The Home Service Expert Podcast - Leveraging Outsourced Solutions To Grow Your Business Faster

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Charlie Felker is the co-founder of Free2Grow, a company that provides back office support to service-based companies to allow owners and operators to focus on growing their business. An expert in home service management, leadership and entrepreneurship, he has also co-founded several other companies, such as RFP Testing and HBM Holdings. In this episode, we talked about outsourcing, CRM, hiring...

So it's getting the entrepreneur, the owner-operator to take a step back and say, well, if you want to be the best in your particular, if you want to be the best painter in Toledo or general contractor or roofer, whatever it is, you've got to remove yourself from the business and focus on what it is that you can add the most value to that business. It may be sales, it may be quoting jobs, whatever it is, they just can't do it all. Maybe it's sustainable, maybe you have to do it for the first period of time, I get it. We've kind of all been in those shoes. But you've got to graduate from that. And I think the really good entrepreneurs just delegate, they outsource stuff like we do for free to grow. And then they have a mission and they're just so focused on what it is that's mission critical. And they just go nuts at that. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I'm your host, Tommy Mello. And today, I have my good buddy, Charlie Felker. He's an expert in entrepreneurship, home service management leadership. He's based out of St. Louis. His company is called Free to Grow. He's the co-founder from 2019 to present. In the past, he was the co-founder of RFP Testing, and then HBM Holdings Corporate Development Associate before that. It's a company that provides back office support to service-based companies, allowing the owners and operators to focus on their customers and growing their businesses. Free to Grow offers its customers the services of a full-time office manager at half of what it would cost to hire someone full-time. It provides team support with its cross-trained staff.

Charlie, exciting to have you here, brother. Tommy, I love being on. And I know we are now kind of official partners and I can't tell you how excited I am. My business partner in our team is to be affiliated with you and home service expert and really glad to be on, man. And it was a thrill to be out and see you in person several months ago. So yeah, man, it's really cool. I like what you're doing with this because we were talking before this started about just A1's growth. And I got to tell you, there's a lot of things that get in the way of a business

when you're a smaller business. You just don't have the manpower. Everybody says, how do I find an assistant? How do I find someone good? I call it an integrator. And how do they find their first integrator? And you guys are helping solve that problem. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Free to Grow, about what you've been doing the past couple of years and just what your goals are?

Yeah, I'd love to. And you're right. Before we went live, we're talking about hiring. And I'm certainly an entrepreneur. In 2015, I kind of went and became an entrepreneur. I was in the military before that and certainly took a lot of lessons I learned in the Army and have kind of seniors age in place through a combination of equipment and construction and grew that business. Ended up acquiring a similar type business in western New York and cobbled those businesses together and collectively sold them right before I started free to grow. So this is late 2019. And so naturally, when you go through the selling process and you're so focused on value and what's your business worth to somebody else, you spend a lot of reflection on the past five years and things that you could have done better. And I got to tell you, Tommy, one of the things that I felt we didn't do well, and it probably wasn't a knock on us,

it's just kind of an old school way of thinking is feeling like I had to have somebody in a chair as an office manager or CSR. And so that kind of thought was really a driver for when my business partner, Nathan, and I got free to grow off the ground was saying, you know what? Most home service companies probably don't need a full-time eight-hour-a-day individual sitting behind a computer screen, answering phones, managing CSRs, scheduling, dispatching, et cetera. So that's exactly what Free2Grow does. So with our home service partners, we take on that virtual, if you want to call it that, office management piece.

With my previous company, it was frustrating. I'd often go in the office and it wasn't a knock on my previous company, it was frustrating. I'd often go in the office and it wasn't a knock on my employees, but it just wasn't a full-time gig. And I've come to realize that really good entrepreneurs, owner-operators deploy their capital really well. And man, I got to tell you, if I would have had something like Free to Grow, I could have taken that $25,000, $30 30 K of annual savings and parlayed that, you know, with better advertising, reinvestment and better employees, or just putting it in my own pocket or, you know, acquiring other businesses. There's a lot of ways that I could have spent that money

accrued over five years better than what we did. So I'm really excited about free to grow. I've got a great business partner. We've got a great team in St. Louis and are growing really quickly. So there's been times in the past, we use a secondary call center. If we don't get to it, it's a VoIP service that just basically, it doesn't round robin and eventually ends up to them because we want to get our stuff answered. And one day we had the idea of just going, hey, why not let this call center handle all of our calls? And it was the biggest mistake ever because they didn't know the business well enough. They're good kind of fall back, but you know, what size is the perfect size business to get involved in? How far do you guys go? I mean, do you learn new CRMs?

Break it down to me. Yeah, we do. And I know for you personally, finding the right CRM is important for small businesses. So we, with all of our clients, we'll use different CRMs. We'll typically use the CRMs they have in place. Although we've gotten familiar with the whole spectrum of the CRMs that are out there and certainly recommend, you know, more than others. We'll circle back to that, but go ahead. Absolutely. So we'll completely integrate with their CRM. We'll take on answering their phones. We'll develop a script that works for them and their business, you know, lead, customer follow-up, email follow-up. And again, I come at this from a unique angle that I was in that entrepreneur's chair. And I know when you spend money on ad campaigns

and you're staring at that lead, when it comes in, you want it followed up quickly. So I get that sense of urgency. And so, yeah, I mean that, that full spectrum from answering the phone, we're way more than just a call center. So answering the phone, you know, we get to know our clients. And so we certainly don't have all the answers, but nine times out of 10, when a customer calls, we're going to be able to have an answer for that customer on the spot and not put the customer on hold. And you know how that goes, that those leads just kind of go away. So call intake, you know, processing the lead and CRM, scheduling the client, kind of getting an idea of pricing,

screening clients, that whole spectrum of services is just you know what you got me thinking here about a one a one-off thing would be kind of setting up like asking the customer what their overall experience was and asking them to go leave a review because we award the technicians that get the reviews another thing that's follow-up i've got a huge list in service titan of just stuff that quite honestly it's embarrassing but we don't get to it enough there's also dialing for dollars getting back to that yearly membership dialing out saying hey it's been a year since we've been out there can you guys do anything and everything offshoot of what maybe would be just a conventional call

booking yeah we do again, we have a base, we call them growth partners, get to know our clients. And our growth partners are going to manage not a huge variety of clients, but a small select group with the intent of getting to know that business. And so if we're doing outbound calls, our clients can be rest assured that the person that's calling knows their business. We're not just sliding a script in front of them saying, hey, call these 10 numbers. There can be some back and forth with our growth partners and the outbound call. So we can book something, we can give them rough pricing, scheduling, leave a Google review. Some of our best success stories is when we look at local national clients where we say, you know what, when you

started, you know, revenues gone up like this, you know, call answering rates up like this, your Google reviews went from 40 to 100. You know, I was looking before I joined of one of our best success stories with TreeCare client. And it's kind of all the above their revenues up over 80% profitability is way up, the reputation management went from X to 2X. All those types of things is how we say, man, mission accomplished. And you wouldn't even know it wasn't free to grow when you call these clients. I love that. You guys are inserting yourselves a lot more than a conventional answering service. Yeah. Answering services, they can be great. And it's certainly not one size fits all. But I think they kick the can down the road for a lot of entrepreneurs.

You know, when I was just starting my company back in 2015, 2016, we had an answering service. And it was frustrating because you get home at 5 o'clock and you have eight to-dos with, okay, this person called and they want this. And you're like, well, you know, it really doesn't help me focus on growing the business. I know I've got to go call those eight people. In the explanation here, and you talked a lot about it, a part-time versus full-time, what happens if someone needs, they're just like, dude, you know, Charlie is, his company's better than me at hiring and getting this office staff. Is there any thing that you'd say, shoot, I can't take on a 200 technician company because that's going to take, I mean, how do you look at stuff like that?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know what that revenue threshold is. There's certainly companies, when I saw your business, for example, where I go and done tours of large HVAC or plumbing businesses, there's certainly companies that need eight to 10 CSRs or whatever. So we would not be a fit for that. Okay. But everything less than that, I would say we would be even down to the, you know, small power washers or individual painting companies. It's highly cost-effective and it's not a one size fits all pricing. We've gone down where it can be a thousand dollars a month for clients that most companies can afford that, especially when you consider the alternative of putting somebody on payroll and you got to manage

them and they want benefits. There's absolutely no PTO and there's probably a 10% absenteeism rate. You know, there's no sick days for us. Yeah, there's cigarette breaks. You know, what I just learned about, I'm a big fan of use your PTO, use it or lose it, but you can't do that in the state of Arizona. The reason why I say use it or lose it is because I want them to take a vacation. I want them to spend family time. I want that refresher. And that's so stupid that they don't allow us to do it.

I mean, these regulations are ridiculous. I want to jump into CRMs because I've worked with a lot of CRMs. Service time is our fifth one. And I don't think service time is a great fit for everybody. I hate to say that because I'm a big advocate of theirs. People actually thought I worked there at one point. And this guy I was talking to about buying out, he goes, well, why would I ever get on that? You'd have access to my data.

I'm like, I don't own service. I wish it's a company. But, you know,'ve worked with with the christmas light business they use a house called pro and i've used different things i've used at torah i've used pro business tools i've used a lot different things for different things i personally use salesforce i've used uh right now we're looking at a lot of other things too on top of we're using hubspot right now we're using this other one called uh what is it called high level go high level which is amazing by the way but i think that a lot of people they choose their crm just because

it's the first one they found and the people answered. I don't think they really know how to, a sophisticated company should use a very advanced CRM. I mean, for example, we have 4,400 call tracking numbers in the service type. So we really are able to analyze the advertising and I've been able to renegotiate a dozen times over. It sounds like to me, sometimes you get the clients to switch because they're probably using primitive software. So let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it's a great question, complicated one. And certainly I recommend when I have conversations with future clients to do their diligence when selecting a CRM. And there are CRMs, the jobbers. When I sold my company, I was working with a CRM called

BuilderTrend. And this is another frustration that I had. Another reason why my partner and I started Free2Grow was, you know, we were using probably like 20% of that, of BuilderTrend's capabilities and spending on the more expensive side. But long story short, we were utilizing, you know, 20% of a very complicated CRM system and probably could have used something for the inputs that we needed much more simple, like a LACRM or even a Jobber. So, you know, Jobber, for example, is one where one of our first clients that liked it and had it integrated was one that we found was easy to use, cost-effective, could cover a variety of industries, you know, from tree care, lawn care, general contractors, et cetera. So Jobber is certainly one that we really like. Have you gone and talked to the CEO and said, listen,

we've already got a lot of success with your clients. I got to tell you, the health center I work with, and I work with a lot of different clients, but they're pros at service titan. So service titan feeds them leads. So, you know, you get in good with Jobber and get some references from, you know, we're going good with job or get some references from, you know, we're going to be working with you at a couple of different capacities, but that could be. Oh, I certainly agree. And I think at the end of the day, though, the entrepreneurs got to do your, your diligence. There's so many out there on these CRMs and so many, so many CRMs and target specific industries. So it's not hard to do a quick Google search and

find the top three to five. I will say this at the end of the day, it's not hard to do a quick Google search and find the top three to five. I will say this, at the end of the day, it's kind of garbage in, garbage out with CRMs. I mean, and we were more on the garbage outside with my former business, using 20% of it and just a total waste. And again, with Free to Grow, having somebody that's going to be on the intake side, taking that customer data and immediately transferring it over to your CRM system. So the entrepreneur at the end of the day knows exactly what activities were logged. That's valuable. Oh, it is. I know our conversion rate. I know what our average ticket is today. I know what, yeah, our booking rate is. I know where we're at today, what we're trending towards. It's amazing. I got a little command station here. You know, something really interesting is to do what you guys are doing, you got to be good at

hiring. And right now it's a weird time. I pride myself and this company and the people that work here. We're just really, really good at finding amazing people. And my next class is going to be about 25 people, technicians. And I've got a ratio for every certain amount of techs I need a dispatcher, for every certain amount of techs I need a CSR. And we've been really, really figuring out ways to get lots and lots and lots of people and build just a way to train them and hold them accountable and build their pay structures. But I'd love to hear your perspective because everybody, everybody you talk to, and I'm sure you're hearing it every day is how do I get more great people? I need more guys. You know, a lot of times they go, I don't need more leads.

I already got enough leads. I just need more people. What is your, well, let me say, so when I, when I went and toured your shop within 30 seconds, you can tell there was great culture, okay? People were hopping around. Nobody's slow walking. Everybody kind of had a mission. And you can tell people were incentivized correctly, okay? And I think we're aligned with how you do that. And culture, you can't fake it.

So that was obvious the second I walked in, that that was there for you guys. And so that certainly helps when you hire people. And I think it's the same with our culture. We tell future employees this, that, look, you're going to be the quarterback. You're going to be the back office driver for these hustling small business owners throughout the country. And for the right people, that's exciting. And if they can't get excited about that, then there's probably not a place for people at Free to Grow. So that's really been our big driver.

Our litmus test is if this individual through face-to-face interactions and our interview process, if we can't get a sense that they're not going to want to take onus for being a driver, a true growth partner for our clients, it's not going to be a fit. So there's got to be that natural drive to want to help our partners grow. And if not, that's okay. But that's really who we're looking for. Where are you finding them?

Like, here's the deal. I spent a long time, and I actually got to go talk to Bree about this, but if you look at my Indeed or Glassdoor, it's amazing. Everything's filled out. Every video that I can put a video every single link about us we've got 155 reviews a four and a half star i also do a lot of craigslist postings i also just started becoming absolutely freaking amazing with the help of some buddies on facebook instagram and we're getting ready to do tiktok and i'm going

to make him available for everybody down the line, but you know, a couple hundred applications a day and we've got a whole system. And I'm curious to hear where you're finding people and any tips you have, because I think that's everybody, it's on everybody's mind right now. This is a compliment for, I think our culture and something that my partner and I have tried to build. All of our hires have been kind of organic, okay? Have been people that we brought on and they'll go and talk to their friends and say, you know what, I'm working for a fast-growing business that really care about their clients and, you know, can I get a piece of that? All the hires that we've made that haven't worked out, I hate to say it, have been straight from that kind of Indeed network.

And not to say that there aren't great people out there. There certainly are. But when we get a warm, organic referral from existing employees, even if we don't have an immediate fit for that, we will make that work just with our experience. Look, we can have them train for more time than we typically do, et cetera, but we'll figure out a way to retain those people. From our experience, those have been the best. We've got a really good referral program. We get $1,500 to the people that get referrals. One guy made $7,500 in a quarter. That's something that I

think most people need to take advantage of, compensate their people for that, but always build the culture of, Hey, we're looking for somebody. We're looking for somebody. Every time we have pizza here, I'm like, go live on your Facebook and you get 1500 bucks,

you know, and here's the key indeed monster zip recruiter, all these places, people go there when they're unemployed, looking for a job, or maybe they're looking to make a change, but Facebook, Instagram, all social places, people go there when they're unemployed looking for a job, or maybe they're looking to make a change. But Facebook, Instagram, all social media, they're on there already. And they might go from a job to a career. They might say the grass is greener and they might come over. So I just think you could get a lot more people in places. The average TikTok user,

which is crazy to me, is on there 58 minutes a day. It's pretty interesting stuff. Tell me a little bit about your military background and how that's helping your business. Yeah, so I'm a West Point graduate, class of 2006. We have our 15th year reunion coming up. Was commissioned as an infantry lieutenant with the 82nd Airborne. Did a couple years with them. And then I tried out and was accepted to the 3rd Ranger Battalion at Fort Benning and got out in 2011 and moved back to St. Louis, you know, went to business school and then became an entrepreneur. But, you know, the biggest takeaways, I think getting it done, that kind of attitude, especially with some of

the more aggressive units like the 82nd and 3rd Ranger Battalion. And I think you'll find this with kind of some athletes. But in the military, especially when I was serving, you know, typically you're deployed downrange. And you had kind of a series of left and right ranges that you had to get done. You had your mission set. And then it was like, OK, Lieutenant, go get it done. You know, call me in a year and hopefully you had it done. So I think that kind of attitude stayed with me. Certainly some tough lessons along the way.

I had a great commander who hated three foot wall issues. He called it a three foot wall. And that's always stuck with me where it's, you present an issue and it's, well, that's a three-foot wall. It's something you should probably figure out and climb over. And I love that expression. And I think a lot of people hit a three-foot wall and don't get over it. And, you know, as owner-operators and entrepreneurs, you see these issues every day. And you've got to turn that little wall into an opportunity. Good weeks, bad weeks, et cetera.

It's just you've got to get over it. I love that mentality. And I've got to turn that little wall into an opportunity. Good weeks, bad weeks, et cetera. It's just, you've got to get over it. I love that mentality. And I've got a mentality myself. And I don't know if all of my colleagues here share the same attitude towards it, but we've been having a lot of supply chain issues. And I said, good, I hope they get worse. And they looked at me like, what the hell's wrong with you?

Do you realize there's fires every day? And I go, go if we're struggling other people are going out of business and i said this is just an opportunity if you look at every that you would put three foot wall i said the more barriers to entry the better because we're going right through them we're going right through the barriers and uh you know ray crock i love this expression and and i'm not an asshole for saying this because he's got it ray crock said when your enemies and and i'm not an asshole for saying this because he said it ray crock said when your enemies are drowning stick a hose in their mouth yeah i don't necessarily i don't care what my competitors are doing i don't focus on them but it's an interesting concept and i agree with you we're really actively going after military people believe it or not because

they're regimented background checks are good they don't they're not drug users they got most of the time a good driving record and they understand the chain of command and um there's just like in anything else there's good and bad some of them may not be as great as others and there's tax incentives there's all kinds of free money out there uh we're working with a military recruiter when these guys come back if they were honorably discharged the military will give you 10 grand to get them in a job. There's all kinds of programs out there. I'm a big believer in that stuff. I don't know. Do you have anybody that works for you? At my previous company, we had a lot of veterans and there was good and bad. That's a subject that's near and dear to my heart. I think there's a lot of veterans that will fill roles with companies and just be

exemplary employees for all the reasons that you stated, the discipline, the work ethic, the selflessness, the overcoming the three foot walls, and just kind of getting it done attitude. It is there, certainly. It's interesting. One thing that I just took from what you said, and it's everything that I go after as an athlete. You know, I was doing my orientation. My orientation lasts three hours with no potty breaks. And the guys go potty. But I go three hours, and I'm just up there, and I'm making eye contact, and I'm up in the end grill.

And I go, the reason I love athletes or somebody that had to play the symphony or somebody that just whatever it is that you had to do, because we practiced five days a week for one one day to compete and i'm a big big fan of coaching coaching practicing practicing ride-alongs never gets old to me and i just said i want more i want more and more and more i want to record it all i want you to watch yourself and i want you to be like this when the time comes when the when you're actually playing the game and this has got to win you know my one of my core values is the second one here is is aspire to be number

one and that's the kind of mentality of an athlete we want to win i don't play games to i do have fun but i play to win in everything i do and i think the true competition comes from athletes i agree and i think with some, you know, a lot of athletes, you find kind of a complete person, you know, they put themselves out there. There's been failure, but they just seem to, to get it done. Yeah. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Charlie. I just wanted to let you know that we have a special offer from Charlie's company free to grow that I want to share with you today. So stick with us till the end and I'll reveal exactly how to take advantage of it.

But if you're in a rush, just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash podcast forward slash Charlie dash Falkner, F-E-L-K-E-R, and check out this exclusive offer that we put together just for our listeners. Okay, now let's continue the chat with my boy, Charlie. I'm sure you deal with objections that you encounter from entrepreneurs when it comes to outsourcing. What are some of the common objections and what is your answer to those? The most frequent thing is we see entrepreneurs who want to do it all, especially with the

smaller, more unsophisticated companies. You know, they started they started it's their baby they have to answer every phone they've got to talk to every customer submit every quote follow up with every job schedule everything and i think those are the same entrepreneurs that i think if i called him or her a year from now they'd probably be in the same spot, to be candid. And we have a lot of those conversations. So it's getting the entrepreneur, the owner-operator to take a step back and say, well, if you want to be the best in your particular, if you want to be the best painter in Toledo or general contractor or roofer, whatever it is, you've got to remove yourself

from the business and focus on what it is that you can add the most value to that business. It may be sales, it may be quoting jobs, whatever it is, they just can't do it all. Maybe it's sustainable. Maybe you have to do it for the first period of time. I get it. We've all been in those shoes, but you've got to graduate from that. I think the really good entrepreneurs just delegate the outsource stuff like we do for free to grow. And then they have a mission and they're just so focused on what it is that's mission critical. And they just go nuts at that. And prioritize. They prioritize. Yeah. And really just, I tell entrepreneurs with smaller businesses, I say, look,

I want you to buy a scheduler, an old-fashioned one with every hour. And I want you to write down what your five things, the big things you need to get done today. Big things, not just the small things. I like little wins, but I want you to focus on every time your time gets taken from you and write those down and then create a role the biggest time sucks in your day we need to get that covered we need to have a role email is a huge time step i don't even look she prints everything out and i know i waste some paper but i'll get a stack here's a stack from earlier right all these and this means i went through it and read it. This means we need to do a zoom. Yes.

Willing to look at the investment. You know, all these things get handled very easily. And, you know, I've always got to refine that and redo it. But I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, they find themselves. I have a rule of thumb. I figured out what I made per hour last year. And I pretty much, unless I absolutely enjoy, thoroughly enjoy whatever, cleaning the toilet or mowing the lawn or whatever it is, unless I thoroughly enjoy it,

and it's like spiritual or whatever, meditation for me, I'm not going to do those tasks. Only one I would like to do that I can't do is my lawyers are freaking ridiculously expensive. But I think a lot of times they work in their business instead of on their business, the old Michael Gerber type stuff. You know, you mentioned dollars per hour and that we've brought that discussion up. So we have talked to entrepreneurs and say, you know what, for you to work with free to grow is going to cost you, let's say just 10 bucks an hour. Is that really what you think you're worth is $10 an hour?

I hope not. They don't know, but that can get them thinking about. It's a lot of it giving up control and they go i would have booked that call and there's an opportunity cost to them doing everything and i don't think they have understood that i'm more involved with high level decisions now and you know i just got off a meeting that i i got this thing online it's a meeting app and you put in the average amount per hour i I put in $45. We've got executives in there. There's only like 10 of us. And if you take $45, just say it was $60 an hour for easy 60, 60 minutes in an hour, that's a buck an hour from 10 people. That's 10

bucks an hour. That meeting for an hour was 600 bucks. And you add it all up. And I'm a big, big fan of off-sourcing because you don't have to pay you don't have to worry about payroll issues there's so many things and as long as you've got checks and balances and i don't know is there like a kpi dashboard or anything that you guys kind of like yeah we do probably in the crms but yeah exactly yeah so the crms will have them you know we also can pull call data, et cetera. And we have high standards for that stuff. And that's a systems question, too, is how do we leverage technology to implement this? You know, the best systems for these entrepreneurs. So, you know, they know from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

There's going to be a systems that we follow every day, day in and day out. No vacation days. Have you ever heard of call cap? I've not heard of call cap. No. I want to introduce you to my friend. Her name is Susie. And they've got a thing called call assurance. And they'll actually listen to every single call for a set fee. And they'll tell you if it was booked or not. They'll actually find out questions, tonality, everything like that. And you can get call tracking numbers from them. And it's a great way to add on to certain CRMs that don't have that stuff built into it. And their teams are in the Philippines and different countries like that. But all they're doing is listening to the call and saying that you get all this reporting done. I'm looking at buying a business here in the next two months, and I've got an LOI.

And the owner said, what is your plan? What are you going to do? How much are you going to change? And I go, I'm going to rebuild your website. I'm going to work a lot on your marketing, put call tracking into everything and find out if we're wasting some money in marketing because the percentage is a little higher than I like. And I said, number two is we're going to start tracking on an individual level, almost everything. And I don't know what I'm going to do until 90 days into it, but I'm probably going to put you on a round robin that the best call booker in your company, and I'm going to add

some of mine, gets the opportunity to book the call first if they're available, because we do a paid performance on the CSR level. And the guys that have the best ticket average and conversion rates and five-star customer service are going to be running probably four or five jobs while the other guys are going to be running two to three. Just simple little things, but I'm not going in and changing a bunch. I'm going to take your two most middle of the pack, but eager to learn. And I want to bring them through our training program. And I want your veterans to see what happens when they get trained properly for two months. And I said, I just, I don't want to come in. And I'd rather than not even know almost that we're the owner, they're going to switch CRMs, you know, consider us partners. And that's

the mentality I have. A lot of great owners out there that are still, still doing the work, still doing the day to day. And the question I'd ask any of these entrepreneurs if there was a big i'm doing a big speech i'd say listen i'm gonna pay for us to go to hawaii i've covered everything i'm taking your wife your kids the dog we're taking it all i'm gonna pay for all the booze the food i'm gonna pay for the volcano tours to swim with the dolphins the only request i have is we're doing this tonight we're bringing everybody tonight and you cannot do any work. You're allowed to look at your CRM, but you're not delegating, hiring, you're not doing anything. How does your business look when we get back a month from now? And very, very, very, very few people can say they're not walking into a firestorm.

And that's, you know, that's a huge value for what Free to Grow does. I mean, that's one of our big litmus tests is if an owner can go to Florida or Hawaii for a week and check their CRM, you know, before they have evening cocktails and the business is running and sales estimates are getting booked and, you know, Google reviews are getting solicited, et cetera. That's our core mission. And I will say this, you know, talking about buying and selling businesses, you know, having bought a business and sold a business, there's a lot of owner operators out there that decrease their value when they're doing all the above. Okay. Because if you're a sophisticated buyer and you're like, well, I can buy your business, but now I got

to, I don't want to take all the phone calls. I got to do all this stuff versus I've got a company like free to grow in place and all those systems are there. And all I need to do is go out and find more strategic partners or whatever it is that I'm good at. Well, there's a, that hinders a lot of businesses. You know, here's what you got to do. How much do you do and how many people do I need to hire that? So I look at these businesses all the time and I'm like, your business is only worth your phone number, your phone number. I'll give you, I'll give you a percentage of every lead we get. That's how I want to buy your company because it's not a business.

Everything evolves around you and that's not a business. So what I try to do each and every year is pull myself out more and more and more. I'm building a business that will be sellable. There's a great book called built to sell. And that should be your goal. I mean, a lot of people think that real estate is the most... I was listening to Grant Cardone the other day, and this is an interesting concept. I just want to share it while we're on this topic, is he said, homes were not meant to be the American dream. He goes, now in the 50s,

some banks were out there going, man, for every dollar we loan out, for every dollar we get to come in and all the loans we do, we get to loan out nine. Every dollar we get to come in, we need to create an American dream. We need to create mortgage-backed homes. And it's crazy because the land that they say the house is probably your best asset, but really, in my opinion, your best asset is hopefully your business. say the house is probably your best asset, but really, in my opinion, your best asset is hopefully your business. Because my business is probably worth right now about 14 times the EBITDA. We're going to be right around $10 million this year.

So $140 million, I mean, I don't have a house worth even close to that. But also, we've got a plan, and it decides. If you ever look up Subway, they had their first store, I think, for 20 some odd years. And then it's just hockey stick, man. It goes like this. And then it just goes like this. KFC opens a new store every eight hours. I just talked to my manager.

I said, we're going to go visit one of these companies, whether it's QT in Tulsa, Quick Trip, wherever we go, I want to go to a fast growing company outside of home service. And I want to find out the roles that they've created for this type of growth and see what happens with it. What's your take on that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's so helpful. I take my trip to come see you, and it's so helpful to come see other businesses in different markets that are doing things exceptionally well. My partner and I make a point of doing that frequently. And I think another takeaway,

and I know you talk a lot about this, is building a support network of peer leaders or thought leaders, or just a network of people that are smart and capable that you can learn from. I think a lot of entrepreneurs isolate themselves and think they'll figure it out, or chances are there's somebody that's been through the problem you've experienced and you can leverage their, their

expertise. Too many entrepreneurs go it alone. And that's a big mistake. I look at all the books behind you and your appetite for reading and listening to people and active listening. And, you know, you've done a great job of that. And it's something we try to do as well. I read so many self-help books. I just ordered this book the other day. It's not self-help. It's The Lost Treasures in American History. I used to like when a kid, my dad bought something from Sam's Club.

It was a treasure like guide. And it was talking about all these places that there's supposedly treasures. And it's fascinating to me. But yeah, reading. I told this new orientation as i said take your five closest friends if they'll tell you take their income add it all up divided by five you're usually within 20 unless you break away and you start reading because if you read steve jobs every day there's a good chance you're going to gain knowledge and that will eventually

gain wealth you know wealth is an interesting word because it means making money when you're going to gain knowledge and that will eventually gain wealth. You know, wealth is an interesting word because it means making money when you're not working. And, you know, I used to be a one-man army, man. I was flipping Bowflexes. I'd buy the Bowflexes on Craigslist and sell them in Arizona Republic. And I flipped over 200. Then I started doing total gyms. I was doing vehicles and I can make a lot of money. But one day I went on a vacation and I didn't make any money. I just spent money. And I said, this is not the way to do it. It's not the way to do it.

And I love what you're doing with outsourcing. I'm curious to know with all the experience in building and selling home service-based businesses, do you got any like stories of entrepreneurs just being able to scale because of your service? I mean, I mentioned the tree care business that is in our backyard. That's just grown close to 90%. We've seen the reputation management double and the big success or part of that is the money they've saved. So my last year when I ran my old company, this is 2018, 2019, right before I sold it that year, I went through four office

managers. And so when I went back and looked at how much time and money I spent to hire these four people and have them not work out and then end up selling my business that same year, I'm like, man, what could I have pocketed or how could I put that money to better use? So when we go out and solicit kind of case studies and financial information from our clients, high level to say, great, this is working. It's just great to see him go turn that capital or leverage that capital at cost savings into more, you know, online leads or better salespeople, et cetera. And that's, that's really our big pitch is you're going to save a lot on the office admin. We're going to have a team in place that's going to know your

business. We're going to answer your phone. We're going to dispatch. We're going to help you sell. We're going to book. We're going to solicit reviews. We're going to help you with outbound calls, with customer lists, all that stuff. You started this, you know, tree care, lawn care, contracting business, plumbing, whatever it is to do that, not to do what we do. Okay. Yeah. We've got a lot of success stories, but most of them revolve around that cost savings and taking all that back office stuff off their plate so they can go, you know, be an entrepreneur that's growth minded. I think there's clients that we will shy away from that aren't necessarily growth minded. Okay. We have a hard time selling people in our services that just are stagnant. Okay. And I'm not sure we want to work with

people like that to be candid. No, it's a time suck and it's a really drains you. It's just, they say it's the 80, 20 rule too. It's, you waste your time with the wrong people. People used to ask me what my avatar was. And I said, anybody with a garage door. But now I'm like, you know, I don't know if my avatar lives in ValPak as much as it used to. I don't know if they're coupon shoppers. I like the people that just go, I want it done right. I want it done today.

My dad always taught me you could have three things. You could have it done fast on their timeline. You could have it done cheap and you're going to get it done. Right. Pick two out of the three and you know, you pick right. You can't get all three. Yeah.

And it's interesting because I decided when I got into business, I wasn't going to be the cheapest. I wanted to be 24 seven, not even on Christmas. And I want to do it. So theirmas and i want to do it so their timeline and i want to do we've got trademarks we've got special parts we've got the nicest trucks we've got the best tools each guy today had to make a decision of a new nail gun that everybody needs to get it's 400 bucks and i'm like do we need it and they said 30 of our warranty calls

are good because of trim. Yeah. And I said, so what's the opportunity cost of not getting this? And it was, I mean, it's going to add a lot of money to the bottom line of what we got to spend. But the ROI is amazing. So callbacks go down, et cetera. Those kind of things, you know, look at those and make educated decisions. Interesting.

You know, I can think of a million ways I've already wrote down of ways to use your service. things you know look at those and make make educated decisions it's interesting you know i can think of a million ways i've already wrote down of ways to use your service if you're doing a home show and you got a great promotion a lot of times just give a great giveaway and then you might get 100 applicants to go through there you like for the prize the sweepstakes or whatever you're doing and just have your possibly someone like yourself your company calling those people because most of the time we do all these things and we have all the best intentions, but we just don't have the manpower to do it, to follow up. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of our clients have seasonal like leave for fall cleanups or Christmas lighting, for example. And so they want to get to those lists, you know, coming up here in September to start scheduling those.

And we've certainly done that in the past. I love it. I'm literally, I'm looking forward to going and talking to Angela and talking to you a little bit after this, because I've got just, you know, I don't always want to hire somebody to do these things. I'd rather it just be get somebody that's an expert. You know, we had a consultant in and and I was talking to my group the other day and they go, we think we're just growing so fast. Maybe we need to slow down because we got to get this stuff right. And one of the guys that works here now,

he said, Tommy, don't ever let anybody slow you down unless you're not giving them the resources they need. Because if I gave you unlimited employees and unlimited consulting and unlimited access to software, could you solve that problem? And if the answer is yes, and I'm not saying no to your requests, then there's issues. Like, tell me what you need to make this happen. We just worked on our six month, like I told you, six months. What does

our company look like in six months? What does the orange chart look like? And it's massive. And I said, okay, the next exercise, standard operating procedures, checklists, what the ad looks like, what their day looks like from nine to five, how we're going to compensate them. Let's come up with all these things. Then I want to make videos of each and every role. And I want to talk about the culture, the freedom. It's a career versus job. And I want them to all kind of resemble one another. Because when I looked, everyone had a different org chart. I was like, this is amazing, guys. But see, I didn't give the great instructions on what we needed to do. But if you really start thinking about the growth

of your business, and you're not outsourcing anything right now, you're crazy. I would tell anybody listening right now to start working on a list of things that they just don't get to. Or it might be just the CSR dispatch opportunity. When it comes to dispatching, you have no idea when you get density in the market, how much money you can save by great dispatching. What do you think about dispatching? Because you guys do that.

Is there, I think it's more of an art than a science and there's no wrong answer that me and you might do it differently, but we have our reasons for doing it. We think our clients, we're probably split in half between we're virtual. So we're not going to know the local market nearly as much as people, the driver or the general manager or technician will. Okay. But that won't stop us with certain technology that we can use that certain CRMs have, or we can do routing or whatever. So a lot of that depends on what the owner is comfortable with. I certainly think certain industries are easier than others for routing or dispatching. It's more advantageous for a business

like ours where like take tree care, we know they're going to be on a job for one or two days. That's much easier for us to plan for versus a quick turn. Let's say it's like a dumpster rental or a port-a-potty business. Those can be tougher because they're just quicker turns, and you've got to have kind of local tribal knowledge on those. So it's not a one-size-fits-all for dispatching or routing. What's your partner's name, Charlie? Nathan Keller. He's the best. Nathan and I grew up together. Yep, Nathan.

And we're super pleased with what we've built and where we're going. And, you know, we want to be the national leader in 2010 because I can trust them. My stepdad. In 2014, Adam was my integrator. And I found a really good integrator that I trusted that cared as much as I do. And tell me a little bit about you and Nathan. Because, see, I'm the visionary. I'm like, you know, everybody heard of Walt Disney. But his brother, Roy, is the one that knew what was in the bank account. He knew how to be the boots on the ground and get stuff done where Walt was up here living to the dream of what it looked like.

Disneyland at Disney world and how it all came together. And you need both a visionary and integrator. There's a book called rocket fuel that talks all about this book. How does your Nathan's kind of the yin and yang work? Yeah. Yeah. I think Nathan and i have been from the beginning extremely honest with each other and i think that's if you're going to have

a partnership you just got to keep communication flowing at all times so you know when we first started out we were both kind of doing the same thing okay and i think where i'm more focused on kind of the business development partner outreach Okay. And I think where I'm more focused on kind of the business development partner outreach and Nathan on the integration side, more of like a COO or operator. Okay. But you've got to communicate. And we certainly have some of the strengths that are similar. And we certainly know what our strengths and weaknesses are. Our best attribute as partners is communicating. We're with each other all the time. We work out together.

We get breakfast together every week. There's no sacred cows, okay? There's nothing that can't be discussed. I think when you start to conceal stuff or communication gets downgraded, that's where you have issues with partnerships, in my opinion. Yeah, that's a great one. There's a good book called Fierce Conversations. I think I got a book over here too that I don't know if I brought it home. Yeah, it's funny. I just bought

this one too. 120 Typical Conversations to Have with Employees. Yeah. I just forget that. You know, employees who's unable to work well with others. approach and it goes what to say how to approach them final tips pretty cool little book but you know my hr gal jen would be proud that i'm buying books like that you know we've talked about a lot of stuff here it still wants to reach out first of all when you're onboarding what are some things they need to be thinking about we want to know what their plans are um you talked about your org chart. I mean, we're going to want to know what their org chart is, how they operate, what makes them successful or what they think they need to be successful at. You know, certainly we're going to be, yeah, we're going to know, we're going to figure out

the technology. You know, we do that every day, all day. So we're going to figure out the call systems. We're going to figure out their CRM. We're going to figure out their dispatching, whatever that is. That's become second nature to us. It's kind of the intangibles. I mean, before we onboard a client, we kind of put together, I don't want to call it like their business model, but it's basically constantly evolving evolving document of call scripting, pricing, tonality is a big one. How would you want us to talk to your clients? It's a very unique approach

to these clients and we do it for every client. So the onboarding isn't just like a 24-hour deal. It typically takes us two to three weeks to onboard a client. This is a long game for us with our clients. It's just not a three-month gig. We're trying to be an extension of their business for years. So every client's different. Onboarding is very important. So a question I have is, when you've got the employees under your business, do you give ones kind of dedicated to certain businesses, or do kind of say anybody could handle this business? That would be tough to do. It's tough to do. I mean, and the way we're situated now, we'll probably have between one

to three people on a given account. But we recently promoted one of our early hires, Linda, who's now kind of overseeing all client relationships. So every client is going to have a point person that's going to know their business. And for the vast majority of time, when a client calls, that person is going to be answering their phone or in the CRM or managing their calendar, whatever it is. But, you know, there's going to be times where that person's on their lunch break or whatever, or they're on with another client. And we've got to have a secondary be able to pick up slack. So the team approach has been great. So long story short, they're going to have a client lead, but then there's going to be a team behind that person

that can support. What about outbound versus inbound? Some people specialize in just inbound. Do you feel like you guys could tackle both? Oh, we do tackle both. We'll do designated campaigns on the outbound side, especially if you have, let's say you did a big marketing push, your lawn care or whatever your business is, and you hung a bunch of flyers, door hangers, whatever it was, or you're marketing a bunch of commercial clients that you want to get. I mean, we can certainly reach out and make sure that those were received, who the decision makers are, whatever that client wants us to do. I don't think that's our bread and butter.

I think our bread and butter is more focused on the day-to-day kind of inbound, but then also following up the clients. Because we're going to have that engagement on the inbound side, but then be able to call that client and say, hey, you remember we spoke not long ago. So there's going to be more of a personal approach rather than some person you've never spoken to reaching out to you. So if I want to sign up or just have a conversation with you, Charlie, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, well, we just built I think it's live our landing page with you on there, Tommy. So are my contacts and foes on there? You know, Charlie at free to grow dot our landing page with you on there, Tommy. So my contacts info is on there. You know, charlie at freetogrow.com. Freetogrow.com is our website. You can certainly go on there. It's a great page. Thank you for your video. We have a weekly huddle, Tommy,

every Thursday and put you up on the big screen and everybody loves it. So yeah. Yeah. Free to grow. Free-2, the number 2-grow, right? That's it. Yep. Go on there. Call the number. It'll likely go to me or Nathan. And the number certainly that's on our landing page will go directly to me.

You know, we have a special on there. We cut the onboarding fees in half as a kind of honor for you and this partnership. And hopefully it'll let some owner operator pick up the phone and give us a call. We'd love to help you. I got a few more questions. I just need to brag because one of my guys, Dylan's on here said,

train us to get the best customer service out there. Create nothing but raving fans. I love that book, Raving Fans. Thanks, Dylan. Thanks for the shout out, brother. What are three books? You know, I'm a big book reader. What are the three books? And here's the deal. I've been shout out, brother. What are three books? I'm a big book reader. What are the three books? And here's the deal. I've been hearing traction a lot.

Obviously, How to Win Friends and Influence People. There's the E-Myth. There's Ultimate Sales Machine. But you got a few books. They don't even need to be necessarily about business. Let's see. I've certainly read the E-Myth. I'm reading a great book right now called The Comfort Crisis, kind of reinforcing what I think is going on right now with people being very comfortable, not getting outside. They're constantly in that sweet spot, and that's a problem. And I think that the lessons that I'm reading, a lot of which I learned in the military where I thought it was interesting, the author of this book suggests every quarter you don't go do something physical that he's got two rules. It's got to be really hard and you can't die. Okay. Now that could be extreme, but that got

me thinking, man, it'd be, it's kind of nice to get yourself outside of that comfort zone every quarter. Not nothing to do with business. I read a great book called 2034 about next future global conflicts. I recently reread a book called Back in the Fight. An old squaw leader of mine who lost his leg in Iraq wrote it. I'm actually in there in the first chapter. In one sentence, I'm in there, so don't. But those are the three I've read most recently. Certainly, the e-myth is a big one. Business Adventures is great. There's a lot out there. And Home Service Millionaire, I read it six months ago. Oh, good. That's a good one. Yeah. I'm going to be working on a 2.0, and it talks a lot more about acquisitions, organic growth, greenfield growth. I've got some tips out there of,

you don't find a lot of companies that can grow as fast as we're growing greenfield acquisitions make a lot of sense but those are not as easy too because you're walking into a different culture and you gotta have a plan to get that stuff this awesome guy i recommend out this book to everybody his name is adam coffee and he wrote this book called the private equity playbook playbook. Yep. Really, really good book. So I was on a plane reading the book and I got to get ahold of this guy. So I took a picture of me reading it and hit him up on LinkedIn. And he got back to me because they brought him on the private equity to, I think they're going for 800 million in commercial HVAC and he's located in California.

And he's coming out with a second book, so he's going to be back on the podcast. And this book's all about the list of what you need to do when you buy a company, which I think is absolutely phenomenal. A lot of HR stuff. But we talked about a lot of stuff here. Obviously, I love what you're doing. I think it's fantastic. I think this podcast is going to mean a lot to a lot of people because a lot of times you just, as a business owner, sometimes we feel alone out there. We're not alone, but people ask me what keeps me up at night and there's nothing that keeps me up at night. I

got to tell you, I got a great team and great procedures, but a lot of times the stuff that you're working on can answer what's keeping people up at night. So I love what you're doing, but we might've not talked about something. Maybe you got a piece of advice, maybe just a call to action for the audience, but I want to leave it to you to close us out. Yeah, Tommy, look, we couldn't be more pleased to be a partner of you. You know, you've clearly built a culture that's worth replicating and certainly we can hope to get to that point. So for those listening and, you know, those that will listen to the podcast later, if you're an owner-operator entrepreneur, just want to talk about that or trying to offload stuff that we do,

we'd love to talk with you. We've got a neat model. I think the world's changing as far as being able to have a team that's working in remote with the technology and you can still have oversight of your business and the controls and the KPIs are all going to be there. So you certainly don't need to go it alone. We'd love to work with you. So thanks again, Tommy. Yeah. Thank you. Listen, you got to go out there and give Charlie a call. What I would do today is start working on a list of things that you might not appreciate or like to do. And Charlie,

I think you're going to grow massively because people are having a really hard time hiring right now. And if you're willing to go ahead and be that person to do all that stuff and onboarding and everything else, I think the business is going to fly. Appreciate you coming on. We'll do it again. And yeah, we'll stay on afterwards. I want to catch up on a couple of weeks. All right, Tommy. Loved it, man. Thank you. Love you too, brother. See you, bud. Hey, I hope that you're enjoying today's podcast with Charlie Faulkner. Now listen, if you're feeling stuck with all these administrative tasks and you can't find a way to grow your business into millions of dollars fast because you have to do it all

yourself, then Free to Grow is a solution you need. They essentially take care of the entire customer interaction without the owner operatoroperator having to be involved. From filling the call to scheduling the estimate to booking the project and invoicing the customer, they do it all for you. And the great news is that we put together a special offer for our listeners. If you go to freetogrow.com forward slash HSE, that's free-to-grow.com forward slash HSC. You'll get 50% off on your startup fees. So if you want to get out of the field and grow your business faster, go to free-to-grow.com forward slash HSC

and book a call now.