The Home Service Expert Podcast - Maximizing Fleet Efficiency: Insights from Industry Experts with Renee Millum

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

In this conversation, Tommy Mello and fleet management expert Renee Milam discuss the intricacies of managing a fleet of vehicles, particularly in the home service industry. They explore the benefits of leasing versus buying vehicles, the importance of maintaining a new fleet for employee morale and customer perception, and how effective branding can enhance business visibility. Additionally, they delve into the role of technology in optimizing fleet operations and the significance of understanding total cost of ownership in fleet management. Don’t forget to register for Tommy’s event, Freedom 2025! This is the event where Tommy’s billion-dollar network will break down exactly how to accelerate your business and dominate your market in 2025. For more details visit freedomevent.com Timestamps: 00:00 Understanding Fleet Management and Vehicle Lifecycle 08:01 The Benefits of Leasing vs. Buying Vehicles 16:01 Optimizing Fleet Operations and Maintenance 23:16 The Importance of Vehicle Branding and Image 30:34 Leveraging Technology in Fleet Management    

We know from all the data we collect about over half a million vehicles, a gas engine, the right time to get out is 100K. There's about a 36% probability that something catastrophic is going to happen after 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. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you.

First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview, so I ask the team to take notes for you. Just text, note, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-5-26-1299, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevate and win.com for slash podcast to get your

copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, today's going to be a killer podcast. I'm sitting here with Renee Milam. And she's been helping me for the last decade just on how we handle our fleet here at A1, Garage Door Service. She's an expert in San Francisco. She's an expert in sales business fleet management fleet administration she's based here in good year uh and uh lots of vast knowledge she spent the last 11 years learning and training in the commercial fleet industry uh knows everything there is to know about fleet strategy and management fleet wellness fleet goals and priorities and fleet administration and i thought i'd have you on because everybody always calls me and says what do i do i do i buy new do i buy use do i go to kick charge do i get it branded do i

depreciate it. How does the gas cards work like Wex? When do I sell it? All these questions. So I'm just going to start out first and foremost. Do you want to tell the audience a little bit about you and what you've been up to the last few years? Sure. Thanks, Tommy. I appreciate you inviting me here to talk about leasing and fleet management. Definitely been a career move for me, like you said, over the last decade. And I'm excited and I'm passionate about it. So moved here with my family. Again, actually, I was trained and worked for when the largest fleet management companies here in, you know, Arizona, is where I met you actually, to begin with. If anybody doesn't know it, Tommy is quite the acrobat.

He, uh, first time I met him, he did a full cartwheel on whole nine of the Scottsdale TPC course. Oh, yeah. That's not surprising. There's probably beer involved. I don't think you can do that right now. It looks like you got a bum foot. But if anybody hasn't seen it, it's quite the the site so um yeah so i'm i'm currently uh working in the commercial fleet industry met you partnered up with you and wanted to you know hopefully share some benefits about you know why does it make sense to these versus buy yeah in 2015 i think it was 2015 i met a guy named darrell i knew him for a long time i knew him for knew him for 10 years before that but he's like why do you buy all these used pieces of crap have you ever heard about depreciation do you know what it's

for your team to have a broken down truck and do you understand the perception of the clients on the road that see those used pieces of crap and he told me straight up like it is he told me that and he told me buy a building i've made more buying and selling buildings as i grew than i made entirely in the garage door business so those two pieces of advice i always thought man i'm getting a better deal my dad's a mechanic i've got hoists i could just fix these things take care of them and I'm saving a bunch of money. Yeah, and that comes up a lot. I still talk to clients,

especially in the home service industry every day, right? They're like, why would I pay all that interest? Interest rates are so high. Interest rates only about 5% of your total cost of ownership when it comes to a vehicle. And if you do have the cash flow and say, I can afford it, why wouldn't you put that somewhere else in the business to help you make more money?

Or if you don't need it in the business, why wouldn't you put it into a money market? putting cash into a depreciating asset makes absolutely no good business sense. Yes, you can depreciate it all up front, but once that depreciation is gone, what do you have? At least if you're paying interest, that's a tax. There's a tax right off anyway. And the thing that I learned about fleets is they got kind of a shelf lift. Usually there's an automotive warranty on everything, the tranny and the engine.

And there's a good time to turn it back in to you get maximum amount of money when you turn it in. versus running it till it falls apart. And you talk a little bit about, like, fleet strategy. Yeah. And some of the, like, you, what are some of the bigger clients you worked with? Some of the bigger clients I work with, Gettle. I can't think of any at the top of my head there. There's, like, massive ones that aren't even in the home service space.

But does anybody, does Amazon buy their own trucks? Absolutely not. No. None of these companies do. The Red Cross, UPS, FedEx, like, they all leave. lease. Absolutely. 498 companies of the 500 fortune companies at least. That's a fact. 498 out of the top 500. That's a fact. Yeah. I mean, my CFO was a wizard of doing this to where it would never make sense to buy a vehicle. Absolutely. Like I said, once you buy it and you depreciate it, it's done. At least when you lease it, you can still use your 179 tax advantage because it qualifies. You're using it 50% for business.

You're owning it like it's your own, your maintenance, you're insurancing it, you're insurancing it. And then there's a buyout at the end of this lease. This is an open-ended equity lease. We're not talking about your typical retail lease where you're going to pay a little bit of money. You're going to turn it at the end. You're going to get ding for mileage and wear and tear. This type of lease was made for commercial businesses because home service business has put on lots of mileage. You never know if you're going to do 15 or 30,000 miles a year, right?

And let me ask you, so usually is it like five bucks you own it at the end of five years. Is that, like, it's like, you get through the five-year lease and it's like a super low bio. It's flexible. We can do it down to a dollar or typically we like to do it to 10 to 15 percent. Okay. Because that way, you're still going to be in an equity position after 12 months, right? You don't want to be upside down in this vehicle, especially if we have to sell them at 36 months or 24 months or 48, whatever it may be. So we're going to make that, that residual very small. And then that way you're not paying interest on that portion of the vehicle that you're not utilizing anyway. I love that. You know, I think I fell in love with the Dodges. They've got a

great warranty. They've been very dependable. I went down to Solantis in Mexico. And then I went and saw Utilomaster. And everybody's kind of like, how do we get your type of deal? That's why we started Jump Spark. But what I love about your programs is they don't just pay for the vehicle. You'll outfit the whole vehicle and you'll wrap it. And that's all included. So I'm not out the the $6,000 to wrap it, and then the $10,000 to outfit, it's all rolled up into one. How does that work? Yeah, it's all encompassing. So another thing, you know, people say, oh, I'm just going to continue to finance it because

my payments less. Well, truly are you comparing apples to apples, right? You're not going to, the dealership's not going to pay for your wrap. If you're full wrapping that, that's anywhere to $4,000 to $5,000. Right. They may, they may not include the outfit that you need in there, right? So with this program is turnkey. We a source the vehicle.

We dial in the outfit, just the way, what is, whatever that department is, it may be service, maybe install, and then we take it logistically to the graphics person, get it wrapped, deliver it turnkey. And we include that all encompassed in the lease. Yeah. So if you qualify for no money down, you're not paying out of pocket for the outfit or maybe 10% down to the dealership or whatever it may be to the graphics dealer. And when is the best time, like a FedEx, Amazon, Gettle, when is the best time to turn that in? Is it right before it ends on the 100,000 miles, or is it a time? thing or both. It's both, Tommy. I mean, the time to get out of vehicle is really a moving target,

to be honest. You know, during COVID, for example, if you could get out of your vehicle sooner, and if you could replace it, it was a good thing because use vehicles were more expensive than new vehicles, right? But it all depends on the appreciation. You know, what is a vehicle worth at that point in time of that mileage? We know from all the data we collect about over half a million vehicles, the gas engine, the right time to get out is 100K. Before that, Even better because you're going to make more money. Dealerships will pay more money for a vehicle that's got less than 100K. But there's also, after that 100K mark, there's about a 36% probability

that something catastrophic is going to happen after that on a gas engine, okay? Right. So that's really want to be. You really want to start looking at getting out at around 80K, after warranties up, and before it gets that 100K mark. You know what we started doing, too, is it used to bug the heck out of me because we take openers and we shove them in the back. and the van started to get all dented up.

And so now we run plastic like that covering. Even, and I never did it to the back of them until about five years ago. Now we do plastic sheets. It's pretty thick. It's about a quarter of an inch. And now there's no dense. So you're turning in this vehicle that's like flawless. Once you pull the wrap off, it looks like it's new almost.

Is that what most companies are doing now? A lot of them are going. Yeah, absolutely. They're requesting to have that put in there. And lots of times, too, I'm finding that we can, well, if you fact, order something, Tommy, we can order just the way you need it, right? That's where you're going to get your best pricing. It's about being proactive. And that takes time, right? Most people just can't step into it because they've been replacing and buying vehicles reactively. I have a new tech

starting. I had an accident. So if you can get into sitting down, which is what part of JumpSpark is all about, is sitting down and being proactive, looking at your vehicles, kind of anticipating what that mileage is going to be in the next street of four months so we can factory order the vehicle. We can get those wall panels in there. We're going to pay the less. for the part to, right? We're going to pay less money overall for this vehicle. Get it outfitted and deliver it and turnkey ready to go to save yourself some money, too. So is that what it is about three to four months proactively most of the time?

Depending on the manufacturer, the times have gotten a lot better now that COVID's kind of over. So RAM is definitely probably the quickest, three to four months. Ford's a little bit longer than that. Chevy's probably right around the same time frame, but. You know what we do is at every market other than Phoenix, we carry an extra vehicle? I think because me not having a guy in the field with capacity, planning doesn't make any sense. I think there's certain markets we have a couple extra. And I think it's important to do that.

So time three to four months. And tell me, what if I like to do business with my local dealer? Isn't there a process that you guys could actually negotiate better through? Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you've ever went the last time you've actually went to the dealership and tried to purchase a vehicle. but I'm sure everybody has been through that process. And it's no fun, right? You get there, you get there, you negotiate, you go back and forth.

And before you know it, you've been there three or four hours and you still don't have a vehicle. We handle that process for you, right? And it is my fiduciary duty to kind of play dealerships against each other. It's my job to get you the best price. I have dealerships in place to do that, and I will go to them first. And if I have to, like I have clients say, hey, I have a great relationship with so-and-so. I've been working with them for 10 years. can you really do business with them?

I'll be like, absolutely. Are you willing to pay more for your vehicle, though, buy it for me to do business with them? Yeah. So you're going to go out there, even if you're used to buying locally, let's say I need a vehicle in two weeks, you're able to source it through a local dealer at a better price.

At a better price. Yep. What have you learned a big piece of enterprise? You understand the fleet game. They're the best of the best. What are some of the common mistakes you see? People buy and use vehicles, that you said, right?

hey, they're going to save a little bit on the front end, but they're not going to save it on the back end, right? So they think by buying that used vehicle, they're going to pay less, they're going to have a more affordable payment. But in actuality, they don't know what that vehicle has gone through that first year or two before they even bought it. At least, right? At least if you bought something new, you know, you have that warranty.

You know you're the only one that's been driving it. So that's probably one of the biggest mistakes. And then, too, just holding on to their vehicles until they need new, transmission. And then they go in to find out that the transmission may be less than a new vehicle, but the vehicle is so old. It's going to have more issues, radiators, the tires, everything else. It doesn't make financial sense to replace that transmission. Now, it's been a while since I've really dug into the fleet department, but I think we've got a program that covers almost everything that we pay a little extra for. The oil changes and if it needs a radiator. I'm not sure exactly.

I think we pay a little, like it said, like an insurance plan or something, or it handles the maintenance. Well, what, you know, A1 is with a different fleet management provider, but with JumpSpark, we have an overall discount program. And how that works, it is a monthly fee, it's a little bit, it's like $10 per vehicle, depending on the size of your fleet. But it allows you to use any of our nationwide vendor. So you could save 20 to 30% is the goal overall. So you get discounted on preventive maintenance. you get ASC certified technicians that are reviewing non-preventative maintenance, right, because they're incentivized to save you money.

They make more if they can save you money on labor and parts, right? And if you have a mechanic that goes in or a driver that goes in and it's too soon, the service isn't going to get done. A vehicle goes in and we negotiate a better price for you, but we still don't think it's going to help improve the vehicle because it's so old, we're going to let you know that too, right? So. You know, when we bought the Don.

garage doors in Denver, there was about 15 guys. And the only question they asked literally was, are you going to give us new trucks? They were so used to getting broke down, getting 500 bucks for the week. The morale was horrible. All they cared about, do we get a new vehicle? And there's like pride of ownership. That's their office. They drive around that. That's how your company's getting showed. Like when we started showing up in brand new vehicles, the ticket average doubled. People were like, we know you're not the cheapest. You're the best. We don't. don't want this to break again. Just do whatever it takes to fix this story the right way.

You guys are the professionals. And then you get like the old truck. I see a lot of the guys in like the tile business. And they're especially in Arizona. You know what I mean? And they just they put everything on the side. Like they do all the stuff they do. You don't really know.

And it's like I've used those guys. Everybody that shows up to our house now has a new truck. Like I want it done right. I want the best warranty. I want them to be safe for all my family. And I think it's just a not a status thing, but just like, oh, they're professional. It's about brand damage.

Absolutely. Like, I don't know how many times you walk coming, your parents told you, my parents told me, first impressions count. Yeah. You walk into an interview. It's the same thing. When you show up with your truck at a customer's house,

it's first impressions, right? And something else you were talking about with the drivers. I get texts almost every other day from new clients that have come on board and said, oh, my gosh, you should see the grin on my technician's face when they got their new vehicle. Yeah. You should see the smile. Oh, my gosh, Renee, he's so excited.

They're so excited. They're so happy. You know, and I'll hear from owners that, like, oh, it doesn't matter what type of vehicle they drive. They don't care about the vehicle. They're just going to beat it up. They don't care. They don't care because you gave them a piece of crap in the first place, right? So give them the benefit of the doubt.

If you're hiring the right people, you give them something new, they're going to treat it respectfully because they're going to feel proud, right? driving around in it. It's like when you go to a nice house, like a pristine house, like if I get water on the sink, like I'm cleaning it up versus like being in a nasty baseball game where you're just like, if you miss the pin, you're like, no big deal. Exactly. It's 100% true. That's a good analogy, yeah.

So what KPI should I be paying attention to with the fleet? I mean, obviously there's oil changes. I think we've got stuff plugged into the OB2 sensor that alerts us about everything. But what are the technologies? What are like KPIs that you look at in a fleet? Like operating expenses are the two main key things, honestly, right? That's your two, the biggest part of total cost of ownership. And then just like I said, depreciation.

When's the right time to get out of there? There's the three main things that are going to cost you the most. And then also, downtime. A lot of people don't know how to track downtime. Yeah. Right? A lot of people say, oh, I have a spare. I don't have any downtime, but you do.

You still have downtime. You have downtime when the vehicle goes in for just preventive maintenance. So that is definitely a KPI that's, definitely not tracked by most companies out there because it's very hard to track. What is AI changing the game at all, shaping how fleets maintained? Is there anything with AI? I mean, there is some stuff coming up. Definitely, I need to find out more information on that, but you're going to be seeing a lot more new stuff in the future when it comes to AI and how that helps. It's going to help, you know, point out KPIs for your fleet.

And when to like turn it in, what makes sense financially, like, especially with that. like we've got the camera systems it's a dual camera it listens we run to make sure if a guy looks down looks away rolls through a stop sign is speeding we know about it and those are like unfortunately we've had a lot of accidents we've had a couple trucks flip we've had like we know every time a guy looks at his phone and those are learning opportunities and we're very strict on that and i think man you get a couple bad accidents you could put put a small business out of business absolutely your insurance rates will crush you yep your loss runs will make that very difficult no so having cameras if you yeah absolutely front facing

back facing if someone knows they're being watched and they you know want to stay in their position it definitely makes a big difference I even had a company you called and told me that they didn't have the camera but with the GPS they had a call from someone that said hey a tool fellow at the back of your truck I was driving behind it right and it you know damaged my vehicle. They're able to pull that up and find out that that vehicle wasn't anywhere in that vicinity on that day and time. So whether you have a camera or not having a GPS can make a huge amount of difference, can save you on your insurance and can keep you out of hot water in situations like that. I like to the OB2 sensor tells you the codes and you know

the codes like you know exactly what's going on like right away it pops up. This is what it was an air filter issue or it's a major issue, right? I think that's a big advantage to understand how long the car's going to be out. I had a guy reached out the other day. He's like, how do you track your gas? He's like, I think my guys are filling up their wife's tanks. I know there's wax and there's other things. Can you explain how that works? So you can get a

wax card, but the only way for you can really tell if, you know, a true theft is you have to use it in conjunction with a GPS tracker of some sort. It can be Geotab, it can be one of the, Sam Sarah, something out there, but they work in conjunction. So, yeah,

so of like my truck, I've got the TRX, it's actually a vehicle in the fleet because I got a company car and I get the special card and then I got to put in the odometer reading every time. Right. And so it's tracking the miles, the gas per mile against the odometer reading. Yeah, even if you just have a card like that and you don't have GPS, if the mileage is input incorrectly, you're going to get a report that's alerting you to that, right? So it could be the fact that, yeah, they were at, say, 60,000 miles.

and all of a sudden, they're filling up something at 30,000 miles. Is it really vehicle? Is it somebody else's vehicle? You don't know for sure, but you would get alerts, you know, giving you a heads up regarding that. Hey, guys, hope you're enjoying today's episode. I have a quick story for you about my friend Kevin. Kevin's family ran an electrical business that brought in just 400K a year. His dad worked from sunup to sundown, doing his best to hide the stress from his kids. When Kevin took over the business, he knew that 400K wasn't going to cut it.

Not for where they wanted to go, not with mouths to feed. That's when Kevin found home service freedom. At the freedom event, he saw everything the business was missing. The manuals, the systems, but more importantly, the mindset. He and his leadership team were so fired up. He said, holy shit, we can scale. We can actually do this. And now, Kevin's dad doesn't even have to show up.

The business runs itself. Kevin's shooting for $10 million by 2028 and $25 million. within 10 years. That's what happens when you get in the room with people who've already done it. You learn from them, you connect, you level up. Freedom 2025 is just two weeks away. So if you're inspired by this story and you're ready for the kind of transformation that Kevin had, go to freedomevent.com and lock in your spot now. That's freedom event.com. All right, back to the episode. I probably get this question, what should I do with my vehicles? They don't want to go to the company like kick charge. Their vehicles look like

crap they're driving billboards is what they are and one of my buddies Cameron harold's like if you start parking on the two days off in the right areas like the right costcos they're well lit up at night he's like that literally grew 800 got junk to over a thousand locations all we we call it parking they park in the right spots but it's got to be a beautiful it's not just stencils and like just we do garage doors it's like it's it's a billboard and it's got to look beautiful and easy to clean and memorable memorable like i don't have bbb and all my vendors and yelp well it's just simply a one garage door service and it's just it's memorable in the colors you know and you're on there you're memorable my mask yeah my uh whatever it's called yeah no i mean yeah a good a good

rebranding can do amazing things for for the business and for advertising so if if you guys are thinking about it considering it don't hold back it's another one of those things that maybe you're thinking too much at this point in time, but it'll pay back dividends in the end. You know, one thing we looked into, and I think this is ending in a year, but electric vehicles had a huge opportunity to get credits and all kinds of stuff. What are your thoughts on electric vehicle fleets? Credits are still out there. Don't get me wrong. It's just like the government still has to do or just the states still have to do more when it comes to infrastructure. Everybody's scared. You know, manufacturers are putting electric vehicles out there and they're saying,

oh, they're going to go this far, or they're capable of this. But what hasn't been taken into account for is weather, payloads, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, companies are scared, right? They don't want to send their driver out and have them get stuck somewhere and don't have a charge or maybe they've run out of, you know, charge before they anticipated happening and they're in the middle of their, whatever they're doing, right, service or install. So I think that's the biggest thing. I think once we figure out that infrastructure problem, we get better, the vehicles get better when it comes to distance and charging. Because here in Arizona, heat does affect it, but not as bad as, let's say, cold weather. Right. Like cold weather below

30 degrees temperatures will really zap your distance on a vehicle. But how many miles does a typical bigger van get electric vehicle? Well, it's empty? 170? 170. But that's empty, right? How many vans are driving empty out there? None. Yeah.

Yeah. I've always thought we could do it. We'd get all these credits and we just, but then I'm like, man, if you run out of charge and that truck's down, I guess we're not there yet, but in the next few years we might be there. Absolutely. What else are you thinking that people should know? So we talked about gas cars, maintenance, making sure, like, the Sam, Sarah and these things,

they tell you when the truck needs an oil change. If you keep that stuff going, like, when you're leasing it, you get penalized for not maintaining it, like if the oil, if you don't get it done in time. You don't get penalized because it's technically still your vehicle. So if something breaks down because you've, you know, been neglectful, it's your responsibility. Well, like, if a tranny goes and it's got 100,000 mile hard part warranty, I remember I had a truck that had way too many miles before the oil changes. And we had to go to war with you guys.

This was years and years ago. Yeah. But it had a training that were like, this is your fault. Like, or the oil, it might have been an engine, but it was like, it was bad because it didn't have enough oil in it. So how do you find the right fleet manager? That's a difficult question. You probably would know better than I do. You've been through, right?

Somebody with experience that understands vehicles and just understands how to care for them, I guess. Absolutely. What haven't I asked you yet? Well, what I wanted to talk about and maybe a little bit more in depth about is, like I said, leasing is very similar to a finance, but what a lot of people don't realize is there's so many more financial benefits to doing it, right? A lot of people say, oh, you know what, I'm just going to stay at the dealership.

It's the same. It's the finance, right? I got a line of credit. Like, what's wrong with the way I'm doing it this way? Well, instead of, you know, finance it in almost every single state, if you lease a vehicle, there's no sales tax. There's a monthly sales tax. So you don't pay interest on that.

If you rolled into the finance, you're paying interest on it or you're paying out of pocket for it. And here in Arizona, there's even additional benefit that some people are aware of and some people are not. And maybe you know, maybe don't. I don't think I do. Vehicle that's 12,000 gross vehicle weight or more,

you don't have to pay any sales tax on it if you lease. Is it 12,000? 12,000. 12,000 pounds? 12,000 GVW. Okay. So if you lease it, a vehicle, like even, so it's usually like a $3.50 you're up. Sometimes the $2.50s, the half

tons even can qualify for it. But if it's registered properly that way, you save all of that sales tax. You don't even have to pay a monthly sales tax. I heard some of the smartest people in the world, they buy, Bree's got one, the Mercedes, because they weigh so much and it can be depreciated. People are like, that's the only vehicle you should buy or lease. You got to be over 6,000 pounds to get the benefits, right? For a 179, yes. For the 179. But this is just purely sales tax benefits.

That's interesting. So right now, if you go out and buy a vehicle, anybody goes out and buys a vehicle, it doesn't matter how much it weighs. If you're not leasing it, you're paying whatever, what is it, 8.1, 8.2, Prescott, 9.3% sales tax on a $50,000 vehicle. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. When you lease it, you don't have to pay that here in Arizona at all.

But across the U.S., you still have to, you still have to, you just pay a small monthly. You pay that percentage of sales tax on the monthly lease payment. I love it. So people are probably wondering, what's my next steps? You know, how do I learn how to do this stuff? Because there's certain stuff that go into the accounting side of it. And small businesses, sometimes it's hard to realize those things.

Do they just reach out to you, tell them, you know, I need five vehicles in the next year, and you'd work with them and just, how? help them understand the tax benefits. Yeah, absolutely. Initially, I set up a 30-minute discovery meeting with whoever it may be, whether you have two vehicles or 500 vehicles, right, to really learn out, learn about, you know, what is your next goals for the 12 months? What are your heartburned, right?

And then just explain, you know, if you're, some people are familiar with leasing, some or not, right? We'll talk about leasing in death because there's, like I said, more than just sales tax benefits, more than just lower payments, more than just no credit reporting. And there you go. I just had a meeting with the guy today. He's got eight vehicles on his personal credit for his business, for his business. Yeah.

So right now, now he wants to go out and he wants to get a nicer house. And they're saying, well, you have $500,000 with that risk on your... That is something I never even thought about. So by leasing, the line of credit stays with the leasing company. They're the lease or you become the leasing. Do I need like two years of business credit? You don't need two years of business credit, right? So we help everybody that is a startup, you know, over three years.

It's just, it's a little bit more difficult. Underwriting's going to want more paperwork if it's less than two years because that three-year mark is kind of the aha where, you know what? They've made it three years. They've proven that they can be successful in this business. So the bank's a little bit more lenient, right? Okay. But if you come in under two years, more than likely, there is going to be, you know, they're going to want some money down. and that's just to keep you in that equitable position.

Because if something happens in another year and you need to sell all your vehicles, the last thing you want to do is have to hand us a check over once we sell those vehicles that you have us more money. So I remember, I had this idea just because I've had hundreds and hundreds of people. I'm like, if I could use A1's buying power, this was hard because we had to get so many people together to make this opportunity happen, which we call JumpSpark.

where do they reach out to you to get to jump out a phone call they can simply go on the jump spark dot com website there's a place where they can fill out a form and it comes directly to me and then i'll send you out my calendar and you can schedule something that works for you and i both how how many clients do you think if they reached out to you that you could actually add value like save them money and explain things i mean is there really anybody out there that shouldn't be reaching out? The only, the toughest ones, I mean, everybody should reach out, absolutely. I would say I help 99% of the people out there that reach out to me.

There's a small 1% that, you know what, they're so brand new and they didn't realize what the payment was going to be on a, you know, a van with $50,000 van with $1,500. $500. Less than that, less than that. But still, they weren't prepared, right? So. Well, it makes a lot of sense. It frees up cash flow.

A lot of people are bearing money. great money that they could use on marketing, hiring, innovation technology, and they're tying it up into their fleet. This is like the first thing I learned with a great CFO is like, keep the cash flow, use the money for growth. What else am I leaving out? The only other thing I really kind of wanted to mention is what makes JumpSpark different than other fleet management companies. Right. So first of all, we specialize in the home service home improvement industry. Right. There's tons of different industries out there. There's municipalities, right? nonprofits, right? We want to focus on and hone our expertise to home service. We feel that we can

really benefit them the most because of how they utilize their vehicles. So, and two, you know, what I did prior to, you know, getting a career in fleet, I spent, I got a degree in hospitality management. I've spent 20 plus years in customer service. And so I can tell you what, if you decide to become a client with us, a partner, your number goes in my phone. If you call me and if I'm not on a meeting, I answer your call. If you text me at 6 a.m. or 10 p.m., I'm getting you an answer, right? If I'm keeping you there through the entire process, right, from sourcing to the time it gets delivered to your door, you know what's going on. Even though you don't have to do it, you have an idea.

So you can prepare with your team. So I just want to say, I guess what makes us different is the fact that we, like I said, we're focusing in our expertise is for our home service industry. Our customer service is number one. I just think we could save people a ton of money. I really believe that people, my cousin just called me. I think you're working with Michael. Mike, yeah. And I'm like, dude, you got to go through this.

I'm going to save you a bunch of money. Like, I believe in this because people ask me all the time. And they don't understand their credit card. They don't understand, like, just morale. There's so many things of how you look. We get a better buy because of our fleet buying power. We're going to get them the best buy. We're going to save them the upfront sales tax.

Sales tax on graphics sales tax on the outfit. They don't have to pay any sales tax on that, right? We are going to save them a ton of money. I spent four years perfecting my outfit to make sure that the guys are organized. It's easy to do inventory and they have everything when they show up to the home. And it's efficient, right? Yeah. And it's quick.

You can look at it. There's the right bins. There's the tubes up top. We got five tubes for struts and torsion tubes and angle iron. And it's just super dialed in. And I think if people understood the organization, how you function, the only time you're making money is at a customer's house. So having all the stuff staying organized, you know, many of my guys take the client to the

trucks and they look at them and they go, we're going to do business with you. Like, we've never seen a truck this organized. And that's their personal office. So I just think people, it doesn't hurt. You don't charge for a consultation. Absolutely not. So they call you up. They go on Jump, Spark, J-U-M-B.

P-S-P-A-R-K.com. You'll talk to them. You'll see where they're at. I think it does take, like, reach out right away because it does take a few months. So you've got to have a plan, and, you know, we're going into budget season. And what we do is look at how many texts do we need to hire? Sure. And we've got a pretty big fleet.

So there's certain times we run the trucks a little longer because we need to hire a bunch. So we've got to take those new ones. And there's certain times we want to, I'd love to turn them in at the perfect time. It's just for a company that's growing like ours, 30% of you. year it's hard because there's certain look people have accidents people quit people have weddings treat fleets are it's a thank God we got the right woman in the fleet department finally she is so good she comes with a vast knowledge much bigger company and managing a fleet of ours I think we got 500 guys in the field now so and then you got my Dodge TRX that I don't

even drive but part of my deal going into the next time I sell the company is they pay half the truck I get to keep it and they get me a new one there you go So, what's your favorite book? Elevate. Elevate, there you go. I love it. There's another one, too, The Art of Closing. The Art of Closing.

Antenelle, yeah. What do you like about it? You know, when I first started in the fleet industry, it was a book, we called it like a book club at all, the office, and we would read certain, you know, chapters each time and come back and say, hey, what was the aha part, and what you really took away with it. He just made it, you know, I wasn't used to reaching out to sweet sweet people, right?

I was used to reaching out to the operations team, right, to get things done. And so he just had a lot of really good information about how to get in front of people, how to talk to like CEOs, CEOs, presidents, right, who make those kind of decisions because they are on a different level and they have a different, you know, talk path. So that book really helped me out my career rise career for that. You know, there's a good book. It's like the best salesman in the world by George, what's his last name? I think he's sold, he's the record setter for selling all the most cars.

Have you ever heard of that book? No, huh? Yeah, he's long since passed away and retired, but he was in the 60s and the 70s. He used to sell seven cars a day. His record was like 14 in a day. That's a lot. And he just said, I build relationships. I get to know the families.

I give them a good shake. I treat them right. I send them birthday cards. You know, I make it an experience. I'm looking out for them. It's not pressure tactics. About trust. I think that's the deal with you is like, if nothing else, people can get some information

and understand this is what it would look like. And planning is key here, guys. Like, you call up Renee, and you need to figure out when you need the vehicles. Going and buying them in the last minute, it's going to cost an extra $10,000. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. You're going to get what's on the lot. It may be a low trim level. You may not, right? You may have options on there that you don't need. You might need a vehicle.

Yeah, like four-wheel drive when you don't need it or not a four-wheel drive if you're in like, for me, Flagstaff, right? Right. Or you're getting an Excel instead of an XLT, which you don't need. Right. I need all the extra bells and whistles. This is a fleet vehicle, right? Because all of them are come with the same safety anyway. It's minimum. Right. Safety stuff. So proactively is definitely, yeah, there's never too early to schedule a time to talk to me. It may not, you may not be ready to go after we talk. And that's okay. I have lots of clients who are like, Renee, I still need to do this, touch back with me in two months, whatever it may be. What are some reasons people wouldn't want to work with you right away? What are they waiting on? They're probably waiting to figure out how many vehicles are going to need

or hiring or whatnot. And they want to talk to their CPA. They want to, they're looking at their budgets. How often do you get on a phone with the CPA? Very rarely does a CPA call me. I mean, I do have clients who come back to me and say, my CPA said this or my CPA said that, but that's the biggest thing is understanding these write-offs and cash flow. I mean, it's really a product of controller, CPA, CFO that understand.

I don't know anybody out of Gettle, my buddy, Eco Plummer, like all these guys all over the country that buy their vehicles. You always lease. It's the right thing to do. The smartest companies are doing this. You might think you've got to figure it out. Why would I pay this payment? if I was talking about cost versus value like yeah did you find a better price but what's going to happen when we got to show up every six months to come fix it because it broke and you missed another day at work and you might be paying less up front but when the it's always in the shop and the morale and people quit because of this I didn't know the number one question I was going to get is do I get a new vehicle it's it's for real and all of a sudden your tickets go up conversion rate goes up

happier clients you look amazing on the road so um well I appreciate you Renee let's just close us out. Maybe we didn't talk about something. Maybe there's something you just wanted to say to the audience to get us. I just want to say it doesn't matter whether you need one vehicle or you need 100. Our goal is to make it a seamless and easy process for you. And you're going to get the same level of customer service, whether it's one or 100. So go to jump spark.com and book an appointment with Brene. Thank you. I just want to say one of the thing. Freedom 25. That's where it's at. Freedom 25. going to be there, I will be there. If anybody comes in and sees me and mentions that you heard

the podcast, you're going to get a special prize. Special prize, freedom, September and Vegas. Thanks, Renee. Thanks, Tommy. All right. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet

paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevate and win.com for slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.