The Home Service Expert Podcast - HVAC Secrets to Grow from Zero to 30M in Less Than 5 Years

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Ismael Valdez is the owner and COO of Nexgen Air, a company based out of Orange County, CA. Founded in 2015, Nexgen grew to become the #1 HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) company in Southern California in a span of barely 5 years. With more than 15 years of experience and a commitment to provide the best service to his customers, Ismael has helped solidify the exponential growth of Nexgen. In this episode, we talked about recruitment, customer relationship management, profitability...

Google will only work efficiently if people know who you are. Like when people search AC repair on Tustin and Orange, whatever, guess what? If NextGen and Bob's getting in there and Paul's getting in there pops up, they're probably going to go to NextGen. Why? Because they've seen it at the Angel Stadium. They heard it on TV, on radio. They've seen it on TV. They've seen it. Our billboards everywhere.

They're going to be like, oh, that's that company. Boom, click it. They call us right away, right? So we use the billboard for the brand awareness to be able to convert all those platforms into calls, into leads, into revenue. So to me, it's working. What I recommend it to people, I would tell people, hey, do your market research, find out what works for you, track it. Don't just track the number of calls, track the conversion, track the average ticket,

track the revenue that's coming in, track the profit, right? And go with it and make that educated decision. So don't go based on what works for me. 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. Today, I have a good buddy of mine. You guys might have heard of him. He's pretty loud in the home service space, especially HVAC. Ishmael Valdez,

there you are. How are you today? This is how I'm going to be in the camera service space especially hvac ishmael valdez there you are how are you today this is how i'm going to be in the camera the whole day right here homie so ishmael is an expert in hvac customer service recruiting and managing he's based out of orange county he started a company in 2015 called next gen air and since then um has blown it up it's a it's a very big company ishmael's the owner and ceo of next gen he does hvac and plumbing he started working as the counter guy of a wholesale distribution to starting and growing his own business he grew his company from zero to 24 million then moved to 30 in the fourth year what are you uh pacing for this year brother 62 if i get a longer summer i'll go 64 65 so 65 million in six years that's that's probably the fastest i've ever heard of uh anybody growing

so we are going to jump right in there's a lot of people that have questions i'm sure i've got a lot of questions really looking forward to this uh thanks for coming on brother i've went out and visited him in california so let's just start out by hearing about what you came from i know you worked for a lot well you work for different asiat companies and then you work for a distribution center let's go through where you started where you came from and what you've been through over the last few years all right first of all thomas thank you for letting me in your home and your podcast finally and rescheduling three times but you know what we made it possible and i'm very happy to be here with you thomas mellow let's give a background about our relationship first thomas the amazing

friendship that we have built in the last two years and how i'm gonna beat you on this rolex context that we got going on okay before we before we get started into an interview of who i am people already know who i am hopefully they do if they don't i'm just a hard-working dude trying to make a couple pennies right okay so we're going to that so i came and visited you and i bet you that this year i could do 150 million i got some work to do still for a 30 000 rolex and um all i know is that i'm just getting started we're not even in june yet so i'm about to attack good i just want to let you know thomas that you are an inspiration to us people don't know how smart you are and i said it to you in arizona when we did the rhino events

in front of everybody. I think I told you the smartest person in this room is Tommy Mello. Did I not say that? You did. That was very nice of you. And you weren't even drinking. And we had some pretty heavy hitters in there. There was a couple of people that are very well known in the industry.

And I still, to this day, I will say it again. The smartest person in that whole room was Tommy Mello. That's nice. Well, I'll tell you what, you're pretty smart yourself. I don't know anybody who's gone from zero to 60 million. I was talking to a buddy of mine earlier, John Gabriela, and he said he's been in business just as long as me and he's doing six. You know, John's doing six, which is great.

It's a fantastic accomplishment. But he had a bunch of questions I'm going to ask you later, but it's, you just don't see that kind of growth. It's taken me to get to where I am. I started in 2017. I got really, really serious in 2014. So seven years, but, but also I had that other seven years ahead of that. So it's definitely something where I feel like you just came in and you got it. So I want to hear more about NextGen. How'd you come up with the name? What'd you do? What were some of the mistakes, pitfalls, how you got involved with Service Titan? There's a lot of story here, background that I think everybody's going to want to hear. I was playing about the thing, but let's go ahead and get serious about it.

I started in the industry. I was 17 years old. Like you said, I worked at a supply house for at least nine years. I think I was going on my 10th year when I was working at Howard Industry. Dude, probably, like I told you, I've said this before, one of the best moves I ever did because I got to network with the actual workers. I didn't see that many owners. There was owners that would go

in there, but they were little mom and pop shops, two, three guys with them kind of thing. But most of my networking became with installers. I got to meet a ton. And by a ton, I mean at least four to 500 different installers that would go in there and pick up parts, material, equipment, everything. I was there for nine years. They network with installers. The technicians were in there too. I was mentored by this guy named Jeff Winter. Really, really, really smart dude. Did my nine years there.

I really thought I was going to retire there, Tommy, because they treated me really, really good. I did my nine years there. I kept getting heavy recruitment every day. I think it was every day or every other day, somebody would go in the counter and want to talk to my manager, right? And remember at the time I'm like 22, 23, 24 years old. And every, it seemed like at least once or twice or three times a week, they would want to talk to a manager and my manager, Richard at the time, kept coming up to me and saying, Hey, he wants to hire you. He wants to hire you. He wants to like different

people would just wanted to hire me. I think it was my energy that, that got people a little bit stoked, but I said no to 99% of the people until one person came in and they just made me a ridiculous offer. I couldn't refuse. I don't know if I said this story before, but he actually, the guy that actually made a recruited me, he sat me at the Lakers games when it was lebron james against the lakers i think he was at the miami heat at the time and we sat next to lebron james's wife and that's what kind of closed the deal for me um i text him hey i'm all in went and worked for him he had he had already

had that company for about two years and just wasn't really getting the point of it he wasn't he wasn't doing bad but he wasn't doing. He was doing like an install every other day, an install a day kind of thing, right? Got in there and we just started like connecting all the dots, recruiting people. He started focusing on the sales side and I started focusing on the operation side. And, you know, we made a really, really good team together. Got up to 21 mil, I think, 21 mil. It took us four years to get there and and that was probably the one of the funnest times in my life because i was learning yeah i remember i was in the wholesale side nothing

to do with the contracting side so i didn't really know what what the turnover was what a marketed lead was like i i didn't know any of this until i got exposed to it with that company you know did did my time there parted ways and and what i know now parted ways in in 2015 late right after summer and now that i know what i know i know why he let me go he was running into a massive cash flow issue and he was running he he grew his overhead out of control he grew his his expenses out of control and and right when summer hits all the hvac guys know right right when summer hits if you're not stacking up your chips right those chips could go like that you know within a month or two you're drying out you know what i'm saying so i got i went on i did that and uh we parted ways with them and we started next gen right after that

so you you started next gen and i know that you've got some family involved tell me some of the steps you went into and you just said what i'm the and i've heard your story because you have a really good video and we'll put that video link in the podcast but what caused you to start next gen what were some of the things you prepared for well let's go through a bunch of questions about that the beginning days so what caused me to do next gen at the beginning? It was out of fucking anger. I remember I had a stable job. I was making 120, 130,000 a year.

I was 23, 24. Like I didn't want anything else than that. Like I was, I was good where I was at. I was already with my wife. We, you know, we're having our first kid. We're having a second kid and I was making steady money. Like I'd never had to worry about money to me 130 000 a year at that time was a lot of money right i had a had a house i had a couple good i got a mercedes like everything was good he came and disrupted me and tempted me to go out there and and obviously that wasn't all his fault it was

my fault for making the choice too but but at the beginning i started it was a hundred percent out of anger i was really fucking pissed bro like really angry that that i let myself get that far into the business without number one educating myself on the corporation number two like educating myself on the back structure like covering myself like we were 50 50 partners up to that point but nothing was in paper right yeah so when shit went down guess what there was nothing that i can do or or say or or be like hey where's my money you know so shit happened for a reason you know i was super mad at the beginning and and that's what caused me to to start an action and um you have was it one sister to tell me who was in the beginning at the beginning is my sister.

She was my first employee, in-house supporter. She was doing all the invoicing, all the collections, all the P&Ls per se. We didn't even know what a P&L was at the time. And she was kind of like weaning. I remember she would go on Google and she would be like P&L. And she would see like, what the hell is in there? So she would just plug in numbers in there. We had like three employees, you know what I'm saying?

It didn't, we were trying to be something we weren't, but that's what led me into this, like making sure that we were structured. So we had my sister, she's now my COO. She runs like the whole backend operation, knows the company inside and out. At the time, my brother was in here. My brother was a service manager

and we parted ways with him probably about a year ago he he started his own company i'm super super proud of him because because now he's gonna see what it takes to run and to uh grow a company so those were the two key people in there that probably uh that were family members of mine and then you know this is a great story so what else you know you go back in time right now, and this is one of my favorite things to ask, and I haven't done in a while, but you're talking to 2015 Ishmael.

So you go back six years, you just formed an LLC, you're working on your logo. You know, one of the things you told me, and you know, I like to go out and have my fair share of cocktails, as you said. One of the big things for you was when you really quit drinking, which a big big step but also what do you tell that younger ishmael six years ago six years ago i tell ishmael slow down homie like dude you're missing the whole point of this like the first five years was like this boom boom boom go go go go more people more people more

trucks more trucks more marketing more marketing and i enjoyed it now that I'm enjoying it more that I look back at it because I saw what it took to get here. Right. But when I was at the moment, I was like, dude, I was waking up at three in the morning that we were working out of my garage, out of my garage for four months. Right. So I was working up at three in the morning, picking up trash, dumping them into different trash bins all around the, like all around the neighborhood, right? Literally like the liquor stores, the laundromats, all that, the home depots, right? So I was chasing the results too bad, too much. That's exactly what I was doing. I was chasing the results too much. And if I could go back and tell that Ishmael, do what you do, but like, enjoy it a little bit more. You know what I'm saying? I felt like I,

I did the same thing in high school, in high school, I was like so eager to get to high school, right? Just like starting my business. So eager to get to high school. I get to high school and I'm like, man, it's so cool to be here. And then I start working every fucking day, right out of high school, 215. Uh, high school was over 230. I was at a job working till like 11 or 12 at night. I'm like, I missed the whole point of high school the dances the football games and that's that's kind of what it felt like starting the business i started the business i was super happy to start it and then i rushed through it you know what i'm saying so you tell yourself slow down and enjoy the ride don't always think about the destination

so you got this next gen business and when did you get on service Titan? I got on service sign the first day that we opened up. Like when we got our first shop in 2016, January, 2016, it was a fresh year. I leased out a building like five minutes away from where I'm at. And I called service sign cause I didn't know anything else. You know what I'm saying? Like I didn't even know there was another, I was going to get into success word, but I think success word, I don't know what I'm saying like I didn't even know there was another I was gonna get into success word but I think success word I don't know what they said they like they couldn't configure

anything that we wanted right and um the marketing I think it was the marketing that they do they're like oh we just don't do that I'm like what do you mean you don't do that that's the most important thing like we can't trace the dollars where the phones are ringing like how are we going to make the educated decision well and then I think service time was able to do that for us. So that's why from day one, we started on service time. Now there's some stories that go back and are as the CEO, your good buddies with them. Uh, Vahe does a lot. Tom Howard came out and visited.

And I think the story goes, you've got a pretty big voice in the industry and they weren't giving you the best customer service and attention you needed and you started to create a um a little bit of a tornado for them so to speak and uh they sent out tom howard and basically turned a couple dials for you and i feel like that little experience and correct me if i'm wrong and tom never told me this but i kind of kind of know through the grapevine that that was a point for you that you started to get your books in order you started to be able to use the ferrari that service titan is i always tell people they're stuck in first gear they're driving a ferrari

but they're not they're not using it do you think that that was a big catalyst for you to really, I mean, look, for as long as I've known you, you've always made money. The question, I hear a lot of people brag about revenue, not as much about profit. Me and you go back and forth and talk about this. Do you think that that was a time where you started to focus more on profit? 100%. And I'm so glad you brought this up, Tommy, because I don't think a lot of people know that story. And I'm glad you know it because I think I've told you the story. So what happened, and this is a really, really cool story about it. So what happened, Service Titan had a lot of gaps in between how their managed technicians

were allocated. We were running a $25 million, million 30 million dollar business with like you know maybe 10 managed techs you know what i'm saying like we had all the installers under one all the technicians under one sales guys had their own like we just worked around the system and and they never noticed right because they've never really paid attention to it until we brought it up to them and they really saw like holy crap How the hell is he running a $30 million business with like 10 managed sex? Right. And we told them how we run it. Cause remember at the time it was 2018, I thought that service time was just a dispatching software because I was so

focused on the growth, on the revenue, on, on hiring, on the marketing, all that. Like I was so focused on that, that I was like, Oh, it's just a dispatching software. It's just so my technicians know where they're going. literally that's what i i thought for the first three years of the business so they finally sent tom uh you know me and aura get it go go at it for a while and i'm like dude i'm not there's no way i'm paying 20 25 30 000 for this shit like there's just no way it doesn't do anything it just dispatches like i'll just go back on google sheets or something you know what i'm saying and he's like ishmael what do anything. It just dispatches. Like I'll just go back on Google sheets or something. You know what I'm saying? And he's like, Ishmael, what do you mean to just dispatch?

I'm like, Aura, it doesn't do anything for us. This is how we do our thing. And I told him like, we still use paper contract. We still use paper invoices. We still have a whiteboard with all the KPIs. Like to us, it was just a dispatching software. It wasn't nothing else. Right. So he goes like, look, Ishmael, like, I really think that you're telling me the truth. So this is what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to send Tom Howard. Right. Do you know Tom Howard? And I'm like, no, I don't know Tom Howard. I don't want Tom Howard in here. What the hell is he going to teach me? Right. Kind of like the same thing I did to you at the beginning.

I'm like, what the fuck is he going to teach me? Right. I'm like, no, I don't want Tom. And he goes like, look, let me send Tom Howard for three days. Let him see how you operate. And I guarantee you, he's like, I guarantee you we're going to make you more efficient. And I'm like, all right, whatever. So he sends Tom power in here. He was in here for my, in my office the first three days. And he, he saw everything wrong. He's like, what do you mean you're using paper contracts? You can upload a contract and they could fill it out and they could take payment. And they could, I'm like, Holy crap. All the technicians, like we had to build a price book.

Luckily he was here to build it out for me. We tweaked it and everything. And they started to show us what the software can really do. Right. At that point, Tommy, I was, and I'm going to be super honest with everybody. Right. At that point, I was spending like $48080 000 on the la times newspaper per year right and i didn't have my service time set up properly on the marketing side and the phone numbers and all that like i said i thought it was a dispatching software right so we start tracking like we start like really tracking like the service time i mean the la times leads dude

we found out that out of those 480 000 we were only generating like less than a million dollars in revenue a year so it's costing you almost 50 you were getting it two times i mean my bare minimum is a five times so you you basically you know to add on to that is when i've got i got you know i don't know if you know this but i've got 4300 call tracking numbers 4300 so i renegotiated all my marketing because of service titan but what i can tell you is the interview i had with the home service expert podcast with ara is he said look the biggest secret to success is conform to what we build the tool for you might have your own way of doing bonus structures for. You might have your own way of doing bonus structures and payroll. You might have your own way of doing dispatch, but we

literally sat down with the monsters, the Roto routers, the big, big companies, and we built the software to do it this way. So when you conform to us, you're going to be unleashing the beast. And you had a guy, Tom Howard, who is an expert at HVAC and plumbing That basically was able to tell you This is how you should do it to take advantage of it And I gotta tell you Tom's a very very smart guy I really you know I talked to him last night And he's a genius when it comes to data

Analytics and you know he told me He went out and flew out to see Bruno Louis Bruno I mean he flies around The country that's what he did for years To figure out what he was doing and then he came and saw you And it was a great story Because not only did you become A big fan of Service Titan

But I think you were single Handedly got them the most clients that any other Company or person has ever done And you got a couple presents From them didn't you Yeah I got some ATV's some Raptors there's more rafters coming by the way but let me finish your story so so we end up saying hey la times is a fucking worst

marketing source we end up cutting that we start allocating we start really tracking dude we were able to cut 1.1 million dollars okay 1.1 man tom howard could verify all this 1.1 million dollars in marketing expenses that were just not giving us the right roi because we started setting up our service time properly right not needless to say we went paperless needless to say we like every time we had a price change like twice a year three times a year we would have price changes on our on our service and like we would print out these books every single time because like we wanted a pricing right so now we set up property like dude in a snap of a second we change all the pricing right so so they helped us with efficiency they helped us with our reporting side right and to that day like when he stepped in the into my shop he was

here for like two months bro and. And we were literally dissecting next gen air where, where we turned it. Like most people would have, would have number one, gone into depression. Number two, probably drunk themselves into something stupid. Or number three, they would have bankrupted the company. Tom Howard literally opened up my eyes to like, Hey Ishmael, this is what your gross profit needs to be. This is where your overhead's at. This is where your expenses that like, you need to start tweaking like all this. this is what your gross profit needs to be this is where your overhead's at this is where your expenses that like you need to start tweaking like all this this is what you as an owner need to pay attention to from that day forward i literally like that's all i focus on is numbers that's why i came up with this shit called data queue because i didn't know anything

i didn't know anything and it wasn't that i was too lazy. I was too busy focusing on other parts of the business that I forgot. The reporting is one of the most important things. The numbers make the decisions for you, and they should. And, you know, not only renegotiating, I've renegotiated pay structures with technicians and comfort advisors in your case, and the way that the installers get paid. And I really, what ServiceTitan and software and good managers help you do is come up with performance pay that motivates people to do the same things that are good for you instead of tenure, where you work here for seven years and you get bonuses and raises.

So I love that story. I got questions that are shooting in here and I've got a lot of questions for you here. I will say that me and you went to Cristiano's thing, and you were there. We had a good time. And Gary Vaynerchuk was talking about the billboards, the buses, the other things we do. And I do a lot of them as well, not as many as you do there in Southern California. But, you know, I think I've spent around 30 grand just on billboards in Phoenix a month. But at the end of the day, he said, Gary Vaynerchuk told us. And I think he was talking to you.

And then I stood up. Did you notice he was picking on me? He was trying to like, he knew who I was. He's not stupid. Of course, he got a brief down of who everybody in that room was. And he knew I was the fucking loud mouth in the room. So he kind of wanted to like, kind of settle me down. You know what I'm saying?

Like, I'm like, bro, like Facebook's good. Right. Tommy, do you understand? Well, yeah. Facebook, Facebook, Instagram. He said, LinkedIn is the most powerful thing. But what he did say about billboards is you're always going to have to pay the toll booth. Who's the toll booth?

The toll booth is Google yeah when you when you pay for the billboards you're paying that 10 15 percent toll booth when you come through but the point is the reason i'm asking you that question is because i never was a huge fan of uh you know you're at the uh the baseball games you got the big signs and then i started to do it once my kpis hit a certain point and it helps you explode like the the vehicles are all wrapped they look the same as the billboards the same as the yard signs i'm starting to do more tv more radio i look at a guy like josh and and his dad from parker and sons and you look at whether it's it's keegan or or the different kens and leland's you You figure it out.

But it takes a good team to close and book those calls. What is your thought on TV, radio, billboards? And this is what the discussion was at the dinner with them. Like, to me, billboards is obviously for branding. But, like, dude, we're constantly seeing our CPM go down on Google. Like, the leads flow doesn't lie. Like we add more billboards to a certain area. We see the traffic of installs of service calls of all that. So what do I think about billboards, TV and all that?

To me, it works, right? It's worked so far. It keeps working. We keep adding more billboards. We keep getting more leads. We keep getting more technicians. Like it's working for us. Now, do I recommend everybody does it? No, of course not. Because everybody tells me the same thing. Everybody

that hops on the phone with me that goes on Facebook on messenger that comes to my shop, their number one question is, Hey, what's your number one marketing source. And how many times have you told her? Have I told you guys don't ever ask that fucking question because what works for me is not going to work for Tommy Mello. It's not going to work for Parker and Sons. It's not going to work for service champions. Like to us, we're a demand. I structured the whole business based on demand around Google's calls around Yelp, around like all these review platforms. Like I'll give you another example. Leland's a hardcore, he lives and dies by his direct mail. I tried direct mail. It enhances us. Yeah, we do get steady lead flows. Yeah, it works for us.

But am I going to dump 250,000 like he does a month on direct mail? Of course not. You know what I'm saying? What I have is working. So do I believe in it? Yes, it works for us. But one of the things

that I want the audience to listen to is Google is God. You got to be searching for your own keywords. So it's called a branded search term. You got to be searching for your own keywords. It's called a branded search term. You got to own those no matter what. And then there's non-branded. So if somebody says air conditioning repair Orange County, you can still be there.

And what's nice about the billboards is the brand recognition in the subconscious helps you get your click through. But what I'm saying is you got to own the search engines if you're going to do branding. Yes. Yes. Google, which leads to my next conversation, Tommy. Google will only work efficiently if people know who you are. Like when people search AC repair on Tustin and Orange, whatever, guess what? If NextGen and Bob's getting in there and Paul's getting in there and pops up, they're

probably going to go to NextGen. Why? Because they seen it at the angel stadium. They heard it on TV, on radio. They seen it on TV. They seen our billboards everywhere. They're going to be like, Oh, that's that company. Boom. Click it. They call us right away. Right? So, so we use the billboard for the brand awareness to be able to convert all those platforms into calls, into leads, into revenue. So to me, it's working. What I recommended to people, I would tell people, hey, do your market research, find out what works for you, track it. Don't just track the number of calls, track the conversion, track the average ticket, track the revenue that's coming in, track the profit, right? And go with it and make that

educated decision. So don't go based on what works for me. What advice would you give to somebody that wants to learn how to negotiate in marketing a little bit, but maybe better for the radio, educated decision. So don't go based on what works for me. What advice would you give to somebody that wants to learn how to negotiate in marketing a little bit, but maybe better for the radio, maybe a little bit better for TV. Maybe when you buy a certain amount of billboards, you get one free or they get bonus and left out an extra month. You know, you've probably learned how to do that over the last couple of years. What advice would you give? So what I would recommend them, honestly, if you get to to once you get to a certain size you know 20 25 30 40 mil marketing is a whole different ball game at that point you're spending

millions of dollars it's not like you're just you know when i started i was spending you know 500 a million dollars whatever i was spending at the time but i was able to like get those people to come to my office grab this newspaper grab this grab this magazine, you know, work down the rates. And I would always tell them, like, hey, if there was five magazines that wanted my business, I would work them against each other. Hey, well, the home mag gives me this rate and the home improvement guide gives me this rate. And this is their impression. So I would work them against each other and work them down and obviously get the bottom of the barrel. But at this point, I don't have time to sit down with 20 magazines,

40 different billboard companies, TVs. So what I would advise people, once you get to a certain point where your time is being spent too much on your marketing side, you have to grab an agency. An agency will do that for you. You deal with one or two people inside the agency

and let them work out the deals for you. Let them, I'll give you a perfect example. The agency that I work for right now handles called jacob.com, which is a huge lawyer here in Los Angeles. They handle me, they handled a couple other companies that buy a ton of billboards, right? So they just blend me in with that. Hey, with, with them and say, go to the billboard company and say, Hey, we want 200 more billboards, you know, under our account, give us the best price possible. There's no way they're already buying eight, 900, a thousand, a million dollars a month of billboards. They're not going to give me the same rate as them. Right. So I let them handle the negotiation and obviously make sure

that we're making the right decision on them. But what I would advise them is, is do it yourself until your time is more valuable than, and then hire an agency to get the best bang for your buck. You're not going to beat their rates, period. So I agree because they got the buying power. They do. Somebody like the one, like look at, we buy ugly houses. They're in every major city across the country. They buy more billboards.

There's like the Lerner and Rose, big lawyers are always out there. But yeah, agencies work, especially on media buys. It's the highest paid person. Usually there's two or three of them and an agency of 50 that do these high-end media buys. And they're very, very good at what they do. So you started a thing, a Facebook group called Service Avengers.

You think you're Captain Planet. No, I'm just kidding. But tell me a little bit about what the purpose of Service Avengers was all about. What was the plan in your mind when you started? Can I tell the real story or should I give the nice story? The, hey, I don't want to pitch anybody's story. Well, at first you started with Service Einstein and Landon. And, you know, I know that you and Ken are buddies now again or whatever.

And there's no drama, but you can talk about that. And Service Einstein is a good group, too. But go ahead and tell us the real story. I'll give you a short elevator pitch on it. Look, Landon had this group called Service Einstein. He had like two, three hundred members on it. Nobody was really on it. I think he had two, three hundred members. And Landon called me and said, hey, you should tell your story to people of who you are and how you came about. And I'm sure people are going to be interested

in that. I'm like, nobody wants to fucking hear about my story. I'm just a regular contractor. At the time, I didn't know that what we've done here at NextGen, and this is honest to God, Tommy. When I was was grinding i'm still grinding right now but when i was in the grind in 2007 16 17 18 19 that i was like i was dude i had my head down and i was fucking tackling through everything i could i wasn't thinking about social media i didn't like i would go on facebook to like talk to my friends i wasn't like i didn't even know these groups existed until like lewis bruno came about and landon and all these guys like started like telling me hey you should go in there and tell your story so landon lets me into this einstein's group and he and he's like hey yeah that's where my first post came about hey my name is ishmael valdez i own this company

called next gen air conditioning we started you know three four years ago we've got up to 30 million dollars from like literally from a garage order whatever. No investors, no acquisitions, no Costco, no big box, nothing. It was just straight hustle. And people fucking blew the fuck up. Like dude, we, that was the most interactive post to date. Like even till now, there was no other posts on Einstein's or on Avengers. That's been more interactive than that one. And dude, we saw like, we had two three hundred members and every fucking day there was like 20 30 40 50 members like asking to get in after that post and then people and then i started posting a lot in there and me and landon were cool we're cruising and everything and and and there was this little beef between me and ken goodrich like we started talking shit and i and i

think he took it a little bit too serious and i i guess landon and him got in an argument and said hey you know, I need you to kick Ishmael out or Landon's his employer. Right? Like obviously he's not going to risk his job for, for a stupid fucking Facebook page. Right. So Landon called me up and said, Hey, you know, like Ken doesn't want you to like be in there or whatever. I just brushed it off. I was like, what the fuck?

Like there are people are in there because of me. I was the one that started interacting. I was the one that started posting putting content out there so he kicks me out and i'm like fuck it i'll start my own page so i call this it was service omg at the at the beginning because me and lewis bruno were on and then this is how it came about me and lewis bruno which love or hate lewis bruno he's going through a lot like dude trust and believe me and i'm gonna be the first one to say this on your fucking podcast trust and fucking believe me louis bruno will be back that dude is hands down in the top three best operators in the fucking nation and what happened to him whether you want to believe it or not can happen to anybody can happen to you can happen to me can happen to anybody when you're

growing that fast right so needless to say, me and him, I are on the phone and I'm like, you know, I'm going to come up with my own group. You know, I'm going to call it, we kept names and I was in a whiteboard and I kept writing a bunch of names. And I was like, dude, you need operations, you need marketing. And that equals, you know, and that's your growth. And I was like, Oh, plus M equals G. And he's like, what the fuck does that mean? I was like, operations plus marketing equals growth. And he's like, holy shit, that's cool. So that's why we came about it. And after a while, you know, I was like, I kept it, I kept it.

But then I wanted like something cool, right? Like OMG was too like, like kind of weird, you know what I'm saying? So that's when we twisted and we became Service Avengers. Now we got like 1,600, 1,700 people in there. And it's probably one of the most interactive pages there is on social media. It's definitely in the home service spots. You've got several groups. That's one of the better ones.

So you know what I'm looking to do. You know, Julian from Next Start came out, visited you. He was out here. That dude's cool, Tommy. That dude's cool, man. Matt Proft's with that dude. He's really laid back. And so I'm going to create something that similar to Nexstar, but a different,

I'd like to partner with the companies and I've kind of told you, but there's so many opportunities and you're right. People don't understand software. They don't understand the software, how it relates to marketing and density and how does your payroll uh here's a quick question for you did you start with both plumbing and afec or did you decided to add plumbing after thank you for this question dude because i'm gonna i'm gonna clear everything up right here like bro i know

a lot of companies are like an a-track they're four or five mil they're four or five mil they're six they get to seven and then they add plumbing then they add a track and they add electron I know a lot of companies are like an H-Rack. They're four or five mil. They're four or five mil. They're six. They get to seven. And then they add plumbing. Then they add an H-Rack. And then they add electrical. And they keep adding things because they think it's going to be a better and better and better outcome. Like, number one, you got to be financially stable if you're going to keep adding, bolting on different trades on it.

Why? Like, don't think that just because you're a five million dollar hvac and you bolt on plumbing you're gonna fucking explode out of control that doesn't happen focus on what you like what you're good at like i focus on on hvac and i got it up to 35 million dollars last year and it was all hvac right like at that point i already knew that my management team was structured it doesn't need all my attention that's when i decided to add plumbing, number one, to protect my customers from going to other plumbers. But number two, because I had a structured management team, we're making money. It's already doing good.

It doesn't need my attention every single day. Now I need something to keep my mind busy, so I use Avengers and I use plumbing. So now we're going plumbing. This year we're set to do 12, 13 mil just in plumbing. This is our second year. Now that I'm pouring my attention, now that I'm pouring my, my energy and marketing on it. So do I recommend it? I started with HVAC. I added plumbing, but I would recommend until you perfect, not perfected until it's self-managed and you don't need to be in there. There's not a hundred headaches coming your way. You know, you're still making profit. That's the key. You're making profit and you're just looking to protect your customer base or

looking to add a little bit more profit because trust me, like to add plumbing, dude, we spent like $450,000 just on tools, on vans, not even including that on tools, on, on racking, on, on our shops, on our inventory, like everything. It costs a lot of fucking money. You know what I'm saying? So yes, I started with HVAC. I added plumbing because HVAC was already self-sustained. So, you know, one thing that I've noticed about you,

especially this last year, is I get in a lot of conversations with a lot of people. And, you know, right now there's a shortage of supply chain and big shortage of labor and the word that i think about when it comes to you is the billboards the branding the fact is you keep your guys busy and it's important to you and um you became a hell of a recruiter i think you've added how many guys have you added in the last six months last six months we probably added about 90 people how many which is which is bigger than 99 of the

companies out there how many on the field about i would say 80 of those were field members so about 80 of them were field members between technicians plumbers project managers college this is an important question so what's the secret because right now everybody's going look we've been able to do it we We've got 30 guys starting June 1st. They're flying out here. They've already gone through their apprenticeship. But I want to hear, you've taken HVAC and plumbing are a little bit different. It's harder to train and get them through an apprenticeship.

How were you able to, I think what you did is you were able to steal a bunch of guys. Tell me if I'm wrong, but how did you do it? And you know what? Thank you for bringing this up too,mmy because you asked me why i do so many billboards what i've noticed in the last year we went from like doing last year we were doing pretty good amount of billboards i think we got it up to like almost 100 last year this year i think we're almost we're passing like to 250 like we're probably gonna pass creep up to the 300 that's where i saw a huge spike on recruiting too because you got to understand who the hell's on the road project managers installers technicians going from call to call like Number one the billboards have done two things for me. It recruited in internal personnel and it included external

Clients so both clients are being recruited with those billboards So your internal customers i've noticed that too, but a word to the wise, you can't have a horrible conversion rate, horrible average ticket, horrible booking rate. You got to have all those things dialed in. You got to have those dialed in before you even think about. And here's the other thing is make sure you've got a strong website with a strong landing page with a good conversion rate online these are all things that i think a lot of people don't look at or think about and they go and then here's what they do they go i'm gonna do a billboard for two months and then they don't they don't become rich and then they stop it and then they go well then i'll do radio let me let me pause you there let me pause you there okay i'm gonna teach you guys

i'm gonna i'm gonna say something i gotta say it and i know it's gonna piss people off but i don't give a fuck i have this competitor of mine okay this competitor of mine talk shit about me online is always going on there talking about how much people he's recruiting we recruited half of his company already here and i stopped it because we he reached out to me he apologized and all this shit we were in good turns now i have 19 billboards just in palm desert palm desert it's. It's like, it's like the size of Tucson, Tucson or whatever you guys call it. Like it's a small one Tucson.

It's a small 1 million people upon a desert from here. He added three billboards for three months and took them down. And I looked at that and I'm like, it doesn't take three months. It doesn't like, not because you put a billboard for three months, people are going to start flooding in and all these customers. It doesn't, it goes back to your original comment. You need a strong landing page.

You need a very nice website, a very good high converting website. You need to like the billboards don't happen overnight. Like right now we started this six months ago, eight months ago, where we went heavy. We're seeing the return right now. We're like, we are getting a ton of leads off them. People are literally calling and saying, Oh, you guys just put another billboard. Oh, you know what I'm saying?

They're on the freeway calling it. So. It's the subconscious. It's they say it takes seven times to see something before it becomes a memory. And they continue to see it. And people all of a sudden people are like, Jesus, you are massive because they're seeing your trucks they're seeing your yard signs they're seeing your billboards then they're like oh my god i was driving by a billboard then i heard you on the radio and you're like all of a sudden it's like

cemented cemented spent it and it's not about them calling you today or tomorrow it's when they hear their neighbor needs someone or they need something and you know a lot of people say well usually those guys are the most expensive, but there's something else to be said about them. They're also the ones with brand new trucks. They're also the ones using the best equipment. They're also the ones that will work nights and weekends. They're also the ones with the nicest office.

They're also the ones where the employees are the happiest. Yes, that right there. Yes, that right there. And I learned one thing, Tommy, thank you for bringing this up again, too. I learned one thing that Leland Smith told me, okay, never, never apologize for being the most expensive. Never, ever apologize. He made it clear in one of the meetings that we had, he never, ever apologized for being the most expensive. If people go and bash you online because you're expensive, don't apologize, sir. And that's what I learned this whole year is I'm not the most expensive. I'm not the cheapest, but I promise to everybody, we are the best there is like nobody. And I'm telling you in all of California, there's 10, 20, 30,000 contractors. Nobody's better than us. Nobody, not one person. Well, well, what I would say to you is think about the biggest company in any market hvac plumbing electrical roofing they're also the most expensive there's a direct correlation and it's almost every single time

the largest is the most expensive because they're running the best business too and they're able to get buy rates down and they're better negotiators they understand call tracking metrics and they're giving the best value too they are the best value and you know here's the deal i say i say this you can find a cheaper company but in the end of it after five years they're going to be way more expensive and there's an opportunity cost because they come out every single year they're gonna you're gonna have to spend more money but you're gonna spend way more time way more aggravation and god forbid someone get hurt we don't want that so let's get this done today to where it never breaks again and you never have to worry about it i agree and

there's all these nickel and dimers that they'll go boom boom they're out every six months and you're missing a day of work i agree you know a good buddy of mine um he's very good at hvac he does a lot of our stuff and his his name is George. He's probably listening to this podcast. He said he repairs units and it's a good thing to be able to offer repair. But Ben Davis came on one of the comments and said, that's bullshit. Did you at least offer the customer to replace it? Because it's the customer's choice. You got to give options and do the best option for the customer might have been the repair, but the unit was definitely 15 years old and it is in Arizona. So it's working

hard. What are your thoughts on that? This is what we tell all our people right here. When we, when we recruit them, Tommy, because obviously revenue, we need any revenue to pay bills to all that. Right. But I make it very clear and I, and all my upper executive team, they know how I feel about this. We always, always do what's right by the customer. Always do. Like if that means it's a five-year-old unit and it needs to be replaced, it needs to be repaired, repair it. We don't push technicians to like, we don't want like technicians to be flipping, flipping calls, flipping calls just because we need revenue. We need revenue. Like, no,

always do what's right by the client. Now, now we make it clear to them, Hey, if there's a five-year-old unit, that's undersized, that's their electricity bill is, it's 12, $1,300. And you're trying to repair it instead of trying to get them to a project manager to come in there and educate them on why it's undersized, why their bill is $1,500 a month, then you're doing wrong by the client. They're not here to choose what the options. They're there to educate the client on it and call in help when, when the customer asks the question of, well, how much is a new one? Right. They're not there to provide those kinds of options.

That's what we have project managers and comfort advisors that go in there and design the whole system for people. So yes, a hundred percent. I'm with Ben Davis on that one. I think, I think we should always be educating the clients. It doesn't matter the age of the unit. It doesn't like, if you got to get all the information from the client, you got to provide all their options and you got to make sure that they get that option to replace it. Because guess what? If they say no, at least they know, right? If they say no, at least they know how much was a new one. At least they know,

like, man, I shouldn't spend those $2, dollars because in two months, three months from now, this unit takes a shit. I'm going to have to spend more money. You know what I'm saying? You know, Joker Sarah says give six options every single time. I tend to do this. This is what I tell my people every week. And this is my mom's. This is my mom's house. Here's what I'm doing now. Here's what's important. I got to know what mom's house Here's what I'm doing Now here's what's important I gotta know what mom's doing Is she staying in the home? Is she moving?

Is she using the house a lot in the summer? I want to know the circumstances And I say here's one thing you guys can't do Is make the prices I make the prices So forget about the pricing Just do the right thing for the customer Let me do the pricing

You educate You follow up You do the right rapport so i think it's what what would i do for mom if she was moving in six months you know this is what i would do for mom that's exactly what we tell people that's exactly what we tell our technicians and our product managers here all right here's a question from jason herbert what was the best quickest way to scale your company recruit recruit and market like you cannot scale without like always constantly recruiting and travis ringy which is probably my best friend in the

in the home service industry now like he sees like he spent a day with me a couple a week ago like i'm constantly recruiting i'm constantly constantly constantly recruiting like whether it's from other people whether it's a fresh like yesterday we hired a technician that was a waiter at a BJ's restaurant. Cool. A technician that just decided to go to a HVAC school. Now he's graduating. He has a badass person. Like we're always, always recruiting, always recruiting. So, so the number one thing like that I tell like the two, three, $4 million people, uh, contractors is you got to recruit whatever your time is being taken off. If you're the sales guy, you need a sales guy or two to be able to focus on the business. Whatever's keeping you from driving that Lambo, right? If you got to get out of

the Lambo and change the tire, get somebody to change the tire. If you got to get out of the Lambo and do a tune-up, get somebody to do a tune-up. If you got to get out of the Lambo for whatever reason, you need to drive that freaking Lambo. Focus on driving, right? Recruit and market. That's the key to growth. Recruit more, market more. That's it. Well, I think you market, I think half your

marketing brain has to go towards recruiting. You know, people say, I look at my Indeed score, I look at my Glassdoor score, and you know, just like you're good at getting Yelp reviews, I try to get my good employees to leave us a review to let us know how we're doing internally. We got to market that. So my marketing brain always goes, now here's the thing, Ishmael.

When you see somebody at a restaurant or you're getting a haircut and you want to bake them a CSR and it's an amazing person, they're smiling, they're giggly, they're fun, don't just hand them a card and say, I want you to work for me. Say, listen, more than this. Ishmael, here's what I want. I want you to tell people, listen, this is my business card. Here's the business I work at. It's a family over there.

Let me give you some things. We do PTO. We go on events together. We have lunches together. But regardless of that, let me ask you this. Sherry, can you come in either Monday at 1 p.m. or can you come in on Wednesday at 3 p.m.? Because so many of us, they want them to go out and go.

You got to follow up with them. You got to go above and beyond to get them through the door, get them a ride along. So often we say, well, how come nobody's coming to us when we posted an ad on Craigslist? It's way, way, way, way, way more than that. So what I do right there, Tommy, and I'm super involved in the recruitment part because the operation is there already.

The marketing is there. Phones are ringing. We're converting leads into revenue. Like that's already there. So that was 80% of my time now. So now what I do is all my men. Give me the tips of recruiting. Tell me.

So number one, exactly how you said, don't just hand people a card. If somebody comes in applies like yesterday was a perfect example. That kid is 24 years old, grew up in Santa Ana. He had a smile on the whole time. I'm writing around my hoverboard, right? This dude probably thinks I'm like the, like the fucking tech or something. Or I don't know what he thinks I am, but I went up to him and he started a conversation right then and there. He's like,

man, that's a cool hoverboard, man. Do you always write that around there? He started like talking to me and I'm on my phone. I'm like, who the hell is this kid? Right.

Dude, right then and there. Right. I texted my, my service manager, Shane, get over here. I need you to talk to this kid.

That kid went into his office. 15 minutes later, we had an offer in the table. He starts on monday he's getting paid hourly plus plus a little bit of bonus incentives the kid was making 16 an hour you know what i'm saying like that's how fast we execute and and when i tell people like we we hired four three csrs yesterday like liz is my my office manager, if somebody walks in that door, they're smiling, they have a good attitude,

they're talking about their family, they live here, they're making conversation with you. That 15 minute interview that you had carried on to 45 minutes, they leave that door without an offer. Because we will teach American nation, we will teach them whatever the fuck they need to be taught. What we won't teach is good personality.

You can tell them what you want, but if they already have the good morals, they have the personality, they have the smile, they know how to interact with people. It's hard to teach people that. It's hard to teach people that. You can teach anybody AC, you know what I'm saying? So number one, yes, always be recruited. Number two, when people walk in the door, dude, don't let them leave without a contract. Don't let them leave without a contract.

Don't let them leave without. When do you start? Don't let them leave it let them leave without when do you start don't let them leave it like if there's something that they want work it out right then and there don't hey i'll get back to you let me talk to the owner oh let me get with my manager no you you are in front of these people you talk to them if they want a dollar more and you were fighting about between 16 and 17 give them the 17 if they're worth it right so close the deal right then and there and number three never fucking stop recruiting never ever ever ever we have 281 employees now like you think we got to 281 huh 280 281 employees yeah and we just hired him so 283 now so let me ask you something we got a few minutes i'm

going to go a little bit over you know i feel like there's certain people in the business that we know of and we might have even talked a little bit is uh certain people get a little too greedy they start making bad decisions they start hitting the day 27 of the month and start doing things that are disingenuous and there's installers that do it there's techs that do it and there's a lot of owners that do it how do you brace and block yourself from being that person who basically does disingenuous things towards the the wrong times and and it happens in politics it happens in everything around us but how do you stop it from from taking over and really destroying the name of the company

i focus on the people so i try not to focus on those little bad energies that how you're saying that because that's always gonna be there right so i focus on always like back to, um, like how we keep our good name, how we keep our good reviews. Like we probably, we have a stellar review on Google and Yelp on every platform that you could look at. But, but it's because as soon as somebody wins, I hear about it and I text them personally. I call them,

like I keep my mind busy on the positive instead of the negative. Like if every day I walk in, it doesn't matter. And I've seen you do this to Tommy and which, which when I went to your shop and reassure me that I'm doing the right thing, I walk in there, I walk into the shop, bro. And nobody is like, nobody's trying to hide from me. Nobody's like, Oh shit, let me act like I'm busy. Like I walk in, I'm like, Hey, what's going on?

Hey, good job on that repair yesterday. Hey dude, that job sold. They're like, all I am is fucking full of positivity. I try not to focus on, on the negativity. So how, how do I do it? I focus on to focus on the negativity. So how do I do it? I focus on the positivity, on every positivity. Now, am I realistic? Of course, we have those meetings.

We have those executive meetings where I got to fucking drop the hammer on everybody and be like, hey, we need this, this, this, this, this, this. We need to get to work, right? But that's 1% or 2% of the time. 99%, 98% of the time, I'm just focused on the positivity, on pumping people up, on making sure that there's nothing shady going on inside the company, right? And we make it clear to them. We make it very clear to them from day one, one bad star review gets you one week suspension. Two bad star reviews gets you a two week suspension. And three bad star review, one

star or two star, anything bad, you're gone. There's no questions. There's no like, hey, should we negotiate this? I don't care if you do $4 million for me a year. If you're a piece of shit, you're gone. Like, I don't try to like convince myself of, oh, well, he does $4 million and da, da, da, da. No. I want good people working here

and I will focus on the positivity. So what are you willing to do if you do get a one-star, you'll just give the money, whatever it takes to get rid of that one-star. You know why Tommy, because if somebody went on Yelp and somebody on Google on anywhere, and they're complaining about my price and whatever they're complaining

about, I don't want their money. I don't want their money. That money is, is mixed in with 99.9% good money. I don't need to infect the other money. You know what I'm saying? It's kind of like a cancer that keeps spreading out.

If I keep taking bad money from people, my company is going to go to shit. So if somebody goes in there, I'll give you an example. Somebody goes in there and says, you know, these guys try to sell me a capacitor for $500. I found the part online for $5. It's a ripoff. I'm not going to sit down and do a ping pong table, a ping pong match with them and tell them on why the cost of doing business, how much the technician's getting paid, the gas, the marketing, they don't care.

You know what I do? I call them up and I tell them, Hey, what happened? Well, you know, this company did it for $200. You know what I'm going to do for you, man? Mr. And Mrs. Smith, I apologize that you didn't see the value behind it. I'm going to go ahead and pay you those $200 for you. Because if we didn't meet your expectations and we couldn't come up with a deal, he didn't call the manager and try to do a friends and family discount, whatever went wrong, I'm going to take that upon myself. And I'm going to go ahead and refund you. I'm going to give you the $200 that you spent with somebody else.

But I need one thing in return. I need two things in return. I need you to update that review. And the keyword is update. I need you to update it, but I don't need you to say how amazing we are. Just say, Hey, you know, the owner called me, say the truth. The owner called me. We worked something out. I appreciate it. It seems like it's a good company. And number two, I want you to give me another time, a chance. If something ever happens to your HBCU plumbing system, I want you to call us because I'm going to put a free diagnostic or a free service call to your home on your account whenever you call back. And 99% of the time,

Tommy, it's like, really? Why? I'm not asking for money. I'm like, because I'm taking it upon myself. That's how much I love my company. That's how much I want people to know that we care about our customers. And right then and there, it goes you know you've done an amazing job of representing your brand through the yelp and uh google so i applaud you for that listen i think there's one thing we've not talked about here that i want to end on i think recruiting and being able to make great technicians is an amazing thing marketing is a huge thing being able to make the phone ring but i also think you know right now i got the bottom 30 of all of my technicians flying back to phoenix to retrain and i said guys yesterday i sat down with five of them and i said you're here because i love you

you're here because we love you otherwise you wouldn't be here but here's what we need to talk about there's a couple things i find that you guys have number one you wouldn't be here but here's what we need to talk about there's a couple things i find that you guys have number one you don't have those magic moments that joe cristiano talks about you're not making the time to connect with the customer and make friendships so you got to do a better job of building rapport you're going to find that you're going to spend 45 minutes talking about a harley-davidson and a little chihuahua. And that's the thing you need to do. Number two is when I ask a question, I'm not going to come into your garage, Ishmael, and say

hey, hi Ishmael Valdez. I'd recommend you replace the rollers because they're getting wore out too. I'm going to say, Ishmael, come out here. Are you looking at these rollers? These things are completely shot. They're gone. They're no bueno. Let's get

this done. And there's a difference. There's a confidence level. I own the garage when I'm in the garage, just like you with the air conditioning. But I wanted to talk a little bit about coaching as I've been in your meetings. I did a sales meeting with you. And the one thing we got to do always, always, always, always. Yes. So much time happens where you're spending 80 to 90 percent of your time on the bottom 10 but do you know that tom brady likes to be coached you know that the coach calls the plays every single time for tom brady and there's a good book i just read this last week it's called the coaching effect it's not my book i read it uh one of the guys listens to the podcast send it to me it's called called The Coaching Effect by Bill Ekstrom. But it explains how important it is to know where you're at in the game, the key performance

indicators, and how to win. And I think to be able to take a current team, the reason why most employees don't do well is because the owner's an asshole and they don't coach right. They don't take the time to love on their people. They don't look at the positive like you said. So I wanted you to finish up and then I got the last questions and I'll get you out of here. But what are some of the important things that you do to make sure you do ride-alongs,

you do the coaching sessions? What are the things that you do to make sure that each team member is hitting their goals in the work so they can hit their personal goals? We do this. We look at our screen. So if you guys see in the back, that's data queue right there.

So the software was meant for that, for coaching, because everybody does the same thing, Tommy, to your point. And by the way, what you just did in the last five minutes, Tommy,

that's why you're the best. And that's why I applaud you for, for everything that you've done, because people don't realize how fucking smart you are. And the last five minute clips that you just did, hands down, probably one of the best advice people should take and run with. But to get back to it, the DataCube software was created for coaching, right? It was created so you can coach on certain things. Like this is

what everybody does. Everybody, they bring in all their technicians and they talk about how they have to wear their booties, how they did it every single time. Or if they're going to do through role-playing or if they're going to go through the different options, they give the same training every single time. The DataCube software was made so you can focus on the weaknesses. Listen to me. So you can focus on the weaknesses real time. If you have a technician that's selling, you know,

50 air scrubbers a month and you have another technician that's selling, you know, five air scrubbers a month, you put them together. You put them together. And you ask this technician, hey, I need you to tell him what you're doing. I need you to show me exactly how you're presenting the air scrubber and all the objections that you have to come through so he can see that. We work on weaknesses here. And when we coach on weaknesses, we do a huge meeting every Friday to talk about how amazing we are and pump them up and, and get their numbers and congratulate the number one, number two, number three, number four technician, right? We do that with them, but we also coach one-on-ones on weaknesses. If this technician is selling a ton of duct work and this technician is not,

then we put them together. If this technician is churning a ton of calls and this technician is churning zero calls, then we put them together and they see what they're doing right or wrong. And guess what? This technician that doesn't churn that many calls is amazing at repairs. Guess what you're going to do there? You're going to kill two birds with one stone. They're going to teach each other one, how to repair more, one, how to churn more. And that's the whole point of DataCube is to create a competitive atmosphere, right? That's why we put these screens all over our training center so they can see who's number one, who's number 50, right? It creates a competitive atmosphere.

Number two, we start working on weaknesses real time. If we see that there's three or four zero tickets in a row from one technician, we bring them out and we talk to them. Hey, is something wrong? Is there a personal problem that we could help you with you know are you worried about something we go through every call you know i'm saying and 99 of the time we find that we need to focus on the technician more they just want attention they're like kids they're like our kids the worst one is always the one that's getting neglected oh i know that's that's a great great analogy analogy. I always say we're the dad and we're the big brother in all these.

You know, our people want four things it talks about in this book. Of all the tasks and duties that a coach can do in a week, month, or year, and there are many, these four are the most important. One-on-one meetings, consistent, structured individual meetings with your team members. Number two, team meetings, consistent, structured meetings with everybody on the team number three performance feedback objectively documented analysis of individuals ability to demonstrate the skills they are proven necessary to roll success the number four career development plans where are they going in the company that's what the new ones for that's exactly what you just told me, those four key points are exactly, exactly to the T why we created DataCube. Well, there's a lot of people saying they're going to get DataCube.

You know, I'm building DataCube is great for what you guys do. I'm looking, you know, the way that we pay our people, what we're building is it's so important to compare with a bar chart the whole picture on where they last yesterday went through each and every one of these five guys and i said you're number 83 out of 170 of technicians where are you going to be at the end of june and we went through each and every one of them some of them said 20 some of them said 30 different positions and i said all right here's what i'm going to do i'm going to give you a couple hundred bucks cash if you hit your goal. But forget about that.

I love cash. But I said, forget about that. I'm going to talk about you guys in the meetings. And I'm going to say this dude came back to Phoenix and freaking owned it. And these guys love, love. Recognition. They love it. So I got to ask you these last questions so number one if someone

wants to reach out to a lot of people want to come visit your shop what's the best way to get a hold of you go on service avengers you know i want to see interaction between people on service avengers and if you want to come in here i'm open to for you to come in here i ask for a couple things number one gotta be on service time and i'm not trying to sell it on them i'm not trying to to get a point so i could get a raptor i'm not trying to sell it on them i'm not trying to to get a point so i could get a raptor i'm gonna i could afford a million raptors right now right what i'm telling them is they need to be on service time because the whole operation revolves around service time and the queue right so if you're gonna come in here you're on success where you're on something

else and we're teaching you how to dispatch how to tag how to how to report how we pull how we do our dispatching on there like you you're going to waste your time. You're going to try the whole time. You're going to be trying to figure out how to put that into success or into something else. So it wastes the time. Number two, implementing. Like if you're going to come in here, I'm going to spend an hour, two hours with them. Right.

I teach, I run them around through my management team. I run them through the queue. I let them sit through our meetings, upper management, executive meetings, all the meetings. I let them sit through it, right? I want them to fucking execute. Don't waste my time. I'm going to spend one hour, two hours of my day, right? Of my day. I could be charging people 10, 15, $25,000 to spend a day with me. I don't charge them anything. I just want people to win. But if you're going to do do that go back and execute instantly because that is the reason why i'm here because i went to kenny and jerry's uh shop i went to leland shop i went to parker and sons i went to travis's shop i went everywhere i went i traveled everywhere and and all i did

is one thing i'm gonna take one thing from everybody and i'm gonna build next year to get better and better so service avengers dm me and and i'll get you on the board and then um is there any books that you'd recommend any books that stand out that you really like tommy mellows homie what the fuck like that's the only book you should be reading that guy's a grinder dude tommy again i'm gonna compliment you one more time i apologize for when you told me if i wanted your book number one but number two bro i will save this in front of joe casera's vegas meeting when there's hundreds of people tommy mellow is the smartest man in this room okay i don't need to hear thank you your energy you're the only guy i think in the world that could compete with me with energy because today i just i brought it down to a real mellow state, but I love your energy. And then finally, this is the thing I kind of finish up with. If there's something

we talked about a lot, I thought this was like literally full of gold nuggets. Like there's so many good things that you mentioned. Is there anything that we missed? Any, maybe things to go tell people to do today, big and small. A lot of people are smaller wondering, I only got this guy that has 35% conversion rate. What do I do? I don't really understand the marketing yet. Oh, and there's some big companies that are going to listen to this go. What's the next step for me? So is there something overarching that you could give them kind of to go take action? So the recruiting is the hard part, but I'm going to, I'm going to take it to another direction, Tommy. Like I want

everybody to focus. And this is going to take a fucking huge, massive Tommy Mello, Travis, everybody's got to be on the same team. And we just got to get out there. We got to get out there and tell all these fucking millions of kids, underprivileged kids, hustlers, high school graduates, non-graduates, people that are thinking of going to college. Like we all have to team up and amplify our messages to come and join the trades. Like I am up, but like, I'm not, I'm not trying to show off,

right? Like I got multiple houses. I got a cooling on the Rolls Royce cooling on getting done right now. Like I have a very lavish life that I want. I'm not doing it to show off. I want people to know that you can make a fucking ton of money. So I want everybody to focus and go out there and promote the trades. I want to go into high schools.

I want everybody to, to mentor somebody in high school or talk to a high school or junior high school or a college or whatever it is. And we just need to tell people that there's fucking money to be made in the home service industry. And we just need to steer them this way. That's what I want everybody to focus on. And I gave them plenty of golden nuggets for the last hour, hour and 10 minutes. My next journey after all this next gen is done and, and we find the, find the right partner. And, and we go out there, I want to go out there and fucking talk to the masses of high schoolers, because at one point I almost didn't graduate high school. You know, I was,

I was living out of my car for two weeks. Once I got out of high school. And I want those people. I want the people that think they're too shy or they're too dumb or whatever to just come and join us. There's an opportunity for everybody in the home service industry. I love it. That was amazing. I think that anybody who does well in business should think about what they're going to give

back. And you've invited people into your shop with open arms. And I think that that's amazing. I do the same thing. So keep up the good work. If you want to go visit Ishmael, I'll be posting his phone number all over the plate. No, I'm just kidding. Thank you very much for coming on. And thank you. There was about 50, 55 people that have been listening.

And I'm sure there will be tens of thousands that this gets out to. So I appreciate everybody that listens and Ishmael, I'll give you a buzz later. I got the trainer waiting for me. It's the one day this week i'm working out which is great okay focus on this homie on the brand focus on this the brand next gen baby well hey i'll call you later man thank you all right hey guys i just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart means a lot to me And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives

and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on.

And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So

check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.