The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Use a Precise, Data-Driven Approach to Find The Right Audience to Sell To

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

Jason Cutter is the author of the book Selling With Authentic Persuasion and the host of The Sales Experience podcast. After observing issues that were repeatedly affecting business-to-consumer (B2C) inside sales teams, particularly those spending money on inbound leads, he started Cutter Consulting Group to tackle those problems and present solutions.  In this episode, we talked about business consulting, management consulting, public speaking, team building, lead generation, outsourcing...

You know, I think for technicians, for employees, for salespeople, I mean, especially where there's some way you want it done in your organization, whatever that role is, that's a tough balance because you want the experience, right? You want somebody who knows how to do that job, whether it's selling, right? Like you hiring new salespeople or the technician, they got to have some skills or that learning curve is going to be difficult. And some track record that they've done it enough where you know you can rely on them and they're going to perform. But you also want that blank slate. I mean, I have made it a rule, especially when hiring salespeople, I just don't hire anyone with a lot of experience. If they have over a certain level of experience and history in sales, I don't want them because they'll come to me and think they know what they're doing and why they're so amazing and why my script is terrible or why we should do it a different way. And my response sometimes actually verbally is, I mean, if you were that good, then why are you on the market looking for a job, right? Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs

and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. And today I have a guest visiting us from San Francisco. And he's cooped away up there in wine country. He's an expert at business consulting, management consulting, public speaking, team building, lead generation, and outsourcing. A little quick bio. He's a Cutter Consulting Group CEO founder from 2018 to present, sales trainer as well. He worked for Ameritech Financial,

VP of Strategic Business Development from 2018, and VP of Sales and Marketing from 2016 to 2018. VP of Sales and Operation in 2016. Is it Asset Incorporated? Yeah, ASET, yeah. ASET, Operations Manager, Airborne Sensor operation mission commander from 2015 to 2016. He's the author of the book, Selling with Authentic Persuasion, host of the Sales Experience podcast. He started Cutter Consulting Group after observing reoccurring issues that were affecting business to consumer inside sales teams, especially those that spend money on inbound leads like me. Jason Cutter, it's a great

opportunity to have you on today. Thanks, man. And that was such a good intro. I like that. Sounds really good when you go through it. It does sound good. Just be proud of yourself. It sounds like you've got a degree in marine biology and somehow- Yeah, there's that part. How did I end up in sales? Yeah, well, tell me about this. Tell me your whole story from soup to nuts and where you're going with this. Well, and I think what's interesting

is bringing up the where I'm at now, which is the sales and the consulting and in the book and the podcast, because literally it's the path most people go on when they get into sales where they didn't plan on it, they didn't think about it. And for a large amount of people, didn't think they would ever be in sales. I mean, there's the bucket of people who are like, they started selling stuff when they were a kid.

And then there's people like me. I say it all the time. I was shy, awkward, only child, late bloomer, analytical parents, anti-sales parents. And I was like, I didn't want to deal with people. So I got fascinated with sharks, got my bachelor's degree in marine biology, tagged sharks for years, and couldn't get a job in marine biology without a master's degree. And I didn't think I wanted to do it. I didn't know where I wanted to go in life. And things just led from one to another. I worked at Microsoft for a couple years doing tech support, because I thought maybe I wanted to be in computers. And then at age 27, I got my first real air quotes sales job in the mortgage business. And with very little training,

very little idea of what I was doing and just grew from there. I'll say resistantly. So you were in the mortgage and then you got in tell me exactly when you decided to write the book become more of a consultant and what do you specialize in now who's your perfect client so the mortgage when i started that was 2002 right and so it's 2020 right now i started my consulting company at the end of 2018. I had wanted to do it. And then an opportunity came up where I was essentially working as an employee, but doing essentially consulting type work around various departments and transforming, improving, starting new business verticals. And so it's a lot of time period in between where I was just learning and developing.

And for me, the book and what I do now just came from the fact that I never thought I was going to be a salesperson. And as I developed as a salesperson, the things that worked really well for me were being authentic, but then also being very persuasive without being the manipulator and without the tactics and the tricks and the traps and all of those things that most people think they have to do to be successful in sales, I found not doing those things works way better long-term. And then teaching hundreds of salespeople to do that in organizations to just be effective without crossing that line. So your B2C, which home service, we're the home service

experts here. So it's all business to consumer for the most part, unless you do partly commercial work with Home Depot or whatnot. But tell me a little bit about some inbound strategies that you've worked on in the past that work? You know, it's expensive, but very scalable would be direct mail. Even in this day and age, it's a fascinating thing. You're dealing with individuals, homeowners, consumers. There's something about the mail that, again, it's expensive, but once you get the piece down and the formula down, that person's interest level

when they contact you is so high, your biggest challenge is not screwing that up. And I see a lot of salespeople who screw that up by not moving it forward and they're too relaxed. The trade-off is it's an expensive phone call, right? But it works really well and you can scale it depending on what you're doing. So inbound that way works well. Facebook ads, digital, anywhere where the consumers are going to be. If you know where your people are at and what you can do. A lot of cool localized stuff you can do with Facebook ads, like zip code specific. If you're a home service company and you're in a region, you can do some really sniper stuff still

on Facebook where you can be in front of your people, like married couples who own a house, who live in this zip code, who are on Facebook and buy stuff, like boom, you can find them sniper. Yeah, you know, that's what's nice is you can go laser focused. And that's an interesting point if you know who your avatar is.

So you could actually assimilate all your data, learn where your best, you could do like a heat map of where your best clients are in the past, which doesn't always say they're the best clients. What would you say the best way to discover who your perfect avatar is? I mean, you really, like if you have enough data points, take what you've got from all your clients and then look at the ones and rank them, even if you have to manually rank them, rank them in some way where you know, as far as the quality from the high to low, which could be profitability, total lifetime value of a client, right? What does that mean? Are they doing more? Are they

coming back often? What did they buy? What was the purchase price? And then also satisfaction, and did you like working with them or were they a pain? Yes, they made you a bunch of money, but they were a nightmare to deal with and I never want to deal with that person again. Funny thing, birds of a feather will flock together. So you've got to be careful not to get referrals or more people like those ones that were painful for you. But yeah, you take that if there's some way to rank those, even on a profitability number, and then find more of them. Facebook has a way to do lookalike audiences

where you could just dump it in there, the list, and it will find everyone else it thinks of like them. Yeah, I think Facebook works great. I mean, Facebook, in my opinion, is not direct response. It's literally the opposite. It's planting a seed and building a nice funnel. So I like both sides. Google's like, boom, I need my, my browser is being broke or my air conditioning is not working. I'm not going to go to Facebook and say, Hmm, where do I find

somebody? Facebook works extremely well. If you know what you're selling, you knew who your client is. I have a client that spends a lot, a lot, a lot of money with us and I'm learning how to duplicate him. And it's asking for referrals. It's actually studying him and seeing where he hangs out. Like you said, birds of a feather. And you know, if I just work really, really hard to get a hundred of these guys, I'll be a hundred million dollar company with just a hundred clients. Yeah. And that's pretty cool because I can handle a hundred clients pretty easily. We handle six over 6,000 customers a month. So a hundred a year is pretty simple, but sometimes they can be fussy, but they deserve to be. They spend a lot of money. You know, I was going to talk to you a little bit about data because direct mail works well, but I don't think the shotgun approach works as good.

Although I've had success with Clipper, ValPak, MoneyMailer. But when you speak about direct mail, are you talking postcards, handwritten letters? You're talking about folded letters that are typed out of the outside of the envelopes. Look, what kind of message are you trying to create? How are you kind of a rifle shot to the perfect audience? You know, there's a lot there, but kind of unpack that for me.

So there's the ValPak strategy, which is kind of everybody in a zip code, in a county, a city, and then they're specific. And the hardest part is the data, getting a clean list, getting a list of people who you know are in the demographic, the avatar of what you want, right? Like homes of a certain price, homeowners with certain credit score or income,

which you can get all that data. And there's some good sources for that. And then the rest of it's A-B testing. It's about, okay, let me try postcards that don't have to be open versus direct mail, which do have to be open. If you're like me, literally, I checked my mail yesterday, just literally not even opening envelopes, just tossing them because I know they're crap versus postcards, which don't need to be. And then it's about what do you put on the outside and what's going to be appealing to somebody that is going to say, okay, yeah, maybe I do need a service on my air conditioner, or maybe it is time for me to check out my roof and see if it's doing okay.

And so I would say that, and then it's really about testing, testing different envelopes. I mean, I've run direct mail campaigns for so long that any one week in particular, we would have four to 20 different test variations going on at a time just to see like small batches to see which is better. Is it blue envelope? Is it a white envelope with blue paper poking through the window? And then literally what gets people's attention? And then it also fluctuates. I mean, there's postcard season and then there's letter season, where sometimes there's so much mail that they're getting that a postcard gets their attention. And so it's just about testing. I agree. And we hear A-B testing all the time digitally. We just don't hear it enough with the old mailers and people say mail doesn't work anymore. You know, I've been hearing a lot about,

I used to be a naysayer of TV, radio, billboards, but I've kind of switched my tune just because I've met a few people that are well over $200 million. And the fact is they own Google because people search for them on Google. They don't search for generic search terms. So their conversion rates high when they're on the field,

they're guaranteed to get the sale. The sale is higher and they're happy customers. Happy clients is like, I like to say, cause a client is a lifetime value. So, you know, there's a lot to be discussed there cause I'm a big fan of direct response

at TV is definitely not, you could have messages in a lot to be discussed there because I'm a big fan of direct response. And TV is definitely not, you could have messages in there that are direct response, but Dan Kennedy wrote No BS About Direct Response, a really good book. And he said, you don't have to spend a fortune on this stuff, but it really works. It's about entering into the subconscious. I think it's about being that go-to name, that top of mind topo, top of mind awareness. Tell me what your feelings are about branding versus direct response. I think both of them, it's important. I mean, it depends on what your goals are short-term and long-term and where you want to be. I think you've got to do both. I mean, I think it's always about your brand and the long-term is kind of like SEO, right? The long-term is that your brand just carries it. It's like your example where people are searching in Google

for that one company name. It's not, I need help with air conditioning. It's ABC air conditioning, right? Like literally that's what they're searching. So the brand is what you want to be focusing on. And then direct response is, how do I attack that from all angles and just make that a part of people's brains?

You know, how do I send a piece of mail? Maybe they go to my website, but then I can track when they come to my website and then I can hit them with something else. I mean, I know companies where they'll take an anonymous visitor on your website that doesn't fill out a form, reverse engineer that IP to who that is, and then you can send out postcards to that person, which you don't tell them, hey, by the way, you were on my site and I saw that. But it's like, okay, here's another thing. And they think, oh man, that's right. I saw that website. Here's this. It must be a message. Maybe I should work with them. And so I think you always got to do both. Yeah. It's pretty cool with this day and age. You could do stuff like that. You can skip trace

people. You can literally geofence people and their ads pop up all day to stay top of mind. I mean, the stuff we're doing, they'll be watching Hulu, playing a game on their phone, watching Hulu, and you programmatically end up on their Hulu ad to the same person. And it's like, boom, boom, boom, boom.

You're hitting them from every angle to where they feel like this is either destiny or Facebook's doing some crazy stuff to me right now. Yeah, And you just don't know. And I think what's great, especially about home services that I really like is that most people are working with geography, right? There's a territory of which they do their business and who they're helping, which just actually helps narrow it down. I mean, I have some clients, it's like, we'll help everyone with credit card debts. Like, how the heck do we find these people? But if you have a territory, then yeah, you can do really good stuff cost effectively and get in touch with them from all angles. And just keep

trying stuff until you figure out what works. What gives you the best cost per acquisition at scale that you can then just throw more money at and get to where you want? Yeah. I think what you figure out is you put a dollar in, you take a dollar 10 out. And then how do you scale that to the point of diminishing returns? I had a partner, his name's Josh. He has a brand now called Snow.

It's a teeth whitening. We've done a lot together and I knew him since he was just a teenager. And he does a Facebook campaign for credit repair. At least he was, they were spending a million dollars a week. And what they were doing is, I can't believe I was able to move my 528 credit score to a 690 within three weeks.

And the people say, I want to learn more. And it starts and he goes, the average turnaround time is 30 hours. But what I loved about listening to it is he had these KPIs. He knew what it was going to look like. He knew exactly. And over time, it becomes predictable is the more data you get, the more predictability you have. And I love that idea because there's so many small businesses, especially in home service,

they throw stuff at the wall for a month and see what sticks. And there's no way you could do ValPack for a month and to be successful. You need to play around with it. Just like everything you do. I wouldn't say play around with SEO. Make sure your site loads fast. Make sure you've got the right content on there. Make sure there's an easy call to action. Make sure you've got good content to keep people engaged and clicking through the pages for time on site. All those things matter. But for these quick direct response campaigns versus the long-term SEO play and the quality scores in your PPC and all that good stuff, I think you do have to A, B test a lot and you should expect at least a six months. But I compare Mailer to Mailer

because I've been doing this so long. And if I don't get a response and they say, yeah, but a lot of our people go to Google and Google gets the credit. I go, you guys didn't get anything. This is garbage. Like I've got other mailers that do here. So it's good. One thing I'd recommend is try to understand a baseline and at least you should be bare minimum of five to one. If you spend 5,000, you should be able to bring 25,000 back. That's a five to one ratio. And people that don't get that a lot of times, believe it or not, here's what I found. And tell me your experience on this, but it's not the ad that's bad. It's the conversion rate. It's

picking up the phone. It's no call to action. It's the ad sucks that you've got everything you do in there. You've got 82 coupons on a piece of paper. That's a quarter of a page. You know what I mean? Yeah. And are you sending the right message to the right person with something that's actually going to help them? And when it's right, it's going to be really easy. They're going to say, yes, I have that issue. But yeah, I see that where it's like too many offers because they're hoping that something on there is going to be appealing and the person's going to self-select and say, yes, I do have problem number 42 from your catalog, right? But it's not. I mean, it's the same kind of overwhelm when you go to the Cheesecake Factory and you look at their 23-page menu. It's like, I don't even know what category to start on, let alone what to pick. So sometimes

it's just simpler is better. We have one solution for one problem. Do you have that one problem? I will help you. Like your credit score example, right? You have a bad credit score. I will help you. That's it. You know, it's funny. I was at Cheesecake Factory last week and I actually worked there for a few years and I started working there when I just turned 18 and it's still open in Chandler here in Arizona. And I saw this guy and I go, Oh my gosh, is that Raul? And I walked up to him. I was like, Raul, he took out his face and he goes, Tomas. And this is like, this is almost 20 years ago now. And it's, it's pretty cool though, because you're right. The menu, thank God I know it by heart, but there's something for everybody there, but you're right. It's like, it's sometimes

too much. Sometimes I like a menu. That's a one pager, less than a one pager. Like you get three choices of an entree, three for an appetizer. I think a lot of times people over clutter it. I do like two choices though. I like good and better. And I always tell my salespeople, start with the best first.

You could always go down, but you can't go back up. Because if you go good, better, best, what do you think everybody chooses? Good enough. Good or better. A lot of them, I'll take the middle ground. I don't want the shitty one, but I don't want the top of the line.

I'm more of a, I don't want the neon, but I don't need the Mercedes. So I'll just stick in the middle here. And I don't even know what my, the middle is on that. But maybe a Camry. I don't know. Yeah, there you go.

Solid Toyota Camry. Yes, reliable. the middle is on that but maybe a camry i don't know yeah there you go solid toyota camry yes reliable so i've met a lot of business owners and there's a lot of complaints and i've been thinking a lot about starting a business about because i've started a dozen of them and i think about the biggest failure points and i think it's not having a plan. I think it's being tremendously underfunded and not having the people that are going to help you with the things you're bad at from the start, like time management and like really being concise in marketing if you're not a good marketer. And I talked to a guy that started a franchise. He just sold it for 120 million. He sold it for a lot of money, but he's a smart, smart guy. And he said, look, I put a team together that I knew could win, that I knew I worked well with,

that are not best friends. They're good at business. And I think as business owners, we don't know that in the beginning, but now I'm like, I think I'm kind of dangerous in business, like in a good way, because now I can build a team and now I could go in with a plan and I've got a manual and I've got a plan for marketing and I just tweak, tweak, tweak. And it's going to cost money to make money. So these business owners go in underfunded, without a plan, without understanding their weaknesses. And I really had an epiphany last night about this. And I'm like, man, I've screwed up a lot with these things by not doing my research, by not going to a very successful company in the same industry and

shadowing them and help going in as a student. A lot of them don't look at you as competition, you know, you're just starting out. So what would you tell the most business owners that are starting out that are still struggling to get out of the truck and still, they're still just caught in the day-to-day and still working in the business more than they're working on it. I mean, I think you hit it on the head is that the self-awareness of what you're good at, who you are, what you want to do, what you like doing, and then what are the blind spots? Where do you need help? My number one favorite business book and the one that I have

held the longest in that spot just early on is the boom E myth E myth revisited right there and I even have the mastery one which is like a textbook oh you know in in all I'm here this is fun on the podcast. I got the E-Myth. I've got the big one too. I've got all of his books. I've got the mastery one. Actually, he came into my office about six months ago. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, for those of you listening, we're just bragging about the podcast. We're just grabbing books off our shelves. I just pulled off E-Myth contractor. Yeah, I know. I've got the contractor one. I've got the eight. Look at this one. The HVAC one. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. And you know, they're all really, really good reads.

So here's the deal. Well, this is why I love those so much is because most small businesses fail. Everyone knows those stats. Most small businesses are generally started, especially home services by a technician. It's somebody who's good at HVAC, has that entrepreneurial spasm, decides to go start their own HVAC company, and doesn't know the rest, right? The sales, the marketing, the accounting, all that stuff. And the more you can fill in those gaps, instead of trying to do it yourself, the sooner you'll win. Well, you're right. The thing is, you go in there and you say, look, I'm really good at my job. I can go do this myself and make way more profit. The problem is managing people, leadership, and culture are three

different things and that you didn't plan on. And then being a good marketer. And I think I'm in a unique situation that I haven't had to hire a marketing agency for everything because I've learned how to make the phone ring over and over. I think it's a little bit different now because I've always been good at lead generation. The difference now is I'm going after leads for my company that I want a high conversion rate. So I don't look at it as wasted money. I was just on the phone earlier and I'm completely transparent on the podcast. I spent right around 15,000 in Phoenix on TV this past month. And I said, I want to get on some billboards, pump it up to $45,000. It's a good month before election to spend a lot of money and really go after it because

I got five new guys coming on. And this is the gift that keeps giving. And I really reverse engineered some numbers. And I think I'll do close to a million off of that, plus my PPC, plus my organic. But if you add up your marketing dollars, I like to say to be around 15% if you're super aggressive, be under 10% if you're trying to just keep it going. If you just enter a market, no one's ever heard of you. You don't do an acquisition. You got to be a little bit more one's ever heard of you. You don't do an acquisition. You got to be a little bit more aggressive. People got to hear your name. They got to start.

And the marketing doesn't start working right away. So 15% is not unlikely and it depends on the industry, but I think that's a pretty solid rule. What is your take on that? It's two things. One is how much does the brand awareness matter for whatever you're selling? And then how much is the problem you're solving as important or more important? And I'm thinking of all companies where they're trying to sell. Sometimes the brand doesn't matter. Just solve my problem. Take care of this issue. And here's a pile of money. Sometimes it's about the brand and the loyalty and or the competition. And so yeah, it depends. I've seen campaigns work right away because you're just hitting the pain on the spot

and who you are doesn't matter as much to at least to trigger the phone calls and then you can do your magic from there, so. Yeah, I think that when you've got a good branding, but there's a small call to action, like at the end of the commercial, like if your garage is making noise get us out there for 45 to come do a complete 25 point safety inspection and tune up on

your door which is lubricating adjusting tightening everything and then i got this annoying thing at the end that says a1 garage.com a1 from day one and all these people call me up they're like dude i can't get that stupid thing out of my head. And I'm like, it's working. Because what are you going to think when your garage door breaks? A1 Garage, A1Garage.com. And it's easy to remember. And we just, boom, we keep hitting it, hitting it, hitting it. And when you do it long enough, I don't know if you ever heard of MyPillow. This guy is all over cable. The MyPillow guy. Have you ever heard of my pillow this guy is all over a cable the my pillow guy have you ever seen the commercial i know i have but i can't remember it's just obviously didn't work on me my pillow that cup it's a girl that sings it at the end but these little things they work

and it's been tried and true but i really think now is a little bit more because the consumer has so much power because of yelp ang Angie's List, that keeps going. Really, the BBB still is active, not as much as it used to be, but you've got about 100 sites that people could trash you on now, not to mention some really nasty ones I'm not even going to mention, because it can screw up a company for a long time. Now that the consumer has more power, I think it takes a lot more. It's better service. We got to have better technicians, more clean. They got to be healthy.

They got to be smiling. They got to have the attitude. They got to have a new truck. They got to be good with their tools. You know, it's hard to find a good technician because you want them to be fairly attractive. They can't be a, you know, a bum, you know, groomed as well. They got to be mechanically inclined. They got to be sales inclined. They got to be a bum, groomed as well. They got to be mechanically inclined. They got to be sales inclined. They got to have a clean driver's record. They got to be focused on the business. And you ask for all these things. And what I've learned is it's

easier to make a technician than it is to find one. Try to turn from the dark side to the good side. What is your philosophy when it comes to recruiting and finding great technicians? I think for technicians, for employees, for salespeople, especially where there's some way you want it done in your organization, whatever that role is, that's a tough balance because you want the experience. You want somebody who knows how to do that job, whether it's selling, like you hiring new salespeople or the technician, they got to have some skills or that learning curve is going to be difficult. And some track record that they've done it enough where you know you can rely on them and they're going to perform. But you also want that blank slate. I mean, I have made it a rule, especially when hiring salespeople,

I just don't hire anyone with a lot of experience. If they have over a certain level of experience and history and sales I don't want them because they'll come to me and think they know what they're doing and why they're so amazing and why my script is terrible or why we should do it a different way and my response sometimes actually verbally is I mean if you were that good then why are you on the market looking for a job, right? Yeah, that's a great, and you know, everything that's so true. Keep going. Cause that's right. And again, life happens, right? I've been there myself in life has punched me in the face and it's like, okay, why essentially, why are you available? Why are you looking for a job? You know, and life does happen,

but yeah, I've been burned so many times with that experienced salesperson where I had this one guy once literally I'm the VP of sales. He's a sales rep. There's two layers in between me and him. He walks up to me the second day in training and says, Hey, I heard this is your script. I think it's good, but I know some ways I'm going to fix it. So I'm going to use it for a couple of times, but then I'm going to rewrite it and I'll let you know how it comes out. That's what he said to me. And it's like, okay, good luck. He didn't make it two weeks. Sales. I'll just tell you this. The first thing you do is get people to like you and you smile. And if you're smart at sales, you want everybody liking you. You know, I told one of my top performers about a year and a half ago, he said, dude, I'm so sick of the dispatchers. They screw

me every time. And I go, you know why? Listen to your attitude towards them. Because they don't like you. They don't like you because you're a know-it-all and you get paid way more and everything else. I said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm like, here's two $50 gift cards. Go walk up to each supervisor, give them these cards and tell them how much you appreciate them. Tell them how much of a jackass you've acted like for the past year. Tell them that you never really knew how hard their job was. And he bumped into me then two days later and he said at the office and he just had bought them all coffee and donuts. And I go, what happened? He goes, dude, you just see my schedule. He's like, this shit works.

And I'm like, dude, here's the thing. They just want to feel appreciated. You just want to know that you understand that they're working hard too. And it's hard because out of sight, out of mind, some people think we sit here at the office and play around and go golfing here or something. I don't know what, there's a lot that goes on, but it's not as hard as turning around. It's not like that physical work, but there's a lot of meetings. There's a lot of tough decisions. For me, it's not, I got to tell you, I don't feel like I'm ever going to work because I enjoy myself. I really do. I was talking to one of my main top managers and I was like, dude, this is so much fun. I'm just having fun. I mean, COVID sucks, but I'm having so much fun. And that's how work should be. I don't know if that's like that for you, but it's...

I mean, it is for me. And I think that's the way it should be for everybody. I mean, I honestly feel bad for people who can't wait for Friday because it means their work week is over. And they dread Sunday night because they have that pit of the stomach feeling because they know Monday's coming, right? And they don't want to go to work on Monday. Life is too short to do shit you hate, right? Life is too short to do shit you hate. Life is too short to be Monday through Friday, can't stand it, and you just can't wait for it to be over for your weekend. I mean, you should always do it. And sometimes life is about discovering that. Doing things for a while to figure out what you don't like to do so you can figure out what you do like.

And then back to your sales example. One of the biggest challenges is sales always thinks everyone can't exist without them. And it's really a team event, right? Like sales can't succeed without people doing whatever they're selling, the technicians and the support and your dispatchers. So it's everyone realizing that everybody is important. That's when organizations really win. So you know what? You mentioned something earlier and that's a great point to love what you do. And I'm thinking in my mind and I'm all, I'm, I've followed two questions on the script that we've written and those are good. How are we going to go back to them? But I never,

I never do. Sometimes my team is like, dude, why don't we even write you questions? Because the podcast takes me in a certain way. And I think it's intuition to kind of pull stuff out of people sometimes. And I'm thinking about if I was a CSR, I don't know if I'd love that job, but we gamified it and made it fun. But CSR is dispatchers, just trainees, just there's different roles. How do you build a job that it's maybe monotonous at times, or imagine cleaning houses or something and you work for someone else. How can you turn that gamification as one way, but what can we do to really spruce it up so people say, I don't mind coming to work. It's like, I like my Saturdays and Sundays because of my family and because I get to see my friends, but how do you do that?

And again, I'm not anti-weekend, right? It's not like, hey, you should be working. I don't know. I know what you mean. I get it. Yeah. You know, I think there's two things. One is you mentioned earlier, which is culture, right? Having a culture in the company where everyone feels like they're doing something that matters, no matter what that is, right? So if you're cleaning houses for a living, like, does that matter? Is there an impact? Do you feel like, hey, I might be cleaning houses, but I'm making this person happy. Their house is now clean. They're feeling joy. That gives me satisfaction. I'm part of something where it's cool. It's not toxic as a work environment.

And this is great. And everyone supports me and we're enjoying it. It doesn't matter what you're doing, but you're enjoying it. So I think one big part is corporate culture and the mission, vision, core values, having something that's aligning everyone because it will always be tough at times. Things will not go right. Problems will happen. Challenges will occur. Let's say, I don't know, like a pandemic might hit out of nowhere. And the people who are going to make it through this right now the best, the companies, are going to be the ones with values and mission and vision where everyone knows. It's like, okay, it's fine. We're going through the shit, but we're rowing together. We're going to win. We're going to do this. There's a reason. So that's one big thing.

The second one is recruiting and hiring and then setting expectations. To you and I, a CSR position might seem like a terrible thing. We don't want to do it. Or I don't want to do the same thing every day. But there's people out there who absolutely love it. It's the perfect fit for their personality, for their behavior, for what excites them, for what gives them joy and juices them up. They just love solving problems and helping people. I mean, I did tech support for years. I couldn't stay. I love the support side, but I was like, this never ends. Other people I worked with, they're like, this is fantastic. They're on fire because it just was like, just so fun for them.

The game they were playing was fun. And it's about finding those people and making square pegs and square holes instead of square pegs and round holes. I think that's a great point. And it's not always about buying everything. You know, people really take... Today, I got two huge checks made. I had a contest last week.

Who could sell three worry frees from Thursday through the weekend? And two of the guys out of like 130 did it. And they happened to be in Phoenix, our home office. So we've got this huge whiteboard check since the first time we used them i got three from amazon and then i i handed them to him and i handed him the gift card right behind it we took pictures and i had him post on facebook but it was just a cool feeling to be up there smiling in front of everybody and just i

just love the fact that you know we've got an employee of the month we've got a monthly newsletter we're doing stuff to show that we care always an employee of the month. We've got a monthly newsletter. We're doing stuff to show that we care. Always giving back. Today, we catered breakfast for the whole company, at least in Phoenix. And all the other markets get to do fun stuff too. The new trainees get to play games. And one of the things we're going to do that I told, I'm working pretty closely with a gal that I've worked with about five years, she's in PR. And I said, listen, I said, I want to get heavily involved with charity, like way more than you've ever thought, like way more than most companies, you know? And she said like, what? Well, I said, well, I've got about 40 to 50 technicians coming in a month. I like to at least donate half a day to them doing something with

their hands, like feeding the needy or going, whatever that looks like. Right. I want them to understand that we're a charitable organization. Number one, number two is I want to donate to Ronald McDonald. I want to get involved with, uh, wounded warriors.

And I want to get involved with doing all these things. And she's like, wow. And I was like, well, look, if we do 60 million this year and I spent 1%, that's $600,000.

That's a lot to give to charity. Not to mention I'm pulling in all my other vendors. And it's really the unfair advantage because people think, man, that's $600,000 out the door, but it probably means another 60 million next year. I hate to say it and it might sound like greedy of me, but it's the gift that keeps giving. It becomes easier to recruit, easier to retain. Customers see what we're doing in their communities. They enjoy it. The media picks it up like crazy. And I'm doing what I love, which is becoming a philanthropist in some ways. Isn't that crazy how that works? And I think, you know, for me, when I hear that and what I've always focused on is the intention, right? Is the intention to do it so it looks good that you're giving back so you can make more money and use it as a press

release or are those side benefits that could or could not happen and you wouldn't carry the way because you just want to do it which is what it sounds like when you're talking about it yes it will be yeah you're right you're right and I think what needs to happen though is's, I don't think what I've seen with my churches and stuff, they don't try to publicize. Publicizing things is not necessarily a bad thing. And let me give you an example, Jason, is here's what we did for the wounded warriors. And we think you should do this too, Jason. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I understand what you're saying. Some people, this is my number one rule, take care of your people first and you're not going to get any

publicity out of it. If you go do something very good for your employees, maybe they'll tell other people, but at the same time, the thing is make sure they got a good Thanksgiving dinner and a good Christmas for their kids and make sure they got a sound vehicle to get to work and make sure the Easter bunny comes and heck, maybe even the tooth fairy, they got a sound vehicle to get to work and make sure the Easter bunny comes. And heck, maybe even the Tooth Fairy, they got a couple bucks to leave under the pillow. The pillow. Yeah, it's definitely gotten more expensive than when we were both kids.

It's not when I was a kid. I got like- When I was a kid, no way. And I would say, and this is a weird recommendation. I've been on a kick over the last few months on my podcast and on other podcasts. People ask me for like, what's a good business management book? And this is a weird one, but I'm going to,

it fits in well with this conversation is the five love languages. If anyone's not familiar with it, the five love languages, basically it's saying that each person has kind of one and two ways that they feel loved, whether it's gifts. My girlfriend's gifts. Yeah. So it's gifts, quality time, personal touch, words of affirmations and acts of service are the five. And then there's like subsets under those. But from a management perspective, the best thing to do is understand that with your team or your whole company, but understand it at a team level. I even know teams who like on their

name cards, like on their cubicle also list their love language so everyone knows it right away. Because what you also want to do is be careful not to give the wrong gift thinking you're doing a good thing. I'm just using your check example. For some people, getting that check and being up on stage and having the glory, that's perfect. For other people, that will upset them and make them never want to perform again because they don't want the attention. They would rather have lunch with you. If they had an hour lunch with you or a 30-minute coffee with you, you could save all your cash spiffs because that's their love language. That's a great point. I use the predictive index and I use a cognitive test. I used to use a disc assessment and I've gone through every personality test you can imagine. I mean, I've got, I've got books, colors, I've got bricks,

like I'm going to add the five love languages quiz because I want, that's really cool. And I'm working on a plaque for everybody's desk that says who they are and really lets you understand the other person and how they perceive things. Because you can be bored one day, walk around the office just learning about, and all of a sudden you'll have this light bulb moment and say, oh my gosh, no wonder why we haven't communicated properly. When me and Brian, one of my top managers, another guy that I was talking about earlier, when he found out who I was, he goes, dude, I got to gotta be honest I thought you were kind of a prick sometimes because you never took the time I'd be working on a project for a week you'd come

looking to say great job tell me if you need anything but you're not a details guy at all like to sit down and go over for a half an hour would be like pulling your teeth and I didn't know that about you and I said dude and I didn't know you needed the time. Cause you know, I'd be disrespectful in his opinion, like my phone would ring or my time would get stolen and I've gotten better cause I've got an amazing assistant. But ultimately, um, when you get to learn somebody else and understand what motivates them and, you know, you could do this too. And this is one of my first podcasts is I had a guy come on. It was one of the best, best restaurants in Canada, five years in a row. And he said, I find out what my, my people want that costs $20. When I like, what would you do for 20 bucks? The person's like,

if I had 20 bucks, I'd like to go to a movie with my wife because we don't get enough time to do that with the kids. Or they say, you know what? I love chocolate. I love Hershey chocolate with almonds. And I love this big candy bar. And then you say, what would you do if you had a hundred bucks? And they say, you know what? For a hundred bucks, I think you'd go bungee jumping. And I've always wanted to go bungee jumping. And what he would do is the minute they got through training,

he'd give them the $20 gift. And they didn't know it was coming. And then the minute they got done with their first year anniversary and celebrated, he'd give them the $100 gift. And they didn't know it was coming. And then the minute they got done with their first year anniversary and celebrated, he gave them the $100 gift. And it'd be like, whoa, you actually remember. And it's pretty cool to think about that. Now we're talking about culture, but this is the stuff that makes a business beat. This is the heartbeat of a company. And for a couple of things, one, it shows that you listen. For the second one, and this is where I see a lot of companies fail, is that you're giving them something that they want, not what you assume everyone wants. Everyone assume everyone just wants a big pile of money or everyone is just going to want to go to the Caribbean. It's like,

no, I don't. I would rather do X or I would rather do this or here's what makes me happy. And the more you can treat everyone as different and special in their way, then it's a done deal. Like you have a great culture. You know, being a great leader is learning what people want. And maybe it's not watching them take a quiz. I know exactly what motivates my COO. We'll be sitting down in a meeting and we're impressing people and he'll go, well, when I started here, there was only 28 people and we were only $4 million. And now, and it's so funny because I always tell the manager,

I'm like, without a doubt, this is gonna come up. But it's funny because I know that praising him and saying, you know, without Adam, we would never blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And without this guy, and he loves words of affirmation. He loves to hear that he's doing well and he needs that. And certain people need that. Certain people need other things. You know, I think there's certain people that are, when you take that test, sometimes you don't really have a huge one, one more than another,

a little bit. And I think it's kind of circumstantial. I mean, acts of kindness or what's the one with the touch? Acts of service, physical touch. Physical touch. Like, I don't know. That's a little hard in the workplace. I'd be like, hey, you know what? This is your second date. Come give me a bear hug. Only with HR watching to make sure it's approved. Well, that's why our HR team is pretty shrunk down to nothing right now.

And again, like, I think this is important. People might think we've gone on a crazy tangent, but if you're managing a sales team, running a business, knowing who your people are and managing them, and then depending on what kind of customers you have, if you have longer-term relationships with your customers, depending on what you're doing, the more you can understand them or pick up on what they like, then you can interact with them at a much better level that your lifetime value on that client is just going to be amazing. Because I guarantee nobody out there selling to them even gives a crap about stuff like that. You know, and you're always like, you think about like today, I asked Luke, I was in the car riding up to North Scottsdale with him

to talk to a customer about four custom doors, which I never do, but it's a very personal customer. And I said, is there any clients of yours that you'd want to take to a basketball game once we get out of this stuff? He goes, yeah, there's a couple. But the more I think about it, we should really run this test with some of our bigger clients and say, quality time and gifting, two punches in one right there, right? Because you're giving them an opportunity to hang out time-wise and you're also giving them a gift. There's Steve Sims, I mean, blue fishing. I don't know if you ever read that book, but he talks about, there's another book called Giftology and it's really about just a card. Today, I called a guy that ended up quitting four months ago. And he didn't quit

for any reasons here. There was just some relationships. There's another gal that works here and they wanted to kind of keep it away. And I understood. So I called him up today and he goes, oh my gosh. He goes, I never expected to hear from you again. And I said, well, listen, man, I'm not calling you for anything. I don't need anything. I just wanted to see how you're doing. And I wanted to let you know, you were very intricate piece of this business and I hope all is well. And I'd love to take you and Tina out to dinner sometime soon. And he goes, well, yeah, yeah. Like he, he didn't know how to react because he didn't expect that. And that's one thing that I got to get better at is the bigger you get,

the more time you should take for just understanding each thing. And the more time you're not working in the business, believe it or not, that call today was working on the business. It wasn't working on the business. And even if he's no longer with you and nothing ever comes of it, and it doesn't matter because there was no intention or expectation about it. But just you doing that in your brain makes you vibrate at a different level and then everyone will feel that. So yeah, some of that's, it's so valuable. My intentions were never, I promise you, I never thought about this during the call,

but I'm sure he's going to mention it to her, that stuff. And it's going to spread and it's, I don't expect this stuff to, but I always say giving is like a boomerang, whether that's any of the stuff we're talking about, the five love languages. It always comes back if it's sincere and it's genuine. You know, I feel like I want to dive into some marketing stuff while I got you real quick, but that was just, it was amazing. But let's talk a little bit about what's a mistake that most people are doing when it comes to marketing, most small business owners. I mean, they're really not tracking anything. They can't identify and work backwards to what they're doing and which ones are working if

they're doing lots of things and then why it's working. We'll take the billboard example, which is I should do billboards. Okay. You do a billboard. Okay. How much deals have you gotten from? Well, I have no idea. Well, how do you know it's working? I have no idea, but I'm just doing billboards. Do you have a special number? Are you tracking it? Are your reps asking when somebody's calling in like, hey, how did you hear? Because you just don't know. And I see a lot of people do marketing because they should, but they're not being smart financially with it and then high grading it all the time. So I think a billboard, and this is where I'd love to hear your perspective because I'm a1garage.com, 844-A1-GARAGE. I've got some other call tracking numbers, but

if you look at a company like 877-CASH-NOW, they do so much and you could ask all you want, but I believe there's certain things that are living in the cognitive side, in the back alley of the brain. I can't think of what I'm like a subconscious, if you will. Yeah. And it's tough to track because if I put all this crap on, I just want them to see a one garage door service that keeps seeing these guys everywhere. And then when they search, they go to Google like everybody does, or they see us somewhere else. They're like, I recognize that company. I've seen their trucks everywhere. They got to be good. I don't think necessarily what I would do, and this is from my perception, and I'd love to hear

yours on this because billboards, especially billboards, sometimes TV, radio, that's just a good offer at the end. As I look at everything else else is my Val pack delivering more. It's my money mailer. My clipper is my pay-per-click reducing the cost per click. Am I getting more clicks for my own? See Ken Goodrich with a ghetto air. He said his click-through rate went to 64% from 12% when he started doing billboards and radio. And he said, I only bought my own keywords after I learned what this other stuff did versus going after. So what I'm saying is I had a benchmark of all these other things before I started that stuff.

I didn't go blindly into the night not knowing what I was doing because I could look at everything else. What would you say to work up to that? Because it's hard to put a call tracking number on a billboard in every single truck. I've got 4,300 call tracking numbers. So trust me, I track my crap. And you don't want to because then it's diluting that number and it's messing up people's subconscious and it's confusing them, right? Like you're talking about with your main number. And so it really depends on the strategy. Are you going for brand awareness and just a conscious level of people seeing it and understanding it? Or is it

direct response mode and you need to know what is profitable from a marketing standpoint, what's generating the revenue? And if you don't, this is where I see people who are going brand, right? It's trucks, it's billboards, it's ads. Do you have a profitable cost per acquisition? When you get that phone call based on your conversion of how many calls it takes to make some kind of sale, based on how much you're spending in a month for marketing, the marketing brand blob, if you will, is it a profitable sale? And a lot of companies, they're doing marketing because they should, and they still don't know the numbers enough to know, wait, that cost me a lot of money for that sale. And where can we optimize? Well, that's the biggest mistake I see all the time is I've worked with advertisers in the past

that told me, thank God they were honest with me and said, stop. You're not picking up the phone until after five rings. You can't get to the job in three days from the calls that I've listened to. And I think most of the time when marketing fails, if it's working for another similar like company, a big reason is they're not charging enough money. Their conversion rate sucks.

But a lot of people rely on word of mouth. And I think word of mouth is awesome. Especially as I hire better, I want to say the best employees that have ever lived because these people go to war for you. They ask people, they call their friends and family and say, Hey, listen, let us go give you a tune up. It's affordable. We'll give you a friends or family. They go to war, they'll get reviews and they'll get Facebook likes and everything else. And word of mouth is great. I wish I could be slammed with, you know, well over a hundred technicians that I have with just word of mouth, but it doesn't work. So if you don't want just a lifestyle business, word of mouth, Hey, because I find that the most people that rely on word of

mouth are still out there themselves in the field. They're still the accountant doing all the stuff. They're still the lawyer that's doing all the stuff rather than having the people underneath them. What are your thoughts on word of mouth? I love word of mouth. I mean, I think you got to do both. And I completely understand what you're talking about with generally, it's the person who's still out in the field because they're holding all the relationships. They're the ones people like. They like Joe. They want to send Joe their friends and family. And without Joe, it's like, well, who cares about Kevin? He's just one of your people. But I think in my mind and what I've always done with organizations is short and long-term. In any vertical, any business, doesn't matter, short and long-term. It's hunting and farming.

You got to hunt, you got to eat today or else you're going to starve and die. And so that's your marketing, that's your inbound, that's your outbound, canvassing, direct mail, whatever it is. You've got to eat today. And really what you want to do is blend it and move more towards farming, which is planting seeds now, eating in three months. But if you have a bad day hunting and you can't catch something, you're going to starve, but at least you got the farm. But you also can't rely on farming only because a bad storm comes through and you're toast. And we can talk about it more, but that applies to sales and selling and marketing and word of mouth and referrals. And so the more you can do to sell now, be

relational, plant seeds, have a system. That's where most companies fail on the word of mouth is they hope it's just word of mouth. Somebody's where most companies fail on the word of mouth, is they hope it's just word of mouth. Somebody's at a barbecue and they're just going to mention A1 Garage, right? Okay, hopefully they just know. Versus an actual referral generating strategy, platform, system, CRM, app. There's companies out there like GetTheReferral, which does a lot with home services, where there's an app that customers can download, submit referrals, get paid through the app, monitor their project. There's systems to use, which are great if you want to take it to that level. But you got to do both. You can't say, I'm just going to go word of mouth and referrals from now on because you're going to be hungry for a long time because it takes a while. So you've got to

do both. But I always think professionals are moving always towards a referral word of mouth business because then you own it. Versus what is Facebook going to do to me tomorrow or change in their ads? And then now what am I stuck with? Relationships are forever. If all your business is two relationships, it's not worth as much

because if one of those relationships goes sideways. And I do think that if you're going to own a business that's sellable one day, it can't be evolved around you. You can't be the core of it. You need to really try to move yourself out. I always say I live on Mars. I look at my business, which is earth, and I'm able to really see the bottlenecks. I don't live in our CRM as much as I used to. And then I look at a guy that I just talked to that's got 1800 technicians. And he said, I don't know what goes on day to day. I don't even know what goes on. I look at our monthly numbers.

I have about a two hour meeting. He goes, my job is to grow through acquisition. So I set up all those deals. I sell to the bank. I sell to the investors. He goes, we're going to make this thing into a billion. That's my job as a CEO. My COO is involved in the day-to-day operation. And I'm not quite there yet. And I don't know if I ever want to be there to tell you, I have too much fun in the day-to-day here and there. You're an operator. You like the operating. I like the piece of it, but I see myself evolving

into this morphing into this relationship expert. But you know, there's no right answer to this. No. And I think what's important too is, you know, and I deal with business brokers who are helping small business owners who want to sell. And the problem is, is it's, you know, what do they have to sell? And the sales is broken and it's all about them. And if they leave, then what's the business there. And it all depends on the exit strategy. And that's a good point is, you know, you got this bartender that's stealing from you, but they're bringing in so many people. And I see these people, they literally live with the theft because they've literally pinned themselves up against a wall. And I'm so glad. And trust me, I've been there i've

been like this guy showed up high as hell one day you can just smell the weed reeking off of him and his eyes are all bloodshot he's laughing and he was a top producer and i'm like oh if i fire you then i gotta go run all these jobs i was like here's some visine and some clone i was like i this sucks this was like 2009 and i mean i had to put up with it because otherwise I was gonna it sucks to be in a situation that you're gonna lose the customer if you don't keep the current employees and I think we've all been there especially in the home service niche because we're like man if I get rid of this guy and you're only four trucks you're like oh so I say this always be hiring always be looking for talent. And I mean,

we hired four guys in two hours. I watched Brian hire and I go, you hired all of them. He goes, yeah, he goes, they're all amazing. I said, okay. Well, and, and the problem too, is that if you keep that person who's toxic in one way or another, whatever toxic means for you and whatever that's looking like on your team, if you keep that, it disincentivizes everyone else who wants to be good, but sees you tolerating basically this crappy, toxic, terrible... That's why I have been in many organizations where the top sales rep has been fired. As painful and as expensive as that might be short term, you got to do it because you can't put up with that. And you've always got to balance it. You

cannot let the prisoners run the prison. That's just not going to work long term. I like that analogy a lot. The prisoners run the prison. And the best way to do that is we've got a whole thing going on right now with unemployment. And a lot of the people are getting out of hospitality and looking for a career that they can be a specialist. You know, I think it's kind of bullcrap, essential versus non-essential, but they understand what that means now. And all of a sudden, home service is starting to look a hell of a lot more attractive than it used to. So there's a good opportunity now. I hope people understand this for the next year. There's going to be a lot of opportunities. And if you can make your company look really good

and train, one of the kicks I've been on lately, Jason, on the podcast have been, I played a lot of sports. And one thing that I realized is I probably practiced four hours to every one hour we played the game. And if you could learn to have a manual and teach an exact process and practice, practice, practice, practice to the point where you could do a blindfolded, then you're just going to have an excellent company of people that know what the heck they're doing. And it's amazing the reaction you get. And that's why I like athletes. That's why I like pulling people from sports because they know what it's like to practice. And they say, I can't imagine my life without practicing. Yeah. And I see most sales teams fail because

practice time isn't profitable. So if you were to take that same analogy and say, okay, we got an eight-hour shift today. It's Monday. So what we're going to do is we're going to practice for six hours and then you're going to get on the phone for two hours every day. Organizations can't sustain that. That's not profitable. And nobody would ever do that. And you get a new higher training every once in a while, quarterly training, that's one thing. But in sales, essentially the operation mode is practice on the field, right? It's the game. It's the Super Bowl. Good luck, right? Here's a helmet and figure it out. And it's expensive. Again, I've done direct mail campaigns. Each call is $55. Okay, cool. Now go practice with that.

You took 20 leads today. That was $1,000 in calls and you didn't close any deals. That's okay. We'll win tomorrow. No, no, no, no. It's a tough balance. How much do you practice? How much are on the field in sales, in business, customer service? Yeah, absolutely. There's so much opportunity for training. And I think that there's a... What did Abe Lincoln say? You give me an ax, I'll sharpen it for six hours, I'll chop for two. Because the fact is, sharpening is what you're doing with your crew, working on that conversion rate. More importantly, this is what I always talk about.

Create raving fans, not happy customers, raving fans. Yeah, that's the book. And you know, raving fans mean they're going to go out of their way. They're going to go out of their way to tell everybody about you. And you know, I got to tell you, I'm going to go on a sidetrack

and we'll start wrapping some stuff up here because I want to know a lot more about your podcast. I've learned so much from this podcast with guys like you that come on all the time. It is the fruit of my business that allows me to grow at an unbelievably fast rate. And I talked to a guy yesterday. He's like, dude, I'm using this, this, this. It was almost like these guys are listening and these gals are

listening super closely to this stuff. And they're just making the playbook based on your, your comments. It's not necessarily me. It's, it's a lot of the input from guys like you that are coming on that have been there, done that. And now I feel like I'm doing it and it's, it's going to be one day I'm going to be on here and be like, done that. And now I feel like I'm doing it. And it's gonna be, one day I'm gonna be on here and be like, so, you know, I wrote the Home Service Millionaire, the next book is gonna be the Home Service Billionaire. It'll be a little thicker.

And I'm not saying that to be- Or it'll be thinner, because it's like you figured it out. It's an easier formula. You know, there's certain things that when I talk to these CEOs that are messing around with venture capitalists, raising money, doing IPOs, they're learning how what private equity looks like. It's a whole new dimension.

It's almost like I'm no longer in the home service industry. This is the next level of business that I never even knew about. And it's fun because now I realize that there's these Silicon Valley investors that are coming into the home service niche. Google's coming into the home service niche. Facebook are coming into the home service niche. Google's coming into the home service niche. Facebook's coming into the home service niche. So it opened up a whole new world for me that I love. And some people go, dude, this is just too much. Just teach me how to operate a business, get the manuals and hire great people. And I'm a happy camper. And I'm more like, man, wait a second. It's almost like I lived in a solar system. Then I realized we

have a galaxy. And what's great is that, you know, some of your clients and some of the people out there, like it's about what's right for you. Maybe you want to just be a solo operator and you just want to do that well and have a good life, right? Like everyone's got a different level and playing their own game. And I know a lot of people compare and go, wow, I'm not going for a billion dollars. I must be doing it wrong. No, no, you play your game. I mean, that's the biggest thing I've learned in my own life is play my game and let somebody else play their game

and cheer everyone on. Well, what makes you happy? Write down, I guess the best thing to do is write down what you want people to think of you when you die and who you were as a person and what kind of life you lived. And then figure out a lot of it you're people to think of you when you die and who you were as a person and what kind of life you lived and then figure out a lot of it you're going to find has nothing to do with the money you've made. A lot of it's going to be about the relationships you've built and the fun you had and the smiles. I hope I have a lot of wrinkles right in here where my smile is because

I want it to be creased in there to where I'm like the Joker. I'm just always smiling. And I think it's important to have that. And I just wanted to know from your podcast, tell me about your podcast and kind of why you started it and what you've learned through it. So, you know, and it might've been similar to your start, but for me, it's the sales experience podcast. You can find it everywhere. But for me, it was just something I had to get out. It was just burning inside of me. Same thing with the book where I'm just like, literally, I've just got to get on the mic and just talk. The first season was just all me talking about sales in my episodes. And then I started bringing in guests. But for me, I just literally feel like on this mission where part of it is I just see sales

people doing things so wrong and organizations doing things wrong where either they're manipulating I just literally feel like on this mission where part of it is I just see salespeople doing things so wrong and organizations doing things wrong where either they're manipulating, which is giving sales a bad name, right? And it's just terrible, especially these days where it's just so transparent, like you said, with Yelp and with Google and all these things. People will find you if you're doing bad stuff anymore. And then on the other end, I see companies that are so afraid of pushing any customers to buy that they do nothing and they're just order takers. And I think there's a way to be successful. So I was just like, I've just got to get this out of me and I've just got to do it. And I'm crazy. So I do five days a week. Yeah. So let's have fun with it.

Oh, that's really cool. So your podcast is five days a week. How long is the podcast? So I try to keep it to 10 to 15 minutes, which is tough. So your podcast is five days a week. How long is the podcast? So I try to keep it to 10 to 15 minutes, which is tough. So sometimes they become like this conversation here. If we were to do this, this would be like a four or five parts mini series, you know, four or five days. And then it's funny too, cause I'm probably like you, we talked about this before we hit record, but you know, I'm thinking about doing seven days, maybe twice a day. Like there's just so much content and so many people I want to talk to. It's just like, how do I do even more? So I'm crazy that way. And there's a process to this, to stay connected to these people, because it's literally enlightened my life. It really has.

It's kind of like you said, a bird's eye of a feather will fly together. And I feel like a lot of the people on the podcast, they're on it. I was very fortunate to learn how to make myself look bigger in this first couple episodes than I was. And I was, I didn't know very well how to make a conversation. Like, I think I cut people off and I probably still do, but it was way worse in the beginning. And there's amazing people that have came on, including yourself. And I just, so many gold nuggets and all somebody needs to do is take one gold nugget to change their life and run with it. And think about that, create better parents, better husbands and wives, better grandsons,

granddaughters, whatever that looks like. And it's just nice to be able to give back. I just think it's super cool. And I love hearing people's stories when they meet me and they're like, dude, thank you. And I'm like, for what? They're like, no, just, you have no idea. And I love that stuff just because it feels good. And I'm actually feel like I'm building relationships. People are like, dude, I already know you. Like I know everything about you. I know where you grew up and your stories in the podcast. And I'm like, cool. Well, we'll just pick it up over a beer then. And it's fun. Yeah. And then get to the real impact and the transformation, right? Now that the relationship is there, let's get some real stuff done. Let me help you in big ways. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a guy I'm working with. He's like, my goal is 30 million in 10

years. And I said, that's easy. Let's do it. And to say it. If you do everything that we talk about and I hold you accountable, $30 million is a, um, I don't want to undermine it, but it's a drop in the bucket. It really is. There's enough water to go around in the ocean for everybody. And that's not a big deal. 10 years, let's make it free. Yeah, exactly. Um, so one of the things I always ask is how do people get ahold of you? We know your podcast, and we're going to post all this stuff on our show, but the host of the Sales Experience podcast in your book is something with authentic persuasion.

And I could have swore I must have downloaded on Audible, and I got to read one book this weekend. And then there's so much, there's 870 books on Audible. And as you can see, this bookshelf is out, the three of them, they're out of control.

So, and that's not even my house bookshelf. So, I can't even remember the name. People remind me of a book and I'm like, yeah, I read that, but I don't remember the name of it. Or yeah, Dale Carnegie. I love Dale Carnegie. But so what else do people do

if they want to reach out to you? The best thing and the easiest thing, I've just made it simple, is if they go to jasoncutter.com. So it's C-U-T-T-E-R. It's just like it sounds. jasoncutter.com is a hub for all of my information. So from there, you can go easily to my consulting email. You can find the podcast. I'm very active on LinkedIn. I have a free ebook. You can pre-order the Selling with Authentic Persuasion book. I mean, anything you can set up a call. So I love when people find me, especially through podcasts, they want to talk about ways I can help their sales team, help improve their revenue. The marketing piece is great and marketing is important. But when you get that call,

that's when you really need the shine. And organizations that are doing well in marketing but are still struggling, that's where I love to help. So jasoncutter.com is the best place. I just had another epiphany and this is crazy. I'm gonna talk to you offline about this because I got an idea. And it's just a crazy idea,

but you mentioned the five love languages. What are two other books that you'd recommend? And you know, you could recommend three other ones if you got them, because I see you got those behind you. So the other one I was going to recommend, and we went off on the love languages is Cy Wakeman's No Ego. So it's called No Ego. And it's really about building teams around accountability with a accountability culture and not enablement or entitlement. I have been a part of organizations where we did free breakfast, free lunch. Then people start to expect it and feel entitled to it. And then the culture just becomes terrible because people just want you to keep

giving them. You can't take it away once you give it. Yeah. And it's about holding people accountable. It's really one of the thesis in that book is only spending your time on the top performers, right? And don't listen to the people who are on your team that are losing in whatever metric that is. And they're giving you the feedback and telling you like ideal sales teams, right? So the people losing on the sales team are going to say your script is bad. The leads are bad. Nobody likes your CRM. We need more of this and this. And it's like, but you're losing. Why would I listen to you? You're not even on the bench in the game. I don't care about your opinion versus you're my starter. I care what you say.

And then we're going to run with what you do. So that book is huge. Yeah, exactly. With your drawing there. I listen to the outliers on the right side. That's it. And you can't listen to just the outliers because they're a special group. And when you try to build a sales team just on the outliers, it's hard to scale. Yes, you can have a certain amount, but it's hard to really scale if you only focus on the top top. So you got to have some people who are always rising and moving up there and they've got somebody to chase. You always have to have a rabbit on the team, which is just somebody who's not super far ahead, but

who's just making everybody chase after them. So I would say no ego is a really good one. And then I just finished reading The Four Disciplines of Execution, which is a great book. I feel like I should have known about it, but I love it. Yeah. So that's another huge one that I think lead measures, lag measures, a wildly important goal. Those factors from there, if you combine that with the E-Myth, that's a one-two combo. There's so much here. I love this stuff. We're going to go two hours? We're just going to make this a bonus two-hour episode? You know what I like to do to kind of wrap us up is there's so much we talked about and there's so many gold nuggets and so many go-to things to do in your

business. I don't care what it is. It could be as simple as get more sleep and bring your significant other roses, which reminds me, I haven't bought my, some days I buy my employees, I say, go buy roses. You're significant other. Bring me the receipt. And they do. And the next day, my manager's like, why do we have the best day ever after you do that? Because I'm like, because they're treated happy and they get good sleep. And who knows what else happens there?

Happy, well, happy wife, happy life, happy husband, something. Happy partner, happy life, right? There you go. So give us something, anything you want to discuss and maybe some plans of action and just doesn't even have to be business related. The biggest thing is self-awareness. That's like the biggest thing I focus on with a lot of people,

especially from a staffing standpoint is what do people want? What do they like? And then moving them into the right positions, right? Sometimes it's not sales. Sometimes it's not service, sometimes it's not technician. But even for everyone listening and anybody out there, and it goes into the whole e-myth discussion, all of that, but self-awareness, what do you like? What do you not like? And then on a total super tangent, I haven't talked about this subject in a long time,

is everyone procrastinates on stuff. And there's two parts of it is I would always, if you find yourself procrastinating, there's the reason you're procrastinating. And then there's how you procrastinate and just kind of monitor those if you're not getting enough stuff done. And I think sometimes we take on too much. And I think sometimes when you take on too much, it's hard to be good at anything. And I think there's always those people that can't say no. And for example, I've set my assistant up for failure several times because I say, you get this, this, this, this, this, this, this. And I didn't know there was three other managers having her schedule stuff. And she doesn't say no. Yeah. She's exceptional at what she does.

We set her up for failure. So we got to be careful that you can't take on too much because one of the things I find that our time gets stolen from us really easily. And unless you've got a really disciplined calendar and a good person like I have to say, nope, you got to be off the phone. Today, I looked at it. I'm like, I'm good. Well, and that's the thing, right? Sometimes it's about cutting back. I know. And for me these days, because I have so much going on, it's actually cutting back so that I can do more and do more focused stuff in what I'm doing. As much as I joke about doing twice as many podcasts, like, okay, how do I do less, but then do more with them?

Yeah. And I think there's something there to say, where does my time? My time is probably best spent, believe it or not, brainstorming. People would say brainstorming isn't actually doing anything. You're not even getting anything done. But if I could get on a whiteboard and really go to town, I mean, I'm not going to solve world hunger in one day, but I think we could get a lot done versus me perhaps mowing the lawn, even though I don't mind mowing the lawn.

If you really equate to how much I made per hour last month, which is astronomical because we had a great month, the company made that much, but ultimately it comes back, but I'm reinvesting it all. But you got to really value your time and decide, is brainstorming really that valuable? And to me it is. And that's the self-awareness piece. So understanding it. And then I also think when there's self-awareness is where do you come up with those ideas, right? Like for me, if I stare at a blank whiteboard by myself, it's not the best, but if I'm on a walk and listening to business podcasts that turns something on in my brain and I'll send my, by the end of the walk, I'll send myself an email with 10 new ideas. I've got more ideas from this podcast. I mean, it's great. And that's where the self

awareness comes in. Like where are you best? And also what's your highest value? How do you make the biggest impact to other people? And how do you do more of that and less of the other stuff that gets in the way? I agree. It's very fun to have you on Jason. I got to tell you, I've learned a lot. I'm going to find your book here and go through it again. And I apologize because my team is the most amazing, but we'll do this again. And I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, no, this has been super fun. I love the fact that I had the idea of what we were going to talk about and all that went out the window and it was super fun and hopefully valuable to people. So great job. This is why we get to do more and more of these. So appreciate it.

Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers,

which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say,

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