The Home Service Expert Podcast - Mastering People and Processes to Have a Business Running Like a Well-Oiled Machine

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

Angela Johnson has been working at A1 Garage Doors since 2008. An accomplished and results-driven operations manager who has mastered overseeing business operations and driving business development, she has had almost three decades of professional experience in the fields of customer service and sales management. In this episode, we talked about telemarketing, client service, sales management, training...

individuals learn at their own pace. And when companies build training, they can fail miserably if they approach it from a cookie cutter standpoint, meaning here's the document, we're reading this, we're going to the whiteboard, there you go, we've dumped, we've mind-dumped all this information to an individual. But what you have to do is you have to step back and realize that everyone learns at their own pace and everyone has their own style of learning, whether it's audio, visual, or hands-on. And then there's some individuals that need all of those in a nice mixture. So you just have to make sure that you've got your training layered in with small breaks in between of different types of training. Again, whether it's textbook, simulation, assessments, activities, maybe listening to a call and then grading it from

a QA standpoint. So you just have to get creative and it has to constantly be evolving and changing based on where you feel your weak points are when they're coming out of training or feedback from the trainees. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. Today, I have a special guest that's part of the family here at A1, Angela Johnson. I'm going to tell you a little bit

about her. She's an expert in telemarketing, client service, sales management, and training. She's based here in Phoenix, Arizona. She's worked here at A1 Grozner since 2008 till present. She's worked at the RM Factory Senior Call Center Operations Manager from 2010 to 2017. She's worked at Spherian Staffing Branch Manager from 2008 to 2010, and ACS Call Center Operations Manager from 1993 to 2001. She also was a call center regional training and quality manager from 2001 to 2008. Has almost three decades in the professional experience in the fields of customer service and sales management. An accomplished and results-driven operations manager with extensive experience and substantial success

in overseeing business operations and driving business development. Was recognized as part of the team of one of the top performing branches of Sperian staffing in 2009. Volunteers as a youth explorer advisor at Pinal County Sheriff's Office. And I'm lucky to have her. Welcome, Angela. Thank you for having me. So you've been doing this a long time. I've had a good journey with you so far. We've experienced a lot, been through some agents, had some tequila shots. So talk to me a little bit about where you came from and how you landed here and what's going on now these days with everything you're

working on. Yeah, well, I really grew up in the industry. So shortly after high school, I needed a little bit of extra money. So one of my friends worked at a call center. It was outbound cold calling, anything from long distance credit cards, you name it, subscriptions. And I thought, I can do this. And I started as an agent, dialing for dollars. That's where you have the mirror in front of your station. And it said, smile when you dial. And, you know, the technology is nowhere near what it or now versus what it was then. And I quickly moved into a supervisor position, training position, a new employee development specialist, project manager, operations manager, and then moved over from outbound cold calling to one of our other centers that did 100% inbound. And that's when

I took on the regional training and development specialist position and kind of stayed there in that position through the rest of my tenure. So really, call center has been in my blood since one of my first jobs. Yeah, you know, you played hard to get in the beginning with me. You said no, and then we had to up our offer, which was smart of you, I guess, because I was cheaper than I am now, but I wouldn't say I'm still pretty frugal. But it's easy to spend money when we're making money. And you've come a long way. When you started in the call center at A1, I'd say we were okay. We were booking phone calls, but there wasn't really a lot of systems in place. And you single-handedly came up with a performance pay.

And I remember sitting in my office, maybe at the old office, but I remember thinking, I don't like annual reviews. I don't like giving people a big hourly rate. I don't like it unless it's performance-driven. And right now, you have agents making anywhere from $20 to $35 an hour, I'd say, on a good day. And it's easy to recruit when you're like that. So talk to me a little bit about inbound versus outbound and the difference,

because there's two different styles. And I've been to a lot of outbound companies in the last year that do very, very well. Well, the big difference is, is outbound, you're always wearing your sales hat. And sales, not as the dirty word sales, but really the skill set and the ability to connect with a customer and to keep them on the phone and build that relationship. Inbound, the mindset is more order-taking. So I really hate the word customer service representative because we all, regardless of the position we're in and the tasks we're responsible for, we're all selling something. So it's really customer sales representative. But there is a huge mindset as far as a roadblock with a lot of individuals when they're hired inbound versus outbound. And that's really the key thing is more process takers or

order takers versus people that connect with people. What do you enjoy most about this line of work? Call center is always fast paced. It's almost like triage. So I think in a past life, I must have been a doctor in an ER room. You've got to be able to be the catcher and be quick on your feet, be nimble and be able to connect with your team. So those are all things that I've, I just have a great passion for and I enjoy. I don't know what I'd do if I had to do the same thing in and out every single day. So thinking outside the box and being quick on your feet. So let me ask you a question because a lot of the people here are home service businesses.

And when you came on, you knew what a garage door was, but we actually ended up doing your garage doors, I don't know, about a year ago now, we shot some videos there six months ago before this whole COVID. But if you could go tell yourself in 2018, what you know now, maybe a little bit about the CRM and whatnot, but what was a couple of the critical choices and decisions? And maybe it's the LMS, maybe it's the fact that the technology stack, but what are some of the critical things that people should be thinking about as a smaller home service company, that real life that you were when you walked in here versus today? Well, first I want to start by the biggest challenge I had coming to A1 and how I grew and learned the product, home service. As far as my biggest challenge, it was a mind block. I don't know the product, right? And I

think too often home service, whether it's plumber, electrician, garage store, it doesn't matter. The individual coming on might be intimidated by the product. While a good salesperson needs to just realize it's just a product, the important thing is the people, the people that you have supporting you, your team, and the customers. And it's just finding a way to connect with them. And it's a product that we're offering. But again, home service, credit card, long distance, it really doesn't matter.

It's a product and people out there are looking for a service. Yeah. So you learn the products. I feel like one of the KPIs for us is definitely the booking rate. And you've definitely improved that over the last couple of years. And now we shoot for over 90%. You've got certain CSRs that do that time in and time out. I remember when we got Laurel to come on, she really just said, I don't understand these young people that are on their cell phones the whole time. You guys pay me to answer the phone and you give me performance pay. So she's just like, I come in here to work. And I think she used to be a server, right? So what do you think it is about certain characteristics of people that you look for now to be really, really good?

Because look, you heard me earlier, a bad CSR could lose us a million dollars a year pretty easily. Yeah. And one percentage point can gain us 30,000 extra per month. I mean, the numbers are the numbers and people need to be very aware of their pro formas on the money they're losing or gaining based on the people that they have helping support the business. So with Laurel, I use her a lot in my new hire trainings when I'm explaining the pay for performance because she was the perfect model of who we're looking for, which is someone that has the passion and self-dedication and self-drive. I didn't have to give her those qualities. She already came with it and with a great personality, always willing to help. But she had her own internal drive where,

give me the information and I want to get to the end goal, which is to continue to improve. Again, she's so well-rounded and just the perfect example. She came on making minimum wage. Her next paycheck, she was up a couple extra dollars per hour. The paycheck after that, a couple extra dollars more. And by her fourth, fifth paycheck, she was in the top tier and she was constantly improving. She was constantly conscious. I like to say conscious with intent. Too often we do things, we just kind of walk through life and work, just moving through the motions. But when you're doing things consciously with intent, you're constantly thinking of what I'm doing, how is it impacting, and how can I take it to the next level? So we've got two levels of supervisor. We've got

level one, level two. Do you want to explain kind of where we're at today with the process of having checks and balances and who's allowed to give a price and who's not and why giving a price gets level one into trouble and just talk about that process a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So how our call center organization is structured is we have level one agents, level two agents, and then we have a supervisor. And then as we grow that structure, we'll just have more level ones, twos, and supervisors. Level ones are the new hires or those that haven't reached a certain level of quality and performance. So level ones are not allowed to give pricing. They can give some basic stuff like what's your labor rate. They need to make sure that they're talking about

pricing as far as disclaimers when we're recalling a job for service or our $20 trip charge. But level twos are the ones that can ask more in-depth probing questions to understand the product that the customer's looking for to give the accurate pricing. Because when someone's too new or they're struggling with their quality on even following protocol or processes, they can easily misrepresent, provide wrong pricing. And then now we've got a technician out there with a customer expecting a certain service for a certain price. And no company can afford to lose their credibility with a customer. So that's how we kind of minimize that. And then level twos go through a training on the pricing, when to give pricing, the questions that

they have to ask to understand. And then there's a handful of job types that level twos aren't even able to address. They have to escalate that then to myself, the supervisor, or a market manager. Yeah. So one of the things we try not to do is pin ourselves into a situation where we don't really know and we get pricing and then we come out and it's completely something different. So we call that a bait and switch, I guess, in the call center home service industry. Let me ask you, how many agents do we have with the supervisors and everything and Corbett and the whole show on? We're a little shy of 20, but I've got another new hire training class coming up. We're bringing on four people and our ramp plan is for a month,

four to five a month to keep pace with our company's growth. So I think I figured it out one time. I think we were, I want to say one to seven or one to eight, every CSR we needed for every tech. How many calls do you expect a CSR on the highest performance level, even bigger than we are today where the phone's ringing? How many calls do you think a great CSR can take? Between 100 and 150. If the calls are coming in back to back and they've got about an 80-85% utilization rate, which means 80-85% of the hour they're actually on the phones. That's really kind of the in-call center baseline metrics and workforce management.

That's really what your golden line is. Now, out of that, how many calls would you predict would be booked? Because you're not taking a hundred. So I think there's something here because we've talked about going, or if a customer has a question, either get them to the dispatchers or get them to a low-level CSR. So as far as opportunities taken, where you want your best quarterback playing in the Super Bowl, what is the amount of opportunities someone could handle in a day realistically? I've heard it's high at 50, but I don't know. Yeah. Well, I mean, it really all depends on the structure of the phone system. If the company has

an auto attendant that's shifting other people or non-leads or excused existing customers to a different group of individuals. So right now we're handling about 50% of the calls that we handle are existing customers or business related inquiries that are not new leads or leads for us to book. So that's our first equation or equator is the 50%. So 50% of the 100, 150, if we were maxed out, would be customer support, more that front desk receptionist, gatekeeper. The other 50% are valid leads. And we're currently booking 85, 87%. So one of the things we disagree on to a certain extent is an IVR.

Can you explain what an IVR is? It's an auto attendant, but can you explain in details what it is and tell me your pros and cons and I'll give you my two cents. I'll let you explain it first. Okay. So there is a difference between IVR and auto attendant. An IVR is an intelligent voice recording system. So I'm sure we've all experienced that when you call into a place and it says, press this number or say, that's an IVR. An auto attendant is more number related. So yeah, Tommy, they are similar in the fashion that the business that has either IVR or auto attendant in place is trying to weed out or send certain individuals to certain groups of individuals based on their skill set

background. Being born and raised in the call center, an auto attendant or an IVR is crucial to be able to get the right customers to the right people and allow you to hone in on those sales groups, the customer support groups, or maybe the escalation teams. But what I've found over the years is there is a compromise. And I think even though I was for and you were against, our compromise was more about setting clear expectations with the customer. For instance, our auto attendant just simply says, press any button to be able to speak to one of our live team members. We've been getting a lot of spammy calls. So to me, even though it doesn't really send that customer to a specialized individual, like if I wanted sales to go to my top

sales people, it does at least weed out those that are doing the telemarketing or the spammy calls or the robo dials, which was my biggest pain point. So I think that's the happy compromise, is having some type of an auto attendant that weeds those calls out, which allows you to answer more real calls. So my take is when I call the cable company, my bank, the alarm company, I don't mind a IVR because I want to get to billing. I want to get to a certain thing. And I've called them. I'm having a problem with the technical, maybe my internet, maybe my TV cable, but I like an IVR. It gets me to the right department. But when I'm calling just for a simple, in my mind, a local garage or a company and support my community,

I think there's some people, especially the older baby boomers that say, oh man, it's one of these. And you don't lose a lot because the millennials are coming around and they love stuff like that. But I feel like the technology sometimes gets in the way and I'd rather have a human IVR when you've got a choice. So when you're looking at a hundred graduate companies on Google, but I do like the idea because we're getting so much spam, the phones are being just, Hey, we would get a lot of spammy calls, press any button to continue.

I think that that works really well for what we're doing. So tell me a little bit about the learning management system that you're developing. It's a combination of both reading, watching, and simulation and activity. So individuals learn at their own pace. And when companies build training, they can fail miserably if they approach it from a cookie cutter standpoint, meaning here is the document. We're reading this.

We're going to the whiteboard. There you go. We've mind dumpeddumped all this information to an individual. But what you have to do is you have to step back and realize that everyone learns at their own pace and everyone has their own style of learning, whether it's audio, visual, or hands-on. And then there's some individuals that need all of those in a nice mixture. So you just have to make sure that you've got your training layered in with small breaks in between of different types of training. Again, whether it's textbook, simulation, assessments, activities, maybe listening to a call

and then grading it from a QA standpoint. So you just have to get creative and it has to constantly be evolving and changing based on where you feel your weak points are when they're coming out of training or feedback from the trainees. So you've created accountability partners recently. Tell me a little bit how that works. Accountability partners that they listen to each other's calls and tell each other how they can be better. Yeah. So I first started that back with one of my new hire training classes and I had them listen. I had the trainees listen to our level two agents' phone calls and had them actually score that particular level two. So they were listening not only from a monitoring form like a QA would, like did they brand the opening?

Did they brand the closing? Did they use the appropriate rebuttals, follow the script flow? But then they also turned those sheets back in so I could turn around and coach that particular level two. Then all of a sudden I started seeing my level twos that sometimes would veer to the right or left because they're good salespeople, kind of stay more on track and become more consistent. So it's just everyone working together. And then we also have them paired up as well, sitting next to them and watching and observing. And sometimes when you know someone's watching and observing, you're going to stay on track. So that's helped. You know, I always talk on the podcast about how in high school and middle

school, whatever sport I played, I always practice. We practiced three times more than we played the game. Like in anything, whether it's cheerleading for the gals, football for the guys, I feel like we train at least sometimes double, two a day. There was two a day, there was two a day there was three a day sometimes the weekends we really looked at the film of other teams to see what we were doing we kept score we you know in golf we kept greens in regulation fairways hit we kept how many putts how many up and downs how many sand how many water safes the thing i'm trying to say here is how important has been practicing and practicing in these meetings and communication and more practice been in developing the call center? Huge. It's accountability and communication.

We were to just train and then let them do their thing. We have no one holding them accountable to make sure they're consistent with what we taught them. And then the communication is just making sure they're consistent with what we taught them. And then the communication is just making sure we're reinforcing it. And then creating team camaraderie gets them to kind of challenge each other to take it to the next level. I want to go kind of a bunch of ways here. So you've got, we keep developing our technology over and over. And really the technology is a big piece of the operational aspect of the company. And I like now, I want to go into payroll here in a little bit, but I can imagine based

on my growth plan of you ending up somewhere between 75 and 120 agents next year, at what point, based on the manual, the LMS, the being able to work from home, the virtual training, the constant attention towards the significant factors outside of the mean, how high can you scale it? I mean, if I had to say that, does that intimidate you at all, 100 agents? No. I'm used to, again, I hate to say it when you're mentioning decades and how many years I've been in the industry. Actually coming on to A1 was the smallest group of individuals I've had to manage. So normally I would be managing upwards of 600. Now that's managing people in process. So making sure that you have the right people in the right positions

and making sure you have the structure built around to support them to develop their teams or make sure that the processes are being followed through on. Then you're really kind of that top tier, making sure everyone's doing, you're putting the oil in the machine and making sure that it's moving in the right direction. So now scaling to 75 or 100, bring it on. I'm ready for 600 plus. It'll be a thousand soon. It'll be a thousand. Yeah, 600 plus. Okay. So what do you think overall of our CRM? And you work with different ones. How important is a CRM in a company? A CRM is huge. Again, back when I started not too long ago, it was handheld scripts.

You didn't have the, I mean, this is before people had personal computers. It was really that old, get out your memo book and start writing down stuff. So having a CRM and all this information at your fingertips where you don't have to go to a file cabinet and pull something out or handwrite something to be able to de-escalate a customer or help support a customer and have the knowledge right at your fingertips is huge. And then from a business standpoint, being able to have all this raw data that rolls up into reporting is also just the next level of just awesomeness. That's the best way I can describe it.

Yeah, no, it's a good word. I'm glad you pulled that one out. One of the things that I love doing is a lot of times customers say, you know what, let me wait till my husband or wife gets home. And sometimes you're very serious about the scheduling aspect of it. But one of the things that I remember talking to you about, I remember saying, I remember that whiteboard that we made at the last building. It said the follow-up and it was like Tommy's follow-up board. We lost a lot of jobs just because there was nobody calling those people back saying, hey, you told us to call back at 5.30. What have you done to combat that? Because I feel like a lot of people don't have it. They say, okay, we're ready when you are,

just call us back. Well, that's leaving the destiny in the customer's hands rather than something that we can control. So how do we combat that as a company? Well, before and after the whiteboard, we would have to spend the extra resources to manage our dashboard for the unbooks and then remind agents to call their unbooks. Or we'd have our level twos when we weren't, because priority is first answering the inbound calls, right? And then when it slows down, then you do your outbound stuff. So then we'd assign to level twos to call those back. And it can just be a cog in the wheel, but Service Titan, who's our CRM platform, has done a fantastic job constantly improving their platform. And they recently upgraded it

to allow us to do follow-ups from a call center standpoint like they have for technicians. So when they have an unbooked, they select follow-up and it goes into our follow-up tab where then my supervisor manages those. It has date and timestamp if they're selecting a certain day or time that we should be calling back. So we're putting some more polish on that, but it's really refreshing to be able to have that type of technology. So Ana's one of the supervisors and I tend to either send stuff to you or Ana when I need a personal job booked because of a friend or investor, a family. And what I really appreciate,

and I send a lot to Ana with whether it's value card or whatever, she responds with, got it, booked this time, all set. There's not this moment of, because I just love, I understand what you need. Here's the solution. It's already taken care of. And if I don't get that back, I'm like, what's going on? Where are we at on this? And so people have learned to respond like that. And I feel like a lot of times when people, especially business owners, they delegate, they dump and they don't get a response and it falls through the cracks. That happens a lot of times when you're stuck in the fire all the time. There's a lot of stuff falls through the cracks and having these systems and just small things. I mean, when we first did the manuals,

that was a hoot. I mean, we had fun. We already had some stuff. We had a lot of training, but to really come up with a super formal, doesn't a really good manual allow us to scale? It does. It allows it to simplify the process and be able to manage the process and the people and also be able to go back. And it's not second guessing. Before manuals, before training documents, FAQs, whatever you want to call it, it would be more, I said, this is the protocol. By having that actually written and put in writing, you can refer back to it. And if at any time something changes, you go back and change the manual and refer back to that adjusted. I would say, you know, the biggest failure in businesses is lack of communication. So it goes back to you wanting to know what happened to what I sent.

I want to make sure it doesn't fall through the cracks. We hear it all the time, regardless of the industry you're in, regardless of the business or type of business you're running, or even people that you're managing. Communication. It goes back to communication. So I want to talk about one of the coolest things you worked on was the pay structure. And I love this system because it's minimum wage or, and the key word being or, the bonus structure. And you don't need to go into heavy duty detail, but just give us a breakdown. Number one, it's one thing to create a payment structure. It's another thing to keep track of it and make sure it's accurate, make sure there's transparency to the employees. So let's talk about what you thought about when

you created it. And then we'll talk a little bit about how you monitor that on a weekly basis to make sure it's accurate. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a pay for performance. It's not foreign to call center, but each pay for performance looks a little different. And you first have to start with, as a company, what are our pain points to that particular department that you're wanting to build a pay-for-performance for? So in our case, from the call center, it was more performance, book rate, quality, making sure they're doing the right thing, attendance, making sure they show up. Because in call center, you normally have a high turnover rate and pretty poor attendance. And then mistakes, their interdepartment errors,

if you want to make sure that the work they're doing is correct and isn't causing undue stress onto other departments. So you find out what your pain points are. Don't have any more than four or five pain points that you want to be able to target this pay structure around. And then you go to the owner of the company and you say, Tommy, if you were to pay commission only, how much money do you have in your wallet to pay per book job? Right? So we had that conversation. Adam had came to me and he'd even said, and I think you did as

well, saying we need to put a bonus structure together. And what did I say? We need to put a pay for performance structure together. There's a huge difference between paying someone bonus versus pay for performance. And so you had told me what your bottom dollar is per that you could afford per book job. And from there, I shaved off a few bucks to give a little bit of extra wiggle room on the books. And I said, okay, now I've got my dollar amount. So now I've got my pain points, I've got my dollar amount. And it I've got my pain points, I've got my dollar amount. And it's really looking at it from almost a profit sharing standpoint. I think so many companies look at their pay structure as, I don't want to pay my employees more then, but they don't take into consideration that if those employees are helping grow the revenue stream of the company, it's only going to continue to go up. If you pay them more based on the

revenue going up, it is profit share. So I had to find those denominators, which was how much can you afford, and then give some wiggle room, find out what the pain points are, and then develop the structure around that. So the best way I can describe pay-per-performance is commission only with the safety net at minimum wage. So you had some details on there. The big one is the percentage of booking rate. And they're allowed to excuse jobs, but you have a supervisor listening to those as well as yourself. So if they lie and excuse it, those are the ones you're going to be viewing because they could increase the percentage rate by viewing a booked opportunity. So making sure there's not a lot of gray area, how do you handle that gray area? And I'm sure,

because I know people that you've let go of were lying about certain things. So as a company, you've always got to continue to evolve and put processes in place when you feel that things have fallen through the cracks. And early on the pay for performance, we didn't have as deep of a process to audit. And then I built the audit shortly after the pay for performance because we did notice a couple of people trying to cheat the system. And the process really as simple as this. It's not about spot checking. It's about making sure that 100% of the things that could impact that pay, impact that number, should be monitored. And I'm not talking about the unbooks. Someone's not going to deliberately put an unbooked on themselves, but someone will

intentionally move something from an unbooked that counts against them to an excused or not a lead. So 100% of the excused, not a lead are reviewed, whether it's reviewing the notes and listening to the call or listening to the call, but they're all reviewed, they're all looked at, and then they're either coached to because it's either knowledge, skill, or behavior. They're lacking the knowledge or skill to have correctly classified the call or followed the appropriate process or its behavior, meaning they're choosing to do the right or wrong thing. So that's huge. And when you identify your pain points, when you're building out the pay-per-performance, you also have to put them in a ranking order. So for us, booking rate was the number one. So I'm going to pay out the most out of that per book job dollar figure that I am going to be for quality or interdepartment errors or other aspects of those categories. So how much, just on that one specific KPI,

if you're above 90%, what do you get for that booked call? Well, we recently adjusted it recently, maybe five, six months ago, where again, our baseline kept climbing up. When I first started, we were 68% book rate, 71 on a good day, 72. Now we're 85 on an okay day, 87, 88 on a good day. And then there's sometimes we hit that 90%. So for that particular piece, we adjusted as the performance continued to increase, you have to constantly change your baseline. So we adjusted 95% or greater, they get $5.70 per book job. 90 to 94, they're getting $5. And then it drops a dollar per ranking. And then all the way down to $2 per book job and anything under 74%, they don't earn anything for that category. So I'll tell you one of the things that not only have you done an amazing job, but I feel like our

marketing is no longer the Craigslist customers and as much of the shoppers, although they still are, we get a lot of that. Our trucks are everywhere. We started to do more TV. They called A1 Grocery Service, not a grocery company. And you used to work at a place called Pella, right? Windows? Well, it was through RM Factory, which is a management company, and we manage their marketing and their call center. So we were vendor relations where they worried about manufacturing windows. We worried about running their call center, their people and their process outside of the manufacturing of the windows. So they created a heck of a brand and when you create a brand, like for example, if I had a, just Sean Hannity on talk radio and he recommended a one and the people that listen to that, they call up, they go,

it's a pretty easy book call versus you're out there with a bunch of coupons. So I do think some people are going to struggle depending on their marketing message and where they're at in their business to ever obtain over 80%. And some people should be over 90 because they're getting such quality calls. And it depends on your service and it depends on the average ticket size. So there's no right answer for this. Susie Boyder told me anything over 90%, you're booking too many calls. You shouldn't be booking some of those customers. You're wasting your technician's time and your dispatcher's time. But as we compared both pay structures, what's cool about it is you didn't roll it out right away and you really backed into these numbers and made it work well. And you said, Tommy, the last three weeks, I actually saved you

some money. But what I love the most about it, and sometimes I'd spend a little bit more money, but what I loved is you created an atmosphere for winners. And you created an atmosphere that if you're not going to win, you're going to make minimum wage. How long are you going to last the minimum wage? And when we explain this in the process of the hiring process, people get excited or they leave and they say, this is not for me if it's performance pay. What have you noticed in the interview process when there's a winner versus someone that's like, oh, well, it's not for me?

As soon as I start talking about the pay for performance structure, I'll get one of two responses. Well, I can't survive off of minimum wage. Or they start focusing more on the minimum wage. Or they start focusing more on the minimum wage and more questions surrounding the pay-per-performance. Those aren't the people I want to hire. And I've rejected a handful of those. I'm looking for the people that go, really? There's no cap? Really? I can strive? I'm in control of how much I make? And the biggest thing that I say during an interview is I really stress on how frustrating it is when you work at a company and you're getting paid the same as

someone else and you're putting in way more energy, effort, passion, compassion, you name it. And the other person is just collecting on the company dime, right? They show up and then they leave. And that's frustrating when you're an employee and you're getting paid the same and you see someone striving for excellence and someone that's just coming in to kill time. And so I use that a lot in my interviews and I always get nine out of 10 times them shaking their head saying, yeah, it is frustrating. I allow that to be a question in the interview for them to come forward and say, yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've worked and I've done X, Y, Z, and then I watched this other person doing nothing.

And I said, well, here at A1, we want to recognize those that strive for excellence and you get paid what you're putting in. So again, that's an easy way when you're explaining it to really weed out those that you don't want to bring on to the company. When you're hiring, what you've noticed over time, I can pretty much tell you what payroll is going to be within 5% most of the time. I can tell you what the day is going to be like, depending on the installs that day. There's a pattern and there's a pattern in the call center. You see these graphs and you know how to staff appropriately and have checks and balances, that historical data is just

worth the world to us because it changes. We know when a certain mailer hits or versus, you know, you work very closely to our pay-per-click manager, lots of things that go into it. I feel like a lot of people just don't understand how to staff. What would you give them advice about staffing? And here's one thing I want to add, just one little asterisk. One book's call, let's just say is worth $500. You're paying that agent maybe $15, $20, even $25 an hour. It's not worth not getting to it, in my opinion. I'd rather be a little bit overstaffed and make sure we're getting to every call and answered in an adequate fashion than be too tight because I saved $15 to lose two service calls that would have equaled a thousand. Now, maybe my margin's only 15%, but on a thousand

dollars, that's 150 versus the 15, $20. Plus I paid for that phone call. I paid for the marketing. Exactly. Well, you've got to really look at it from a workforce management perspective. So when you're running a call center or you're running any business that you have individuals answering the phones, you've got to figure out the most common arrival pattern. Again, you can forecast your budget. You can forecast different things. You have to be able to forecast your call volume. So it's going to come in waves based on when you're dropping mail. There's so many different variations. And so it's working closely with the marketing department to understand when they're doing drops,

because normally you've got a ton of historical data to be able to say, okay, when we drop X amount, it's generally this percentage that call in, right? And then this percentage that actually convert or book a job. So you're looking at those patterns to be able to anticipate spikes, but also higher to your highest point. And then during your low time, in between those mailers or those high spikes, they're doing other tasks that still support and benefit the company. And that's where you can trim off your lower performers, have them work on some additional tasks, and then keep your higher performers answering those smaller amount of calls coming in. So it took us, I'd say it took you a good year to get your hands around this. I don't want people

to think you hire a call center manager with a lot of experience and they come in and all of a sudden wave their magic wand and it's all cherry. But we're very fortunate because you understand the system, you know Excel, you've literally got this thing dialed in, you know how to train and you know how to manage people. And I think you said earlier, getting every strong department heads. And one of the things that we're very lucky is we've got really, really, really strong department heads. You look at a guy like Ross, who's been a CFO of over $400 million company, and just the people we brought in that kind of stacking the deck, Travis and the training department. I can go on

and on because everybody's really good here, but getting the right people in the right spots, and it takes time. I want to talk real quick. I don't want to go into detail on this because I don't want them to get bombarded and give us bad service, but there's probably 10 really good backup call centers. How important is it to have a backup call center when you're growing as fast as we are? It's important unless you want to run 24-7 and be overstaffed by 200%. So there is a fine balance between being overstaffed to be able to handle those flex during your mail drops and during certain times of the day where there's generally higher volume. But after hours, I mean, you need to be able to be accessible to your customers at any given time and having that backup center overflow after hours to support you during those peaks when you might be a little

understaffed or on the weekends or holidays. It's huge. You can lose, I'm sure you've already calculated the amount of money businesses have lost when they are only open during certain hours to answer the phones. So yeah, it's very well worth it. Well, there's a lot, you know, a lot of people, especially the guys that I've met that are a certain age, they go, well, this is crap. I'm not going to work myself. The reason I started a business wasn't to work 24 seven, but you got to realize the customers need you 24 seven. And you got to build that into the equation because they're competing against us and they're competing against companies like us. So if I can make more money because I'm on Google,

I can spend more money. If I could outpay for a lead with our booking rate, our conversion rate, our average ticket, and our lower cost for acquisition, then I'm going to win every time. It's going to be very, very difficult. We're like the Roger Federer or Tiger Woods in this industry. And it's going to be very hard because we've got the systems now in place. The systems, I would say it's not the great people, although we do have great people. The systems choose the great people. But I would say it's the way that they're managing the technology and the expectations and accountability that create the great people. You know, these guys might have started as a C plus, then you bring them up to an A.

A lot of business owners that I've met think I'm going to hire these amazing people and they're going to change my business. And that's not the case. The people don't change the business, the processes and the standard operating procedures. When do you think you had an aha moment? I mean, all of us have when you understood that, man, if I dial in this process and really create accountability and have checks and balances, my life is not only going to get easier, but I'm going to have more fun. Now, are you talking in my decades of call center experience or here at A1? Maybe a little bit here, but I would say more in the career.

I would say fairly early on when I was a senior operations manager for one of my programs, outbound cold calling credit cards. And I had about four different projects underneath me, 35 to 40 agents per project. And then I had supervisors per project, I was given a challenging outbound credit card program that this particular bank had close to 200 vendors. So we were competing against 200 other companies with all of these records. And then our company also had six to seven different locations. So they would divide up the records to feed their other locations. And so it was kind of competition between the other locations and also the other vendors. And I had to jump on the phones. I mean, to be able to tackle anything, you have to be able to be in the ditches and figure out what the pain points are. You can't just listen and hear. So I jumped on the phones and I kept going through the training material and I'm like, how can we connect with these customers? What's in it for them? And I found some hidden benefits that no one had taken advantage of. It was actually more of an explanation of the benefits and leveraged the upsell benefits.

And next thing you know, I was rotating agents in every hour, training them, just the mantra of everything, how they should be connecting with the customer, the questions they should be asking. And within a month, month and a half, we were outperforming all other vendors. We were outperforming all other in-house, our other locations. And we even had the CEO of that bank come in to meet with me to say, what are you doing? We've never had this type of phenomenal performance. And I said, it's simple. You've got to get back to the basics and figure out what's in it for the customer. So that was my first aha moment. And it's not just about fixing

a problem. You have to get in, you have to play around with different techniques, scripting. And when you find that perfect magic, then you have to continue to reinforce it and take the risk to educate the customers or educate your team and hold them accountable and continue to repeat, rinse and repeat. You know, I remember the days where my mom was answering the phone [phone] and although she couldn't handle a ton of calls when i showed up to the job as being the guy driving the truck the technician the people were already in love with me they'd smile and they go you must be tommy and they go oh my god and they'd be so happy and they'd be you must be Tommy. And they go, oh my gosh. And they'd be so happy. And they'd be like, you know, you guys are just a genuine from the ad that we saw you guys on to the way you treated us

on the phone. We are just whatever you think we need. And it was just like, I just remember thinking, wow, I had no idea the impact that first experience with the company could make. And we call that empathy. Oh my gosh, you've got to be kidding me, Angela. You're stuck in the garage. You know what? Believe it or not, I've worked here. I had this company out to my own home and the worst feeling in the world

is not being able to get your car out to go do something when you need to. And just having empathy, smiling on the phone and how important, I can't stress this enough because it's a game changer. When I talk, it's been a long time since I've talked in the first orientation, but I had a whole presentation and unfortunately you're training now, mostly you had me do these recordings via Zoom, but I love being there in person. But how important is empathy? I mean, it's a game changer, isn't it?

Empathy is huge. There are something that I learned early on in outbound sales and cold calling is feel, felt, found method. So if anyone that's listening to this podcast doesn't know what that is, research it, read it. But it's, I understand how you feel. Many of our customers have felt the same way.

What they found was, right? And you can spend that so many different ways in your, not only your empathy, but your appreciation statements. And you got to slow your roll and you've got to connect with that customer, pace yourself with them. And sometimes the hardest thing as a salesperson to do is to stop talking and start listening. Listen more, talk less. A hundred percent. And listening, you know, that's what I tell the guys. He who could talk the least, you got two ears when you're in the garage, ask questions and listen and smile and nod and say, yes, sir. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. And it was fun. Today I was at an HOA working on 140 full view doors. It's going to be,

I don't know, $450,000. And I was just like, oh my on 140 full view doors it's gonna be I don't know $450,000 and I was just like oh my gosh you gotta show me your redesign of the house and Russ was there we're going in we're having so much fun and I'm like holy cow what hole is that you're right on a golf course and I was so I'm like I've golfed here before next time I'll say hi when I'm coming by and we're smiling we're talking but there's just so fun they're like oh yeah wait I gotta show you my room wait till you see this and I'm like holy cow and we just had fun we're talking, but there's just so fun. They're like, oh yeah, wait, I got to show you my room. Wait till you see this. And I'm like, holy cow. And we just had fun with it. And I, but I'm not fake about it. That's the most important thing. It's the real deal, Holyfield. And you don't need the light sheet or still the customers. They got to like you though. People buy from who they like. And when you're on the phone and you're able to answer their

questions and you're smiling and you're happy, they look at that as a reflection of the company. They say, wow, this is a cool company. And we've got a lot of advantages because of the technology we use. I was thinking we've got, you know, I was going to talk to you about this, but we've got an ability to see a heat map of, Hey, we've done four jobs in your neighborhood in the last year, one on culture street, one on here, one on here. That's called social proof and that's huge. And that's just going to help us. One of the things we've struggled

with in the past, and it's never an easy thing, but when we're doing door quotes, more of that thousand dollar plus ticket is getting the decision maker to be there. Post COVID, that's easier said than done. What have we implemented to kind of make sure that we're getting the homeowner? I know we already made sure the homeowner is there, but try to get both decision makers instead of, well, I need to talk to my wife or I need to talk to my husband. Right. Well, as a business, you can approach it one of two ways, require it or plant the seed, how important it is for both to be there and ask and listen. So I actually have experience with this beta test that my past company did for the window company and their major competitor. Their major competitor required all decision makers or both decision makers to be

present. The company that I helped support was not asking or requiring. So they wanted to find out how they could increase their odds of closing that particular job. So we went in the middle and we did some testing. And instead of going and requiring it, because that's the last thing you want to do is have a valuable customer walk off because they felt that they weren't valuable enough to be the only decision maker there present, even if the other person wasn't. So we've changed the scripting on our door quotes to be able to just softly ask, now, does this date and time work for any other decision makers that may want to join and understand what's going on or be able to ask questions? And then it's continuing to reinforce the value with the agents that are asking it

so they understand why we're asking the question. It's not just a question to ask a question. It's a question to be able to listen and be able to say, you know, hear the customer's hesitation. Or maybe there's this long pause where they're thinking, you know, Joe, it sounds to me like you might want to pick a different day. Is there someone else that should be there with you? So we can make sure all the questions are being answered. So it's not scripted, but it's taking it one step further by asking that

question. And you know, one of the things we found the other day, there was a certain campaign that the decision makers weren't home, but with our technology, we were able to dig into that campaign and find out, according to Russ, that it was just, it happened to be that this certain type of lead source. And what's really nice is when you could drill down into the lead source and find out the conversion rate for lead source, it's just so many cool things we could train on and do with this data and data is king. You know, I had a guy, Joe Crisara on the podcast and he said, look, if you're ever at a job and there's a decision maker that's not there and they're not allowing you to book another follow-up appointment, then they're not serious about the work getting done.

And you didn't truly find the objection and it might not be worth your time to even stay there. Maybe one follow-up here or there, but if you can't book another appointment when the other, like book it and say, look, I want to come back. Are you guys here on the weekend? I'll come back. It's not, you know what? There's one thing I want to do and that's earn your business today or this next week when you both are home. If it's a price thing, if it's a timeliness thing, whatever we want to do, we want to show you the value of our company. And I want to tell you about this company. And that's what I love when the technicians and the CSRs do is they say, here's the reason I work here. Here's the reason I love working here.

And here's how I know this company is going to be around for a long time. It doesn't need to be about me, but they're buying the company when they buy our service. And to get that set up correctly is easier said than done. And I feel like now, I won't say it's easy, but it's the easiest ever been. It's like the more we grow, the more systems, the standard operating procedures, the expectations we lay out, the accountability, the easier it gets. Although we're changing all the time and people are afraid of change, but they've adapted to change. Am I right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think as long as you have the processes dialed in and making sure that you're communicating and then reinforcing, you can change on the fly. But when you change on the fly and you're missing communication on how you're rolling out that change, that's where companies end up kind of falling flat on what they're trying to launch or implement. You know what I really got excited about is obviously this nasty disease, COVID hit, COVID-19. And what I got excited about is that day that we told everybody they could work from home, they checked out the computers and we didn't drop a

beat because our technology was prepared for this kind of thing. We do voiceover internet protocol. We've had a system where everybody could take a computer. Now, if our electricity goes out, we're still fine. If our computers go down in one area, it almost builds some redundancies for the company. And it's kind of cool because we could have agents. What we've realized is all over the country. Now, I'd love for them to be here for the most part. There's a lot of people available because of people being out of work because of the hospitality industry.

But what are your thoughts on being able to run from home now? Love it. The company that I worked for prior to joining the A1 family was 100% virtual. The business didn't even have a brick and mortar. So everything was virtually trained. Everything was virtually ran. We used Skype before there was Zoom and then Zoom. It allows us to be able to recruit at a deeper level, be able to have our recruiting scalable,

and really get the people that we're looking for. It's the next level. It's the new age of doing things. You asked me the other day for the book that Art wrote. I got to bring that over to you. You should check it out. But speaking of books, what are three books other day for the book that Art wrote. I got to bring that over to you. You should check it out. But speaking of books, what are three books that come to the top of mind? We read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. We've read The E-Myth. We've read some stuff as a company. Is there anything that you'd recommend as far as just business book reading?

You don't have to have any. I honestly don't. I think they're all great. Good answer. You know me that I'm not a big reader, but the books that you've picked and the books that you really get out there and communicate are great reads are truly great reads. And they're just full of nuggets of information. So I don't have any one particular one that I like over the other. No, no.

We read a lot together. And, you know, ultimately, a book's only as good as you're going to read it, comprehend it, and use the information in it. So you've got to be passionate about the stuff you're reading and think, I'm passionate about anything to do with business. So I'm going to do this. I'm going to turn over the floor to you. Well, one more thing I guess I could ask is, I feel like leadership, whether that's you leading your department or me or whatever is so important. And I feel like a lot of times

the owners become inhibitive of growth. They become counterintuitive to the growth. They want things their way. They don't give any flex. They're very strict. It's their way, the highway. They don't delegate properly. How important is proper delegation of leadership? Huge. That's the only way that you're going to be able to grow your

leadership and your department head managers is you've put them in that position to be able to grow their department, to think outside the box. It gives you an opportunity as a business owner to assess, do they have the grit to be able to jump into that department and take it to the next level? As a manager, I'm fearful too. It's like there's a handful of things that I own that really it should be a level two or an escalations team member, but I'm fearful or at times certain things I'm fearful of. Well, if I hand it off to this person, it's not going to be done at the same level I want it to be done.

And so you always have to kind of have those self-balances and checks to say, if I'm that uncomfortable or that fearful, then I haven't built strong enough processes around what I'm doing to be able to ensure it's being done correctly and be able to give some wiggle room for whoever's handling it to continue to grow and take it to the next level. On that particular piece, I do want to throw out there anyone listening to this that has a business and a call center within that business to research TQM. That's total quality management. There's a handful of different ways that you can look at it, but really the essence of total quality management is you focus on the customer,

you make sure there's employee involvement, you're process centered or centric, you have integrated systems, you strategically and systematically go through your approaches, your decision making is based on facts, strong on communication, and continually improving. So you kind of do the full circle and then you start back over, you rinse and repeat and you do the reports and you look to see if there's something that needs to be adjusted. And there you go. Analyze and adjust. Analyze and adjust. What do I want to do in the next three to five years? Where do I want to be as far as cash goes, as far as revenue? Billion. National. National. We want to be in every single neighborhood. We want to be thought as everyone's first go-to for services on their

garage door. Well, it's not only the billion that I care about, it's the shift of thinking, because a billion is a big number to most people. So when you think about a billion in your mind, you go, whoa, if he's serious, which you guys know I am, then we're morphing into a company we need to become rapidly on a daily basis, not on a monthly, not on a quarterly or daily meetings that we get ourselves into. What were some of the meetings you were involved in today? My level two meeting. So I've got a weekly team meeting with my level two agents and we talk about their struggles, challenges,

any additional tools that I can help support them with, any updates, again, communication. Also our manager, our company mojo, which is all the market managers and department head managers coming together to talk about their one big thing and what they're working on. And then I had one of my other team meetings, which are a combination of level one and level twos. So meetings are important and done properly can be very effective. And the last thing I do, Angela, is ajohnsonata1garage.com if you want to reach out to Angela, but she's a busy gal. But ultimately, what I like to do at the end of the

podcast is just give the listeners a little taste of whatever final thoughts you might have, maybe some encouragement, maybe some goals, maybe some go-to-action gold nuggets to just, here's how to get started. Like for me, I would simply say some things about, you got to inspect what you expect, track the numbers first, and then move up and have a goal to not be perfect, but continue to progress. But that was just an example of what I like to do. What would be a couple of minutes that you kind of talk to the audience and the listeners,

maybe give them some words of encouragement, like to do, what would be a couple of minutes that you kind of talk to the audience and the listeners and maybe give them some words of encouragement where to get started? I would say manage people and process and everything else and have strong communication. Everything else will fall in place and also listen more and talk less. It can go against any business, any industry. Those are important keys to managing your people and process. You know, and if they get the chance, we've had people come through here and usually you're here Those are important keys to show people what we do. It's hard for them to go ahead and go home and implement it and integrate it. And it takes years. I think the reason I started the podcast to let people know I'm not evil. I'm not bad. I'm an okay person. I don't mind sharing. And then I learned, I learned so much from the podcast. Then I learned I could help other people. And now it's like, holy cow, how much more can we help people? So it's a good feeling to kind of give back and hear the stories we hear.

And someone's going to listen to this podcast and say, man, 43 minutes through 45 minutes, I got this one piece, I implemented it, and it changed my life. And it's the little things like that that make a big difference. So I really appreciate you coming on today. And we'll do it again. And I'm sure some people will be taking us up on the field trip of coming out and learning what you do. Absolutely. Doors always open. All right. Thanks, Angela. Thanks. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast.

From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me and I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com

forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, our secrets, basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it, to be completely frank with you guys. But I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I

really appreciate it.