the customer because it looks good like but people are like they spend more time and to me i'm just like this we're still technicians but we don't go out there and poach them they come to us because they see we give new trucks people like these guys come into our town and because you were there doesn't give you this is what i love about capitalism is we're not going to play this game that everybody starts in an even playing field because we don't. Our SEO is built up better. We hired better people. We're making better decisions.

And you're right. We've elevated this industry. You know how many phone calls that we've both got over the last couple of weeks saying you guys are our best customers. You pay on time. You did what you're going to say. We came in last year and made a lot of promises. We kept everyone.

We're building credibility. When all these other little bitches are complaining, I'm not i'm going what can we do for you when we sat down and negotiate with our vendors we said half of the discussion is what can we do for you and there's all these guys out there i'm telling you dude it's crazy when i went recently went to the ida we walked into the uh that bar and a lot of people didn't like me they're like you know i heard this guy's a douchebag just like luke said that and you know there are a lot of people didn't like me. They're like, you know, I heard this guy's a douchebag, just like Luke said that. And you know, there are a lot of people that hear about you and it's not as much because

you're not on a podcast. Now you are. On Facebook and social media. Yeah, you're not on social media and you're not reaching out to these groups as much. But, you know, I didn't take offense to that because if I got offended for being successful, then that would be a tough life.

But we've got so many good things going for us. And you're a big piece of everything we're doing. And I think the fact is that Adam, he doesn't travel there as much as he used to because he's got a family. So I could go out. I was in Portland. I was in Utah. I was in California at service time. I was in Florida looking at another guy's company, learning from him.

We like, that's what's so cool is I kind of get to go do this stuff. I'm not married with no kids and I don't get to stay here and really say, okay, how are we going to drive every single thing and make sure inspect what we expect simply means come up with a process and make sure that we can tell you how you're doing. I hate to walk in a business that says everybody's created equal. And I love to show them, here's your job. Here's how we're going to pay you. And when you do a really good job, you can dictate if you make 50 bucks an hour, I am super excited. And I remember sitting in that chair when we first moved in this building going, I was super annoyed at

certain things. We're just going to give that manager a raise. We're just going to pay that CSR more money. We're just going to give that dispatcher more. Now I'm like, dude, they made $1,500? That's awesome. It's just a completely different company. The mentality is just night and day for me. And you've helped create a lot of this stuff.

And I love the fact that me, Adam could disagree with me every single day about stuff. But you know what? He's going to build a case or I'm going to build a case. And most of the time we say that's true. You know, I'm not, I'm never like, no, I was right. Who gives a crap? We're all on this.

If we make great points, you've always backed it up with evidence. And he's very good at Excel. And that's what I love is you're very good at building pivot tables. And you tell, you say, these these are the facts and it's like whoa okay this is what we're gonna do so it's really good to find a person that actually could understand that we could communicate with his wife's always like dude don't you guys work together all day why are you guys talking at night but it's very rare unless we play a big game, a big buck hunter, that we're spending more than 10 minutes together.

Yeah, we're different focuses. Completely, and you know, right now, like I said, is when I think about it, Adam creates processes and manuals. I mean, right now we've got 28 manuals, I think. Yeah, something like that. And we're hiring better than we ever have, and I just think it's important

to keep our eye on the goal and understand where each of us stand, because he gets a call about marketing he's like i'm not really sure i know enough enough to talk about it but that's really not my department and if i get a call about service time i'm like well hopefully adam's on those new updates about how inventory is going to come out because people are like hey how do i do this in service time i'm like i have no clue i've never even looked at the mobile version i don't even know how to log into the mobile version i wouldn't even know where to find a part in the mobile version where Adam can do all that stuff like the back of his hand

because he created the price book. So it's good to have this relationship. The one thing I'd say you've done a great job over anything is really process improvement. You've really helped. We've started somewhere and you go in and you say, we need a process behind this. So people hate change.

Let's talk about how we built. Explain the culture here. Explain what change means to you and explain our vision when it comes to that. Yeah, always improving is one of our core values. And that, in essence, is change. Not always improvising. Not always improvising. Sometimes it feels that way. We had a little typo in something somebody put up and we didn't catch it for a little bit.

But, you know, it really has become part of our culture. And we try to make sure that people understand the change, understand why it's coming. I think that's another thing I hear from a lot of people I talk to is, yeah, I'm interested. I'm on board with this, but my staff isn't going to like this or they're not going to be willing to do this. You know, I asked two questions. One, do they own the business or do you own it? And I understand, you know, the complexities of sometimes being beholden to your employees. We totally get that. But when you start to explain to people how we're going to continue to make improvements and, you know, service signs, a big example of this, they've changed immensely over the four years we've been on this software. And it's only continuing.

But now I get CSRs, dispatchers, techs. They're excited for the day after release because the first day of a release, sometimes there's a little bit of a hiccup. But they always fix it nice and quickly. But it's one of those things that it's become a part of our culture. And it's really rewarding when you have I'm in these department meetings and, you know, we're having an issue with, let's say, special order parts or deposits. And it's not me saying, hey, we need to fix the process. It's not the manager of that department.

You know, it's not Luke or Brian or Tommy. It's, you know, a dispatcher saying, you know what, we keep having issues with this. We went and looked and we're all doing something a little bit different. I think we need to come up with a uniform process and procedure. We've talked and here's what we think would work best. But we know there's other facets. Is this something we think we can implement? And it just really shows people, the core level employee, taking that always improving

to heart and making their work better. And they understand why we need to make the change. I think a lot of times people don't like change because they feel like it's change for change's sake. And there's a reason why Service Titan focuses on change management. There's definitely an art to it. You need to make sure the change is rolled out. But it's funny, we changed to their phone system in Service Titan a few months ago. Everybody was really afraid, really, you know, it's a big change. We had to switch back and I won't go into details. After the first day, I was like, why do we have to switch back? Like this sucks. I can't wait for the new system to be back. And I don't know how to do everything yet, but,

you know, I can't wait to be back on it. And it's just, it's part of making that a part of your culture and explaining the benefits of that change, you know, allows some of our employees to be a lot more effective, which means maybe we can have them make a little bit more money or put a process in place for them. So it's definitely a part of the culture here. And if you don't have that embracing change mentality, you're going to struggle. And you know, one of the things about always growing was so nice. There's so much opportunity. You've got an apprentice, junior tech, senior tech, field supervisor, and then you can move into a management role. And there's new opportunities coming out every day. And I think that's what people love about us. But the most important

thing is setting the expectations. And we've got this thing, Paylocity, and Adam's pretty intimate in Paylocity as well, of it always updates our manuals. And so we add things, and we want to add expectations to say, you've read this, you understand this, and it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. What I mean by that is the people that have been with me 8, 10 years now, Dean, Danny Meredith, they're rolling with the punches. But I'll tell you, it's really hard because they didn't sign up for this. And it's true, they didn't. They didn't know all the changes. So what I would say to those companies that have those old dogs is say,

Kate, teach them the exact same thing. Unless you're changing a CRM. Don't change their pay. Don't mess with it. But start hiring these other guys and say, here's where you're at. Now you've got eight other guys and you've got these four old guys. And say, guys, now I'm in the drivers. Old being, tenured, not being. Yeah, no, no, no. these four old guys and say guys now i'm old being tenured not being yeah no no but the old guys that have been there they could be they could have started

when they're 20 to 35 at 15 years so i think the main goal is the numbers have dictated some of the decisions we've made with payroll some people say well i get paid a higher percentage i'm like well let's see how much does your truck cost every time it breaks down? It broke down three times last year, your truck payment, your new tires, your oil changes. How much is your gas charge? How much do you have to pay in taxes as a 1099 employee? How much does it cost you to buy your own lube? How much does it cost you to not have an iPad from the company? How much does it cost to the insurance of your vehicle? So all in all, I will say we are by far the highest paying company for what we provide. There's no one even close.

I want to just do a last round of closing here. So I want to do a little drill here with you because you've been with the company through all this. So one thing I do want to say real quick is when there's a storm, when there's a hurricane, when there's a housing crisis, this virus, you either go lie down under a bridge and drink and do your thing and say, I'm a victim, or you come out of it. And I just want to make that the one thing. Are you going to step up to your business and say, I'm going to go? I know for a fact, I'm guessing we're going to double. I'm guessing in the next six months, we double our business because everybody's folding around us.

When they're all folding, we're shooting up to the stars. So, and that's just my mentality, but Adam's been here when we were less than 30. Adam's been here right around a hundred and over 200. So let's go through this. Let's talk about the advice you'd give from your experience. And I could go off on this, but I love it because I've talk about the advice you'd give from your experience. And I could go off on this, but I love it because I've talked about the same stuff you're probably going to talk about. So when you're less than 30, what's the number one goal when you're the owner or a senior manager? I mean, when you're less than 30, you're definitely owner and operator. At that point, you're intimately involved in the day-to-day operations. I used to run calls. Yeah, all the

time. I remember we'd have a CSR call out and I was like, well, there-day operations. I used to run calls. Yeah, all the time. I remember we'd have a CSR call out and I was like, well, there goes my day. I'm answering phone calls all day. Really spending that time, it's almost easier when you're smaller. It's harder to move a big ship. They always talk about these big companies being like the Titanic and they just can't turn. They can see the iceberg ahead of time. But when you're that small 30 person company, I'm guessing at that size, you've got maybe 15 guys, 18 guys on the field. Maybe only three. You know, maybe, maybe you're under like 10, 12, you know, I've got a couple of people in the office, but really spend that time to think about what you want your business to look like,

what it's going to take to get there and laying that foundational groundwork for the roles, the operating manuals, the structure of it with that goal in mind. You know, obviously we have a big goal. Our goal is to have 2000 technicians. That's probably going to put us close to 3000 employees, you know, 20, 2500, a billion dollars a year in revenue. Obviously that looks different than a 30 person company, 50, 200, a thousand, but really start

laying the groundwork for where you want your company to be and start acting like that company now. And when you're smaller, you're having all these roles. So go in and define it and understand it. I think, you know, Tommy joked earlier in the podcast that I wanted to go pretend to be a technician, but I didn't want to pretend. I wanted to understand from the ground up what this job was going to look like. And I had no intention of being a technician, but I wanted to let the guys know that I have their back. I'm not coming to them telling them you need to do this because I've never done it, but I'm the boss. This is what you should do. I really made a connection with each

and every one of those guys because I've had these roles. And when a CSR tells me that this is impossible, I can say, well, no, it is. I had the CSR role. I did that. And when a dispatcher tells me that, well, I really can't manage more than about five techs, I know that to not be the case, you know, because I've been there. I've done that. But I also have a lot of credibility with people because they go, man, our tech count has gotten up and I'm managing 37 guys right now. And I go, man, yeah, that's not sustainable. And so really on that small side, take the time now. And I know this is the stage where you're a firefighter. You're putting out fires.

You're running the jobs. You're in the field. You're meeting vendors outside the truck a lot of the time. But the more you can invest your time into that business, even if it means losing a couple jobs, to take that time. I think we talked earlier, too, about taking that pause from the busy minutia of what's going on to focus on your business, even if it's just one day a week, where you say, I'm not going to do that.

Maybe it's a Saturday a week. Your biggest headache. You say, how do I solve my biggest headache this month? Yeah. And start there. Start with your biggest headache. When you want to pull your hair out, like whether it be a nighttime call, I to hate it on a saturday night when the phone would ring and i'm out having a great time we're at a movie and you know girlfriends and i'd be like i'm sorry but i have

to so we got a weekend i used to get anxiety i'd go to a movie with my wife and i could feel my phone like vibrating in my pocket and you know one time they set off the alarm seven times when we first added the old new building. But I couldn't even enjoy myself. I was stressed out. I'm sure this is resonating with a lot of people. So then we said, you know what, let's devise a simple system. You don't have to spend a lot of money. You don't have to sometimes spend money at all. You know, we figured out a way to forward the phones. We said, OK, I'm going to take this weekend. You take next weekend. So I know this weekend I can go to a movie and not feel like my phone's blowing up and the business is on fire.

The biggest thing is don't take off the weekend because you want to do it for me because you're a team player. I want to give you some skin in the game to make sure you book every call and answer it on the first call. So you got skin in the game. And some people will volunteer

if there's skin in the game. One other thing I wanted to say that I just thought of is we're going to have a learning management system for these roles. Now, I know how to dispatch. I'm not trying to spread it out to go 50 miles, but I want the best guy running the best opportunity. Just like if you've got a guy with an extension ladder and you're in air conditioning, you're going to have him run on that two-level house. So we know how to dispatch. And I've done dispatching, but I don't know the standard operating procedures

to do it perfectly in service time. So we're building this LMS, and guess who's going to take all the courses and say, this is good, but I still, I'm excited because I understand I can find holes in the system. I was used to having Adam make something and I'd break it. And I'd be like, but here's where they're going to get us.

They're going to do this haul-off fee for 100 bucks instead of 50. They're going to double it. They're going to take half of that. So growing through this, I'm excited to learn the small roles, but let's dive into, now you're at a hundred person company. You've got some heads of departments and a hundred person is not much different than two to 500. I don't think, but there is, there is this point of diminishing returns when it comes to things. I remember it really takes a lot once you hit 100. It's another one of those peaks and valleys thing. So what's that next step when you hit around 80 to 120 people, would you say? I think you really need to start relying, like you said, on the department heads and

making sure that they're delivering the same message. So one-on-ones and department meetings are a huge piece of that. The one-on-ones literally to understand how you can help the person, what they're struggling with, help them make sure that they're developing the future leaders within their organization, making sure that your message is being conveyed to their team, their department. You know, typically if you're say say, a 120-person company, you know, maybe you got 60 techs or 80 techs, you know, 40 people in the office,

you got dispatchers, CSRs, schedulers, whatever, procurement, accounting, that you're spending at the time and devoting to them. And again, it's just a broken record here. It goes back to operating manuals, following the org chart, making sure that you're setting systems and structure because at that point when you have that many people you know

100 you're going to have people that are going to try to be in control of their own little fiefdom and they're not going to want to necessarily play nice with this person who's control of the dispatchers or in charge of procurement and really making sure that you're kind of really spending the time focusing on that middle level. What was that book we read, the first one in the book club? It had a lot to do with that. Five Dysfunctions of a Team. So trust and autonomy I think is really important at 100

is when you need to start saying, I'm going to trust you. I'm going to trust but verify. But there needs to be a level of autonomy to say, I'm not going to come in and they can't come to daddy. Look, you fired the couple of top performers and I just was like, okay, you know, they're not going to be able to undermine Adam or any one of our management team. And as hard as it for me to say to someone that's been here a long time that I became buddies with, you know, you're wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You got to respect your management. And that's the hardest thing for small business owners to say. I used to run the show, but they say, listen, sometimes when you

get rid of that, it might not be a bad apple, but it could be they're undermining everything you're working on and they just could tear it all apart. When you got an owner, sometimes the owner's got to get out of the way. But sometimes the owner gets way too much trust and they watch their company crumble because their number two in charge is literally that bad guy. So let's talk about over 200 because we're there right now, but we were here a year ago. Yeah. And the difference is now is we are making a lot of money. We're putting a lot of money in the bank, at least before this all hit.

The difference is now we've got, we're focused on profit versus revenue and we're focused on organized growth versus growth for growth so considering we've been to more people than we're at now but now we're poised to do another 10 times i feel like i think i think as you get to 200 and i'm assuming and just in talking to other people three four, four, 500, a thousand, it's get yourself out of the way. Focus on the big picture objectives, drive that change in what you want your organization to be, but delegate that to make sure that every person, at this point, you're having people that are kind of running almost divisions, so to speak, make sure that they are doing the things that you used to do when it was a hundred, 150 person company. You know, it's funny people come to me.

Oh, you know, everything service time. Well, I don't know about capacity and demand booking because I delegated that to Brian, our service manager, and he really ran with that. He embraced it. I know about it. I'm in the loop, but I'm also now working on sold hours. I'm working on billable efficiencies. I'm working on our price book.

You know, I'm able to expand my reach because of scale and staying out of the day to day. You know, I get people all the time that try to come to me and like, well, he was really unfair. And he told me this. I say, what did the manual say? Okay. What did you manage to say? Well, what was in the manual? Okay. I'm sorry that, you know, give me a reason why that a Big Mac, you know, we always say this, you know, McDonald's make the Big Mac, two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, sesame seed bun. If you like it on a poppy seed bun, go convince 51% of the population that a Big Mac tastes better with poppy seed, and we'll change it. You know, these aren't these living, breathing 10 commandments that came down. But, you know, at that point, when you're a much bigger company, you know, the home service or any,

you need to just let your people do their thing and trust them. You're still sitting there monitoring them. You're still in charge, but you know, just kind of like we have here, Tommy's out leveraging relationships, meeting and greeting. And, you know, we've been able to even scale the business quicker because I mean, if you're not here for a week, do the meetings stop? No. If I don't go to the meetings, do they stop? No, I'm looking for that next.

I'm always looking for, okay, how do we improve revenue and increase profit? Yep. That's it. I mean, there's going to be years that we say we're going to really decrease profit to grow. But the deal is I'm always going out there going, what's our next strategic move? What's the play? Because here's the deal. I know this company will grow at 5% to 10% to 20% per year.

I'm asking how do we get to 1,000%. What's the play? Because here's the deal. I know this company will grow at 5% to 10% to 20% per year. I'm asking how do I get to 1,000%. I'm asking, so how do we get 1,000% still as an area goal? So how do I become that igniting force to do that? So one of the things I learned from L.A.V. and you learned this too is there's always that guy. We've got 10 of them that are just amazing. You're one of them. But what I don't like is not having a depth chart. What I don't like is not having a depth chart.

What I don't like is having this perfect guy without, look, if Brian hit the lottery, not got hit by a bus and he disappeared or had coronavirus for a month, God forbid, the stuff still needs to run. And I really like documenting. I really like the LMS. I really like putting in to do a Zoom call, creating a video on it.

It's so important. You create a lot of videos. We make a ton of videos. But you've relinquished a lot of control. But this is why I love big business is because, and this is why people want to buy big businesses. If me and Adam disappeared, things would definitely not run as smooth, but we'd go on. There's nobody here that could not be here. Adam's got a lot of stuff.

And the more Adam is here, the more I think he'll ensure that if he's gone, it still runs better because he's changed that whole paradigm shift. This is for the better whole. Sadly, I'm not the backup to a lot of jobs anymore, but there's still a few that I'm the third backup. I hate when I get tied into it. My goal is to train more people to be able to take that backup role. We can focus 100% on growth. I guarantee you.

Me and Adam both are like, look, we're both out of town. We don't have to be out of town, but say, are you better or your best? If each department continues to better their best, and I believe every single person

in this company needs a performance improvement plan because their performance will improve over time through being lean, through being consistent, through making the changes necessary to develop their people,

to making sure every single person has the skill set to continue to grow and evolve and do better. And the more we load them up, and we've spent so much time and energy and money. I remember this whole thing someone told me, they said, what if I train them and spend all this money and they leave? And then the guy said, what if you train them and they stay? So that's the question. So let's close it up here. You know I always ask three books. And you've got a whole shelf there you can pick from. But you've read a lot of these books.

We recently read The E-Myth together. Well, we said that to you years ago. Yeah, I've read it several times. So three books. The E-Myth and Rocket Fuel. Talking about that visionary integrator relationship. I really think that that's helpful. And we mentioned it earlier, the five dysfunctions of a team.

Kind of an interesting play on a fable. But really, those are three books that have probably had the biggest impact. You know, Al would want me to say the Seven Power Contractor. Seven Power Contractor. So I'm going to say a fourth one there. But leaders are readers. We say that a lot. Audiobooks are the best. I now move and have a little bit longer commute. So I've been able to get some of those books and listen to some podcasts too. Yeah. I've been out in the parking

lot waiting sometimes to come in, but you know, it is really, again, just that continuous improvement in yourself and books are a great resource for that. Talking to people is a great resource. Podcasts are a great resource. So, and then the number one thing I got to tell you, Oh, I forgot. I'm home service.

I'm a millionaire. I don't know. I forgot that going to the shop. I can't tell you enough. How much did we learn from, um, recently to ER too. We've gotten to,

you haven't gotten as many as I have, but it's such a game changer. And finally, I'm going to give you the floor. We talked about a lot of stuff. It could be philosophy. It could be anything. But tell the audience, I'm going to give you the floor just to go up and get stuff done. And it's a bad time for a lot of people, but there's going to be winners.

I don't care what you say, but give them one final thought from Adam Cronenberg. Actually, they want to get a hold of you. What's the best way to do that? My email is probably the best one. It's A. Cronenberg, and I will spell that for you. It's C-R-O-N-E-N-B-E-R-G at A, the number one, garage.com. You can probably find it on the spelling for the podcast. You guys probably put my last name up there.

Yeah, you'll be able to see all this stuff with the resources, and then I'll give you the last thing. Yeah, you know, the last thing I'll say is, and it kind of goes hand in hand with continuing to learn from reading, from visiting other shops. But, you know, I think that you can learn something from everyone. You're not going to learn everything from someone. But I also think that you need to take everything you learn with a grain of salt. Just because one person does it this way, don't then shift all your business to do it that way. And then you

read a different book or talk to somebody else and shift. You got to kind of really almost, you know, yes, the data can make the decision, but sometimes you have to trust that gut feeling of here's what I think and here's why. Use data to drive that. But don't just say, oh, this person said that. That must be the 100%. I'm going to copy their playbook. If you notice in all these books, at least that I've read, everybody takes bits and pieces from it but kind of develops their own method. And I've kind of found that to be the most effective.

I always take at least one thing. If we go visit a shop, I'm happy when I get three things out of it. I was at a Service Titan power user training, God, almost two years ago. And literally, I was hoping I'd come away with like three things that came with like 10. I was just blown away. But, you know, make sure that you're taking that and figuring out how you can implement it, what you think.

And, you know, whether it's having to come home and talk about better your best or always improving or always improvising. Take that for what you think it to be. Be genuine with it because people can spot when you're phony about these things. And, you know, hopefully you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. I appreciate it. Hey, and I'll just close out with, you know, Adam, I can trust him. He runs the business that if I was gone, he'd make the

same decisions. He looked after what's in the bank account. You're very trustworthy. So I think the most important person when you're looking for somebody around you is to have that trust. And he's proven year after year, time after time that when I'm gone, it's not like, hey, I'm going to buy the whole place pizza. Although we do buy the place pizza a lot because we love pizza. But the point is he's going to make good decisions when I'm not here. He doesn't need to call me because he's got a lot of autonomy. He's not going to spend the money. He's not going to go, guys, we're going to go party with Tommy's gone and go buy tickets for everybody at the movies. He's making conscious decisions to hit his goals. And he's got a whole plan that he makes money on.

And he's got skin in the game, too, because guess who has the most skin? If we lose money, I'm gone. If we make money, I'm still here and he's still here. So skin in the game. Remember that. Home service expert, Tommy Bell. Appreciate you guys. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, Wyatt's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also when you subscribe,

what I'm going to do is let you know the next guest coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask that next person coming on. All. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here. I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow together. Also, I'm giving away my book for free now. All you got to do is go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. You got to cover the shipping and handling, but I'm giving the material out for free. It's 200 pages. It's a hardcover book, home service millionaire.com forward slash podcast. I appreciate each and every one of the listeners and thank you for making this

home service expert podcast a success. I hope you're having a great day and thanks again.