The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Use Technology to Grow A Profitable Pest Control Business

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Donnie Shelton is the owner-operator of Triangle Pest Control and Coalmarch Productions, both of which he has grown to multi-million dollar enterprises within the last 10 years. He is the author of two books on business development, Build and Grow! A former United States Air Force Reserve pilot and software developer for a Fortune 500 company, he is an innovator with a proven track record of helping entrepreneurs beat strategic growth challenges in the pest control and lawn care industries. In this episode, we talked about team leadership, project management, business development, pest control, software development...

As an owner, you really do sit in a unique seat, right? Because you're the dreamer, right? You're the vision. And I think as an owner, one of the key things that you absolutely must day-to-day be very, very aware of is your mindset and your vision. Because that it falls in and behind you and everything that you build has to be built in your mind first it absolutely and you're the only one that's going to do it you know no one's going to come and magically create this wonderful business for you right it's like you have to be willing to think of it on your own, have this vision, believe in it, and be willing to fail until you get it and realize you may run out of money. You may have someone do something bad to you. You may fail 10 times before you get it right. But I know for me, I am very aware of

what my vision is. I'm very aware of where I'm going and I'm absolutely convinced that I'm going to get there. 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 very special guest coming from Holly Springs, North Carolina. He's an expert in team leadership, project management, business development, pest control, and software development.

He's the Coal March CEO from 2012 to present, Triangle Pest Control owner from 2006 to present, U.S. Air Force Reserve pilot, 2003 to present, and Progress Energy Software Engineer from 2001 to 2006. A former United States Air Force Reserve pilot and software developer for a Fortune 500 company, he decided to take a leap of faith, follow his passion for entrepreneurship, and start his own pest control company. He is the owner-operator of Triangle Pest Control and Coal March Productions, both of which he has grown to multi-million dollar enterprise within the last 10 years. He's the author of two excellent books on business development called Build and the other one's called Grow. He's an innovator with a proven track record of helping entrepreneurs beat strategic growth challenges

in the pest control and lawn care industries. Donnie Shelton, how are you? I'm doing well. I think you've created quite the challenge now. That introduction was way over the top, but now I got to spend the rest of this trying to convince people that what they just heard was really true. So I'll try not to screw it up. Yeah, let's quit the resume there. You've done a lot of things these last decade.

You got two businesses. Talk to me a little bit about your unique journey. What have you done? What got you into home service and what's your goals going forward? So I get asked this question a lot. So my background is computer science. I went into the military when I was 17. I went to the Air Force. My mom had to sign me in because I wasn't holding up to sign a contract. So straight out of high school, went in the military. I worked on aircraft there. I worked on C-5s out of Travis Air Force Base. I did that for four years, decided that I wanted to fly airplanes instead of work on them. And so in the military,

in order to fly an airplane, you have to be a college graduate and you have to go through pilot training. And so that's what I decided to do, that I was going to go to college. So I came back to North Carolina, went to NC State, got a degree in computer science. I started out in aerospace engineering and switched about halfway through just because back then computer science was a hot degree. Guys were getting recruited in their sophomore year. And so, yeah, I switched about midway through to computer science and then started working. I worked at Progress Energy, actually, as a software developer there. I ran their Java development teams while I was in college.

And I've always been kind of really driven. And I knew I wanted to fly airplanes. So once I graduated, went back into the reserves. Well, I went back. I went to the reserves. But I had, you know, to be a pilot, you have to get through all the training that an active duty guy goes through. So I actually spent three more years on active duty. Just as I was coming to the end of that, you know, I had spent some time on the tech side and, you know, I love technology. I don't know

that I love writing code. I spent a lot of time in front of computers. And I mean, man, there would be days that I would come in and like, you know, work 12 hours and not talk to a soul. And I just realized then like, this is not for me. I mean, I enjoyed the challenge. I mean, I don't know if you've ever written code or been in that world, but intellectually speaking, I mean, it's great. It's a lot of fun. You fun you know if you can think of it usually you can make it and so so i wanted to transition and i wanted to transition to be i always had kind of this mindset i was going to run my own business or i wanted to own my own business and so so what i did was i applied to duke their nba program and got deployed just as soon as i got back from pilot training. And so

that gave me a lot of time to get my pre-coursework done. And believe it or not, I don't know how I pulled it off, but I got in. So I got into the MBA program. They sent me a bill for 95 grand at that time to get started. And I realized then I'm like, man, I don't have 95 grand to do this like that maybe I could just do something on my own and you know at the time home services in general was in my mind a market that had been neglected when you think about most home services I mean what do you think about what kind of owners do you think about yeah they're getting mom and pops right yeah yeah mom and pop you know kind of the local company and so know, I started doing research on different industries, right? I looked at lawn care. I looked at pest control. I looked at cleaning services. I looked at all these different home services. And I mean, to me, I was a business guy. I didn't care

what the service was. To me, it was more about what's the business opportunity and what makes sense over the longterm. And so that's how I transitioned to pest control. So I came back from pilot training. I turned Duke down. I made all my in-laws and all my best friends think that I was an absolute nut job. And I started a pest control company because at the time I had this nice cush job as the lead job developer at Progress. And I was flying airplanes. I just said, hey, I'm going to start a pest control company. And so that's how Triangle got started. I went around in the Yellow Pages at the time and I started calling companies and I found this one company. It was called Mike's Pest Control out of Fuquay, Verena, North Carolina. And the owner

was 82. They had 23 accounts and was doing $12,000 a year in annual revenue. In the pest control industry, you can't just set up shop and start, right? You have to have a license. You've got to be certified. And so you just can't roll in it. And so what I did was I bought his company and I tied him to me for two years until I could get licensed. And that's how I got started, man. That was the first transition out of the technical world into the home services world. And I was right. When you look at a lot of home service industries, it's not like the big box brands where there's one or two main companies who run that industry. And I think fundamentally the reason that industry can't scale like other industries

is that you're dealing with people. There's very much a relationship part than any home services industry. And so I kind of got that and it was nice because at the time, you know, Orkin and Terminex who were typically the largest brands in that industry, they only owned like 38% of the market. So the remainder of the market was

all mom and pop and so i i saw an opportunity there so that's how i got started you know i started in 2006 it was just me i started in my garage my um you know it's funny to have all these regulations for chemical cages and those types of things and my chemical cage was the toolbox on my truck and, you know, the rest is kind of history. I mean, I can talk through the rest, you know, but I mean, that's, it was like starting most companies, man, the first, first three years, I never took a salary. I, you know, I dumped every dime I made and money I didn't even make back into the business to grow it. You know, I wanted to get it to a million as quickly as possible so I could start hiring

managers and salespeople and to go even faster. So, I mean, we didn't get into the goals part of it yet, but that's how I got my start in home services. And, you know, Comarch is kind of a unique story as well, because I always had this mindset, you know, when I started Triangle of growing myself, really working myself out of a job. And so, you know, when we first started, I was under houses, man. I mean, I was like digging trenches and treating houses and drilling houses and doing all the technical work you would typically think of. And I was flying airplanes at night because I was not making any money in business. That's for sure. I was doing a great job of losing a lot of money. And so I had to eat with, you eat with what I made in the military.

And then eventually over time, when you get enough revenue, then I hired my first technician and then I hired my first office person. And I just kept leveling up over time. And I would build the systems and procedures and checklists and those types of things as we went along. But the very last thing I let go was marketing just because it was such a critical part of the business. The one thing I never wanted to do was slow down the growth.

The unfortunate part, I think, for a lot of companies that I worked with was that my background was in computer science, and I understood marketing very well. And back in the, I would say the mid to late 2000s, Google was the Wild West, man. I mean, you could get away with so much. And so I had it set up such that if you said a city name along with any kind of pest, I owned the top three listings. I owned all the paid ads. I mean, it was just like we were running circles around all of our competitors in every market that we was in online. And it was just largely in part at that time. I mean, a lot of the other industries had figured out that this was the platform of the future, but in our industry, it was way behind.

And so I just kind of took advantage of that. But, you know, every time I would go to an SEO company, typically it was ran by very creative left brain type folks. And what that typically means is no procedures, no checklist, and no discipline. You know, the first four to six months, man, we would be the shiny toy in a toy box and we would get all kinds of attention and get great results, new website, whatever. And then after about six months, eight months, like things would kind of start, you know, they take on new clients or whatever and we get kind of thrown in the corner.

And after I went through like five rounds of this, I'm like, my gosh, man, I'm so frustrated right now. I'm never going to be able to turn this over to a company that I trust. And by this time, I had a lot of buddies in the industry, and they're kind of saying the same thing. And I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to find a company and just do it myself because I'm just tired of dealing with people who can't figure this out.

So Clomart was a company I had worked with in the past. They had a lot of raw talent there. And so I bought that company. It was the craziest thing. I bought them and they had some big clients, man. They had RCA Records, they had Duke University, they had some pretty big box brands. And day one, man, I walked in and fired them all. I said, hey, we're not doing any... Because they were your traditional SEO company, local and Raleigh. And so my idea was to get rid of all of that and only do pest and lawn and to specialize in that vertical. So that's what I did. Over a period of a year, we offloaded every account that did not directly tie back to either pest and lawn. And we just took off like a rocket because they, I was right. I mean, there was, and I say, I mean, there was a huge need in the market for a company that really

understood our industry and really understood digital marketing. And I can tell you in that industry, digital is everything. You know, when someone sees a rat, right. Or they see a roach or whatever, you can only imagine the urgency when they call like it's not like well you know when you get around to it or especially like we got some crazy calls i had one time a lady call in and there's a rat in her car oh my kid gotten into her car so she was trying to go to school and she couldn't like she's so my point is is right you know that service is very, very response driven. And the sales cycle is like literally minutes. It's not days or months or whatever.

And so what that means is that we had to be huge online in that industry. And so once we had a company that could speak the lingo, understood what the fundamentals of that industry were. And we specialized. I mean, it just, the business took off. And so that one, you know, took off as well. And that's a really long story you asked. I don't know how else to explain it. No, it's great. I love it. I mean, there's a lot more under the hood there than what I'm trying to give you the

high level, but I'm still talking way too much. I feel like it. No. I mean, I'm more than happy to go into like goals and kind of where we're going. But, you know, I mean, that really is kind of the story right and and then from that you know i wrote a couple books after that mainly because we had a lot of folks in our industry saw what triangle did and how we did it had a lot of questions and so i thought instead of me just doing and saying the same thing over and over again i'll just put it into a book and so

that's what you know grows more the digital marketing side and build is more, you know, building a really good service team, because I truly think, you know, really what matters in any service industry is, you know, the only unique competitive advantage that we have is our people. And so the better that you get at sourcing people, you know, the right people, training them, developing them, and then, you know, ultimately helping them succeed. That is really the biggest competitive advantage in any service industry. And I realized that early on. And so that's why I wrote Build. Build was the last one. So that's the story, man. You know, and I know I went kind of fast and kind of slow all at the same time, but questions about that, I mean, that is my story. It's a lot more under that. And one more thing you said that I think it's kind of funny. So I'm actually,

I'm retiring this year. So I am done. I'm still flying. Of course I fly personally, but I will be an official air force retiree here in just a couple of months. So there's a lot there for sure. So I'm a big fan of marketing and sales. And I had two guys here listen to the podcast religiously. They wanted to do a tour. I had to sit down with Angela. She pulled out her pivot tables.

I showed these guys all the software. I looked at their list. They had a whole page of 15 different softwares between our lms our crm our recruiting software our onboarding software our payroll software i mean literally they're like holy crap you run i've got these spark hire i've got greenhouse i've got active campaign i've got all these tools the survey monkey and they're like oh i've got ActiveCampaign. I've got all these tools, the SurveyMonkey. And they're like, oh, I've got this thing for the camera systems and the trucks and the automatic car washes and the OB2 sensor detection and the learning moments. And they're just like, you must be running 20 or 30 softwares. And I'm like, yeah, because our departments are so big, you need a robust system

for recruiting. And I've got the PI test and the cognitive test and the background check and the drug test and the driver's license checkup and all these things work together. And they're just like, this is like a hundred grand. I'm like, we're a technology company. Just, we happen to do garage doors. Yeah. I would think you've done the same thing. Yeah. I mean, for us, I say a little bit different I say we're a marketing company and we do pest control and the fact is is that whatever tool we need and I am 100% with you you know sometimes people want to be on one platform they make conditions where it's just like hey the software yeah you can

do it but it's not the best software and you can't you can't execute it so I'm maybe fan of like you know you figure out your process you figure out what works and then you find software that supports that, not depending on, you know, you depend on the software to tell you what to do. I think that's a big mistake. And I think a lot of folks fall into that. So, I mean, but, you know, technology has been a huge accelerator, you know, I mean, the fundamentals of how you run a service company, how you market a service, most of that doesn't really change. I mean, the platform has changed where, you know, I mean, the fundamentals of how you run a service company, how you market a service, most of that doesn't really change. I mean, the platform has changed.

You know, obviously, we're doing digital. That's a big part of our strategy. And, you know, how you run a business, that's all pretty fundamental as well. But, you know, technology, you can just leverage and scale so quickly and so well. It has definitely been a key part of our business. So you've grown a lot digitally. Let's dig into that a little bit. So what have you done really well?

I mean, I met a guy, Lenny Gray. He wrote the Door-to-Door Millionaire. He's on the Door-to-Door team. I've talked to a lot of different people and a lot of different aspects of home service and there's nothing that doesn't work valpac still works pbc works lsa ads work jambes they don't understand there's algorithms on google then there's bing there's yelp there's next door i've made social media kick butt i've got people that call on property managers. I've got door knockers. We did 70 booked appointments and 400 stickers in four days of door knocking.

People say that doesn't work. Moxie built their whole company, the local guy here, a great guy, Austin, on door knocking. A lot of them are Latter-day Saints. They're really good. They've sold religion. Why not sell some pest control? If you can sell religion, you can sell anything. That's for sure. It's true. So you've really learned to be competitive digitally. It sounds like what are you, so in this day and age, where are you getting most of your customers? I mean, I'll tell you this over $2 million a year or a month for me comes straight from organic SEO. Not GMB, not pay-per-click,

not local service ads, straight up organic, which is, it's crazy. And I'm still building out, you know, a thousand pages a month. So it's crazy. You know, for me, well, let's back up for a moment.

Number one is, I don't know, Moxie is a big company. Have you ever heard of Altera? Altera. Yeah. So Altera has a very unique story. The guy who owns it, his name is David Royce. And he has, you know, you're talking about banging doors. So in our industry, when say i mean has control i would

imagine any kind of response driven type home service company the two main players in marketing is either digital or do or adore altera has a phenomenal story i mean they're going to do 181 million in four years and they've done it all with just banging doors. And that's their model, right? I mean, they've got a recruiting center out in Provo. They've got tutors that help the guys and girls out there. I mean, you name it, man. I mean, these guys are on it and they've really got a nice tight model. On the digital side, for us, what has really worked for us over the long term, much like what you're saying has been organic and really good content. I don't know that that will ever go away, but I certainly see the platform changing

quite a bit, especially in the last probably three to four years. Google has gotten very good at monetizing their platform. I mean, we've seen the introduction of where paid ads now all of a sudden look like organic ads. And then we had the local pack that got introduced. Now we have Google local services that are being introduced. And then now these are starting to get intermingled together as well. And so what you're seeing is that on the organic side, the prominence of a top three listing is just not as valuable as it used to be. It just doesn't pull the kind of traffic that it did before. For me, one of the things I talk about a lot with a lot of

business owners and we track religiously at our businesses is our cost per sale. Because at the end of the day, you're a business owner. Well, what does that mean? That means I'm an investor, right? I take a dollar and I invest it. And then how much can I make out of that dollar? And what's my return? And is that worth my time? And so cost per sale is a great, it's a wonderful measurement for that. And so, you know, now, I mean, we,

I will tell you that that game, what worked 10 years ago when I first started, it would probably get me de-indexed from Google now. I mean, yeah, we were doing crazy stuff. I mean, backlinks and paying people for links. Black hats. Oh, that's kind of, right. But, you know, now what I'm seeing more of is very much a strategic approach to digital

where you're lining up resources like social, like branding. You know, I used to not be a big fan of branding at all. And even with COVID, we just see a lot of behavioral changes. In the past, I would never pay a ton for branding online. Now, it is a key part of our strategy. So to back that up, and I'm kind of dancing around the question here, but I'll try to be clear and concise here. What we do, we're big in paid, we're big on organic, we're big on branding, and we're big on super good content with inbound links. And so if I had to say which one is driving the most leads, it would be paid ads at this point between Google Local Services, pay-per-click, and then even with the local pack advertising there as well. And I mean, the other part of this that

has really been changing too, has been the platform. Now COVID has given us a bit of a reprieve, you know, last year, and they've been saying this for over a decade, you know, oh, mobile's going to overtake desktop. Mobile's going to do this. Well, it was always kind of hot air. Well, last year, you know, 2019, that was the first year that it truly happened, that mobile device traffic overtook the desktop. It was the first year that it truly happened that mobile device traffic overtook the desktop. It was the first time it ever happened. And so when you think about mobile traffic in general, organic is like nowhere to be found. You know, the fact that someone's going to scroll on their phone, you know, and so we went really big with mobile ads. And I think

that's what you need to do now. But you know know on the digital side man it's it really is all about getting a well-defined funnel i mean you would be amazed at how big of a difference one or two words make in conversion and response rate and so getting a really tight funnel on your site and then taking the focus outside of your site and really focusing on what your ecosystem looks like in general. So I know that's kind of broad, but without getting into specific strategies, I mean, we could spend hours going into that. But in general, that's what we do. About a year ago, I started turning my opinion of branding. I used to be really focused on direct response. And now, I mean, I just got on 40 billboards and I started doing a lot of TV and the phone rang off the hook. I couldn't even keep up. And you're hitting 99.7% of the population to get into the back part of

their brain. So when it does break, they're going to use you. And you're, you know, my keyword, my pay-per-click went way down because people search for my keywords. And then my conversion rate went up and my average ticket went up, but it's expensive and you gotta be trained in sales. You gotta be trained in conversion. You gotta be a product expert. You gotta create raving fans. You gotta get the five stars out there. And you gotta be committed. You know, a lot of folks, they start branding. Yeah. They don't have the longevity.

They don't have the stomach for it, and you just got to commit to it and know that it works. And the book Grow, I wrote that book at a time that I was very much, I was the same way. I was direct response. And in fact, in that book, I say, hey, if you're less than, I think I say, if you're less than 10 or 5 million, I don't remember what the number is, then don't brand at all. And I don't know that I would change that advice, but I would definitely say that what I see happening is that digital is normalizing into what TV, radio, and yellow pages are, which is going to be whoever has the largest pocketbook is going to be the largest

presence on that platform. And it's going to cost right i mean in the past digital was just a steal when you look at cost per sale now that we see you know kind of everyone jumping the platform of course the algorithm works its magic and it's just not quite the deal that it used to be you're absolutely right i think digital has done great but i think i i took for granted tv radio and billboards and it's done great and the door think I took for granted TV, radio, and billboards, and it's done great. And the door knocking thing is just absolutely phenomenal. And I put a lot more effort into recruiting. So when I think about marketing, I think about, I market for employees. I steal them from other industries. I don't like getting anybody with experience. So hospitality is a

great one. I'm advertising all the time for employees. I'm advertising for companies to buy out acquisitions and I'm advertising for customers. But I think a lot of times business owners fail at finding companies they should be looking for to acquire it because they get a better multiple because they're a platform company and they don't advertise enough to get great employees that literally a good CSR will make you a million dollars more than a bad one. That's such a good point. Years ago, I don't know if you ever talk about mistakes, but let's talk about a good one that I made. This is funny. This was probably about five years ago. I had this idea that we were going to buy these smaller businesses. We do these small acquisitions. They're pretty low risk. We could essentially accelerate even more. And boy, that was a really dumb move. I cannot tell

you how dumb that was. And I learned a lot from that mistake. You know, humor me here just for two minutes here, but it was, it was an interesting, so we bought a small company and right out the gate, I realized, oh my gosh, we made a big mistake. When number one was, you know, at triangle, we have always had the mindset of scale technology, good quality service and super easy for the customer. What that translates to, we don't do invoices. We do credit card monthly billing. We've got a very set service protocol that we follow. And that's what we do. And if a customer doesn't fit, they don't fit and it's cool. Right? I mean, this is our model. We know it works. I mean, we are very much the Southwest model in our industry, right? I mean,

we have a very small service offering. We do it extremely well. We're very efficient at it and it's very effective. And that's what we do. And so when I bought this other company, yeah, we got the revenue right out the gate, but you know, these folks are like, what are you talking about? You're going to email me an invoice. What are you talking about? You're going to bill me before you do the service. What are you talking about that I got to pay my bill within 30 days. I mean, my mind just kind of just blew up.

And what I realized is like, it was consuming so much of my team's time to try to bend this company into our model. And I hate to admit this, but you know what we did is I gave the company back. Man here. And what's interesting is we were all sitting around the table talking about it one day. And we're like, we just sold the equivalent of that company in two weeks. Why are we spending all of this time? Because if we generate a customer through marketing, guess what? They fit the model. Because we've got it dialed in that we attract that type of customer.

And so I guess my point here is that I think acquisitions are good, but if you can really dial in your marketing, I just think that's a much more valuable customer, you know, just because they really fit your model so well. Yeah. You define your avatar. So it's going in green organically. My big thing about acquisitions is I don't want to buy anything commercial. I want to know, are the companies calling you? I'm buying the phone calls and I'm buying the bodies. I'm going to retrain the technicians. Most of them are going to fall off. I want those 30 calls a day. And then I'm going to throw steroids on your stuff. I'm going to rebrand your trucks. I'm going to throw my brand of trucks in that market. We're going to throw steroids on your stuff. I'm going to rebrand your trucks. I'm going to throw my brand of trucks in that market. We're going to throw a bunch of fire on your website. We're

going to quadruple the reviews overnight by contacting your past customers. All little things. I think the biggest thing though is I don't want your inventory. I don't want your old trucks. I don't want that paperwork. I don't want your AR. Keep it. I'm not going to try to collect it. People get into these headaches and a lot of the old owners go, well, this stuff's worth paperwork I don't want your AR keep it I'm not gonna try to collect it people get into these headaches and yeah a lot of the old owners go well this stuff's worth a lot of money in my then keep it because I don't want yeah yeah yeah that's exactly right that's exactly right and I'm not for sure about your industry but our industry recurring revenue is the key driver of value and

that is to me is what I really want to when i look at what am i trying to generate in terms of a customer i would much rather take you know a five hundred dollar recurring customer than i would a ten thousand dollar one-time customer it just builds a ton of value over time and it quite frankly it makes us it makes it super easy for us to grow because every year you know we start from a different a different rung on the ladder which makes it great so so if you were gonna go so for me the garage door is HVAC plumbing electrical the majority of home service businesses they take your EBITDA which is basically profit and they take a multiple usually three to I've seen him go as high as 15 times so they take profit times a multiple and the even that you could add back in things yeah time

things like if I hire a consultant I could add that back in if it's just for like a three month period but how do pest control companies get valued that's kind of a loaded question I'll give you the general and then I'll give you a couple of things that will modify the general. In general, the most common way to value a pest control company or a lawn is a multiple of revenue because most buyers could care less about your infrastructure. They could care less about your trucks. They could care less about your inventory, all of that stuff. They've already got all of that, right? What most business owners care about are their recurring accounts. And so that's why typically the valuation is based on a multiple of overall revenue. If you are a, say, door-to-door company,

so there's some modifiers that change what you can expect in terms of the multiple. It can be as high as three. It could be as low as 0.8, right? Depending on where your company falls. Things that change that multiple would be how did you acquire those accounts? As you can imagine, door-to-door company, their multiples are lower because traditionally their cancellations are a lot higher. Same thing if you have, let's just say you have a profitability issue. So it's a combination of profitability, like how efficient is your business, sometimes key employees, but the largest driver really is your recurring revenue and the breakdown

of that recurring revenue. In our industry, commercial, home, pest control is valued pretty highly. Lawn, not valued very highly. Mosquito, not valued as highly. Doesn't mean that it won't work. I mean, there's been deals where a company has really wanted this large platform company and they gave them three acts on everything just to get the deal done. But in general, if you're a $5 million quality company, you can expect to go between 10 and 15 million for the sale. So somewhere in that range. So what is the profit per year percentage-wise that you're trying to get in pest control? So one of the things that I look at religiously in both businesses, quite frankly, is what I call

a composite. Now, this is a Donnyism. I don't think you'll find this in any book, but it's just the way I do it and it works for me. I like to balance between growth and profit. I'm a huge fan of growing profitably. I don't have private equity group behind me. Everything I've done, I've done organically. our composite is our profit percent plus our revenue growth. Now, when you think of a large company like Orkin or Terminex or whatever, the way that they view their branches, they call it the rule of 23. So if profit or revenue growth come up to 23, 23% or above, then that is considered to be a great branch. If it falls below that,

then there are issues. Donnie's number is 30%. Those two have to equal at least 30%. A good pest control company profitability-wise, and I hate to give you all these disclaimers, so let's take, for example, let's say you've got a guy or a girl who is pretty close to retirement, right? What do you think their focus is going to be? It's going to be all profit, right? They want to make the money. They're getting ready to make this transition. They want to fill the coffers, pay off the house, do whatever they need to do. And so they're going to run 30% usually. I've seen as high as 35. I know one guy who was getting 40% profit on the bottom line. It's crazy. Right. But then you've got young guys who are just getting started and they're still 40% there,

but it's getting all reinvested back into marketing. And so, you know, marketing is a big player there. You know, young companies, you're going to see them spending anywhere from 10 to 25% marketing. Older companies, you're going to see them spending anywhere from 4% to 8% in marketing. So a lot of it has to do with the goals of the business owner. But I would say in general, if I were to say, hey, this is what you can expect, you need to have at least 30% on the line. And then how you divvy that out. I mean, for me, I reinvest because, well, I'm lower taxes, I'm growing faster, I'm building a nest egg. And what am I going to do with that money anyway? Well, I'm going to pay taxes on it and we're going to spend it. So might as well be growing my investment. That's been my

perspective. Take what I need to live. Well, I think I take probably, well, I know I take more than I really need to live, but I don't know anyone who, you know, but I always make sure that we keep the efficiency there. You know, push came to shove. I could pull back in marketing. I could clean everything up and be right back at that 30% number, no problem at all in profit. So it just depends on your goals. I think that to do what I want to do, to grow organically, let's just say you were going to buy a business that does 500,000 profit a year. You pay three and a half times EBITDA, so it sells for 1.75 million. If I was to put half of that into marketing, I could grow a triple size of the company. The only reason I'm buying it

is because the day I buy it, I know I'm going to cut the rent. I'm going to cut the overhead. I'm going to get rid of the brother-in-law that's been there for 20 years i'm gonna fix the conversion rate so for me i'd rather go in organically but when i'm trying to build the multiple if i'm gonna grow 300 a year it needs to be somewhat of buyouts because i need to buy the phone calls for as fast as i want to grow but you know right now i'm hiring to go. But right now I'm hiring a go-to-market strategist. I'm hiring a success manager that goes in and makes sure we've got enough techs to match the phone calls. I want $10 million per market is my goal. And I've got all these different roles I'm hiring in the marketing department because the two things you hear every day, I need more calls

or I need more technicians. I can't find good people. And I think if you solve those problems and write your manuals and your standard operating procedures and dial in the checklists and create an expected outcome and inspect what you expect, I think it's pretty easy to get up to where you're bringing in 20% a year. But there's years that I call it paying it forward with my CPA because I'd rather spend this money by the fourth quarter and not pay as much in taxes like you and put it back to business and all of a sudden it starts to multiply I think I'm probably 12 times what we're doing and you know this year we should bring in eight to nine million net so I mean that's crazy to think about that number because

I don't even know what I would do with it. Yeah. And I think that's a key part, right? As long as you're strategic, I mean, the one thing, and I mean, you hit on a really great point here. And I think if anyone's listening and like, Hey, I want to, I really want to grow a big home services company. I would say get really good at people first, get your people systems locked in, really understand. Because one of the things I see a lot, I see this an awful lot. I'm in a unique position at I get to work with a lot of different businesses is that, you know, the owner is on fire. They want to go to market. They're marketing like crazy and they don't have the people systems in place yet.

And so guess what happens? They can't hire enough people. The people that they have are overworked. The people that they have are not led. The wheels start coming off, cancellations go high. And then all of a sudden it's like what they had as their dream five years later, it's like this big cement block tied to their neck and they're drowning. I mean, they just can't, they can't seem to. And so it's much better. I think, and this is my opinion, of course, is that you build that infrastructure with your core people first, and then you add the marketing because now when you execute, you execute well, your brand stays good. Everything stays tight. And again, you can scale so much easier.

And quite frankly, life's too short, man. I mean, I just don't want that headache at all. I'd much rather it be, you know, I like things nice and smooth. I like things. I mean, it's always going to be chaos when you're growing a business, right? Especially if you're growing fast, but not to the point where it's just like, you can't, you know, you're not sleeping at night and you've got cashflow issues and you got people issues. And it's just like, oh gosh. And I've lived that life, right? When I first started, it took me a couple of years to figure that out. And then I was like, man, I'm being really stupid here. I got to figure this out. So great, great point about people. I think that very much needs to be step one, right? And then you come back and say, now, now let's put the gas on it once we're ready

to go and scale. So. Well, people are your recruiters. They're your brand. They could attract customers. They could hand out cards. They're your networking. I mean, when I learned that less than a year ago, I mean, I had a guy walk up to me a couple of weeks ago and he said, dude, I don't know how you're getting these guys, but they're A plus players. He's like, I never seen the quality come through like this. What are you doing? And I'm like, I get 500 applicants a day now. And we narrow it down to a couple that we really want to see.

We do all these things to these people to make them jump through a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of hoops. But now it's a, it's a sexy job. You can move up, you can start out, you can get trained as an apprentice, move up to a junior tech tech, senior tech supervisor. Then you go run a market. There's a ladder there. But I think the biggest thing about it is it's fun. We have a lot of fun here. We do a lot of fun stuff. And these guys go live all the time on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok

and all these other places. And people are like, your job looks fun. I want to work there. Like, you guys just goof off all day? And we have a lot of fun here. We do a lot of employee trips and a lot of going out and doing fun things and dunking the trainers and the softball. We throw out the stuff, and I've got games. And the more I could give back, the more I feel better as a leader, almost like a father

figure to a lot of the employees. And it really is a cool place to work. And I get a lot of energy just walking through these doors and seeing all these trainees and people changing garbage cans and cleaning and picking up the metal on the parking lot. And when I started this podcast, I didn't really believe in culture. I didn't know what culture was. I was like, I'm too busy working all day. How am I supposed to, I don't have enough money to buy popcorn for these people. You know, there's a guy still in toilet paper. I got five people on a smoke break outside. Why the phones are ringing. I mean, everything was going bad until I stopped and said, I need organization and I need, I need some processes. I need some people on a smoke break outside why the phones are ringing i mean everything was going bad until

i stopped and said i need organization and i need i need some processes i need some standard operating procedures so how'd that go for you when did you have that awakening when i got tired of getting my butt kicked man it was probably two years in and you know we had we had eclipsed a million i was doing everything i had the business set up such that I was the only one that was making decisions. Everyone came to me for everything. And it just, it got to be where it was just, it was all consuming. And I'm just like, there's got to be a better way. And then I read the book, The Enith.

And like that book is an old book, right? And it's hokey. And if you listen to it, we still make fun of it. But guess what? It's required reading for anyone that becomes a manager at triangle but you know the book talks about this whole chaotic process and what do you do and how do you scale and processes and checklists and and immediately for me you know i'm a pilot right i mean and checklist you know it saves my life it

saves other lives right and so i just immediately that resonated with me and I'm like, well, yeah, of course, why wouldn't I do this? And so once I kind of started seeing that I could standardize it and that could get people in it to do better than I can, and we could scale it. Then I realized like the part, like, I'm like, no, my job is not my, obviously marketing is a key part, but really what I am, what makes us unique. The only thing, I mean, you think about this for any service company, your only competitive advantage, only competitive advantage are people, period. You know, Southwest, you know, Herb Keller said it best. He goes, you know, everyone knows our model. You know, they ripped our model off PSA Airlines. And he goes, everyone knows what we do. There's no secrets at all, but no one can execute like we can.

No one can replicate our culture. And I think once I really understood that, once I really understood what it takes to win in service, then my company changed, my stress level changed, my bank account changed, everything changed. And it just became way better. I mean, I'm not going to paint some, you know, and I wrote off into the sunset story. We still have our issues from time to time, but it's a lot more fun. We're way more profitable. We grow a lot faster. And it was the one thing that I think that I just needed to learn the hard way. You know, I wouldn't say the one thing I've learned a lot of things the hard way, but that was one that I don't think I'll ever forget that lesson ever. You know, what I've tried to do is embrace, like, I'll tell you something I've done is I buy the best. Like I started buying

the tools for the guys. We buy everything to make them more efficient. And the parts I get custom built that if someone's selling apples to apples, I sell oranges, but it's the people with the tonality, the eye contact and the body language that actually give a crap that matter. But it's the little things and people say, well, how do you know that stuff's going on? And I say, cause I got a second pair of eyes on everything through zoom and I've created checks and balances just, and when you nail it, you scale it and you just go really deep into it. And, um, there's no one that's done what we're doing in this industry. I think we're in 14 States now I'll be in 40 States by the end of next year. I mean, I can handle 70 technicians a month.

I kind of don't feel like it's fair because my industry garage doors, everybody thinks you're not supposed to make a great living. No one's ever been to multiple states before. It's too hard to manage all these people. But I go watch and they do a little bit of commercial, a little bit of Home Depot. They do a little bit of everything. And I say, show me your manual. And, you know, I've got manuals all over the place.

Just this manual alone is a lot of pages. It's 31 pages and then it shows you everything that you need to know to do this job correctly from day to day and i just the reason i do this podcast is people just the guy that was here earlier there was two guys the one said but i don't like writing manuals and i don't like making videos like you. And I said, what's the definition of insanity? You're doing the exact same things with the same problems, but you're not stopping it from happening. Every single day, the same darn things. How do you take time off? What's your payroll going to be? The day that we stopped having payroll problems is when we built it into

a algorithm to where it automatically figures it out and the math doesn't break unless the equation's wrong. And I feel like I have one person in my payroll team that doesn't work more than a couple hours a week. I have 140 technicians. I mean, it's a few hours bi-weekly now. And some people have nine payroll people. I'm like, how are they going to keep up with us though? How could they spend the money we can spend in marketing when they're spending it on labor? Yeah, 100% agree with that. And I think that really is the take-home lesson there

is that you've got to learn how to give your people the best tools. You got to learn how to make them the most efficient and make them the most productive and do the best job. And that really is the game in service. I mean, that is the game, right? And to realize some people think that, especially a business owner, that their job is to do the best job. And that is true, but that's the technician's job. That's not your job, right? Your job is to build the system that allows folks to do that. It's not for you to do that. And so I just think it's a critical lesson. I think it's one that any service company owner, and quite frankly, there's two things that, you know, as you were talking about that I see a lot. And this is not to be a Debbie Downer, but number one is that a lot of owners don't have the discipline to sit down and write manuals, to sit down and think about how to scale their business. And I, you know, when I did it, I remember it wasn't like

when I came in, all the problems went away because I had this epiphany. It wasn't like all the distractions went away because I'm like, oh, I'm going to scale the business now. I'm going to, like, I remember, I'll never forget this. I came in and I said, listen, from 7am to 9am, I'm shutting this door and you're not to come in it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to be working on the business. And unless there's someone on fire and there's no one else who can put that person out in the entire company, then you can call me. And I shut off my phone and I shut the, and I mean, you know what I mean? Like I just made two hours of focus time every day. And I don't, obviously I don't do any of this. Now I have managers who do that, but I did the initial generation, right? I did the very

first round of it and that changed everything. Right. So just, I think the first thing is, is having the discipline to say, I am going to standardize my business. I'm going to make procedures and much like what you talked about, Hey, here's, here's a manual, right? I am going to standardize my business. I'm going to make procedures. And much like what you talked about, Hey, here's, here's a manual, right? I'm going to make the manuals, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is owners unwilling to invest in their people, everything from training to recruiting. You know, we, our recruiting budget is, I would say, most likely one of the highest in the industry. We go big on Indeed. We do paid ads. I mean, much like what you said, I mean, we recruit for people. We spend a lot of money on that. And

most folks are like, well, why are you doing that? I'm like, well, why do you have people problems and I don't, right? And then once they get them there, they'll put them through initial training. And then for whatever reason, that person is supposed to just train themselves after that, right? There's this mindset that they, you know, the world's changing, right? Customer expectations are changing. Technology is changing. You really need to be like, you want your people to be in front of that. And so, you know, it takes money to build an LMS. It takes money to have people spend two to three hours a week training. But, you know, I think it was Henry Ford, the quote he said, right? I'd much rather train people and have

them leave than not train and have them stay. You know what I mean? And so, I mean, I think that's the other part, right? It's like, you know, once you have that mindset that this is the critical part of our strategy, then it gets a lot easier to, you know, because the proof is in the pudding, right? When someone strokes a a check that's when you see how serious they really are so well you know it's an investment that's the thing is your employees are an investment and i think the best way to get started is look take an activity log and you write down every question you get from that day and it should be in the manual the question comes 80 20 if it comes 80 of the time i mean i look at my manuals my main technician manuals 54 pages it's got what are they allowed to wear what's my tattoo policy what's my smoking policy what's my time

off policy what do you do if you get a flat tire what everything that could happen is in the manual there's a spot for it there was an. But I find that most people get their time stolen from them all the time. They're a got a minute manager. They don't have very productive meetings. Their time management is poor. Their organization is poor, which was me. And so I hired an executive assistant because I said, I need my time back. So I duplicated myself times 10. I have somebody come in and do the things I suck at. I hired a consultant to help me come in and write the manuals that said, here's all the questions we need to answer in your manual. It should probably be around 50 pages

when we finished. It was agonizing, but then we all learned to never answer questions again. Go to your manual. We read every single week. We read two to three pages a week. And a lot of the pages we read have something to do and so I read the manual out loud on my LMS and every single manual I've read out loud and so I read it with them kind of I I use videos to duplicate myself but you're absolutely right and one of the things that I've realized I wanted to ask you what is the number one thing for me I think it's aspire to be number one is my favorite core value it's it's finding an athlete I wanted to ask you, what is the number one thing? For me, I think it's aspire to be number one is my favorite core value. It's finding an athlete.

I used to practice four times more when I played golf or football or wrestling. We practiced four to five times more than we played. Why don't we role play more? Why don't we talk to people? Why don't we get them good at handling objections? Why don't we learn where to stand when you knock on the door? You just throw them in the game the whole time and you don't teach them how to win. So what is your number one trait you look for in the team member and why?

So we call it humble, hungry, and smart, right? Folks who are trainable, right? You know, they got to be willing and open. You know, I like folks who are driven. I don't like folks who know everything, right? So they got to be humble and they got to be trainable. The second one is, is that they've got to have a desire to win, right? Some people are looking for a job. That's great, but they're not going to work for me, right? I'm looking for someone who

wants a career and who genuinely enjoys winning. And that's a particular personality, right? There's some people who are okay with, you know, Hey, I'll follow the leader. I'll do whatever. Like, I don't want those folks. I want those folks that no matter what they get paid, if they lose, it hurts. Right. I want people who like, they don't care. I mean, obviously the score is, you know, I mean, what they get paid is one thing, right? But for me, I genuinely enjoy playing the game and I want to win, right? I tell people all the time, like you might have more money than me. You might have more opportunity than me. You might have a better whatever, but you won't outwork me, right? That will not happen. You know what I mean? You

just won't. And that's my mindset, right? And if I find someone who's doing a bit more than me, I'll keep going, right? And so I want folks like that on the team who really feel like, hey, I want to win. And then the last one is smart, right? We actually do a ton of testing up front. We do cognitive testing. We do psychological testing. I'm not trying to create PhDs here, but generally speaking, I want folks who know how to make good decisions and who can think analytically and who can be wise about the direction of our business. Because, you know, we've reached a size now where I am driving a cruise ship, right? I'm not driving the speedboat anymore. And so, you know, we make decisions. It might be two or three years before we see the real impact of those decisions, good or bad, right?

And so, you know, you think about a big cruise ship that's heading toward a dock at 30 knots. Well, you know, at some point, you're going to reach a point, it doesn't matter how much you try to go reverse, it ain't gonna stop, you're gonna hit it, right? And so those are my key things that I look for. I like people who I can train, they're humble, you know, they want to win. And again, I'm not like PhDs, but they got to be super sharp. And so, I mean, that's what we call it. Humble, hungry, and smart. I call them PhDs, poor, hungry, and determined.

There you go. So yeah, and you know, one of the things I think I've done that's been better and better each year is becoming a real true master delegator. Someone that sees things through. We get signatures. They understand why they're doing what they're doing. And I'm making sure they're making progress on a daily basis. And they understand the reasoning behind it because my time has become so valuable. If you take the profit we made last month, we're talking thousands of thousands of dollars an hour profit. And I'm

like, unless I love doing it, why am I doing it? There's so many great things I could be doing, like training. One of the things I'm putting everybody through is not only the predictive index, but the five love languages of work. I want to know what you like. Do you like time? Maybe I should take you to dinner. If you like money, do you like gifts? What is it that you need to motivate you? Speaking of that, what are three books that you'd recommend to the audience? Well, I feel like everything you're asking, I get out qualifiers. I'm a huge Jim Collins fan. And so if you're a business strategy, you just can't go wrong. Let me do this. I think the best way to answer this question is

to tell you what I train my team on. What I train my leadership team on. Okay. So for both companies, both leadership teams, we train on all the Jim Collins books. So good, great, built to last, that whole series. And that's more of business theory, business strategy. This is how we're going to build the model, right? This is how we build the business. The second side is leadership. And I'm a huge fan, huge Jocko Willick fan. Leadership strategy and tactics.

You know, we spend a lot of time on that because that book and, you know, extreme ownership teaches you how to be a leader, right? So there's the what to do and then there's the how to do it, right? And so those are huge. And then the last one is e-myth. But e-myth is more of a, it's kind of more of a frontline manager. So people really understand like, this is why we have procedures. This is why we have protocol. It's just to get folks in the mindset of scaling.

But I don't know that I have three. I mean, there's a lot more than three but those two things of what and then how you know collins is what and then you know willick is how those are just phenomenal books to train on so yeah yeah i think you're right i think built to last a lot of owners get in their own way and they want the company to fail when they're out of the picture. But if you look at an owner like Jack Welch, CEO at least, I called up the CEO. He manages 1900 Techs. Private equity brought him in to quadruple the company. And he said, Tommy, I work with investors and future acquisitions all day. I don't know. I got a monthly report. I sit in for a couple hours to see how we're doing, but I'm supposed to create shareholder value. And I think not a lot of people have heard of that in the home service space because it turns into this, when private equity is involved, what I love what's going on in the home service business is it's getting sexy again.

It's like you can make money out of nowhere. It's like, who would have thought a garage door company or an HVAC company? I mean, I know guys bringing in a couple hundred million dollars all day long. I know the rents group just sold for 850 million. That was two years after they sold for 300 million. So they did almost three times the multiple in two years. I just think it's getting fun. I mean, this is cool stuff. If someone wants to reach out to you, ask you questions, what's the best way to kind of contact you, Donnie? Yeah, they can email me. I mean, that's probably the easiest thing. Just dshelton at comarch.com. More than happy to answer any questions. You know, I think that's probably the easiest way. I, you're going to laugh.

I'm not huge on social. I'm on Twitter. I'm at Donnieny ray three that's my handle but facebook and i've got folks that handle it and you know obviously handle it for the businesses but i'm just so freaking busy i'm all about flying airplanes and running the businesses and so i don't i don't go that big on social but the best thing to do is either email me or just text me which after an email then i'll i usually will text people whatever but I'm not going to get out that number right now. And then, you know, we talked about a lot of stuff today. I think the one big takeaway is when I hire people that want to win, they want to move up. They hate to be second place. The people are the everything. And really there's a lot of naysayers out there. Google doesn't work and it's too expensive and it's too much cost per click

where I know no matter what I I'm going to be in existence because I can pay more than all my competitors on pay per click. He who can pay more per lead will always win. So I could charge more to make happier customers because they want the experience. You and I might go to a steakhouse and pay $300 for dinner. When people say, well, I could cook at home for the same thing for 25 bucks. Why do you go to that steak dinner? I will take that one step further and say this. If you really focus on your people, it doesn't matter what the market does because you'll always win. It's like making the game where you can't fail. If you make your focus, and again, this is unique to service companies. Okay. I mean,

maybe it's not unique to us, but you know, in service, if your mindset as an owner is, is that I'm going to collect the very best people. I'm going to develop them the very best. I'm going to have the best people model, period. Who cares? I mean, what better safety blanket is there, right? You've got the best people and you've got the smartest folks. Whatever the market does, well, your team's going to outsmart, outthink, outwork any other company out there. So you're going to be just fine. I mean, to me, it's the best safety net there is. There's plenty of lessons in this podcast, but there's a lot of early owners out there, the guys, they've been in business since 2006, and I still see them fighting a rat race. And they're going, this is impossible.

How do you run so much software? How do you get such great people? How is this even fair? And I said, guys, you need to make the time to work on the business. That's what the e-myth says the whole time is, what are you going to do to stop this from happening? Whatever got you here today won't get you to where you want to be. So I'm going to let you kind of wrap us up on some of just maybe some things that the audience could get started on, maybe some lessons you've learned, maybe some gold nuggets, maybe something to keep them motivated, whatever you want. But I'll give you a few minutes to talk to a lot of the owners out there that are still,

they're not convinced. They don't know the next steps to take. They like the activity log idea. They want to write a manual. They want to start spending more money on advertising for great internal customers. They don't know what to do yet. I'm not going to monologue for sure, but I will, as you were talking, I had a few thoughts that came to mind. As an owner, you really do sit in a unique seat, right? Because you're the dreamer, right? You're the vision. And I think as an owner, one of the key things that you absolutely must day to day be very, very aware of is your mindset and your vision, because everything that falls in behind you and everything that you build has to be built in your mind first. It absolutely.

And you're the only one that's going to do it. You know, no one's going to come and magically create this wonderful business for you. Right. It's like, you have to be willing to think of it on your own, have this vision, believe in it and be willing to fail until you get it and realize like you may run out of money, right? You may have someone do something bad to you. You may fail 10 times before you get it right. But I know for me, I am very aware of what my vision is. I'm very aware of where I'm going and I'm absolutely convinced that I'm going to get there. And I don't care how many times I have to fail. I don't care if I die trying and I don't ever make it.

Right. But I will tell you this is that I am very aware that no one else in my company is going to create this grand vision and then make it happen for me. It truly is. That is my role is to dream. Right. We're not going to play a theme song here, right? But it is true. I mean, dreaming is another way of saying, you know, have a great, great vision,

but to have a very clear vision of where I'm going and a commitment where, I mean, I remember years ago, yeah, I was like 250 pounds and it wasn't good. 250 pounds, right? I weighed like 195 now. And one day i just got in front of me and i'm like dude you're fat man you got to change this this is you know i'm done and what happens in my brain all the things well you know it's hard i got kids and you know i got this going on and i'm like i don't care whatever it takes you know what i mean like it's that level of commitment so so what i guess that's the point of me saying that is that, you know, have a vision and don't allow your mindset to go to a place of this is impossible.

I can't make it. Just get rid of all that crap, right? Number one is have a vision. And then number two, commit to it like your life depends on it. Like, no, don't stop no matter. And, you know, failure, you only fail if you quit, right? That's the only time you fail. And that really needs to be your mindset.

Because once people see that, hey, this guy's got a vision and he's not going to stop, it motivates people. And guess what they start doing? They start believing it. You know what I mean? And then guess what happens then? Now we all believe in it. And you know what?

We go out and we do it. And so that would be my nugget is as an owner, that unique to you right your vision is unique to you your commitment is unique to you and it's a great thing but it's also a bad thing everyone cues off what you're doing so pay attention be aware so i don't know if that's i mean obviously i don't think that really got into what we were talking about but that's you, if I were sitting there and I was sitting in that seat, I mean, I remember many a time broke as all get out, barely making payroll, getting my butt kicked. And I'm just like, dude. And, you know, and I mean, it was just, Hey, you know, realize that if you do the right things, the right things happen and time will work. It's magic, but don't allow yourself to get pessimistic don't

allow yourself to stop believing and don't ever stop but that hopefully that helps i don't want to monologue but i want to add on just one thing it's a lot of people have a vision that's not realistic and what i recommend is get yourself out of your comfort zone. Go visit an industry leader that's willing to give back, that's been in the game, that wants to pass the baton off. And the biggest mistake I think I've ever done in the other industries I've worked in is not go find someone that owns that industry, that's picked out the right software, that's on their fifth or sixth DRM, that understands the checklist

that I'd rather give 10% of the company away to say, hey, nurture me, skip me this five years. The other thing is a lot of people are underfunded. I tell people, if you're just a great technician and you got 10 grand somewhere, that's not enough to start a business unless you want to put a lot of sweat equity in a tough three to five years. It takes money. And the problem is if you got a lot of money, you can blow it really fast. Cause luckily I blew all my money when it was small money versus the big

money. But yeah, you know, Donnie, there's a lot of great stuff we talked about here and I really, really appreciate you coming on. I've got some really good ideas of stuff I'm going to work on. No, it was great.

Yeah, it sounds like we're a lot alike in many ways. So I'm glad you invited me, enjoyed it. And hopefully someone will find it useful. But you obviously had my email from before. I'm more happy to go into details if other folks have questions. Yeah, well, I'll reach back out to you too and appreciate you coming on. And there's a lot of stuff. So you're in North Carolina.

That's where you reside. Yeah, yeah. We have offices. I mean, I'm in Colorado a lot. We've got branches in Colorado and South Carolina, North Carolina. I mean, we're not in 40 states. I can tell you that. But, I mean, I go all over.

And plus, you know, on Comart's side, we've got customers all over the United States. And so, you don't have to, I mean, as of right now with COVID, of course, we're not traveling too much, but I'm usually every week I'm traveling somewhere. And now it's more for fun than business,

but it'll switch back over once we start traveling again. Well, you should come to Phoenix, man. You're welcome anytime. And we'll do some fun stuff. Sounds great. Take care now. All right, buddy. Have a good one.

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 gonna do to become a billion dollar company. And we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, 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.