The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Win At Entrepreneurship By Making Everyone Else Win

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Eric Barstow is the founder of Painting Business Pro, and is a certified painting and contracting expert. Even before his business took off, he had already been sharing his knowledge, training and mentoring college students to prepare them for a successful career in the future. With nearly a decade of experience in entrepreneurship, he is now a leading figure in the paint industry. In this episode, we talked about painting, contracting, entrepreneurship...

I think that's one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they're chasing top line revenue and not like their bottom line They're making hard money not easy money. I think it's interesting to hear you Not doing commercial because i'm in the same boat, man We get so many commercial requests for you know rfps every week. It's insane And we just don't do them Because of all the same reasons you said man It's a more complex business.

And that's one of the big mistakes I see a lot of people make is they, they spread themselves so thin and people aren't thinking about scale. You know, how you add your bottom line is by scaling what you're good at. And what makes it a lot harder to scale is adding a ton of complexity. And a lot of complexity comes when now you're not just doing residential, but you're doing commercial too. And you're not just, and then you throw a new construction and then you throw in this, you throw that and you start being this jack of all trades because you're chasing money.

You're chasing top line revenue. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello and today I have Eric Barstow with me. He is an expert in the painting,

contracting, entrepreneurship, and training environment. A little bit about him, he's National Painting Group co-owner from 2014 to now, Painting Business Pro owner from 2013 to now, and Painter Choice co-owner from 2013 to now. For the first six years of his painting business career, he recruited, trained, and mentored college students. Trained over 100 college students who had no prior painting or business experience to run a successful painting company. He was company from $150,000 in 2010 to over $3 million in sales, and that was in 2016. He's the co-owner of Painter Choice, a national lead provider for painting contractors, and Painter Business Pro has become the largest online resource for starting and building a

successful painting company. Eric, it's a pleasure to get you on today. Yeah, man. Excited to be here. This is going to be good because you do lead generation. You've recruited people who never had any experience. You're in the home service niche, which is right up what we talk about on here on this podcast. Tell me a little bit about, you know, you live in Colorado. Tell me about what you've been up to the last eight to 10 years and what your goals are. All right. That's a lot.

So last eight to 10 years, the thing you mentioned about coaching college students, that was during my college years with the, you know. There's a handful of companies out there that run that as an internship. So I did that for six years, coached a bunch of college students. Then I started coaching the mentors and had an awesome experience there, built a new business model for the company in my last year there. And that was in 2010. That was the last year I was with the company. I graduated from school. I did economics and business, got out of school, and I started a painting business, not because I wanted to be in the painting industry. I actually didn't want to be in the painting industry. I actually tried to avoid it for about three years. But I started a painting company because I knew I could make

really good money not working a lot. I knew I could make 50 to 100,000 bucks a year very, very part-time so I could pursue other business ideas. And so for the next couple of years, that's what I did. I tried to, you know, I pursued a bunch of stuff really in hindsight, Tommy, I was looking for like that overnight success. You know, I think a media and everything really hypes up, like that's a thing. You know, you see stuff on Shark Tank and Profit and all the media about Silicon Valley companies. And, you know, everybody wants that like overnight success. And that's what I was kind of chasing for a few years, whether it was network marketing or consulting or a clothing company or a handful of other things that I did that didn't work out.

Or I ended up being like, hey, I don't want to be in this business. And so after a couple of years of doing that, my painting company basically doubled every year. And I was working on it very part time. And, you know, after a few years, I'm like, you know what? Maybe I need to stop chasing all this home run stuff. And maybe this painting industry is the place I should be focused. And it kind of opened my eyes to just what an incredible opportunity there is in not just the painting business, but just the whole construction industry and home services industry. Obviously, it's

massive, massive industry, so much money floating through there. And there's not a ton of competition, you know, it's no secret that we've got a lot of bad reputations in our industry. You know, every homeowner has got some complaint about some contractor they worked with. So just saw there's a huge opportunity. So in 2013, that's when I kind of ditched everything else and went all in on the, on the painting industry, started focusing more on my painting business. We grew from like 150 grand to 390 to 650. And that's when I'm like, all right, I'm going to get a little more serious about painting business and started painting business pro online educational thing. And honestly, man, I just wanted to learn how to do business online. I didn't think that would be

anything. I was like, yeah, maybe I'll make a couple thousand bucks a month someday, but really, I just want to learn stuff online. And so I started teaching people what I knew best, which was how to start a painting company and build a painting company, started a lead generation business with my buddy. Actually, he started it. I was his first customer and he was getting me great leads for really good price. And so I talked him into partnering with me and that's Painter Choice. And then in 2014, we opened our first expansion company with my painting business. So by 2014, we had a couple of locations for our painting company. I was teaching people online how to start and build their painting business. And I was doing lead generation,

providing leads for painting contractors. And that's what we've really done ever since. So since then, the last five years, just been doing more and more with Painting Business Pro every year, making the course better, doing more articles, doing more YouTube videos, just trying to provide more to painting contractors in terms of the business side of operating a painting company. I don't talk a lot about the trade itself. There's plenty of people doing that, but what I'm really good at is the business side of it. So that's what I teach people is try to bring some business savvy and professionalism to their painting business. Well, we'll, we'll get more into that, but, um, you know, Legion, we've just

been grown with that, trying to provide good leads to more and more contractors across the country. And then what I spend most of my time on is building my painting company. So we've started 16 companies since 2014 and, uh, closed eight of them just made a lot of mistakes, uh, partnering with the wrong people and among other things. And then of the eight that were successful, we sold off four of them and we still operate four of them and we still operate four of them. So in 2018, we did about 4 million. 2019, we'll finish right about 6 million and got some really exciting things in the works there. So that's all the business side, man. And then besides that, what I really love about entrepreneurship is the life it provides. So

been doing a whole lot of traveling and I was traveling about 70 or 80 days a year, most of the last nine years, mostly with my wife or my buddies. And really enjoyed that. And then about a year and a half ago, my wife and I got married. And we just had our first kid. So we just had a baby girl a week ago, as I told you.

And so now that's what I'm going to be spending a lot more of my time doing less travel and a little more family time. But yeah, man, I just love, I love the opportunity that entrepreneurship provides, you know, the kind of life you can lead as an entrepreneur. And so I'm really passionate about entrepreneurship in general, want to help as many people as I can just live a great life. That's great, man. It's exciting to hear you're living the life that everybody kind of strives for. And I think what I've started to realize is entrepreneurship is a way to get there. But I got to tell you, I do a lot of thinking in this show, which is probably 99% of us. It's weird how that works.

And this morning I was thinking, man, there's a lot of people that work for me, like over a hundred that are going to make six figures this year with full benefits. And think about loyalty for a little bit. How many guys have gone on to work for me to start their own thing versus stay with you? What's your attrition rate like? Most of our expansion companies were the successful ones were former employees. And our retention is like through the roof. It's great. It's cool to hear you say that about your guys, all these guys making six figures full benefits. That's what we're working towards. And this next year, we're going to have probably half our team getting pretty

close to that. So I'm right there with you, man. The value of keeping a great team of people around, I don't think people put enough value on that. And so that's a big part of what we've been focusing on is how do we make this company a place where our people can make... That's exactly what we're working on. How can we have people making six figures with full benefits and maintaining a good life balance and having opportunities to continue to grow in their career? Because entrepreneurship, yeah, I agree with you. That's one way, but it's not the only way. So our attrition is super, super low.

It's taken a long time to build the culture and like the systems and everything to get to that point. We had obviously more attrition earlier on, but now we've got just an amazing team. Yeah, that's huge. It says a lot about a business owner, but it takes time. We all started. We were all out there. Most of the people that are listening right now are either still there or we were there

at one point where business is tough. I mean, we work hard and we get rewarded well, but most of us don't make it. I mean, we work hard and we get rewarded well, but most of us don't make it. I mean, think about it. The stats that I've heard are one out of a thousand will make it to seven figures. And that's pretty crazy. I mean, you hit seven figures and then eight figures. I mean, it's crazy some of these numbers because just this business, the average plumber is 47 years old.

And I mean, here's the deal. I know a lot about painting. I started in the painting industry. I painted garage doors. That's all I did is I painted. I took a Magnum five. I'd have a small car loaded in the back. I painted 10 doors a day. I make a thousand bucks. That was 2005 and six. So I love painting, but it's hard to get good people. Tell me how you did that. I love that you took college students. Well, that was back in those days. These days, we are mostly subcontracting. And I think subcontracting gets a pretty bad rap.

We've been able to find some incredible, incredible subcontractors. And we're going to start bringing on some employee crews as well, but my approach with finding good painters and is the same with, with any other position is I think first and foremost, you, you want to find the best people out there and there are amazing people out there. You need to be providing the best opportunity out there. You know, if you want the best subcontractor in town working for you, you better be the best person to work for in town. You know, and the things that matter to people is their compensation, how they're treated fairly, and especially for painters and subcontractors,

consistency of work, being paid quickly and on time, being treated as a partner, you know, respect, all the things that we all want. So that's like the first thing we want to focus on is how do we be someone that everybody really wants to work for? And then after that's in place, you know, cause you can't cheat that, you know, if you're just not paying people well, like you might talk somebody great into working for you, but eventually they're going to go where the better money is. So once that's in place, you know, it's really just a matter of like, we're always, always recruiting. We're always looking for people. And to the degree that we can, we're always trying to provide more and more training or support to help people be more successful

working with us. Obviously that's a lot easier with employees. You know, we're trying to look into what we can do in, in general to, to provide for general to provide for subcontractors and help them be more and more successful working with us. But certainly with employees, we invest so much into our employees. So much time, so much training, so much support, so much care. I think that's really the name of the game is provide an awesome opportunity, find great people and invest in them and support them. And, you know, not to go on a soapbox, but that's what I think is so beautiful about entrepreneurship is, you know, if you really want to win, the key is making everybody else win. You know, we've got our employees winning, our customers are winning, our contractors are

winning, our vendors are winning, like everybody else is winning, we're going to win. So that's kind of what we're focused on. It's just, there's no shortcut here. Yeah. And you know, that's important is I was saying to somebody two weeks ago, I was like, when I get into a relationship, I know that someone needs to win. There needs to be two winners. And if you look at the art of negotiation, there's certain things that people feel strongly about, even in politics some people feel much stronger about the climate than they do about gun law so that's where you see them get to meet in the middle and you know there's certain things i know that my employees want and here's what i tell them we do this once a year especially with my management team is we write down where we were

last year and we took a huge whiteboard i'm talking a huge whiteboard and we wrote down, we ran out of room on how many things we hit from the year previously and everybody contributed. And the main thing is to keep the ball moving forward. And if you can't make money in this economy, there's something wrong right now. And I like what you're doing with the subcontractors because that's how the roofing companies do it. And I think there's more than one way to skin a cat. What I don't like, and I'm sure you've heard these guys on Facebook groups and everything, and they go, oh, that's bullcrap. Everybody has a different way of doing it, but they're not open to other ideas. And I don't understand that.

And those aren't the people that are listening that love podcasts because the people that are listening are growing themselves. Here's a different point of view. They're trying new things. So you've done lead gen and that's super cool for me because I'm going to blast this podcast everywhere. And talk to me a lot about lead generation because it's something that I'm absolutely in love with. Well, you probably want to talk to my partner more than me on that one. He does a lot of the running of that business, but we're still pretty small and simple with our legion, man. We're doing almost exclusively Google AdWords,

targeting customers who are actively searching for a painter. And so, you know, we've done a really good job with that. We hired this company recently who does, who's very, very highly recommended for AdWords optimization. And we dropped a pretty penny working with them to try and improve the quantity and quality of the leads we're getting. And in two months and a lot of money spent, the best ad they came up with was losing to our ads by like 35%. So my partner's been like just combing through this AdWords account for seven years and he's gotten so, so, so good with AdW the way we've built that business. So that's pretty much it, man. I mean, you know, we've got two aspects of that business.

One is bringing in leads, which is primarily AdWords. We've got some SEO stuff. We're not buying leftover leads or anything from other companies at this point. I'm really trying to protect us, the quality of our leads. And then, you know, we've got our contractors. And on that side of things, like we believe that our leads will speak for themselves. And we don't have contracts. We just say, hey, look, we know our service is going to work. If you've got a decent sales process, we know our leads are good and you know, you're going to have success and keep

buying leads. And if you don't have success, you're not going to keep buying leads. So again, there's no shortcut there. We're just trying to provide really good leads and good customer service to our contractors. And so far it's been, uh, been going really well. That's great. And I love Google because you can pay for leads and you can do that now through the Google guarantee program. I will tell you there's a fallacy out there, Eric. And the fallacy is that you can't do things the way Google doesn't want them. And you can't, I'll tell you this, what I want to do, I want to you this, what I want to do, I want to educate the crowd. And I want to tell everybody something about lead generation is there's certain places like home advisor used to be called service magic, service magic used to

get 97% of their leads through affiliates. And there's, there's a thing called commission junction. It's an affiliate network. There's 100 affiliate networks that I know of. Anywhere that I could get a lead from, I buy them. Now, somebody will call me up, and they'll say this. They'll say, Tommy, I found some weird thing, and it came to your number. What are you doing that's black hat or illegal? I'm like, look, I have one of the largest

graduate companies in North America. Do you think I'm going to jeopardize it? But I buy leads from every single place on the planet. If it's a good lead and I monitor it, I can't control where they come from. They're huge conglomerates. These places, they get leads from a thousand different people from a thousand different places in the world. Maybe it's PPC.

Maybe it's Craigslist posting. Maybe they figured out a way to do drop ads into forums. Maybe they're doing Facebook traffic. But so many people think Tommy must be sitting behind the scenes doing. I'm like, look, I've got three employees in my marketing department, but we buy leads from everywhere. And there's nothing wrong with their good leads. That's what these networks exist for.

Now, of course, they're doing a bunch of stuff and it's getting us in trouble with Google or something. Of course, I don't want to do that. But the funny people that complain have no idea what lead generation is. They don't have any idea how to market. They have no idea how to close leads. And here's the most important thing, Eric, is I don't care what a lead costs. Because if I got all my leads, imagine this.

You're a painter. You understand what a wood overlay garage door is. I mean, we make a lot of money when we sell expensive garage doors. So if I was paying $200 for a lead, that's a lot of money. But if I was selling a $5,000 door, 70% of the time, that'd be a fart in the wind. I'd be happy to pay that price, you know, because I say the quality of these leads and just that there are a certain type of class of people that love what overlay doors, some of the HOAs require it. And that's where so many people frown upon the expense of a lead. You're in lead generation, you know, they say, oh, are they exclusive? And all that's expensive.

If you're painting a 7,000 square foot house inside and out for every, whatever you charge, it's not expensive, is it? No, dude, it's so funny to listen to you talk, man, because you're just like, you're taking the words out of my mouth. It's wild how many people are evaluating lead services based on how much a lead costs, not their ROI. And it's amazing how many people are dismissing different marketing avenues without testing them. And you're 100% right. It's like there's so many. I just so agree.

There's so many ways I can get leads. And at the end of the day, my business is going to be limited by how many leads come in the door. If I only get 100 leads in a week, I can't do 110 estimates. So marketing is just such a critical point in the business. And people are so quick to dismiss things based on the wrong kind of information man it's it really blows my mind too and so anyways you're just yeah i'm right there with you man well one of the things i look at too is when i evaluate my leads of my roi you know the first person i look at it's myself in the mirror yeah

because i go wait a minute. In Albuquerque, I don't have any guys that are good at conversion rate. Our door sell conversion rate sucks. Our average ticket blows. And I'm like, so maybe it's not the lead quality. Maybe it's the quality of the employees or conversion rate. We haven't trained enough. We haven't done enough follow-up. So I don't necessarily dismiss something based on solely the fact that I'm at like 21% on a certain lead. I look at what does that guy rank as far as closing rate, number one, number two, customer satisfaction. And I'm sorry to tell everybody on the podcast, but average ticket matters. I'm sorry. And I know that sounds annoying to people like, oh, salesman. Dude,

we're all salesmen. Our freaking pastor at my church sells us to give 10% on every single week he talks about we need to do that. And people that don't like that should get out of business, stop listening to the podcast, and go work for somebody else. I don't know what to tell you, because we're in sales. And it's a scary number. But the first thing I'm going to ask you, Eric, if we ever work together, and I, you know, be more of a friendship thing, but I'd say, what's your conversion rate? What's your average ticket? These are things that matter. How much do you pay per lead?

But I want to cluster that. I have 3,900 call tracking numbers for a reason. Certain leads are better because I buy from every, dude, I post ads on Craigslist. I go to HomeAdvisor. I go to Porch. I go to Thumbtack. I go, you name it. I go to Porch. I go to Thumbtack. I go, you name it. I'm doing ads on Groupon.

I'm living social. I work pay-per-performance deals with the newspapers. I've got RSVP. I've got Valpak, MoneyMailer, DirectMail that I personally do. You heard about my sticker program. I'm doing all these things. And they all work. And it's funny because I sit down and I talk to people, 700 people at a time.

And they go, yeah, I tried that PPC stuff. It doesn all work. And it's funny because I sit down and I talk to people, 700 people at a time. And they go, yeah, I tried that PPC stuff. It doesn't work. I'm like, yeah, I have too. And I've had the wrong companies. And I lost my ass. I've tried TV. I lost. I've also made a lot of money doing it.

But there's no way these things exist and are profitable if they really don't work. It's just you got to take the time. But here's what I recommend. Pick one of the bigger ones and master it. Whether it's HomeAdvisor, Google, Angie's List. I mean, I don't know what's big for you. Obviously, Google is God for us. Some people think social media is good. Do not do billboards, TV, or radio to start. Do not do those to start. I would agree. I would agree. So dude, curious. You said if you came in and were to work with me or somebody, your first questions are, what is your conversion rate? All right, here, let's do this together. Here we go. So write this number down. Pick a number that

you want to make next year. Pick a number. How much? Everybody do this. We'll say a million bucks. Okay. You want to make a million dollars next year. Okay. So now let's reverse that. What's your EBITDA? What is your real earnings? What is it? Let's just say 20% you make.

That's a huge number. So you need to do 5 million next year. So 5 million starts on the left side. And then I got a million because there's 20% of that, which is a million. That's one fifth. Then we're going to go down from there. And I'm going to say, when you show up to the home, which you better please show up to the home if you're going to bid, your closing rate goes through the roof.

I want to know what your conversion rate is when you're face to face. So right face to face, F to F. And I want to know that conversion rate. 45%. So 45%. So then I want to know this, you're at 45%. So now we're going to go over and look at the next thing. When you get a phone call or a form fill, and this is where people screw up. They don't count form fills. And I'll tell you what I did. I pulled every form fill, every single home warranty company, everything into

one CRM so I could have KPIs performed around it. But let's just say you close, I don't know what, you probably book most of your estimates, but some of them you probably dismiss as you don't have the money that's too far out. What do you think your closing rate on the phone is? So write phone leads. Phone leads is probably like 90%. Okay. That's an important one to know. And then, then I want to know how much it costs you to generate a lead so we have all these broken down obviously by source which is great but i need to know which you would run this through every source but let's just run this as a cumulative

just for sure i will say cumulative then let's go with like you said per lead per lead by 40 bucks okay so we got five million divided by five thousand my average job size is a thousand 2, then divide that by 0.9 equals 2, 4, 6, 8. So you need 2,468 jobs. And then you divide that by $40. So you times that by 40. So this is how much you need to spend, $98,755 to get to that 5 million. So you need to spend about a hundred grand in marketing, which makes sense. But now here's the deal. I look at each of those in every separate campaign

to try. And then I look at this, where's my most profit? Because here's the biggest mistake. And I'll tell you where I'd like to be on all these numbers, Eric, but here's the number one thing is I got out of commercial with garage doors. I got out of all the Home Depots because I looked at it and I said, I got net 90 on this stuff. I need extra insurance. I can't get a hold of the decision maker. I've got a different truck set up. I can't have standardization, different tools, different pay structure for the employees.

And then I looked at Home Depot. I said, wait a minute. So you got Home Depot. You got my manufacturer, which for paint might be Frazee or Sherwin-Williams, whatever. And then you've got the customer. So you've got the Home Depot, you've got the customer, then you've got them, and then you've got us. I get blamed for everything. I got to do all this extra work for Home Depot and Lowe's and Costco. So we got rid of all that and we just started focusing all of our attention on our main core business, which is residential, mostly retro. So we go and we look at retro. And here's where I like to be. Anytime you could get over an 80% booking rate, 90 max,

unless you're just setting up free bids, anybody can get a free bid. That's easy. Hey, we'll come out for free. But I think you need a little bit of a, let me ask you this. When are we looking to get the work done? Are you the homeowner? Tell me a little bit about the project. You need to have a little bit of, it's a little bit easier in painting to just get you out face to face. So you get the bid. So let's just say you're a 90% or a hundred percent. That's different. But I like to be above 60 percent. If you get above 70 percent, raise your prices because you're too cheap if you get above 70 percent. Now, here's the best way to get there is offer things no one else offers. So I offer springs that are higher cycle length or powder coat or red that come sleeved. I offer things. I carry surge protectors

on the truck that we give away with certain things. We call things different things. You know, we had a Black Friday sale. Things that we do are so much different because if we're comparing apples to apples, it's hard to ever get a high conversion rate. If the next guy shows up and says, well, I use the same paint. I prepare the same way. I'm going to repair the two by six. I'm going to replace your garage door trim. I'm going to cock all these spots. Well, then it's apples to apples. But I tell all my customers, we don't sell apples. We sell oranges.

Apples to apples will compete on price. But there's nobody that's going to do what we do. And I think that that's important. An average ticket really counts a lot per marketing source. Because here's the deal. This is really hard. This has been what I've learned this year. I'd rather make 20% on 10 million than 10% on 20 million. The only thing I can tell you about 10% on 20 million is I can move a couple knobs pretty quick and raise that.

But you got to think, how hard do you want to work? When I started cutting costs, getting rid of certain marketing that wasn't working, cutting employees that really weren't holding their weight, I started working less hard and started smiling a lot more and having a lot more fun. And everybody in the company started making more money. We weren't chasing our ass. And I think that that's important. Sorry about the math fiasco there. I usually have a whole chart I put this on. So what is your thought process on

that? I agree with you. I think that's one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they're chasing top line revenue and not like their bottom line. They're making hard money, not easy money. I think it's interesting to hear you not doing commercial because I'm in the same boat, man. We get so many commercial requests for RFPs every week. It's insane. And we just don't do them because of all the same reasons you said, man. It's a more complex business. And that's one of the big mistakes I see a lot of people make is they spread themselves so thin and people aren't thinking about scale. How you add your bottom line is by scaling what you're good at. And what makes it a lot harder to scale is adding a ton of complexity.

And a lot of complexity comes when now you're not just doing residential, but you're doing commercial too. And you're not just, and then you throw a new construction and then you throw in this and you throw that and you start being this jack of all trades because you're chasing money. You're chasing top line revenue. You're chasing a client that says, Hey, I've got this other job. Do you do this too?

And you want to say yes, because you're trying to get the money. And all of a sudden, you've got this really complex business that makes it harder to recruit people, harder to train people, harder to scale things. It just makes it so complex. And I think business is hard enough as it is, you know, building teams is going to be the toughest thing for most people, man, it's harder to build teams when you are a really complex business. So I'm in the same boat, man. For the first three years, man, I said no to interior. I was like, no, I'll just, I just do exterior. I'm an exterior painting company because that was, that was even more niche. And then we got to a point where it's like, Hey, we need to do interior too, or even too much money on the table. But then we had our

minimum job size was 2000 bucks. So we were turning a lot of jobs down there. I'm still turning down commercial. Now we're starting to lot of jobs down there. I'm still turning down commercial. Now we're starting to get into smaller stuff because it makes sense. But I just totally agree, man. Our thought process on all of this is really similar. And I think that's a mistake a lot of people make. They're not tracking their ROI on marketing when they aren't effective with marketing. They're blaming the marketing source instead of looking at how I improve my processes. They're chasing top line revenue. They're making hard money, not the easy money. And they're not focused on just getting really good at a couple of things. So I just totally agree. Well, it's funny because my cousin,

he's like, dude, I brought in 600,000 this year by adding commercial. And he's got one guy that does it. He's collected half that money. So it was accounts receivables through the roof. I said, dude, how much is your insurance? How long does it take you to figure out payroll? How many accidents have you had where some workman's comp injuries? It's crazy. And I'm not against commercial. What I'm about is there's a great garage store that they only do commercial. There's this great company, Vortex. They make a lot of money. And they've got the whole thing set up because every single guy, they've got a whole training center. They've got a whole pay structure.

I don't know what it is about these companies. Five guys are smaller. They love doing commercial half the time and residential. They'll just take whatever they can get. They're like, well, I landed in my lap and it's a big job and I can do it because I'm pretty cool. And I know how to do it. Like people think because they're smart at the mechanics of something or maybe a really good painter on a scaffold or maybe they could fix a chimney on a five-story building.

Whatever it is, what I see guys brag about on Facebook is how technical they are. Then go be a technician. If you're an owner still doing all the technical work, do me a favor. Quit right now.. Then go be a technician. If you're an owner still doing all the technical work, do me a favor, quit right now, go back to being a technician. Because if you can't start being a leader, building a culture, learning how to recruit, learning how to train every single day, being an expert at getting payroll done fast, offering great things to your employees, knowing how to get control of driving records, background checks, drug tests, these are the things that matter. And no one ever thinks about, wait a minute, I've got to have a whole

team of analytics to understand my cost per click on this or my ROI for this marketing source. And I'm like, you thought it was easy because you knew how to fix a toilet, but you didn't realize you got to charge $400 an hour to cover all your costs because you're only on the road. You're in the house 16 hours of your 40-hour work week. And then you've got all the other staff. You've got your CRM, your air conditioning in the building, your rent, all these other things. There needs to be people to take vacations. You have to have 24-hour service, a secondary call center. And they go, well, that's highway robbery. How could I charge $400 an hour for a $26 part? Well, the problem is you had the expertise. You had to have a good truck. You had to have insurance on the truck. You had to have

workman's comp. You have to pay taxes on insurance. You might have a 401k. You might be paying for their medical. That's not even including all the right things. You had to have the marketing to get the phone call. You had to book that phone call. You had to have a dispatcher. You had to have a warehouse guy to make sure the truck was planned. Isn't that crazy how people don't realize this stuff? Yeah. I mean, you can tell I get pretty passionate. Well, and that's no, dude, I'm with you. There's just, I don't have anything to add to it. Cause I say I'm saying all the same stuff, you know, and this is like largely what I'm trying to do at painting business pro. And you mentioned some things earlier too, about, you know, guys who are not the guys listening to this podcast.

So this is almost useless to say, but so many people who are tuning out and just being right about their trade and how they do things and they're not open to learning. And that's, you know, you're either going to start adding some professionalism to your business and some business savvy and start operating a business or you're going to be out of business. It's getting more competitive. There's a lot of competitors out there, but there's a lot of guys who aren't really competitors.

And they're going to start losing if they don't start learning. Yeah, I love this stuff, man, because you're in a similar industry. It's not the same. We're going to complement each other's services as you grow and we grow. And I'm definitely going to come see your operation. You're going to see mine. Tell me some low hanging fruit for home service entrepreneurs that they just maybe some aha moments in the last five years that you were just like, I wish I could have told myself this. Well, I think it's probably two different answers for that question. The first one is the low-hanging fruit is what we've been kind of pointing at.

A lot of this conversation is improving your sales. I think a lot of people are doing the apples to apples and they are competing on price and they don't have a professional sales process. And you and I both know that when you improve your sales, it has such a massive compounding effect through the whole business. You can charge higher prices. You can close more jobs, add better prices, make more profit, deliver better service.

You can afford more marketing. And when all those things compound, now you got more leads coming in that you're selling at a higher rate, at a higher price, more profitably and delivering better service and get more referrals on the backend. I think people aren't focused enough on improving their sales process. So I

think that's the quickest wins, especially because as far as I can tell in this industry, people don't have very good sales processes. It's not hard to improve them. It's not like we're trying to take a 9.8 out of 10 sales process and make it a 10. We're trying to take someone who's not even delivering their estimates on the spot. They're sending an email three days later. If you just start delivering those on the spot, your sales rate's going to go up. We're talking about really easy ways to improve a sales process. So I think that's the lowest hanging fruit. And that's number one. Second one, man, is what we also talked about is all these lead services. People got something going on about lead services

because they got burned by one of them one time when they spent 300 bucks and didn't sell a job or something. But that is just guaranteed leads. You can trade money for leads and it's instantaneous. I think there's huge opportunity there. But again, those go hand in hand because you got to have a good sales process to convert that. And then if there was something that,

if I could give myself some advice from five years ago, quit trying to grow so fast and focus on building, building a stronger foundation. You know, I think I got wide eyes trying to chase money and we opened nine painting companies in one year and closed eight of them. And, you know, honestly, we just weren't ready to grow that quickly. And so I spent the last year, last two years really saying, Hey, we're not going to open any new companies for a little bit. We're going to focus on getting our existing companies really, really, really, really, really good so that I'm not duplicating a mediocre one and a half million dollar painting company.

I'm duplicating a $10 million business over and over and over. So taking our time and building a better foundation and realizing that it's so cliche that it falls on deaf ears, but it's like, this is a marathon, not a sprint, like slow the hell down and do things right. And just realize that it takes time. I think people's impatience. I know my impatience and my ambition got me. And I think a lot of people's impatience gets them. Like they're so impatient to get there that they, they take some shortcuts that end up backfiring and you end up back at, at ground zero. Anyway, there, there is no shortcuts and there's a, there's a really great quote I heard from just a friend of mine. He posted it on his Facebook page a while

ago, but he said that there's no shortcuts. The shortest path is a straight, a straight line through the long cut. So that's what I'm doing now. And I'm seeing the benefits of only, only slowing down for a year, you know, getting our foundation down, man. It's crazy how much faster we've grown and how much healthier we are and how much better our margins are and how much more successful our employees are

when we're not just in a rush to hit bigger revenue numbers so quickly. And that's going to really add up. So yeah, that's my answer to those questions. You cranked out a few things here. So first of all, revenue, check this out. Revenue is for vanity. Profit is for sanity.

Okay, number one. Number two, you're absolutely right. What do you see your business doing? If you see a $100 million business, write that on a whiteboard and say, what would we need to do? First of all, for me to become 100 million, which is going to happen here in the next year and a half,

I know what I need. I needed an amazing training center where everybody knows my eight step sales process. We know exactly what we're doing. We know exactly where we're recruiting from. We know the drug test background check. We're checking their credit history. We're checking their taxes. We're actually checking personality profile. And we're using three of those. We're meeting their wife before we hire them or vice versa, their husband, we're taking them out to eat. We've got a whole, so what does it look like? And the hardest thing I see every day, Eric, the big thing is how do I get great people? That alone takes about a year of infrastructure to build because you're going to have a whole process in which you find the people, you lure them in. You've got a great opportunity for them

as a career, not a job. So my guys started out as an apprentice. They move up to a junior tech, then they move up to a tech, then a senior tech, then a field supervisor, then a market manager. And it's hard. You need to have your technician to everybody else ratio two to one. You get to that, you're going to be murdering it. And some people get out above that three or four to one, which is easy to make money. And then a thing you kind of knocked loose in my mind because I had a podcast not that long ago. And what are you doing to differentiate yourself? The lady told me that Janice, she said, my cleaning lady used to bring in cookies from Costco.

She used to bake like 12 of them at a time. And when I got home, the whole house smelled of fresh cinnamon cookies. And it smelled so clean. And she'd leave a whole house smelled of fresh cinnamon cookies. And it smelled so clean. And she'd leave a nice card with these fresh baked cookies on the oven, on the stove. And I'm like, oh, my God, that little thing alone was probably what you were addicted to. You'd look over to see that she missed something. So when you're painting, I say, what's something small that you can do that just it's like one of the things i try to do is i blow out their garage i literally have a blower i get them out there i

show them what i'm doing i change their light bulbs i clean everything in front of them i put on my stickers and then i get them out there say is there anything i can help you move anything right now while i'm here that i could do for you do you need any light bulbs change in the house is there anything i can look at for you while I'm here? Because who else is doing that? Nobody. And that's the extra mile of how we got the five-star reputation. And then you say this, now here's the key. This is what most companies fail at, is I don't like leaving a five-star review, even if I had an amazing service at Applebee's or Cheesecake Factory or Melting Pot or P.F. Chang's, unless the server says to me, it would really mean a lot if you left

it and make sure to mention my name. Because then I'm not thinking about a business because I could care less. The business, they're a rich company already. But this person looks good. This person asked me to deliver an amazing service. I feel more indebted to leave it for the person than I do for the company. And that's what we need to do as business owners and managers is make sure we're training our staff to personally get them liable to ask for that and give them a reward system around it. Have you ever tried doing that? Yeah, absolutely. And I just noted that down, man, because I think that's such a brilliant point. You're a hundred people don't care about the business and we haven't been doing that. And the one year we incentivized reviews, I had one guy get me 55 star Google reviews

and he did maybe a couple hundred jobs or something. So that works, man. And reviews is everything. Reviews matter a man. And reviews is everything. Reviews matter a lot. It's called user-generated content. I use a company called BirdEye. And the more you can automate the process, I think a lot of people on here, we can attribute one good person that came on

that really was a paradigm shift in our company. So ultimately, as human beings, we say we need more good people. But here's the deal. say we need more good people, but here's the deal. You wish you're good people, but it's the process that finds the great people. It's the system that dictates the output. So rather than saying the ultimate goal is to have low level, what I mean by low level is you don't want people with PhDs to have to come run your company. You want to get them while you're young, willing, and able, and the systems will allow for an expected outcome. Does that make sense? Like if you're hiring a 20-year-old out of college, you should know no matter what,

no matter if this person's a hard worker, a lazy person, you know that there's a foreman watching them, holding them accountable, making sure that things are right. There's pictures they need to take. There's videos that need to happen. There's maybe a checklist that the customer needs to sign off on. Because when I go to McDonald's, when I go to KFC, when I go to Applebee's, I'm not looking at people that have done this their whole life. But yet the food comes out fine, and I know what I'm getting every time. And it's harder to do in home service. And I think that's why Amazon Home Services is struggling. That's why Yelp has 10 sponsored

ads now for the home service space. And they've got it wrong. That's why Home Advisor had to change their name from Service Magic to Home Advisor. That's why Google Guarantee struggled so many times and rolled out this program so slow, because they thought it could be an Uber-like service. So I got off the phone with Thumbtack, Eric. Thumbtack called me up. I got off the phone with three different major companies, billion-dollar-plus companies. And you know what they told me? They're getting away from the small guys because the small guys might take five leads one day and not another lead for the next two weeks. They want companies like ours because they want expected results. Can you handle quantity and can you get them serviced?

And can you get good reviews? Because we want our customers, because here's what HomeAdvisor is saying. You call up for a paint job. It's a really shitty job. Guess what happens? No one's ever going back to HomeAdvisor, right? So they just lost that customer for life.

So they want it done fast. They want it done good. And they want lost that customer for life so they want they want it done fast they want it done good and they want a happy customer so there's a lot going on behind the scenes but all these companies are starting to realize it's not like uber that you just have a car and show up and pick somebody up you need systems and the sales system for me is not only about sales it's about customer satisfaction it's about putting a smile on their face. You know, Eric, what we do, and I've said this before on my podcast, you might have probably never heard it, but I call up and I'm like, Hey, Mr. Barstow, Tommy Mello here with A1 Garage Service. I want to let you know I'm on my way. You might've got the text message or system automatically does that. You probably saw that tacky picture with my dog on my profile,

but I love the little guy anyways wanted to let you know i got everything on my truck i'll be there in about 20 minutes but i'm stopping off at 7-eleven if i could grab you something to drink anything for the kids just let me know i'd be glad to stop and pick it up for you that's my first step is building rapport before i even get there now what do you think that guy just did in his head? Well, he likes you. Who the hell is this guy? Yeah, seriously, man. Beautiful. Beautiful. You've done a great job with these seemingly little things that are the things that make all the difference. Well, it's a differentiator, right? And all of a sudden you go, wait a minute, this guy's good. So the first thing I do when I walk in the door, I'm looking at three, first of all,

if it's your garage door, I'm looking to see if there's any cracks or dents. I'm looking if there's any oxidation. I'm looking for a keypad, the bottom rubber, and the trim. That's before I even walk up. Then I walk up and see if you've got a nest or one of those rings. Then I walk in and see if you have a nest in the house. Then I'm looking for a refrigerator or a freezer in the garage because you might want to add insulation or get an insulated garage door. You might want an automated garage door opener if you love home automation. But when I walk in, I'm looking for something to find in common with you. So I walk in and I see you have a little baby girl. Now I've got a niece and I could talk all about, oh my gosh, Eric, you're going to have

such a great time. These years, never forget them. But now you're like, dude, this is pretty cool. Who is this guy? Like, we've got a lot in common. I walk out, I see your snowboard. I'm like, dude, I went to Bracken Rage in the last four years. I got the ski pass. And we start talking and you're like, so the first 15 minutes, I'm not even talking about the paint or the garage or whatever, you know? And you're like, people buy from people they like. And I don't have my guys lie cheaters still i just say look we're in their garage that's where their tent gear is that's where their hobbies are find something you like about them and i look for people that actually enjoy socializing you know that's one of the things it's a sales job and you got to be able to talk

to customers so you know those are the type of people you should have going out to homes, right? Yeah, no, for sure, man. It's great. So what are some of the things you've done in this last year to really set yourself up? You said when we were, before we got on the call, you said we've got a couple of years probably before the, you know, you catch up to us. What do you see? You said, I'm really busy the next year. Tell me what that looks like.

What are you setting up? A lot of the stuff you're talking about. So last year we were, it blows my mind, man, that at least in the painting industry, we get five-star reviews. We follow up with every client and ask, one out of 10, how likely are you to refer us to your friends or family?

And we follow up on every single client on their experience. And what blew my mind was we were getting 10s when we shouldn't have been getting 10s. People are giving us 10s, they're giving us five-star reviews when I don't think we earned them. We've got such a bad reputation as an industry that when you deliver a seven or an eight out of 10 experience, people will give you a five-star review or they'll give you a 10 out of 10 experience, people will give you a five star review or they'll give you a 10 out of 10. But that isn't good enough. So we're looking at how do we actually deliver like an 11 out of 10 experience and what that looked like for us last year, where people are just like shocked and

surprised. A lot of these little things you're doing, but then for us, I can't even worry about those little nuances until I just get the fundamentals of the service really dialed in. The bigger an interior, we need to get a lot more guys. How quickly are we going to be in and out? What kind of schedule do we give people? Like, how do we be as least intrusive as possible when we're in a $10,000 interior that could take a week or two? How do we get that down to like three days? So last year we were looking at all of the self-imposed issues we had in our business, the mistakes we were making, you know, we weren't following up on time or we were setting a bad expectation or a client voiced a concern and we kind of brushed it off like it wasn't a huge

concern and it wasn't a huge concern, but it becomes a big concern when they feel brushed off. So we were looking at last year at what are all the issues we're causing ourselves? And then the next step is, okay, now how do we really get our contractors dialed in? And we got to look at a lot of legal stuff around that to make sure that we're not violating the rules that define them as a subcontract. So we're doing a lot of research with attorneys right now on how can we really support our contractors or, or manage our contractors or our agreements so that these guys are delivering incredible work on the front end. And so we're like really doing that research right

now. And then we'll start looking at what are the bells and whistles we start putting on this. So I talked to my team, there's a book called the art of learning by Josh Waitzkin. And one of the little principles he talks about in there is smaller circles, drawing smaller circles. It's like, that's the way I look at we're also looking at automation. You know, you mentioned the automatic text that goes out when you're heading out on the appointment. So we're looking at things like that now. There's a ton of stuff. I think before we got on the call, you said you've got these 12 core things you're working on. I've got something similar where we've got system development teams across the company and you know, all of our employees are on two teams and they're all working together in all these different systems.

We're working on really getting a lot more proven and dialed in and optimized so that we can deliver an extraordinary customer experience, that we're creating more value for our employees so they can make more money and we can be more efficient and all that stuff. So there's just so much, man. And that kind of comes back to where I said,

look, there's no shortcut here. Like we got to take our time and do this right. I tried to scale too early before and I learned my lesson the hard way. So there's a ton, man. And I got, I was taking a bunch of notes on this with just the little things you're saying. Um, and it'll be fun to, to hear more about the things you've done. Cause as I said, man, you're, you're further down the line on this than I am. It's fun, isn't it? You're, it sounds like you're having a good time though. And this is what, this is what life's about. This is what a business is about. I hear the passion with you. And it's

not like you're like, dude, I'm just, I'm doing this for my baby and my wife. You're like, no, I actually like my employees. I'm doing this because we're creating something bigger than we are, could ever be alone. And you know, it's just, so one of the things I'm working on, and this is something that is, dude, we're working, it's almost like we're a technology company that just got into garage doors because right now we're setting up crawlers for Facebook and LinkedIn. We're going to be looking for every single discount tire and big old tire worker because those people are the best. And we found them and we found out that they're the perfect employee. Okay. So what we're doing is we're crawling them out, finding out the city, their first and last name, and then we're skip tracing

it to find out their address and email and sending them a handwritten card and an email to try to say, if you're ever looking for a career, here's what it's all about. They go to a whole video and learn all about the business and what are the career paths is. Do you know how easy it is to freaking find great people when you find out the honey hole of where they're hanging out and what they need and what they like? Well, you obviously are at that point where you're pouring gas in the fire because you've,

there's a really great analogy I saw recently where, uh, you know, this guy I'll, I'll try to keep condensed this, but I think it'd be good for the listeners. So he said, all right, I need three volunteers. And he puts a $20 bill down on the, on the floor. And then he's like, I'm going to give you six hot wheel cars. You stand 10 feet back and you try to roll these hot wheel cars over that $20 bill. And every time you hit the $20 bill, I'll give you 20 bucks. And so, you know, these three guys get up and they start try to roll these hot wheel cars over that $20 bill. And every time you hit the $20 bill, I'll give you 20 bucks. And so, you know, these three guys get up and they start trying to roll the hot wheels car with a $20 bill and they're missing the cars going off the right or left. Some of them are just going shuffleboard speed, trying to just hit the 20 and maybe they hit,

you know, best person, maybe hit the 22 times out of six. Right. And then he's like, all right, now I'm going to bring in my guy, Jake. And Jake reaches behind the couch and pulls out a Hot Wheels track and lays this Hot Wheels track right over the $20 bill. And he's like, all right, here's your six Hot Wheel cars. And he just rips them down the track and every single one of them hits that $20 bill. And then the point of it was how many of you guys are afraid to grow too fast? And it's like, I think if you're afraid to grow too fast, it's because you're either insecure about your leadership or you're insecure about your systems. Because if you've got a system, if you've got your racetrack down, you're going to put as many cars down that track as you can.

And that's what I hear you're saying is you're like, you're at this point where you're just trying to recruit as many people because you've got a system you can plug them into. And when you plug them into that system, they're going to be successful. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of work to build that system, they're going to be successful. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of work to build that system. And it's a, it's an exponential thing, which is, you know, people like, how the hell do you go from, you said 34, 36 million, 70 million, maybe more starting to take off. And it's because when you put the right foundation in place, you can scale it crazy. So it's just cool to hear that you're in that position, man. Really exciting position for you to be in. I'm pumped for you, man. I'm pumped for you, man. This is the kind of stuff

I live for because I get off on learning about other businesses and just what they're doing. You know, I talk a lot about marketing and sales, but there's other things that go into it. And what I've learned to kind of do is love operations. And I never thought I'd say that. But the one thing I noticed, I got to tell you, I was in Virginia the last few days. And I must have made 10 pages of notes of things that we need to improve on. And here's what I love talking to my managers about. We're absolutely murdering it. We put over $600,000 in the bank last month, net. Now, here's the cool thing.

I'm not bragging about that. What my goal to tell you was, we got so many things to fix and so many things to do, but it's fun and I'm enjoying it. And to say, like, if I was like, dude, Eric, we're the best. No one can beat us at anything. No one can touch us. That would be a cool feeling

if I could actually believe myself saying that, but we're not even close to that. Like what I love about even small guys. One day I was talking to this small, small garage for a company. I mean, really small. And he told me a piece of advice, some stuff about store locators. And he said he gets 10 calls a day. And he's just in one city from this one source.

And he said, yeah, check this out. I poured on as much knowledge as I could. I talked to him for an hour and a day. And he's just in one city from this one source. And he said, yeah, check this out. I poured on as much knowledge as I could. I talked to him for an hour and a half and he poured on as much knowledge as he could. So from a company with three employees, I learned how to add an extra several dozen calls a day. And he was glad to help. So I think it's important that we humble ourselves and no matter who we're talking to, every time I get on a podcast, I learned something new. I mean, I am actually, I hope my employees don't listen to this one anytime soon, because I think I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to get a race car. I'm going to set up, but I'm going to be like, here's the deal, guys. We're going to all send 10 cars. You guys go first. If I beat you, then I don't pay you anything. But if I don't,

I'll give you 20 bucks for every bill you hit. I love that idea. Yeah. I'll credit that. That was Sam Taggart with Door-to-Door Experts that showed me that. It was beautiful, beautiful example. In their business, it's like, man, there's poor on the door-to-door guys. Drive that marketing and sales, but you can't do that until you got the right systems in place. And dude, I'm with you too, man. I'd love to say i'm the best but i'm the same way man i'm like all i see are the holes and the gaps and where we suck but that's exciting to me because we do a pretty damn good job we're doing pretty good but all those holes are opportunities you know to do an even better job for our customers for our our employees, ourselves. So it's a ton of fun, man. All right. I just got a few more things. If you got a few more minutes.

So it sounds like you really know how to get guys trained. And I think I've been talking about role play for years and we go through this every week, but we don't do enough of it. I don't think you could do too much of it. Real life scenarios. I told, I told my manager the other day, my main, main, main, main, main guy. I said, I think I know why we're not good at sales with guys when they come out of training. And he said, why? And I said, well, let me just explain. You got three things we focus on, technical, operational, and sales. So you got the technical, the operational, and sales. Now, operational is where do you park

your car? What do you say to the customer? What are some of the things we look for? How do they work our CRM? Technical is really diagnosing the door and knowing how to use tools, whether it's a paintbrush or a socket. And then the sales side of it is really tonality, eye contact and body language and being able to have rebuttals and really prove value. So I'm like, if I'm struggling to even diagnose a door and I don't know what wrench to grab, I'm not sure how to take a post-dated check that they wanted to leave or know where to find this item in our CRM. How the hell would I ever have confidence to look them in the eye and really be bold and diagnose the problem with a good voice and eye contact. I'm like, if I'm not really great at the technical and really, really great at the

operational, I'll never be able to move to the third step, which is the hardest, which all of us need to work on every single day because every single thing we do in life is sales. So that's what we kind of nailed it to. So now we're having all these tests that we're saying, no, we're not going to let you go until you can prove you're amazing at technical. And there's a time test and operational. We're going to ask you to do 10 things that are tough and no same guy gets the same 10 things on the CRM. And there's finals, there's questions, there's all these different things and activities we're running through now. And, you know, tell me a little bit about your training, because I can't imagine that the biggest

problem I see is owners and managers going, well, they'll never do it right there. They just don't have the skill set there. But it's not about the skill set painting a house. It's just about experience and telling people how to do it. I mean, right? Dude, it's so funny to talk with you, because everything you're doing, I'm like, Oh, I can't wait, man. That's like where we're heading. You know, it's with the testing and the, all the on, like I'm literally building the whole online training platform right now. LMS, right? Which one? It's called an LMS. It's we're using the learn dash. Learn dash. Yeah. I'm actually checking into which one we want to use right now.

So I'll check that out. Oh, dude, I'll run you through a full course. It is so cool and it's so affordable. And there's a lot of good ones. Don't get overwhelmed on the learning. The hard part is making it part of your process to see, look, how do I make sure every single person – So right now we're investing quite a bit of money in an analytics tool. There's Tableau, Power BI.

There's these two other ones I'm trying to think of. We had one before I didn't like it as much. And then there's a really expensive one. But anyway, the analytics tools, there's scorecards. It tells us exactly where you need help with, because here's the thing. If your average paint job on a 2000 square foot house is taking you twice as long, then I don't need to work with you on the technical side. If you're really, really slow on the tablet, like I can tell exactly how long you really were fussing through on a sale on the tablet, then we're going to train you on that. Now we know the most profitable items for the company, and some of them are the highest cycle life parts. So if you're not selling those, you know what I found out? This is the probably best thing you're ever going to hear if you

simply adopt it and put it to work. Forget good, better, best. Forget that whole idea. Get that out of your mind. Reverse it. Best, better, good, and you only start with the best. Because what you'll find is a lot of customers will say, yes, the best. Now, you just anchored it. You anchored the price at $7,800. And they go, whoa, that's expensive. And you say, well, no, I've got other options. Let me talk to you about another good option. And here's what we're, you know, obviously, we don't remove the gutters for this and whatever it is, we're not going to power wash it, but your house doesn't need to be. I don't know enough about painting, but what happens, we have our guys doing this. You know what they said? I have five guys call me. I remember this day vividly.

This is the same day we taught this and the morning call, there was a hundred guys there the same day. I had five guys call me by the afternoon and say, we sold out of all of our best openers. And I said, you guys have never sold out. They said, they're all gone. We need to come back to the shop and pick up more. I said, holy shit, this is so cool. Because the customer just said, hey, that's the best, that's what I want. But they didn't anchor their head going, well, no, no, no. I think I want that cheap one. And a lot of people say good, better, best. A lot of times people pick the middle one. Why not start at the best and then go better and good. So you're, you're working on your LMS and you're working on recruiting.

So anyway, so yeah, it's like, there's nothing I'm going to say that it's just based on our conversation so far. It sounds like we're, we're thinking the exact same. I probably think very similar to you is in terms of training and you're a little further down the line than me on a lot of this stuff. So I might be preaching the choir here, but it's, you know, we were training people in a classroom or through the LMS. Right. So they've got to get introduced to the material. We're training people in field. So they're seeing everything getting done. We're shadowing people. And then we've got what we call a competency model, which is basically just a name for a spreadsheet that has every an SOP and a way some things to be done. And we're just ranking people on a one to 10 scale on every single one of those SOPs. So my project managers probably have 60 of those. So they get ranked one to 10. And then if they're not a 10,

here's the note, what they need to improve. And it's just the training never ends. The training just never ends. The more we invest in our people and, and it's a lot of work. What I've noticed is things take a lot of work. Then you start making a more and more efficient, you know, over time. So we're getting so much better at getting people highly competent faster than we had before. And every time we train somebody to competency, the next time we train that same position to competency, it goes faster. It's smoother. So, you know, it's classroom training, infield training, shadowing, and just ongoing training and support based on metrics, you know, based on their measures, based on how they're performing

against what we know they could be performing at. Yeah. And that's the key is nobody's doing this stuff in the home service space. I can tell you there's a handful. And the fact that you're going to be doing it, I hope that other people take this seriously and they say, I'm going to commit to at least 100 hours a year for my employees to train. Because that's the game changer. That's the end all be all.

And there's a lot of people, I'll tell you this too, Eric, this is a quick thing. The people that will take you to 10 million aren't the people that are going to take you to 100 million. You're going to start seeing guys go, dude, this is not what I signed up for. You're changing the rules. I didn't want to play this game and now it's just more corporate. And you say, look, don't think of it as corporate. It's still a family. We're just trying to get expected results for our clients and make sure that we can scale this because ultimately when we scale, everybody scales. There's more opportunities to move up the company. There's other jobs that open up that never existed. And this is going to be a pro for you. But if you're going to be a negative Nancy, here's the door because I don't have time to hear you complain all the time. Now you were one of my

originals that started with us and I am loyal to you. But if you're going to be cancer for everybody else, as we grow this thing, we're going to have to part ways. And I'd be glad to give you a two week severance pay. And plus I'm going to give you a great opportunity to work for my competitors. Dude, we had the, that exactly what you're talking about happened a year ago is when we kind of said, Hey, we all got together for two days and we said, this is where we're going as a company. And it was very different from where we were naturally kind of just heading. We were just kind of like one year at a time. Let's just grow again.

Let's grow again. And we sat down as a group for two days with 25 employees. And we said, what are we really committed to in a big picture? Who knows how long it's going to take? And we kind of mapped this thing out. And naturally, there's a bunch of changes to be made, exactly like you're saying. And we lost about 23% of our people. It was like 22 to 23% of our people were gone within like two months.

And then we replaced them. And the four newest hires we have are just crushing it. Absolutely crushing it. They're so bought in. They're so in line with everything. They're contributing. They're passionate. They love being here.

Literally all four of them in their performance reviews this year were like i want to be here for like ever like i have no intention of leaving like how can i progress and in 10 years this is what i want to be doing here and blah blah blah so yeah it's really cool i can i just totally relate to everything you said you know i wanted to just get a couple more things here so you said the art of learning is one of the books you recommend is there a couple other books that really changed your whole mindset and business and life? I mean, a few that I would probably name because there's a ton like you have read. I've read a lot of books and I get little gems from all of them. But the ones that I think made a big impact on me

was the four hour work week made a big impact on, at first I took it seriously and I really did get down to working like five hours a week. And it was, uh, it was great. It was, it was after I had been hustling my ass off for like eight or nine years. Like I was working like 50, 60 hours a week in college on top of school. And so when I got out of school, then I was doing personal training and development course, starting all these businesses. And then I stopped some of that. And I literally went down to like five to 10 hour work week for about a year. And then I was like, man, I'm way bored. I could have worked a little more and have been a way better position. My life would have been even better. Like it really wasn't always cracked up

to be, but the big lesson from the four hour work week for me was just how to optimize your productivity and your efficiency, how to keep getting rid of things that are not worth doing and replacing them with things that are worth doing. And essentially that's how you keep making more and more money as you keep placing yourself in more valuable positions in your business by eliminating the things that are least valuable that you're doing. So I think that's just such a powerful principle. Another book that I would really recommend is it kind of takes a whole book to beat one

point in the ground, but it's called The One Thing. Oh, yeah. I have both of those. Very good book. And I think that's just such a powerful thing, man. Like if you've got 100 ideas to implement in your business, and I think very few people do this, man. People are shiny object syndrome.

They're not very strategic about what projects they take on in their business, but there's only one of those 100 ideas you have that can be the most valuable thing to do. And having some idea on how to pinpoint that is powerful. And it sounds like you're in that position now where you've got enough leverage that you can pursue a handful of different things at once, which is really fun and exciting. And that's where we're starting to get slowly but surely. And then third book, really good principle is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. And I think that book is really useful

because it just puts some things in perspective. Are you familiar with that one? Yeah, I've heard it. I don't, let me see if I have it in my audible. I'll basically give you the breakdown. It's Darren Hardy's, the founder success magazine. He's interviewed tons and tons and tons of successful people. And what he found is that the thing that separates the super successful from the average is not the big things. It's

the little things. It's the little things that compound. And we're all pretty familiar with compounding interest in money. So, you know, there's an example of if I give you a penny that doubles every day in 30 days, that penny becomes 10 million bucks. And that compound effect plays a role in every part of our life. You know, it's, it's that Snickers bar you eat or don't eat every day. It's the 15 minutes you listen to audible every day, instead of listening to the radio, right? By the end of the year, you've listened to 20 books or whatever. Whereas the person who listened to the radio didn't listen to any and that compounds and it leads to exponential results. You know, you mentioned a hundred hours a year investing into your employees, man, that compounds. It's the little things done repeatedly and consistently that produce exponential

compounded results. And so it also puts some things in perspective, like there is no overnight success. What we can do is make sure you're doing enough of the right little things consistently. And over time, that's going to pay off huge. So I think that's a really good book to just put things in perspective and kind of check yourself on those little things, man, those little things add up. And you know what's so funny is about three months ago, I got obsessed with consistency. The word consistency. We can work out for 20 hours today, all night.

We'll take a lot of Red Bull and just work out, work out, work out. Or guess what? Cut that into 40 workouts a half an hour a day and watch how your body looks because it's that routine. It's the consistency. It's the consistency. And there's a great book that I'll have on my website for everybody called the consistency chain. Now the deal is here's the mindset. Here's what you need to remember. This is the key. Your goal cannot be for months, quarters, and years. Now, yes, in accounting, we do that stuff, but your goal needs to be today. Today, I'm going to work out. Today, I'm not going to have a cigarette and try to do it for the next hour. Say, my goal is to not to

eat bad in the next hour. My goal is to not have a glass of coffee or not that second cup or not have that second beer or whatever it looks like. But so many times we say, I'm not going to drink for the next year, but just say, look, I'm just going to make it through today. I'm going to stay consistent through my day. And then that adds up to weeks. And then that adds up to months. And there's a book called the consistency chain. It's an 85 page book. I'm working on a deal with the guys to get it at a better rate. It's like a $10 book, but definitely want to check that out. And, uh, last thing I do, Eric is a couple of things. How do people get ahold of you if they want to learn more?

Oh, probably you could send me an email, eric at paintingbusinesspro.com. And mostly where you find me online is at painting business pro. So I got a handful. I got a handful of YouTube videos. I got some articles. And that's probably the best way to reach me is Eric at PaintingBusinessPro.com or my website, PaintingBusinessPro.com. Perfect. And last thing I do, I love that you just said that stuff, is pick something. And most of the time, here's another misconception is, man, I pay that guy $120 an hour to do my books.

He comes in twice a week for four hours. I don't care if I paid him $1,000. If it's accurate information and I don't enjoy doing it, it doesn't matter about the cost. If you're getting, I hired a new guy in March in my book, the bookkeeping slash financial slash accounting. Dude, this guy came in, he got his last company from 20 million to 420 million. He's worked for a $420 million company. He was the head of the financial department. Now he's head of my financial department. He's already been there. So at the rate in which I pay him is a fart in the wind in comparison to the value he's bringing.

For some reason, people have this tendency to say, I would never pay a guy 120,000, whatever that number is. And I'm like, wait a minute, this guy's already been to half a billion dollars. He's already been on the road we're getting on. Why the hell wouldn't I do anything it takes if I gotta pay a little bit more? Then what's the big deal? You know what I mean? Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. I love paying good people, good money.

And it's hard though. It's hard because we said, cause all of us have paid a lot of money and had people burn out. One last thing I wanted to mention on that is come up with compensation programs that pay for performance. Just like I do with a lot of my marketing platforms is when I started switching to pay for performance on most of the do with a lot of my marketing platforms, is when I started switching to pay for performance on most of the jobs in the company, whether it's dispatcher, CSR, management, top management, financial department, you say, how do you pay your financial department? Well, the speed in which the reports are given out and then the accuracy of those reports are the most important to know that we're really running the company based on exact real numbers.

So we test against that stuff. And if they come out within a 90 percentile, that one's complicated, but there's other ones that aren't as complicated. And when you find out you can pay people for performance and they earn it and you both win the game, like you talked about earlier. Yeah. God, life gets fun. I mean, everybody wins. You're moving in the right direction and they know how to play the game like you talked about earlier. Yeah. God, life gets fun. I mean, everybody wins.

You're moving in the right direction and they know how to play the game. Most of us hire people and say, you sit on the bench. I'll let you play sometimes, but I'm not going to teach you how to win. And you're not going to get any more conversation. You're an hourly person.

You have nothing to look forward to. No goals to try to figure out. Who cares what your goals are? It's only about us. And that's the biggest mistake. So last thing I do, Eric, is I'm going to give you, and obviously I'm on one today. I worked out before this and I'm all excited and I talked way too much, but you've got the floor now. You've already said amazing

things about the compound effect and just staying consistent. But if you wanted to leave the listeners with one gold nugget, one thing to implement or think about or get going on this next year. What is it? There's a webinar I did a couple of weeks ago and I was talking about how to make building your painting business easy. And this could be relevant for home service, any home service business, but you got to have a business plan that's based on your numbers. So you start there and then you start working on hitting your numbers and any numbers you're not hitting, that's where there's a problem. And all you got to do is solve the problem until you're hitting the number.

And once you're hitting all your numbers, you set bigger numbers. And then whichever numbers you're not hitting, that's a problem. You can solve the problem. And the thing that's really beautiful about business these days is there's so much access to so much information. You know, there's all, I mean, there's probably just gold through your podcast, just talking with you for an hour. There's so much good stuff that has been talked about and you've got however many episodes you got it. You have a ton of them and there's YouTube and there's people selling courses. Almost every problem you encounter in building your business,

unless you're out at the cutting edge, like you are, where you're going from 30 million to 70 million, if you're building your business, almost every problem you encounter has already been solved by somebody else. And there's two ways you can solve problems. You can either solve a problem by testing and trying and try, try again until you find your solution. Or you can go find somebody who's already solved that problem. You know, like I'm over here, like with, I'm really clear what my next problems are. And I'm like, oh, I'm talking to Tommy. Sounds like he's already solved a bunch of these problems. I'm going to want to talk to you a little bit more because I don't need to go and figure all this out on my own. Nobody does. And so no matter where you're at with building your business,

just focus on what's the next step. The compound effect will do the work. It's not that crazy to, whichever ones you miss, figure out how to solve that problem. Just be patient because the compound effect will do the work. There is no overnight success. And, you know, it's just a fun game to play. So enjoy it. And it's probably what I'd leave people with, man. There's just such an awesome opportunity of being an entrepreneur. That's some of the best advice I've heard.

I really think you're onto something there. I never really thought 30%. For some reason, that number is starting to get way more attractive, 30%, especially at the right margins. So just say you're a $10 million company. It's pretty cool. That's $3 million. If you're doing 15%, that's $450,000 you gave yourself a raise that year. And it happens fairly quickly. I mean, once you hire those first 10 amazing employees and you figure out the processes and the systems and the checklists, Kentucky Fried Chicken, they're opening a new store every eight hours. Okay. But think about that. They might only grow 30% this year, but they're opening up a new

store every eight hours. So think about how to get to that point. I got to tell you, I am pumped, dude. This was great. I really appreciate you coming on today. Yeah, man. It was great talking with you, man. Thanks for having me. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute

and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, Wyatt's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also when you subscribe, what I'm gonna do is let you know the next guest coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask

that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here, I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow together. Also, I'm giving away my book for free now. All you gotta do is go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. You got to cover the shipping and handling, but I'm giving the material out for free. It's 200 pages. It's a hardcover book,

homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. I appreciate each and every one of the listeners and thank you for making this Home Service Expert podcast a success. I hope you're having a great day and thanks again.