The Home Service Expert Podcast - Keeping Your Brand Top of Mind through Exceptional Customer Service

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $100 million-plus home service business with over 400 employees in 16 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses.   In this episode, Tommy is joined by Danny Kerr, Managing Partner at Breakthrough Academy, and host of the Contractor Evolution podcast, as they talked about sales, finance, training, marketing...

I think hiring yourself out, making yourself obsolete in the current job you're in, and it's not to go sit back and relax. It's to spend time on the next step of the company. I think too many people build themselves jobs, get comfortable with that job, and then that's kind of what they do. And whether it's them and two guys or five guys,

guys and girls, that's kind of where people stay. Unless you go, wait a minute, I'm doing a lot of crew moves, doing a lot of like estimates. I'm doing a lot of paperwork. There's stuff that you're doing that's taking up your time that's $20 to $30 an hour job that could be somebody else's job. So you can go do things that are $100 an hour job.

So it's just don't ever get complacent with the way things are and just say, hey, well, I'm busy. So I can't see myself doing much more. Say, what are those things I'm busy with? And how do I delegate them down? Wow, I got to pay $60,000 a year for someone to do that. Okay, well, how much do I need to book to pay that salary? Okay, well, maybe that's my next motivator to grow my company.

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 Experts. I got a very special guest today on the Q&A, which will be really, really fun. Danny Kerr, one of the smartest guys I've met,

works with tons and tons of clients you know benji said he's worked with about 2 000 people onboarded throughout his career so just really been able to see it from a third perspective i'm in the middle of it danny's worked with lots of people in your shoes i do have a lot of questions here already but let's let's just do a few announcements if you haven't heard of the book, you can go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. And I am going to have another book coming online in about three months and it's going to be lights out. If you haven't bought the Home Service Millionaire course, it's course.homeservicemillionaire.com. And hopefully you join our free

Facebook group. It's Home Service Expert Group. But Danny, how the hell are you, brother? I'm good now. Yeah, I'm good. I'm moving up to doing a little personal size, building a little garden right now. I'm getting ready for spring. Got my kids helping out a little bit. And I got my father-in-law down there actually as we speak. And then business-wise, I mean, we're probably like most of us in the industry.

We're just still growing like crazy. So it's been fun and interesting getting a bigger team and more members and just doing me, man. We moved a while ago, which I told you about, but just been enjoying living. So, yeah, I don't know. Nothing too crazy. Just been bopping along, hanging out in Canada where it's a bit more authoritarian here, but make and do. All these guys are coming in from Canada to the United States. I feel like it's a mass exodus of Canadians. It's weird, but you know,

there's a lot of weird things going on in the world right now. Totally. Yeah, I know. I think I've just made peace with it. Maybe that's a good way to put it in the last couple of months. I'm just like, what am I going to do about this? I'm just a dude. So I'm going to do me. I want the world to do its thing. So how many guys are you guys up to and breakthrough academy so active companies we have 480 i think 470 something 470 480 active businesses that we're working with right now so that's been ever growing and yeah it's been neat just watching

kind of this whole business program work right because you you start just by being okay i've got value to bring to the marketplace. Let's teach businesses how to run more effectively. And then you start to look at it from an at-scale perspective a little bit. And you're like, how do you actually do this in a more efficient manner? So I feel like we're getting into that phase right now where we've got lots of coaches, we've got people on the team that are experts in what they do. How do you take that knowledge and that information and present it in a way to the marketplace where more people can gain from it than just one-to-one coaching relationships so

we're working on some interesting technology right now that we're going to bring out probably the next year year and a half some beta testing right now and yeah we're just looking at the way we run our program what is the stuff that really makes the biggest bang for people's buck and how do we do that and compartmentalize that in a way where a thousand people in a weekend could benefit from it and just delivering it one-to-one. Yeah, it was interesting being on the podcast with Benji. He said three things that people have a hard time doing is really, really smart. I agree with them. Number one is they don't know where they're going. They say, I want to get bigger, more profitable. They tend to say, I want to spend more time with family, but they don't have any KPIs. They don't know when, by who, what they need to bring on. That's the first thing. Number two was

they don't have hard conversations. And number three, he said, was the ability to create a magnet for your company. And I have a few more than that. He said, those are the biggest three he sees just by onboarding a lot of the smaller companies. He said, man, if they know exactly what they want, they know their revenue, they know their budgets, they figure, but this by this year, they break it down into quarters. Those guys are always successful. You know, it's like a golfer that says, man, I just want to have a lower handicap, make more putts and just have fun versus I'm shooting a 79 consistently. I know that if I make a couple more putts and straighten out my drive, you know, they know exactly where they need to work in their game. And I think that's key. Yeah. And I think there's different stages in business. I mean, I look at startups as like,

you can have as much strategy as you want, but if you don't know how to grind, if you don't have no stress, if you don't know how to be an entrepreneur, I think, think objectively and at the same time, problem solve everything that's going on around you and still be... I think an objective person would do better in general i think it allows someone to kind of get to this place in business where they can have a team they can have a budget they can have an ability to run a business but once they get there yeah it's time to sit back a little bit and look what you've created and see patterns and see habits and be able to as a capitalist would do capitalize on great ideas and make something worth more. But yeah, it takes time. It takes

practice. It takes some failure along the way, lots of failure along the way. Somewhere in the middle, somebody figures it out and away they go. I'm pumped, man. Shit's moving and shaking. I can't even tell you. Let's take a question here. Ashton, he said, question, marketing early in the beginning seems fairly difficult. Outside of referral business, did you fellas find it took a good while to get traction on main marketing streams, Google, Yelp, Facebook, in that order? And I'll let you take this one first, Danny. Sure. I've always been a very grassroots guy when it comes to startups. So I didn't touch Facebook ads or anything for the first couple years at all. And for me, it was what you're talking about, referrals and just good old-fashioned guerrilla marketing.

If we're producing property, or I was painting back in the day, so if we're painting a house in the area, you better believe there's 10 signs up in the area if I can get away with it. Sometimes just two, but 10 would be optimal. And then there's like 200 to 500 door hangers up in the area saying,

hey, we're currently painting at XYZ address. If you need anything, let us know. And then the day after that, I've got a guy door knocking every single door in the area. And before you know it, one job turns into two, right? And then you're doing that job. And then that job's a month or two later. And also in that same neighborhood, you're picking up more work. So for me, I always found I had my referrals, which kind of supplied me like half my work. And then I had my like guerrilla marketing tactics, which supplied me the other work. And then I had my guerrilla marketing tactics, which supplied me the other half. And the growth came from the fact that I was constantly out there reaching active tactics to my ideal clients. So Facebook ads, all that stuff,

I think is good. I think if you have a budget for it, and you can take the time to understand it, I think it will benefit long-term in dividends. I know that's for us, that drives about 30% of our business today. But it's not the first thing I jumped on. I went to like, who is my marketplace? Where do they hang out? What are their pains and needs and their wants and their aspirations? Well, the only way I'm going to really understand that is by prospecting myself and getting out there. And yeah, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit just in the neighborhood you're working in, but you just got to be out there reaching and grabbing and talking. Yeah. When I was out there, I got a lot of word of mouth, but I was nothing as good as Danny where I was door knocking.

I wasn't at B and I groups. I didn't have the greenfield game. You know, I wasn't out there as much. I was like, listen, how do I get direct response? I started with Val pack. It worked. Okay. So then I went to Clipper.

I dialed in my ads. I went through every ad out there, made mine look more professional, not as complicated, not as many deals, cheap, cheap, cheap. I decided to make mine stand out a little bit more, worked on conversion rate. Google takes some months, if not years, and the right partners. I think Google, you could only go so far with your networking when you're at enough B&I meetings and you're stretched to the bones until you could hire someone else to do the marketing for you. So I've used people for LSA ads that are much better than me. I've recently used somebody to

help optimize the GMB. I'm in the three-packet everywhere I'm at. I mean, I think if I could do what Danny said, and I was really good at it, I just think too many people get trapped in that and they go, I'm making enough money. I'm making 130 grand. I don't even have to spend money in marketing. And when you never have to spend money, it's a good business to have though. I don't spend any money in marketing. I'm making a lot of money. I wish that was the case for me.

I've always been comfortable at 10 to 15% still making 15 to 20% in profit. And that means you have to get really good. So I think it's two different perspectives. I just know for me, I got to do things where I figured out almost how to cheat. I was posting a hundred ads a day on Craigslist. I figured out ways to really beat people on these platforms. And the way I did that back in 2008 is I'd post an ad for my stepdad,

put it to his cell phone, post another ad to my top tech, all call tracking numbers. I knew how many calls they were getting. Then I'd post three to me, post one to my stepdad. Then I put one to my mom and I just figured out, okay, how can I do this on Thumbtack? How do I get the best deal on Yelp? How do I do a Groupon that beats everybody else that gets me into the garage? But these simple little things, I figured out, man, I could get 10 calls a day from Groupon if I do it right. So two different perspectives. And I want these questions to be due to two different perspectives.

So tomorrow was really, really cool as we're doing a really cool roundtable event that I'll be in. And, you know, we got Benji and we've got Jody and Megan likes. I think it's going to be absolutely amazing so if you guys get a chance this one's going to be very structured very organized and it's going to be very fun let's see here i see breakthrough academy paid at every time i log in so we're using them now so let's go ahead and read some of this. Nick said, I am a growing electrical contractor in northern Wisconsin. We are well established and always improving in the installation part of the electrical world. And now looking to grow the service aspect of the business.

I cut my teeth on installs and not on the service side. If you had to start your company all over again and never worked a service call, how and where would you start? So figure this, the guy's done a ton of new install, right? He knows how to install from scratch, but the real money I've always thought is the service side. It really is an electrical, I'd say that for sure. So what goes back to the last question, I think is how do you do the marketing side? But more importantly, how do you differentiate yourself? I was on a Q&A earlier and I'll answer this one first because I already started and then I'll let you answer it. But if you're just selling an electrical switch and regular electrical stuff, there's no money in that. If you're just walking in and being the, hey, I'm just like,

I'm a commodity like everybody else. You can go to Home Depot, buy the parts and I'll install it. You have to say, how am I different? There's a book called Purple Cow. There's a lot of these books that say, how am I different? I've got pages and pages of how we differentiate ourselves. I don't carry the same parts as anybody. You know, I was talking to a guy earlier about, he's like, I just do drywall. I was like, what kind of questions are you asking? I was like, does your son play the drums in his room?

Do I want drums echoing through the house? I could put some noise barriers behind the drywall. It's going to cost more, but no one else knows how to do this properly. And let me show you an example. And this is the type of thing. So what I would remember that I'm not a commodity and how do I differentiate myself? I can tell you this, my trucks, the way we hire our guys, the experience you have, we get out there quicker, same day guarantee. I think too many times when you start an install, you start to commoditize yourself and you say, man, people could just go to Home Depot

or Amazon. And that's the one big thing I tell you is, and know who your client is. A lot of people don't understand their avatar. And once you identify that, I don't think it's the rich people and it's probably not the poorest people. It's probably somewhere in between and define that. Those two things matter a lot to what I would say. I would just think of it as a funnel. I just think about like your install is your lead magnet, right? It's the thing that gets you in the door, starts the service, does the work with the customer. But what is your sales process? What is your funnel leading through that process? Right? Because right now your tech probably just goes and does the job, gets the bill, moves on. Well, what can happen between when that job is initially booked even, like,

hey, we booked the job, we haven't even come yet. What are we doing pre-meeting you, whether it be through email or through whatever it be? What is the tech doing when he arrives? Is there any kind of inspection he's doing? What does his agreement look like when you're signing off? There's all these little things you can do in your sales process to prime the idea of, hey, we have a service package. Here's whatever. Good, better, best.

Pick whatever is best for you. And then teach your rep on how to have those types of conversations when they're out doing their installs. That'd be right for residential. Commercial would be a little different. But I just think about the sales process itself. Don't just think of, hey, we sold the job, now we've produced it.

The production aspect, that is literally like the beginning of your service sale. And what are you building internally to make sure that that is happening every time you go do an install? It is. It's a weird world to be in to go opposite. I learned service first, but the one thing that I'd recommend is that you don't think about when

you're doing new install from soup to nuts is you don't think about your call booking rate, your conversion rate, or your average ticket. And I'd really focus on those KPIs when you're spending money in marketing because you don't really need to do that when you're doing new construction. So all of a sudden the word key performance indicators becomes a lot more important when you're an electrician doing service calls. And the other big thing that I do on top of it, and this is a great question because it's making me think is, I'd go to the largest three electrical shops within a few states away that I could go to. I'd probably call my buddy Dan Antonelli because he charges a ton of money to do branding.

And so you know these people paid in 20, 30 grand to build a brand. So they must be good if they can afford that. And I'd fly out to them and say, can I come ask you a million questions? And those guys are going to know exactly how to do it. Because if they paid $30,000 just for a brand, then they're probably bringing in a couple hundred grand net a month and they don't mind they don't mind paying it for they don't mind helping out the fellow contractor and i think you'll get a whole new grasp of what it is because the electricians in your market are not going to want you to train you on how to be their competitors so that's probably the best advice is go figure out how it's done did you want to add anything else no the only thing about is just, it is a different beast to be able to

go do service work versus to go to install. And so you have to make sure you've thought through that part. It's not just that we have guys that are going to go do it. Cool. Who is that? And what does their truck need to be equipped with? And what does their roots need to look like? And what kind of technology do you need to have to optimize that? Like what are the little components that come with actually producing those jobs? Because there's a lot of them and they're smaller. And so there's a whole operations side that you might want to think through a little bit as well. That's amazing. So Trevor Maddox said, when you have a fleet vehicle program, what percentage of revenue do you budget for vehicle-related expenses and what percentage

of gas? How do you run the gas programs for cost? It's interesting. Our coaches are really good at this one because they sit down and look at everyone's books every day. I think about this. This one's interesting. We've got a special card we use called WEX. So you want to run a WEX card.

It allows you to know you can track it so nobody's stealing your gas. It knows exactly. It actually registers the miles on the vehicle because it reports back. I'd get into a vehicle monitoring software that plugs into your OB2 sensor, tells you anytime an engine light pops on. I would definitely get a fleet manager. We lease to own or we pay extra to have them service everything.

So a flat tire, a cracked windshield, anything with the unit. After four years, we own it. The reason why it makes sense is we do accelerated depreciation we actually own the vehicle after four years our vehicles are worth more four years later than when we bought them in this kind of crisis but i can tell you that it's so important to do your vehicles right you should have your own fleet the worst thing i used to buy all these used old vehicles. At first, I had the guys ride their own vehicles and I lost a lot of control in the brand. So I would say for tax purposes, get with a good CPA, understand there's a lot of

advantageous tax laws to buying your fleet. I'd say if you pay for the plan a little bit more money, you can get included maintenance, especially if you're buying it under 100,000 miles because there's lots of warranties that come on it you pay an extra i think we pay an extra 40 dollars per month per vehicle we have several hundred so it it turns into some real money but that way there's no unexpected effects on that so here's a question for you would you put that type of expense into your variable expenses with the cost of doing the project or the jobs or would you put that into your overhead expense no i always put that in overhead i never could break that down so that's not on a cogs line at all that's i put that in variable outside of it yeah i don't put

that into my direct cost to go out there that's too hard it's too hard to figure yeah i can do parts cost pretty easy i can do my labor cost very easy for the figure out gross profit. You know, let's break this out a little bit because I got about plenty more questions. But let's go into a couple of things. You know, I've been talking to a lot of people. Have you heard of the big short, the movie in 20? Yeah. Yep.

Kind of when the whole market took a crap. This was 2007. There was a thing called CDOs. And I really I watched that movie last night collateralized debt obligations yeah and what they did is they threw a lot of crap and they called it triple a double a you know i'm seeing things out there that don't make sense mathematically it doesn't make sense right now now i don't think it's going to be as bad as it was, but I'm seeing just multiples. I'm seeing a lot of things that are just I'm not saying it's in the next year or two or three. I'm saying I just know if you watch that movie, there was guys waiting like, is this going to happen?

When is it going to happen? And it went an extra year than it should have because everybody was in kind of collusion. They didn't even realize it but what are your thoughts i mean the multiples i'm hearing people getting in the arbitrage i'm like yeah i find it interesting there's there's large firms buying up on like residential properties like crazy and i know that that's a large part of what's just driving this whole thing right so you've got i don't know what the percentage is but it's a large enough percentage to impact the entire market let's's just call it 20, 30% of all home sales happening or happening by private equity firms. Which is really like, so they're seeing something and they're following something.

Now, whether or not they're right or not, God will tell. But I don't know. I mean, I look at this and I'm just like, at some level, what we grew up in where we had an economy run by the dollar and the dollar was backed by something, that has been completely wiped out. And now we're trying to figure out what is that new thing that's going to take over. And everyone's got opinions about what that's going to be and how that's going to look. The real estate market will be tied up into that, I'm sure. But the rules are changing, right? What used to be debt to service ratio all that kind of stuff is just all out the window now in 2020 the united states government canada included a lot of other

western countries we printed 40 of all the money we ever had in circulation and then we went and printed some more and what does that do to assets obviously that raises everything but what does that do to like a recession or a downfall of it i actually don't know it's a whole new world for me and i'm sure it is for all of us i'm just like that's why that's some of the stuff i'm putting my hands up i'm just like it's too hard to understand i'm just all i can tell is that there's a lot of market manipulation going on and people that are paid a lot more than you and i i think have an idea and they're making moves and we're just stuck to figure it out so you, you know, I know a lot of people with REITs, a hundred million dollar plus REITs.

I happen to be quite, I don't want to say connected, but know some of the larger funds. And one thing I can tell you is we moved my girlfriend, Bree, amazing. Her brother, he's 19 and we moved him into his own apartment good place it's a one bedroom it's not in the best area it's not in a bad area but 1200 bucks the rental incomes are going through the roof and what i know is these investors now they're going in and they're putting everything brand new and they're putting a brand new roof with a 10-year warranty they're putting the garage door the air conditioning the hot water heater and then they're putting everything brand new and they're putting a brand new roof with a 10 year warranty. They're putting the garage door, the air conditioning, the hot water heater. And then they're saying, now it's all under warranty. And now you could have a linear

progress of the rental and it's land. And I can tell you this, I got some buddies that from China that say they're trying to buy as much land as possible because real estate, the land doesn't go down. You can't make more of it. So I think you get a little bit more expected ROI. You get a three bedroom, two bath, two car garage and a non-busy street in a good area. And if you could buy the house relatively, I don't want to even say affordably, but you look at how long it takes you to pay it back. When you're at six, seven years, you're winning. And that's with new things. That's with someone else managing it. And I'm looking at some of the ratios on what I'm getting for some of my stuff. And I'm like, even if it crashes, the rents aren't going to crash. People still need a spot to live. They're still going to pay. They can move into a smaller place.

But I think that's why you see a lot of these big funds open door and all these places getting into the game. And for a while there, Zillow did, but I don't anticipate a big, the multiples I'm seeing even out there. We were really important because we were essential businesses. We didn't close down, right? And then everybody was able to spend money on their houses. Nobody was investing in movie theaters or hotels or nail salons. So we became this essential service and we were still profiting like crazy during COVID. And I got to tell you, what do they say?

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Right. To not realize when, when something's too good to be true, sometimes it is. And there's sometimes people should be looking for strategic partnerships and making maybe in a,

this is just personal point of view. And I might somebody that you don't need to listen to this but maybe there's a spot that you want to might want to take some money off the table while the getting's good because we're in a hot market right now yep i guess whatever i've been doing personally i've have money in cash money in the marketplace money in real estate and i'm just starting to put some money into crypto and it's mostly just because i'm like i don't actually know the answer and i'm not going to pretend to know the answer and so i'm just going to put a little bit in each little place learn a little bit about each thing as i do it and i think having some money in cash too is just like i want i want opportunities i want to be able to jump on things when i want them and not be able to be stuck with all my stuff, stuck investments everywhere.

Or have it look quite easily liquidable. I mean, if you don't have them in these. Totally. Yeah. But I think like maybe to that question, I'm wondering why they're asking it, but like there is very much a, hey, everyone's out there producing work right now. And we all kind of know this is a crazy hot market that may not be hot anymore if house prices crash right that's what we saw in the past

we're using past experience to try and figure out what happens in the future i just think it's different i think the game's changed there's just too much money that was printed yeah you're right but the deal is even inflation inflation yeah but and that's hence why there's so much money in the market not only did we print that money but now everyone's house speculation you know house price went up so everyone's got equity in their home it's imaginary money it's so much money in the market. Not only did we print that money, but now everyone's house speculation, the house price went up. So everyone's got equity in their home. It's imaginary money. It's not real money.

Well, that'd be because they can't sell their primary house. But do you know what deflation is? When they raise interest rates high enough, what's going to happen is it'll turn back things and deflation starts happening. Now, listen, COVID changed everything. There's not a country out there that wasn't printing. In fact, some of the smartest people in the world say there's only going to be three currencies left out of the 63 out there. One of them is obviously the Chinese yen and then the U.S. dollar,

and there's probably a third one going to make it. But you're going to see currencies start to go away because they're getting useless. And although we printed a lot, we don't have the most nukes, but we've got the largest military in the world. And we happen to be in the best spot in the world because we're not next to China. We're not super far away from China, Russia, but we are quite a lot further away than any other country. So it's a tough subject. I just think some people, they want to know the answer to these tough things. There's no right answer,

except when something's too good to be true. Usually it is right. Yeah. And I'd say you said something smart at the end there where, you know, pigs get slaughtered, like fat pigs get slaughtered. Like don't just don't get greedy.

There's no reason to, we already live in a country where we're provided for. So don't get confused by that and think that you need to go and like over leverage yourself at a crazy amount, just because there's some massive investment to be made now or it'll never come again like i don't know live your life make what you make you know try and increase that as you grow but don't over leverage yourself to the point where like if things turn on you you're screwed what like it's not worth it what's the point love it i'm glad i got that because now we got a ton of

questions all right let's do a little bit of a speed round here. So how often do you train your team? Interesting. So I think like most people, when we have an initial onboarding, so I actually just have two new people on my team being onboarded as we speak. It's a pretty intense month with both of them. So literally their entire nine to five Monday to Friday is pre-scheduled the month out. It changes every week, but I'll do like a Friday meeting with them and then look at their block

scheduled week and just kind of think through, okay, is that the most efficient way to do it? I'm personally with them five hours of that week, but they're cross-training. So they're meeting with my team. They're going through certain resources. I've predetermined their learning path for an entire month. So it's pretty important. I'd say initial month or even two where you have very intentional things for them to be doing and learning. After that, we do weekly goal setting and review meetings, which is accountability. There's always a little bit of training. And then out of that meeting usually comes a little bit of a gap. So if there's a gap they're not figuring out, then we'll book something to go either in field or, you know, in person together.

And then outside of that, I don't do this as much as anymore. And I probably should, but I used to do like kind of like quarterly training sessions. So we'd pull everyone together and we'd go over like a team, whatever event. Actually, I just did one recently on priority management.

So we all went through our calendars, talked a little bit about how to be more efficient. And you used to do that quarterly. I'll say right now, I'm not doing that quarterly right now. So, you know, Travis just brought this in. It's exact training guide for a new program we're launching.

The biggest thing I can say about this is can you train the trainers? And I bring the train, the trainers in every quarter. And that's because we're in 29 markets right now. And the better my trainers are trained and there's new checklists

and new processes and better training. We're moving at a lightning speed right now. So the biggest thing is how do we grow leaders? How do we make them more accountable? How do we make them smile more? How do we make them motivate other people? So I think it becomes really, really hard sometimes to train each and every person, but to have dimensions of the business where you train the trainers as much as possible is important.

The next one is how do you decide how many CSRs have we're working on some of that right now well you have to know roughly how many leads you're getting in every week is it cs a customer service reps yeah right i guess it depends on their job description yeah i would look at your call volume and what is the average call timing on an individual and then how what percentage of their week should they be on the phones essentially the big thing is just what's called an abandonment rate you do not want to abandon phone calls number one number two is there's a thing called schedule engine there's other softwares like that if you get more people in their marketing to schedule online into your capacity board to lower the call volume that means they just want to use your company quick and dirty way

to get less CSRs. But what you really want to do is figure out that exact equation that Danny's just talking about and make sure to overhire a little bit because I've never seen a call center that kept up perfectly with their demand. I love your story, but I'm a little guy. I bought your course because I believe I can grow. What's your first step to going from a little guy to a medium guy i think hiring yourself out making yourself obsolete in the current job you're in and it's not to go sit back and relax it's it's to spend time on the next step of the company i think too many people build themselves jobs get comfortable with that job and then that's kind of what they do and whether it's them and two guys or five guys guys and girls that's kind of where people stay unless you go wait a minute i'm doing a lot of crew moves doing

a lot of like estimates i'm doing a lot of paperwork there's stuff that you're doing that's taking up your time that's 20 to 30 an hour job that could be somebody else's job so you can go do things that are 100 an hour job right so it's just don't ever get complacent with the way things are and just say, hey, well, I'm busy. So I can't see myself doing much more. Say, what are those things I'm busy with and how do I delegate them down? Wow, I got to pay $60,000 a year for someone to do that. Okay, well, how much do I need to book to pay that salary? Okay, well, maybe that's my next motivator to grow my company. Yeah, I agree with that completely. I think Al Levy, I'm a student of Al's. I always quote him. So he says,

the first thing to do is to build out your org chart, understand the depth chart. And if you're, put your name on every hat on that list and decide which ones you suck at first and you can't stand the most and slowly begin to put people in those places, but take yourself out of the technician role. Next is learn how to delegate. And I'd say a big thing is starting to set up manuals, read the e-myth and think about how do I franchise my business even though I don't want to franchise it. I think too many people say, man, I'm the best worker. And they go into the job instead of saying, I know this job, I'm a really good worker, but now it's time I learned how to motivate people and recruit and train and retain and love

and motivate and help them accomplish their goals. But it's so hard to do that if you've never been trained outside of the home service. So that's where something like Breakthrough Academy comes in. And I'll tell you guys, is there's a lot of things to do out there. If I got to tell you from going small to big, it's control your calendar and learn how to prioritize the one big thing each day. If you looked at my calendar today, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 things on my calendar today. This is one of them.

And everything has been negotiated through Bree and set up and time set up. There's different books I can read, call my mom. Every single thing has a purpose. And I know that if I, Brie squared is four. Brie squared squared is 16. Elon Musk has the same amount of time in his day. I can tell you that. Same exact amount.

He's going to Mars. He's putting internet and everybody's... He's learned to duplicate himself. And the problem that I have with when I was small is when I wasn't working, I wasn't making money. I'll give this one more thing. This is a little tip I always use. You've probably heard me say this before too, but it's a simple to-do. Just make a list of everything you do. Circle the stuff that's highest time consumption and lowest skill. That's the next thing you need to hire for and or delegate for and or potentially find a system to automate it, but it's,

it shouldn't be on your plate. So it's like, what is everything you do? Circle the stuff, high time consumption, but it's low skill, whatever those things are. That's the stuff that needs to be delegated.

Often it's a new hire. You know, I do get a really good, I guess something really good for this. And this is it right here. If you guys look at this, it's a picture, but it basically shows. So the four quadrants,

number one is high impact, low effort, high impact, high effort, low effort, low impact, low impact, high effort. And what you want to do is really spend your time on the high impact, low effort first. And it goes through is how to do this stuff. And if you learn what OKRs, OKRs are highly, highly important. A lot of people don't talk about them, but it's outcome and key results. And you get those dialed in, it changes the way you do things let's see here

here's a good question how do you pay your gm do you pay them on commissions i got one for this yeah so gross versus net well what are they in charge of right that's the first question i would ask so they're in charge of gross there There you go. So if your GM is only in charge of growth, then it would be a huge detriment to give them something around net profit. Because what you're going to go do is you're going to get all excited about the future of the company

and you're going to want to go spend money on that new thing. And they're going to be pissed because you just spent money on the percentage of that as their bonus. You bought a forklift. Yeah. They're like, we don't need that forklift.

And you're like, well, we need it for like a year from now when we get ready for this. And he'll be like, I don't care. I'm trying to hit this year's goals and this year's bonuses and you're getting in my way. So if it's gross, which I would say I would agree is probably the easier way to do it, have what's called a gross profit driver. So you can do it in lots of different ways. One of the best ways I've found to do it is I have a salary for you, which you can pay to live your life, right? You do your thing, you pay your bills, and that's the salary you're getting. But if you want more, you want to go on cool vacations, you want that nicer car, you want that nicer house, you want to upgrade your life, that's what your bonuses are about. And your bonuses come from the

gross profit that you're driving above and beyond the set goal that we have for you. So just give round numbers here. If I'm trying to get you to produce a million dollars this year at 40%, I'm telling you to bring to the company $400,000. We're going to use obviously some of that to pay for your salary and the rest goes to overhead and some profit. But if you want to make extra money beyond your base salary, you need to make over and above that 400 grand. So if you make 1.5 million at 40 well now that 10 of all that extra cash made you get or if you just do a million still but you do it at 45 right there's extra cash made and you can figure out how you want to do it through better productivity and more production through better profitability or a combination of the two but you get to think about the dynamic that goes into play

to optimize that. It's kind of one thing I put up. You know, the general manager is a very, very vague term. It's very general, hence the word general manager. I find it hard to just say this guy's my GM. I think it's so much better to say this guy's in charge of sales. This guy's in charge of marketing. So I want a low acquisition cost. Do I? I don't care if it's low acquisition cost relative. If it's $2,000, I'm making $100,000. $2,000 sounds expensive to acquire a customer. Hence, there's a great book called Dream 100 book.

But I could go down a deep valley here. But the point is really to find out what they're responsible for. And then no more than a few things to base them on to where it's not quantum physics to figure out their pay. But one of the things I highly recommend is getting with a really, really strong CPA, a really, really strong, probably CFO, even a consultant to say, what have you seen work well? Because I've seen a lot of people screw these up. And once you start paying somebody who's really good and they make a lot of money, they're like, holy shit, I didn't think they were going to make this much money. And you could even be killing it, but you didn't account for, hey, I needed a GM, but then I needed to hire a bunch of supervisors.

I needed a trainer. Then I had to get an LMS. I didn't count on that. And so what I thought I was just going to be paying them on, now I had to build all this infrastructure. And I think that's the biggest mistake that people don't realize. That's a good point. Yep. Let's see here.

Do you employ an accountant or just have an APAR bookkeeping type positions? What time do you hire them? What type of revenue? I'll just take a quick stab. This is a really quick, simple answer. But my CRM does a lot of stuff that accountants do. Between my CRM and my accounting software, we do all the reconciliations. It does a matching principle.

We could go eliminate a lot of roles we do automatic payroll i don't have a lot of ar because i don't do commercial or net 30 or anything i collected stuff while i'm there uh don't do a lot of new home builds so we've kept our accounting team for over 450 employees there's five and so i i try to figure out a way to automate, automate, automate. And I think Danny mentioned this earlier, but I think too often the financial team, people want it to be really, really big. And if you include my data integrity team, it's actually eight or nine now. So they're making sure all the transactions are stickers.

There's all these things that are right on the job, but it's not really in the finance department. So I'll let Danny take this one. But a lot of these questions, I would say too, are really more CFO controller driven and you want to hire the best controller ever. I mean, these questions, I assume most people are 10 million and up,

probably, you know, maybe 7 million and up. But like you get to those types of ranges when you start to think about these kinds of things. Through automation or people, it doesn't matter to me. I would just say like, just realize there's a ton of value that this would bring to the company, right? 1% on $10 million is 100 grand.

Are you trying to, you know, save on someone's salary just to save on that salary and then lose out on 5% of the company and lose $500,000 as a result? Or can you pay somebody $60,000 to do something that would save you a lot, right? So whether it's automation systems or people, just realize that the bigger your business gets, every little percentage matters to the nth degree. And not only just being able to track it and being able to say this is where it all went, but having somebody who has a brain behind strategizing how to optimize that is massive, right?

So yeah, I would just say, just don't cheap out on it. Even when it comes to hiring people, don't just pick somebody that's maybe a little cheaper than somebody else because whatever. You're trying to fit the budgetary requirements for that salary for the year. Look at who's going to be able to blow it out of the water for your company. And on that note, there's not a person in any department that works with me that says they don't need five more people every day. What we do, I don't just do that.

So we really look at what they're getting done in their day and put some KPIs around that. Number one, and I've tried to make them triple efficient. And number two, Danny made a great point. If I had to hire a guy at 500 grand a year, but he worked 10 hours a week, that would be $125,000 a year. but he'd put in the systems of a $400,000 person for that $125,000. So he'd say, here's the software. You need to use Expensify every time you go out because I don't want to have to get a full person for that because that's 60 grand right there. Then the other person we're going to need is this person, but I'm going to get this software and get this. You get a $400,000 person that knows every system to put in place, the checklist to start using, the right automations, all of a sudden you're paying $125, but now you've got systems running the business. There's no data

mistakes. There's not someone doing Excel pivot tables and wrong people going in. I love human beings, but the less involved with my numbers and the more automated that grabs the data and puts it in and the things that have been built out there the stronger so i'd be really careful on just building a huge team around an eighty thousand dollar chief i'd rather get that really expensive guy part-time than a really decent guy you know what i mean yep it's good oh thoughts here thoughts on clients paying a monthly fee that covers everything well what industry but go ahead danny i think you really got to know your cost structure and you really got to understand the parameters of what you're saying right there's no such thing as everything right so it's hey we know that our average client sits within this range and we have a good better best program

for that and we know that once we've set, we can basically have it for about a year, maybe. But even after a year, how much has changed in the last two years? So you can never promise everything and you can never promise it indefinitely. There's got to be timelines to things and there's got to be very specific contracts in place about what that thing is. And then, yeah, if you want to set it and forget it, that's fine. I mean, Breakthrough Academy, we have that. So we have an agreement with our clients they pay us once a month and we supply basically what they need to be coached and developed we took a lot of time to understand what the average coaching time per client is and what one average coach can take on we then also have something in where every single year if we need to we can go up with

inflation right because we don't want to put ourselves behind we actually just recently had a price increase across our membership and the first one a long time i'm glad we did it but i mean at the end of the day what might seem great this year can turn into a bankruptcy situation five years later because scope creep happens inflation happens and you need to make sure you have some agreement in place that stipulates that. You know, our agreement here that I have is a monthly agreement that covers some stuff. It's our worry-free club membership. It's $8.95 a month. It gives you a free surge protector, a free annual tune-up, 50% of today's work, 50% of future work, priority front- line dispatching, half off emergency fee,

lifetime labor warranty of any part replaced, extended warranty on openers, different things on parts. And I like a partial club membership because now when I go to need that big new garage door and the opener and the storage, I'm still getting a ton of money. I'm building a venture on the customer. That's how you make money on these things. You don't do one size fits all because you go out of business eventually when people start running into stuff going wrong with their equipment. Let's see. Here's a good question by David Cook. What do you do when you're on a sales call and you've gone through the whole sales process and you are convinced you're going to get an acceptance

signature and they say i need to go over this with my spouse before i make a decision any suggestions on how i could close the deal without them taking it to their significant other i like this one so i'll go through this one real quick number one i had a guy he's called the goat he did 13 million dollars one time in HVAC sales one year. It wasn't that long ago. And he said, here's what needs to happen with these types of calls. Your company is the only company that they could possibly want to use. And it's a real simple thing is, you know, Mr. Danny Kerr, I've got the opportunity to work wherever I want in any garage or a company. I'm actually nationally certified.

And the reason I chose A1 Garage or Service, and then I go into it, and it needs to be done today. And here's why. And here's a little bit of, we service over $10,000 a month. Both parties are aware. So one of the things that I'll go into that price desensitized and they have payment options are the other two. So both parties are aware. I get this question all the time when can i come back out and go over this with your wife or husband or significant other if you don't get an appointment joker saratata says if you don't get that next appointment to go back out there there's some bad stuff there and i sure i could understand mr kurt you're exactly like me. I always go over significant expenses

with my loved ones. And I'd like to be able to have the opportunity to show them exactly what I showed you. When's a great time for us to come back out. But realistically, before I go into that, sometimes I'll go into it. If I know this post is going to be $30,000, I'm going to say, is there a time I can come back? And one of the things you do on the pre-arrival is say your dispatcher, your CSR has tried to set it up. So both people are home. I think there's too many times, but you got to understand what estimate are you going to? Because it's not hard to make a thousand dollar decision. It's a really hard thing to make a $30,000 decision. That's what I would say. So we have a objection handed model that I've

been using for years, but my first thing is to don't defend or explain. So just acknowledge. Thanks for sharing that with me. Don't put them on either side of the fence. My second thing is to ask an open-ended question that demands more explanation. So something along that lines would be like, cool, awesome. What are some things you guys need to talk about or think about together? And understand what it is they're even saying to you.

Half the time it's bullshit. Half the time they just want more time which is fine but it's just like cool what are some things you and your wife need to think about well you know i just not really her it's more just me i just haven't really cool and like get into that story and understand what it is they're actually saying to you and see if there's an opportunity to problem solve it because often there is often it's like yeah it 30 grand. I just personally want to sleep on it. I always make decisions after I sleep on them properly. Cool. So you just literally just want to clear your mind and think about it. Yeah, cool. And then I would do what you're talking about, Tommy. And I would say, great. So why don't we give you a night, sleep on it, chat with your wife if you want to,

don't if you don't. Sounds like you just want to kind of breathe. And why don't we meet tomorrow? I've got time at three, whatever it is, X, Y is xyz time what you're exactly talking about and let's do a follow-up call and let's make a decision is that fair right so you're still you're teaming up with them you're calling them out if they need to be called out because you're understanding what's actually going on and you're making an agreement with them and they feel like you know what this person wants to make a deal but at least they're respecting me and they're holding me accountable it's like cool like i don't want to follow up with you forever. And you probably don't want that either.

Right. Be real with them. And I've always dealt with sales in that way where it's like, look, you have an objection, whether you're telling me it truthfully or not, chances are you're probably not. Your first objection to me is probably just the story you're telling yourself. But if I don't take the time to first understand it and ask open-ended questions, then who am I to tell you how you should feel about it? That's right.

Open-ended questions. And a great one is Mr. Kerr. When Mrs. Kerr gets home, what do you think she's going to ask you? What if I booked the $30,000 job? No, no, no. I'm just saying, if you want to talk to Mrs. Kerr, what do you think she's going to be asking about when you talk to her? And one of the things I try to do is when I set up a service call is we go through the buyer's guide and we let them have an opportunity to see our buyer's guide and know a lot of the things. So if I already know they're interested,

because I know where they land on for the buyer's guide, if they spent the whole time on wood doors, I know that one is a big sale. And I know I want to explain knotty pine versus not knotty pine. And I know, listen, is there a time? I want to make sure we've got a lot of choices on this? And I want to make sure that both of you guys are home. This might

be better for a night or weekend when I could grab both of you. But if you know that going in based on what they've done, you'd be surprised what software could do to stack the deck, man. It's crazy what you could do. I like this question. What is the best form of advertisement it's by robert jills right i mean i think it's just you it's the way you treat people it's the

way your employees treat people it's the way you're out there every single day it's your brand i mean i'm watching it even happen with what we do every single day like our core values the way we were when we first started this company to today is yielding us way more roi than any anything we go out there and do now does ad spend help does all that you know guerrilla marketing all that helps but i find it's just our customers being like they delivered on their promises they were good we grew as a result we refer them and even if they don't refer us it's the things they're just talking about randomly with other people and people hear about us, it's the things they're just talking about randomly with other people. And people hear about us,

but it's always in a good positive light versus a negative light. It's when, you know, back in the day when I did a painting company, it's when people went door to door. They were going door to door and leaving a bad impression every time, or were they going door to door

and leaving a positive impression every time? That's subtle stuff in the back end. I agree with that. What's the first thing you got to get right? I say invest in your brand. But here's the biggest missing element from almost everybody I meet. Is I always ask them, what's your budget like? What are you spending money on right now?

And they always say, you know, right now we're spending this on Google. I've got ValPack. I do some stuff on Facebook. And then I'm doing programmatic TV. And I go, now how much are we spending on finding amazing people? Because I could show you right now that these two technicians, these three CSRs and this dispatcher is losing you well over $8 million a year, just the six of them. What are we spending on developing these amazing people?

Are we showing some empathy to them? So I think, what can we do to turn ourselves into a magnet for great people? And how much does that cost? Last month, I spent $850,000 in marketing. True story. We did over 9 million. I only spent 20,000 to recruit. It's not enough. I'm going up from there. That's between some different things. Facebook ads, Instagram, little TikTok stuff, and then a lot to do with some different other employee engines. But $20,000, it's not a lot of money, but how much are you guys spending to make sure you attract this amazing people? Because Jim Collins said it the

best. You get the right people on the bus. I've heard of people hiring a couple of key players, giving them a tiny bit of phantom equity, and then going from $100 million to $5 billion. And I don't think people understand the people that you get on your bus dictate where you go. Yeah, as long as they're the right people, they'll drive ROI into the organization itself. And yeah, that's something I've thought about and talked about with a lot of people. But yeah, where's your best marketing dollars spent? It's a very individual question, but it's good. Let's see here.

What is the proper ratio for service work versus install in the garage door business? Used to be 80-20 for me, service to sales, but now I'm 50-50 again. It's how I started. And then now I'm literally 50-50 because I think you need to take these service calls and turn them into new sales. And so a lot of people would argue that the GDS is precisions of the world. They make a lot more money on service. Why? Because they mismeasure doors. It's a lot more infrastructure to be able to replace doors.

Now you're dealing on vendors to get doors. I can get Springs rollers, cables, bearings. It's hard for me to get a really good door, perfectly measured, make the customer happy. But I'll tell you what, the ROI per household, would you rather have, okay, so my cost of parts on a service call is about 12%. My cost is about 30% on a door. But here's what I love is my average door sale was $9,800 last week. My average service call was about $1,300. I know that sounds high.

It's because it is high because we're not the cheapest. And we have trainers and recruiters and full-time trainings that just goes on. So, you know, I think everybody, that's a really relative question,

but I believe you should be 50-50. I don't know a lot of companies that are 50-50, either they're one or the other. other i'm a blend i don't know if you got any insights on that no you'd be best for that one i mean again i see like landscape maintenance and landscape install and then you've got garage door and then there's all these different industries i i haven't seen a pattern that's that i would feel i could speak on so so this is interesting. Cody and I spend a lot of time at the IDA.

Perfect time for this podcast. Tell me we are working on what you suggested for us. We are going to pull me out of the field as much as possible. I think that there's not enough. We sat down at a dinner the other day and I said, Cody, I'd like to speak with your father on possibly giving you more time to work on the business because you do such an amazing job in the field and you always will.

But if you could be focused and get a lot of stuff done and really get these manuals, these standard operating procedures and these checklists and motivate your guys and have meetings that matter and the proper steps of delegation and get these systems going, just give me one month. I'll cover your damn salary, you know, of what you're going to get done. But imagine what a guy like Cody could do in his garage door business with his father. They're getting service time going right now. They're getting a lot of other things going and he's trying to work at the same time. What do you say to those guys? I mean, you said it best earlier. Yeah. We talked about it earlier. I mean,

I'd say this too. I'd say it's totally normal that there's a bit of a struggle there, right? Because it's new to you. So it's like, well, are we really going to take you out of a revenue producing position to go sit back and build a manual? Like, what are you talking about? So that's totally normal that people have like objections to that and that people feel a little uncomfortable with that. But I can tell you personally, I mean, yeah, we have 480 companies.

I don't even know the exact number. The audit we took in January, I think was $1.3 billion under management. And what I can tell you from that is that these companies are growing. They're becoming more profitable. They're becoming more efficient. The owners are having more time in their day

and more time with their family. It actually is a thing. It's not just like a pipe dream you read in a book and maybe it'll work for someone else, but not you. This is where the industry is going. We are going to professionalize the contracting space. Everyone will get on board or probably be out of business in the next 10 years. And so there's opportunity in this that has to be realized. And even though it's a bit scary, that's totally normal. It's probably a great use of time and it's going to yield dividends for the next 10 years of your organization.

And you might not on Tuesday build a manual and on Wednesday suddenly get an ROI out of it. But there's got to be some things you do in your business that are not just week-to-week activities that build into the next year or two and beyond. I agree with you wholeheartedly with what you said. So here's a quick question. Tommy, what do you recommend? Well, I recently shot out of a helicopter, and I had some of these glasses. And if you look really closely, there's cameras built into them, and it can also get the visual. Visual and audio.

These aren't really a good look but anyways what's really cool about these is i can wear these to jobs and i can see the perfect body language see exactly what the customer is doing i can be coaching when the customer's not in front of me doing the work showing everything i'm looking at grabbing the tool putting it out there and what better than to have these and then be recording i tell people shoot just do a screenshot on a loom of everything you do as you're working to start building things you can just throw it in a google drive or another drive but you know i use a company called absorb because service time got it free for me i don't know if i should throw that out there, but you know, I think any LMS is only as

good as the content you put in there and how it's organized. Most people, they build out crap. No one does anything. There's no test. There's no accountability. So I just have a hard time recommending a software for an LMS because content is king that, and how it's delivered. I've got great videos I put out every week and if the guys aren't paying attention what's the point so i'll let you take a stab at this danny so yeah we're working on more right now so we're building one but we went and researched training will process street and way we do just to kind of see what's out there and we saw that all of them were kind of they were lacking a little bit of each other actually so i mean we're not going to be an immediate solution but we have in the next year and a half

a pretty epic little system coming out that's going to involve proper on-site checklists, proper SOP usage, proper what you were just talking to me, like automatic upload of videos that you can kind of just do off your phone and put it right into the system.

It'll just help create a collective brain. And what's neat is we're putting all of our members together where they have their own independent environment, but they can also collaborate and share their best practices with each other. So you're not just building your own stuff,

but you can see what's going on in other organizations that they deem to be shareable. That's what we're doing. I would say based on our research, Trainual is not a bad option for now. They definitely have, I think, a good market share and they've been working on their software, but it is relatively simple.

Check out Process Street and WayWeDo as well. Those are all three good, I would say, platforms that we looked at and we saw a lot of good things in them. They're all missing a little bit as well. Yeah. When I was actually in college, we had a thing called a blackboard. I mean, it's as good as the content you put in there and how accountable you're going to make people. I think everybody's different. And to understand personally profiling how they learn how they interact body language eye contact to know there's no one size fits all i think that's bs and to put everybody through the same curriculum that's like i tell people all the time

i was in the worst reading class in first grade i really struggled and then my second grade because i got a really good tutor mr donovan i was the vest. And they knew because we had arithmetic back then. We did cursive and all kinds of stuff. They knew where to focus the attention to get me tutored. And I think if you don't know where to be helping your guys learn, an LMS makes no sense. How much should I spend on a

decent website is the question. Depends on the size of the business. Yeah. I can tell you what I've spent. I i mean we spent 5 000 bucks on our first one 15 000 bucks on our second one and we're going to do a big revamp now through internally in our team we have like basically someone full-time committed to this plus a couple contractors will probably spend 40 50 grand on the next one right so we've been growing over time but it has to serve different functions right our five thousand dollar one we needed a place to look good right our fifteen thousand

dollar one we needed kind of a sales manual and we did a little bit of lead capture going on and this next one that's going on is going to have a whole back end and a much smarter you know i'm not even smart enough to talk about it to be honest a much smarter kind of like algorithms that understand who's hitting our sites who's retargeting how to basically use that based on heat mapping and understand kind of where's the usage of on our site the most and anyways we're going to science the shit out of this thing and turn it into a really good just you know salesperson essentially so it depends on the site and it depends on the traffic you're driving to the site as well right you go from like a thousand people visiting to like 50,000 people visiting a day or whatever that ratio would be for you. There's obviously

more ROI when you have larger visitors. So this is such a tough question because Dan Antonelli does such a good job of branding the site, but then there's other factors like the site map, SEO, you can put heat trackers, you could put conversion tracking on there. You could go to the 10th degree. So I say, number one, Google loves WordPress. Number two, try to figure out ways to build something that can scale with time. That's on a really, really nice adaptive thing that WordPress grows and make it so that you don't need to change it in three years. I think too many times people go and they build something on one of these cheap websites that they do it themselves. And then all of a sudden,

no one can work on it. So I say something that's going to be mobile friendly, very, very good that you can add content to. I spend right around 15 grand a month on my website right now. So who cares about what I pay to get it up? How much can I put into it? How easy is it to do? But that's another tough question.

One of the questions we had is your callers use a dialer to work old leads in the database such as five nine i've talked about this before actually quite a bit going back and forth on this we decided not to we decided it was it was not good quality now pending that the amount of people you have to dial every single day it can optimize the obviously the pickup ratio for your people to have more meaningful conversations. So we have yet to actually move on it. We've talked about it a couple of times internally, but depending on how many people you have to call,

if your callers are literally like there's more opportunity coming in than we could ever handle and our only barrier is the fact that we keep getting people that we're calling that aren't picking up, then yeah, it's probably a useful thing to kind of look into. The reason we decided against it is we realized that our customer was going to know they were being prospect before we even got to say hi. Because of the way that the delay happens and just the people are tuned to this now. And we're like, we'd rather go quality over quantity. And that's the route we went. But I'm not saying that's the right answer because I've poked at this for a while.

So I would say some really, really easy, easy things are getting an opt-in from your past customers, trying to get an opt-in for the text message them. If you could get that. And then what I'd try to do is text message them and say, listen, I'd really like to speak with you. There's a few times that work for me. It's a Calendly link. I think we waste way too much time on programmatic dialers than we do just getting a hold of the customer on their convenience and then explain what the conversation is going to look like. And it can't be that threatening. And I just go back to things like active campaign that are super simple to set up.

And as long as we get up, I go through 10,000 customers a month, but if I could get back out there for tune-ups every year, and maybe not even on the service agreement, I think people just say, oh, if I don't have the service agreement, I can't get back out there. Man, every time I go back out to a past customer, there's, oh, you guys do garage door storage now. There's garage door flooring. Oh, they came out with a new garage door. There's all kinds of opportunities. I know companies who do not advertise at all in HVAC. They do $15 million. They just have their list and they serve up their list well. They mail to their list. I know another guy that does $800 million that doesn't even have wrapped trucks. $800 800 million he's got logos on the side of his trucks but they're not the dan

antonelli you know and i got there's guys like dan but that did the full wrap but i think it's important to do that but here's another one is there a formula for marketing versus branding for example if i spend 3 000 on pPC, how much should I spend on Facebook? I would say, make sure your website, make sure you got your Google My Business with a bunch of great reviews. Make sure that you've got your vehicle wrapped. Those are all branding. I don't necessarily think Facebook is as branding. You can make that direct response depending on what kind of ads you're doing. But I think by not having your vehicles wrapped, not having a good website, not having your stickers look like your coupons look like Your everything needs to interrelate to the brand

And then I would say, you know, even your shirts and then I would say What's going to happen on your pay-per-click and what's going to happen with all your other stuff? Is this going to have a higher conversion rate? It's going to have a higher click-through rate You're going to have a better quality score And when you're doing things like that, it makes a huge difference. Ken Goodrich told me he had a 4% click-through rate. He started doing TV and radio hardcore, wrapped his vans. He went to 63% click-through rate from 4%.

So branding helps you get noticed and gets you to choose you. And they say, I only want you to come out, Ken Goodrich, because I see your trucks everywhere and you guys are the most professional. And it raises your average ticket. I would just say, is this because of your OCD or is this because you actually see opportunity to do things better? What? I'm just saying it was like branding. I know a lot of people, including in our business internally and actually a lot of our members we work with, sometimes they're spending all this money on branding because it's an image thing or it's OCD. And they're just like, it just

doesn't feel and look right. I just want it to be right. And I'm like, cool. But is this for your customer and your marketplace? Or is this because you feel this internally? And that's okay that you feel this. It's probably like there's some merit to it, but go validate that merit. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I think a lot of people go, man, everybody talks about my trucks. Everybody sees my commercials. It must be working. merit do you know what i mean yeah no you're absolutely right i think a lot of people go man everybody talks about my trucks everybody sees my commercials it must be working oh your trucks look like shit and your billboard you've got 20 paragraphs on the billboard people can only read six words they're not reading your promo code they're not reading your phone number

i'm like oh my gosh their truck has everything they do in their business i mean i look at these window washing guys and power washing guys their shirts have everything they do literally power wash i'm speaking at their event and i go guys i can't even read your shirts that looks busy as hell i said no, but every one of you guys are wearing the rainbow and have every single thing that you do plugged. I'm like, I know you wash stuff. I think if I didn't wash them, calling you guys. I don't need to

know. Oh, you guys do porches? I had no idea. Oh, you guys do pool areas too? Who would have thought? You guys do roofs? Holy cow. It's like... Actually, the same guy that brand 100 got junk and he helped with the um igor built shakshan window cleaning prior to doing bta with me and yeah they're window cleaning they're power washing their east trough cleaning they're

all those things right and they spent a lot of time thinking what is it that we do you know what they came up with house detailing done and it explained the whole thing people got it in one sentence easy to read quick to pick up and really explain something different than another power washing company right people understand car detailing but who's house detailing yep yeah you know this is the kind of stuff i live for. I get this all the time and I love podcasts, but the people like this, because these are real questions people are getting. And I'll just tell you the books I've been reading and the things I've been learning and the questions that I go and seek out and I get answers to. Here's an interesting thing, Danny,

that people don't know is most private equity companies are not interested in buying your building. They will if you really want, but they're not in the real estate game. So if you could buy all your locations after you make a deal with equity or with capital venture, whatever venture capital, they'll pay you 1.6 times because you get a 10-year lease on it. But that'll be a real estate investor. There's all these little things out there that I'm learning that are like, this is why the rich get richer. I'm learning about these new write-offs. I'm learning about these new things to add on. And I'm going, what, how's that even possible? It's crazy. But the curious minds, the guys that are on here, they're watching, they're thirsty. They're listening to podcasts that are reading.

I can't tell you enough, Danny, you don't read because I've asked you many times. No, I know. But listen, you watch a lot of stuff and you like learning in different ways. I find it hard to get a lot of people on my team to read. I don't know what it is. I guess I'm just so thirsty for knowledge and I'm just obsessed even with audibles. It just doesn't make sense to me. What do I do here because i just

read a book oh man the ideal team player and then and the same author patrick leozi or loni whatever it is uh he wrote the five dysfunction of a team and like that book changed my life just reading both those books and i'm just trying to share that with people and what do you do when they don't want to read like it's hard what do you you do? Do you just go over like a synopsis with the people? I mean, how do you deal with that? I mean, I'll tell you how I feel. So I, yeah, I can't read very well, very slow for me. And I don't take information super well when I read.

I have to read out loud to even like remember anything that I read. So people always recommend books to me, always. And I don't read any of them. And I almost feel bad about it sometimes where I've gotten to the point where i started telling people like look i don't actually read a ton of books and what i've realized is what comes out of that is like can you explain to me what you're trying to get across and take time and i just take time to understand people and it takes more time on your end when you're excited about a new idea that you read in a book but to compartmentalize those ideas into to thoughts or statements or exercises

or examples, I think helps a lot of people who aren't reading be able to take that and run with it, right? Like my example of write a list of everything you do, circle it, circle stuff that's high time consumption, low skill, like that helps somebody understand the concept of priority management super quickly and do something about it. That's how I learned. I'm very tactile. I'm very hands-on. I like to watch and read and understand things. I love having conversations with people. I take a lot from that. And everyone, like you said earlier, everyone learns differently and that's okay. So I bought this book for five guys on my team and I wrote on there, this book is designed to make you a badass. And then on every page that I liked, I either highlighted or wrote a note into the different things.

Literally, look, this is page whatever. So I won't lie to you. I did the first one, and I'd read you the rest of them. But the kind of stuff that I'm talking about, man, is it's like, I can'm like i'm gonna make everybody around me so freaking smart but you made me really smart just having a podcast and just all the stuff you've taught me so danny i appreciate you being on this so much fun this is always a blast i love these q a's great questions guys means a lot to me that we can help answer some questions. And some of them are just not black and white.

They're all perception and experience, and there's no wrong answer. I think really what it is is to frame these questions as much as possible of your exact scenario of where you're at in life and your business. And the more we can help you out in your day-to-day of where you're at today will help. But do you want to close this out? There's some thoughts. I'm just thinking about where you're at today will help. But you want to close this out with. This is some thoughts. I'm just thinking about what you're saying with all these questions. Everybody has,

I think there's a lot of power in life to being confident in your opinion and being able to move on the things you feel are right. And I think that what makes that opinion even more powerful is, is adding educated risk to things. So there's blind risk, which is like, I'm just going to do it. Cause I think I'm right. And I think I'm the best I'm going to go, which there is a lot of value to that actually. And it

gets a lot of shit done in the world when a lot of people are too afraid to get anything done. But I think if you can add to that opinion, an educated risk, which means I now understand my KPIs. I now understand the patterns and I can see them coming in beyond just my gut. You can put those two things together, you can be a pretty powerful entrepreneur. And I think those are two just like very good things to hold on to. I've always said like, as long as my heart, sorry,

my heart and my head are agreeing, right? The knowledge and the logic agrees with my gut and intuition that I know it's something to go for. So. It's killer work, man. Danny,

really appreciate coming on. I'll be in touch with you this week. I'm actually traveling at Wednesday to go visit my sister in Florida. The other kids are there, her kids. So can't wait to just get out of town and actually have some fun with family. We're going golfing twice, going to be swimming. Don't think I'm not going to be making phone calls out there because I can't live without talking to the entrepreneurial spirits out there.

But appreciate your time today. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And I'll be in touch. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Tommy. Appreciate you. 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

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