The Home Service Expert Podcast - Maximizing ROI: How to Make Strategic Business Investments that Pay Off

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Keegan Hodges is the co-CEO of Best Home Services and a board member at Apex Service Partners, a leading national provider of air conditioning, plumbing, and electrical services. Keegan was honored with the Business Ambassador Award, presented by Gov. Rick Scott, and has achieved a remarkable feat by winning the Carrier Corporation President's Award for six consecutive years. In this episode, we talked about private equity, acquisitions, integrations...

grow your current market first. Don't even think about leaving that market. And by that, I mean, if you're in the HVAC field and if you've done your market studies and you've captured what you think is a huge portion of market share, then before saying, hey, I need to expand in another market, bring on another service line, bring on plumbing. Bring on electric. Bring on garage doors. Do all of that first because you already have the customer base. Utilize, milk that customer base like it's a cow for as long as you can. Once you finally milk that cow as much as you can, then start to expand your footprint. And what I'm seeing out there today, I mean, I'm kind of out of touch, but what I'm seeing out there today is these young kids are

so eager to expand and get new markets. And really, they should just harvest the fields they have in their own backyard first. 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 asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299, 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 elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. Hey guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. You guys know who I am, Tommy Mello. Today has been a long time in the waiting. I've got a really good friend of mine

and a very, very great businessman, Keegan Hodges here. And he's an expert in HVAC plumbing, leadership, employee training, business growth. He lives in Naples. He also has a house in Nantucket and moved near me as another house in Sandpoint, Idaho recently. Uber successful. In his last business, he was the co-CEO of Best Home Services, a board member at Apex, which was a national leading provider of air conditioning, plumbing, and electrical. Now he's in the garage door business. He owns a company called Mo Better, M-O Better Garage Doors, and he's buying companies across the country.

Keegan received the Business Ambassador Award presented by the governor, Rick Scott, and has won the Carrier Corporation President's Award for six consecutive years. In his free time, Keegan volunteers as a treasurer of the Southwest Florida Family Business Foundation and supports local charities. He's also a founding athletic sponsor of the Florida Southwestern State College Foundation. He holds a Master HVAC and master electrical state license as well. Keegan, how the hell are you, brother? Good, Tommy. Yeah, just enjoying the summer. It's winding down. Kind of glad a little bit. Get back to work a little more, but sad at the same time. Been a great summer, though. Yeah, it has. You and Flores get around, and it seems like you guys

are having a great time. What I love about what you've always done, well, let's go back a little bit after this, but just what's your philosophy about business? It seems like you're engaged, but you've realized you can't be everything to everyone. You hire really smart people. And I think a lot of people miss that. You travel, you have fun. Even back in the day, you weren't there every day. You weren't like, I got to go run this job for it to get successful. You just hired great people. What is your philosophy overall on that? Well, I guess to be clear, it's not always that way.

I mean, you and I, when we first started building our businesses, I mean, it was just us. It was me and my brother and it was just you and you work day and night and you do what you got to do. As a business evolves and you start to make more money, you really start to learn the value of time. So for me, the value of time is worth more than anything. It should be to everybody on the planet. And so when you start to focus more on time, you start to think differently. And so now I've surrounded myself with an amazing team around me. And MoBetter Garage is one of the brands. We're running four different brands right now, but it's under Garage Store Partners actually is the technical name for it all. I have a great team I've surrounded myself with. I lead them. I coach them. I mentor them. Act kind of like a chairman of the board, actually, with them. And they're

running the businesses every day. And that's, you know, it's by design. So if you want to get out of the grind, if you want to quit killing yourself, design it that way. And that's what I've done. Yeah, you do a great job of that. And I would say one of the clarities I've had recently was I used to think time was important until I realized health supersedes that. Not because I have any issues, but you're like 8% body fat, probably the best shape of your life other than your early 20s. I mean, we were all in great shape. But, you know, we should be very fortunate that we have our health, we could get up, we could work out, we could go on long walks, you're getting 12 to 14,000 steps a day, no matter what, you're just making it part of your livelihood, you really cut back on alcohol. And you sent me a picture recently, you're shredded. And you're helping other people

around you get that way. And I think that that's important. Why did you just, I know you had back issues and you just weren't happy. You just said, I don't want to feel like I'm 60. You want to feel like you're in your 20s again. What was the magic bullet, the awakening that caused you to just get a good grasp of your health? I think it was the last time you and I drank together. I woke up the next day. I said, I'll never do this again. I quit. No, I'm just kidding.

Just kidding. You know, it wasn't really a magic bullet. You know, as you get older, you get wiser. And, you know, after a while, you're just like, look, this is just not the way that I want to get old. I mean, I wasn't in terrible shape or anything, but I said, you're just like, look, this is just not the way that I want to get old. I mean, I wasn't in terrible shape or anything, but I said, you know what? I'm around. I happen to be around a lot of older people in the areas I live just because I guess at that age, you can afford those areas to live in normally. So everybody's older than me. And I watch everybody around me. You know, some of them are in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eight. I have friends in their eighties. You've hung out with one. Remember George? Oh yeah. Some of them are in their eighties and I look at them and some of

them are in great shape. And the ones that have the best life later in life are the ones that took care of themselves earlier in life because it all catches up to you and it all snowballs. And so I just said, you know what, I got to get on it now. That way when my seventies, you know, maybe I'll feel like I'm still 60. And when I'm 80, I'll feel like I'm 70 or maybe even better. Hopefully modern medicine and science catches up more than that as well and contributes to that. But I just want to, you know, when I get older, I want to be young still. And every day, if we can just try and fight death a little bit, it all adds up. And so it wasn't just one thing. It's more of just a lifestyle change.

And what do I want to do and what I want to be like, what I want to feel like when I'm old. A lot of people don't think that far, even about their businesses. I want to kind of hear the story. I know you learned about HVAC, you and your brother went out, your parents had a business. Walk us through the best home services story and just, you built an amazing business. I got this rubber band of those of you that are watching this. It's a bracelet that says a1 from day one and aspire to be number one it's one of our core values and keegan taught me to get these bracelets and now i wear it every day and i got them from my whole team and i learned so much i visited keegan's shop we got introduced by mutual friday took me through showed me everything he he came

into phoenix and told me to close down four markets he taught me about how important a great cfo is introduced by a mutual friend. He took me through, showed me everything. He came into Phoenix and told me to close down four markets. He taught me about how important a great CFO is. He taught me how to focus and say no. He introduced me to a lot of mentors and he's had a lot of mentors in his life. So I want you to tell the story of what was those milestones and what were some of the setbacks when you started down the HVAC industry? Yeah. I mean, so I started out a lot like most people do in the trades. My dad was an electrician.

And so therefore, I became an electrician. Grew up in it. Was wiring homes and stuff as a kid, helping my dad, helping his guys when I was 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. By the time I was about 17 years old, I could wire house myself. And so grew up around the trades, especially electric, ended up getting my electrical mechanical license for the state of Florida, and then decided we wanted to go into HVAC. And so went to school for HVAC. My dad had a friend that was in HVAC and he was in Fort Lauderdale. And he said, look, I'll, I'll share with you whatever you need. He was a Nexstar member. I don't know if, you know, many people on this

program will know what Nexstar is. Maybe they do. Okay. I don't know. I've been out of this a while. Next star was big. So he was the next star member. We had joined Next Star and he gave us his playbook. Greg D'Atilly over in Fort Lauderdale gave us his playbook and went over and would ride with these guys. You know, pretty much plagiarized everything he had made it my own like we all do rip off and repeat yeah and um so started hvac my brother moved down from college and i started with us we had my parents uh electric business their customer base to go off of so picked up the phone started calling people saying hey we're going to start doing hvac now and then we started giving away free maintenances. And so we would go out just to get out there to the existing electrical customers, give them a free tune-up.

Some of them were $29 tune-ups and just got our foot in the door, proved to them that we were a good company, why they should leave their current HVAC company and go with us. And that's kind of how we started the company was just calling existing clients. And then we did 400,000 our first year out. Those number, I talk to people nowadays and these guys go knock down a million dollars like it's nothing their first year. I don't know if it's inflation or what, but it seems like our accomplishments weren't

aren't as big as they are today, but 400,000 first year. And then we said, okay, look, we got to grow this. And, uh, there was a guy named Jamie D Domenico that joined Nextar. And I saw his name that back then they used to have a book that they send out to all the members. It wasn't online. And there was a book with every Nextar company in this whole book across the whole country. It'd have a book that they send out to all the members. It wasn't online. And there was a book with every Nexstar company in this whole book across the whole country. It'd have a little bio about the owner, the company, how many employees they had. And I saw this new member join in Sarasota, Florida. Back then his company was called In-N-M Cooling, I believe. It wasn't. And then he changed it to Cool Today. And, uh, man, he had,

I don't like over a hundred employees or something. And we're like, this guy is just amazing. So I called him up and, you know, said, Hey, I'm down in Naples. I'm an hour and a half away. He said, come on up and see me. So drove up there with my brother. We went and spent the day with him. He gave us the whole day of his time, which I thought was amazing. And the guy was just, to me, was just brilliant. He was a bothered him too much, but just, I was a sponge, you know, took everything that he was willing to give me. And he taught us marketing. We didn't know anything about marketing. And so this was 2010 and we were still in the thick of the recession and they had credit cards. My brother, we didn't have any money. We were broke, but we could get credit. And back then, they were giving 24-month interest-free credit cards.

And so my brother and I went and got as many as we could get each. And we said, okay, we think we can do this marketing thing. And we said, this is either going to bankrupt us or it's going to work. So we spent it all on marketing direct mail radio a little bit of tv and uh it worked we started doing it and back then we were the only company really marketing throwing dollars into the market back then and uh it just came easy and we we started to explode. Next thing you know, every supply house I go in, oh, I hear you on the radio, blah, blah, blah. And we're the only ones on the radio. So that worked. And if you go in my brother's house today, he still has those credit

cards on his wall in a frame. And that's what kind of made us with those credit cards. And you guys, you got to the point where there was a i think you had when i went visited you one of the first times i think you had six billboards within one mile we drove down and you you wanted to just own certain neighborhoods you didn't just want to like dip your feet into a market you said these are my clients i want to own it and you did a culmination of a lot of things that's what we met is through justin at gannett you know i don't know how long it's been five six years yeah i don't know i think i met you uh yeah maybe 2018 something like that well you're running up on your five year because you hadn't exited and you had the five years and it was well before you did

that so it was probably yeah five years ago yeah so yeah i'm coming up on uh i can't believe it it's been almost five years since i've sold my business it's going by fast and you had a great i mean at the time the multiples weren't what they went into but you were one of those people i i was used to hang out with you and be like, Jim Abrams is the godfather. We talk about one hour air. And you said, actually, there's a guy before him. His name is Ron Smith. And that day I bought Ron Smith's book, HVAC Spells Wealth.

And then I had him on the podcast. I've met him in person. And it's amazing what that guy had figured out in your area 50 years ago. Yeah. He was doing AC before people knew what AC was. I think he probably invented the maintenance agreement. You know, I got it on CDs, his book, and I listened to all of it on CDs

and then I bought the real book. And one of the things I've loved about you is you picked a mentor once a year and you literally paid them. I don't know how you worked out the payments, but you said, we're going to learn everything we can take a lot of notes and more importantly, implement these things. Talk a little bit about the mentors that you brought in or why you brought them in. And your brother's name is Chad. So you and Chad, did you guys do this? He was a different arm of the business.

Explain that as well. Okay, I'll start with my brother. So my dad likes to describe my brother and I to people. He says, I've got a blue collar son and I've got a white collar son. You know, I grew up in electric with my father, blue collar. They didn't want my brother to have to go through that life. And so they sent him off to college. He got the degree. So the dynamic was really good in business. He was good at all the things that I didn't even like to do. And I was good at the

things that he didn't like to do or know how to do. So the dynamic was great. And it worked really well for many years. The mentor thing, you know, what I found, and it still holds true to this day, I still have mentors, whether they know it or not. And a lot of them are my neighbors. I'm fortunate that I live in very affluent neighborhoods. And I'm like the little fish in these neighborhoods. So I'm around some pretty amazing people, pretty accomplished people. But what I found is, especially these guys that are older, if you talk to them about their businesses that they grew and what they built and just stroke their ego a whole bunch, they just eat it up. And they haven't been in business for a long time and they love if they can see like themselves in you

and you get them excited about what they used to do because they really miss it. And then you kind of invite them into your world and they can help you grow your business. They eat it up. And so it's really not that hard to find the people. You just have to put out the time and the energy to go stroke their ego.

And then some of them, depending where it goes, I end up making them an offer to pay them. I'd have several mentors that I pay every month. And then I've had several mentors that I don't pay. And to me, that's been the whole key is just stroke their ego. They love it. You know, I've always said this. If you look at your circle that you spend the most time with and you don't get inspired, it's a cage. And it works the opposite way, that if you're the dumbest guy in the room, you're elevated.

When I go golfing with three really horrible golfers, I play like shit. I don't even have to try hard to win. But when I play with scratch golfers, all of a sudden my whole game is elevated. There's tips being thrown out. There's ideas. And the same thing works in life.

I mean, some of your mentors, Dave Geiger. I mean, you always had people. Who would you say, Jack Tesser, if you had to pick your top five, and I know it's changed recently with Naples. You've got one of the nicest houses right next to the ocean but if you had to go back to really what were the roots of the home service and this is about a little over a decade ago who were the guys that moved the needle and you just needed to be around that open your eyes to everything i'll go back jam Jamie DiDomenico was huge for me. I never paid him anything. Unfortunately,

he was very generous with his time with me. I do remember at one point, I think he said something along the lines like, basically, you're fine on your own. You're going to be bigger than me. And that's kind of how we ended, but he was a huge help. Had a guy from one hour air conditioning. You know, what you find is you, as you grow, you find mentors that are, have been bigger than what you are and then you outgrow them. And, you know, it takes sometimes two, three years or whatever, and you outgrow what they built and you move on. And then you find somebody that built something bigger than you. A guy named Joe Huck.

Joe Huck recently has been in and out of the hospital. He's got some, some major health issues going on. Wish him the best, but he's been just instrumental. He's been like a father to me. And I've been like a son to him. He's been amazing.

He built a company called Williams Comfort Air and eventually sold to Wrench Group. He sold to a company called Dial One at first, the largest ADT alarm dealer. They thought that, hey, let's get into the HVAC side and we'll put alarms in all our houses and connect all the thermostats to everything. And that didn't work out well, but he sold to them and then bought the company back, eventually sold to Wrench Group and then, you know, went with Wrench Group a while and Wrench Group sold. Huge, huge successful company, you know, well north of, you know, $100 million in sales annually. He was huge. And I've got a guy named John Paz right now. He's helping me a ton. John's been extremely successful in his life. He's got multiple family offices, kind of taught me all about family offices and has really taught me about money, really.

You know, a lot of these guys out there, when you build a big company, you end up selling it, you come into a pile of money and you really don't know what to do with it. You don't know who to trust because everybody's coming at you. Everybody wants a piece of you.

He's been really helpful in really teaching me about money, protecting wealth, building out an office and a team around you to manage your wealth. So he's been huge right now in my life. And, you know, Jack, I've met Jack several times and Jack was the CEO of NextStar. Frank Lauf started that in 1991 with a few guys. Georgeia brazil was on the team amazing best practices buyers group all in one julian scadden's good buddy of mine he'll be in town next week jack built that business in a lot of ways i mean he was super involved he left it with a 20 million cash reserve when he

left smart guy what was your relationship with Jack? Because you joined Nexstar and you really, you were a Nexstar company. I mean, you drank the Kool-Aid. Yeah, I was there when Jack was not Jack Tester. I remember Julian, he would come in and he was, he was a trainer. He would train my guys for me. Now Julian's worked his way up to be the president. I didn't really have a really tight relationship with Jack. Of course, we would see each other about once a quarter. Florida, I believe Florida and Texas, it may not be true to this day, but back when I was in the game, Florida and Texas had the largest amount of Nextar members in the country. And so Florida, we started kind of our own quarterly

Florida group and we'd have quarterly meetings and all the Florida members would go and meet quarterly. And so Jack would come down once a quarter with a few Nextar team members as well to help facilitate the meeting with just the Florida group. And I'm not sure if that's still going on today or not. Things have changed. Let me ask you a question because I get this question all the time. And you've kind of learned a lot since the day you started. And if I could go back, it would have changed a lot of things I've done. But Greenfield growth is great. Organic growth is amazing.

And everybody says, I want to do what you're doing. I want to go buy up companies. And integrations are like really, really difficult to change the whole culture, the way people get paid to just go in. And with there's a large infrastructure, it's not as easy as people think. If you could go back and talk to young Keegan about greenfield growth versus mergers and acquisitions, how would you go about thinking about it? Well, first I'd say grow your current market first. 100%. Don't even think about leaving that market. And by that, I mean, if you're in the HVAC field and if you've done

your market studies and you've captured what you think is a huge portion of market share, then before saying, hey, I need to expand in another market, bring on another service line, bring on plumbing, bring on electric, bring on garage doors, do all of that first, because you already have the customer base. Utilize, milk that customer base like it's a cow for as long as you can. Once you finally milk that cow as much as you can, then start to expand your footprint. And what I'm seeing out there today, I mean, I'm kind of out of touch, but what I'm seeing out there today is these young kids are so eager to expand and get new markets. And really, they should just harvest the fields they have in their own backyard first.

And I'm seeing a lot of that today. Not to say that I did that. I did start HVAC. And then I did. I had electric. Then we started HVAC. Then I started plumbing. Then we went into other markets.

Greenfielding is extremely difficult. Tommy, you're like the greenfield king. But it's extremely difficult, extremely expensive. Acquisition costs for customers are just crazy. So I would say if I could go back and tell myself to do it differently, I would probably start with doing tuck-ins and smaller acquisitions before greenfields because greenfields are so difficult. And when I first met you, you were having extreme difficulties with greenfielding new markets because it's so hard. Well, I made a lot of mistakes. I mean, in foreign markets where you're extremely profitable areas to be in, but without the right leadership team, it's almost impossible. Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Florida, which was Tampa. Keegan

walked in my office one day and he said, hey, where's your coffee machine? The nice one. And I said, the Kearig's in the other room. And he said, that's not a nice machine. He said, you got to buy a nice coffee machine for your people. And he said, this place doesn't give me great vibes. It's nice, but it needs to be nicer than this. So I wrapped all the walls, made it feel like the brand, like his best home services at the time. And I took pictures of all of his stuff. He had lunch catered for all of his employees.

And like people saluted Keegan when I walked in, they were like, nice to see you, sir. And he looks at my financials. We were in the conference room and he goes, I opened up my books to Keegan and I always have done this with him. And he says, I don't remember if you grabbed a highlighter or a pen and you started circling stuff. And he looks me dead in the eyes. And he goes, holy shit, dude, you make a lot of money, but you're bleeding bad in these four markets. He goes, I need you to close these today. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. I don't need to close those.

I could do stuff. He goes, dude, he goes, if you want this company to operate, you're going to print cash. You need to close these. You need to get your best technicians an opportunity to move to another market. And he goes, I promise you, Tommy, you have to do this. And I don't think there's anybody in the world that could have convinced me this other than Keegan at the time. And I closed those four markets and all of a sudden the profits started turning up. And what I learned from that was sometimes you got to say no. Sometimes you got to realize you might not have the right leadership.

Sometimes it's not the right time to grow. And I had a lot of key hires since then, a lot of people that are way smarter than me. I needed to be the dumbest guy at a lot of things. And it was hard because it was almost embarrassing to say i'm defeated but i wasn't defeated we were making a lot of money and i had to internalize it and say i'm doing the right thing for everybody here because he said everybody's going to be out of work you looked at me and said everybody's going to not have a job if you continue bleeding this bad in these four markets and we closed down started making money and we're back in Houston. We're going back into Dallas. We're going into Atlanta.

We're going back into Tampa eventually. And, you know, the deal is, is that was tough. It was hard to say, pull out of these markets. It's tough for people to say, close down a market. Now I'm looking at it. We're probably going to close down two markets because we can't take a ton of market share. I mean, the fact is there's certain markets that's a juice worth the squeeze. And it's exactly like you said, can you own a

market? The private equity guys I work with now, they say, why do you want a hot dog stand in so many markets? Grab the market. So we spent millions of dollars. We did a Parthenon study. Out of England, we did a study at Google on the keyword research. We looked at every house being built. There's two garage door reports that we looked at, and we narrowed it down to 20 cities we need to own. If the opportunities don't meet our buying criteria, then we don't do it. It's a hard lesson to learn, but you're absolutely right. Own your market you're in. If you think it's going to be easier by buying a market in another state or even organically

growing, nothing's easier than the market where you already have clients, where your kids went to school, where you've got relationships, where you grew up at the same middle school, high school, where your Facebook friends are. If you cannot take substantial growth in your current market, do not even think about growing outside of that. That's 100% dead on. And also with acquisitions, you know, there's certain people like Ken Goodrich that tend to buy companies that need to be fixed.

And he's done a fantastic job. He's known as the guy that goes in and buys companies and fixes them. He did it with Gettle. And then there's guys that will only buy great fundamental businesses with great leadership. What's your idea of when you buy a business? What do you look for? Are you looking to improve the KPIs? Are you looking to improve the marketing, the booking rate? What fits your buying criteria? Is it commercials, a new construction? What gets you excited for an acquisition? You know, I used to think that, because I've got in garage store companies right now,

I've got five companies that we run. And I bought companies that are super high performing, bigger companies. And I brought companies, like you talked about, Ken Goodrich buying that just need rebuilds from ground up. It's exciting to look at these companies that are a mess. They need rebuild from ground up. It's exciting to look at these companies that are a mess. They need rebuilt from ground up because the upside is so huge. But the work,

the amount of work that you have to put into those companies is 10 times harder than if you just bought a successful big company. And it seems like, oh my gosh, look, it's a bargain. I can get them, you know, rock bottom multiples and all that, but it's so much work. So I would prefer now after, you know, having bought, you know, we'll call it companies that need rebuilt and very successful companies. I prefer acquiring very successful companies and go ahead and pay up, pay the multiple, pay what they want and you're buying a business that is already very successful and of course there's always things you can improve and you just you just figure out okay how do we go take more market share for that business in

the area that it's in the little ones are hard you know and it goes to you know apex service partners is who I was partnered with in private equity and they figured it out. They buy these little companies and they've got a model and they've done amazing with it, but it's not easy. What is the hardest part? Obviously during the integrations, Keegan, I can't tell you how many people call me. I get offered board seats twice a week. And they, lots of very wealthy, wealthy people. They've got a good fund. And they go, we're just going to go into garage doors.

We're going to go into pest control. We're going to go into these things. And we're just going to buy these companies at a good multiple. We're going to get the arbitrage. But they have no clue on the operational side and the integration side. No great PE company is going to pay more for a company without it having the same leadership core values, mission, and vision, the same culture. I mean, they got to run off the same CRM, the same intact, right? Or QuickBooks. They've got to look and feel the same. You can't just Frankenstein

this thing together and say, hey, I got 3 million of EBITDA now, give me the arbitrage. And I think a lot of people, especially some of these early on PE companies, they believe that if I buy 3 million of EBITDA, I'm worth 12X. And if I could help get it to three and a half. So they kind of mash this stuff together and then they go to the real world and they say, show us, let's see, they're called a similar sip. They're the same thing. And you got to go through and build this presentation of why they should buy this machine and it's built to buy. And it's just not there. What went wrong? Why are they getting this message? How hard are integrations? What are the things that you've been kind of surprised by?

So, yeah, I've been in the garage door game for two years now. And the first year I bought into a company, partnered with company majority. And I took the first year just working on the foundation. And that's all we did is work on the foundation. And that's all we did is work on the foundation. And I said, okay, we're ready for an acquisition. Then we went out and did one, two, three, four, five of them. And it's hard. Putting together these companies are hard. I have a new respect after doing this for private equity. Private equity hires all these young kids and they integrate all these companies and it's hard. There's nothing easy about it. And I hear

there's a lot, the garage store, I mean, since you went with PE and I told you you're going to do this, you started it, private equity for garage stores. Now it's going to get on fire. But private equity companies are calling me too all the time. And they're wanting to get in this game and they think that they can just come in and start buying a bunch of companies. And it's totally different from HVAC, plumbing and electric, totally different, totally different business. I was with your buddy Gus a couple of weeks ago and he said HVAC is so much harder than HVAC plumbing and even harder than electrical. And the amount of transactions, even if you get great at sales and you're good at service to sales, you're good at financing,

you're good at service agreements. But I will say this, it's way less. The competition is you could come across the border and start a garage or business the next day. And that's a pro and a con, right? There's pros to that, meaning that you don't need to be licensed and it's easier to recruit people. But also you get a lot of Chuck in a truck that are playing the price game. So you got to differentiate yourself. You know, if you could go back and I know this is a really tough question, but you've kind of figured out what garage doors look like and you know what HVAC is like. I followed the private jets.

That's what I tell people. I followed the private jets and those were all on HVAC and plumbing. And I'm getting the same calls, Keegan, from PE. They're like, another group's getting in, another group's getting in. I'm like, great. I don't care. I really, really don't. People are like- I want more of them.

But come on, drive the multiples up. Well, what's interesting, if you could go back and talk to, you know, 2010, 12 Keegan, obviously you had a great outcome in H.I. Plumbing Electrical. I mean, from your perspective in the next decade and what you're looking at, what industry would you choose based on your experience with those four industries? Garage doors. Really? Yep. Like I told you, when you were partnering with Cortec, I said, this is going to start it all, Tommy. This is where it all starts. As soon as you go, I mean, there were, I think there were 18 private equity companies that didn't get to partner with Tommy. So there's 18 of them out there that still want to partner with somebody.

Because I believe you had 19 letters of interest, if I remember right. There was 39 out of the 18. 39? Yeah. Okay. So that's a lot of disappointed people. And so they still want in this. And now they see Cortec in it.

I think garage doors is going to be the next HVAC plumbing and electric. You see, I look at average tickets and I tell people, if I got in the HVAC industry now, I know the dollars don't go as far and I know you're paying for a lot for companies, but you take this grassroots approach. The problem is there's a lot of really, really wealthy people in HVAC plumbing electrical. There's not just a couple of people that have made it a hundred million. There's a couple dozen. And so it's getting more expensive to target customers. But I look at things like roofing, gutters, solar, where average tickets are 20, 30 grand. And I have to run 18,000 jobs a month.

And we'll see. I mean, literally, I think the great thing garage doors have got going for them is you can still get them at a decent multiple. And if you can make technicians and make them fast, you can do really good. But I got buddies of mine with average tickets of 45 grand in roofing. I got a buddy that just showed up to my house a couple weeks ago, who's rolling up a deal to do 4 billion in 6 000 jobs a year in commercial roofing where the average ticket's you know hundreds of brand and he's dealing with insurance so i agree with you though hvac is kind of congested right now but you look at what terminex just went you know terminex has been public where they split off

they're getting 30x i think there's a huge opportunity right now. And I don't think it's just garage doors. I think they're coming in everywhere. I've got a buddy doing a fence roll-off that just, I've got guys doing things that you wouldn't even think of concrete. And it's blowing up right now. And here's why, we're considered essential.

As hotels were failing, Vegas was failing. Movie theaters were failing, nail salons, chiropractors, everything failed. We were considered go to work. You guys need to work. You're essential. And we're a pretty safe bet. And I think home service in general, the multiples are going to go up because it's safe. But they need to find a really, really, really good platform of a great, great industry that it's deemed, I need to get this fixed. And you know what they loved about us is no one sits there with a broken garage. HVAC, no one's sitting there on a hundred degree day or 90 degree day without getting their HVAC. Garage doors, they might be able to wait a little bit, but you're still going to repair it.

So it's an interesting opportunity and we're going to run with it because I feel like we've got the first mover advantage, but also I look at the companies we've bought, and I'm like, unfortunately, with garage stores, and tell me if you're going into this, they do new construction, they do box stores, they do home warranty, they do new construction, retrofit, commercial, box stores, home warranty, they're all of it. It's very rare you find one that doesn't have a little bit of all that. And you want to be the best at new construction. You want to be the best. And typically, the buy box for PE is retrofit. It doesn't follow the dips in terms of the economy, like new construction in particular does.

What's your philosophy when you look at this Frankenstein of a business? And there's a lot of them out there. Well, I mean, it depends which way you're looking at it. If you're looking at it from private equities perspective, I mean, as long as you have, they care about reoccurring revenue. You know, if you mentioned commercial, for example, I've got some big contracts with Amazon, Pepsi, Walmart, big places. That's guaranteed repeat money. I mean, Walmart is the largest employer in the world, and it's gold. You know, it's guaranteed.

And they keep trying to throw work at us to move to other cities, all kinds of stuff. As long as it's repeatable income, that's what private equity is looking for. You mentioned Terminex. The reason that they're getting those type of valuations is because of that reoccurring model of service revenue coming in and the contract revenue, the reoccurring contract revenue. So as long as you're getting maintenance agreements in garage doors, as long as it's all repeatable revenue, I don't think it's that big of a deal to say, oh, you shouldn't be doing commercial or whatever. And you should never build your business based off of, well, what is private equity going to want? Don't ever build your

business that way. Build your business for however you want to build it and do it because you love doing it. Who cares about private equity or selling your business one day? That's a big thing right now. I meet a lot of young kids that are in this and all they wanted, they can't wait to sell their business. I'm like, why do you want to sell your business so bad? Why would it be like you? Well, why don't you just hang on to it a while and make great money? Well, I will tell people if you don't have a plan to build a business that's sellable, the reason I tell people build a business that's sellable is because they're like, who cares that I'm not selling it? I'm not making a profit. And they keep saying,

I'm reinvesting into the business. You're not making a profit. You haven't hired the right CFO. You have no HR team. And the deal is, is you're missing a lot of pieces. And if you were going to sell it, there's a great book by John Warlow called Built to Sell. Even if you never want to sell it, make it a company. Just because your CPA calls you and tells you to spend all your money at the end of the year on inventory doesn't mean you shouldn't have cash in the bank. And they're all thinking about, yeah, I don't make a lot of money yet because I'm not ready to sell. But if you were going to sell tomorrow, would you fire your brother-in-law who's literally creating toxicity within the company? And if you looked at it that

way, I don't tell people you have to sell, but build a business that you could sell tomorrow because the books are in order. I believe you taught me about service agreements. It took me a long time to catch on because, you know, we have 33,750 service agreements. That was as of Thursday. Cause I remember when you had like nothing. Yeah, I know. You got to build up the service agreements and we didn't get good at it till we learned to discount. If you bought the service agreement and we learned to really, I went to service champions, Leland Smith's office, and I watched their training of how they did a tune-up and it took an hour and a half to do a

tune-up. They took it apart, every single thing. And when I came back home, and you're good friends with Leland, I said, we got to come up with a really big tune-up that takes at least an hour. And we did 151 point tune-up. And that was a lesson. And we really take our time. We rewire everything. We hand tighten every bolt. We take the case off the opener and we show the value. And it's a big, big deal. The only reason that I stay out of commercial Keegan, and I do want to get into commercial is because I found my strength is making technicians and commercials, a whole different ball game. It's a different truck set up to a set of insurance and pay grade, different CRM set up whole different AR team on the finance side. And if you're not really great at something, especially making technicians,

and you got to learn, if you learn it and you get good at it and you get great at recruiting the talent, but those, that talent of a commercial guy, for the most part, if you look at most commercial guys, they're in their fifties. They're very good because they've seen it all. They know all the brands and they've been doing it a long time i could build a great technician in two months commercial it's a lot more difficult but you've done it because you did it in so many different industries hr columbia electrical now garage doors so this doesn't you're not afraid of it but you need to have a great training club i've got great partners and then that's one thing that i've done different just go around in this new business venture that i'm Well, I've got great partners. And then that's one thing that I've done different. This go around in this new business venture that I'm in is I've got a lot of partners.

I've bought into really successful companies, partnering with them, and they still stay on as minority partners. And I've got some great partners that they know the commercial business inside and out. So that helps. Yeah, I think like you said, it's take the current market. I think there's a lot of money in commercial. I've got a mentor in commercial right now that said he happens to be the largest distributor of groggers in the country. He's number two at the company. And he said, I'll teach you guys commercial and you guys will make a fortune. Now here's the deal. You're not going to make a lot of money for the first six months because it's accounts receivable. Even if you do net 30, which most

bigger companies want net 90, you just got to have really, really good team in the finance department. You got to be able to finance it to begin with, right? I've got a neighbor a couple streets down from me in Naples. He's doing over 300 million in garage stores. He's the largest overhead garage door dealer in the nation. And is that commercial? Yeah, he's all commercial. And so we went out and he's like, why the hell do you want to do residential? Why would you even want that business? And I'm like, well, why the hell do you want to do nothing but commercial? Just a different animal. But he's doing over 300 million in garage doors. He's huge. You know, I've met people, so many people that just figure out an industry. And it's crazy

because we talk about garage doors and you watch these guys. The guy that's my CFO for my family office, one of his other family offices, he goes, guess what we do? The only thing that this guy does is, what do they call those crates that you pick up with a forklift, the wood ones, the wood pallets. He goes, it's a pallet business. I said, what the hell? A family office with a pallet business? He goes, Tommy, you'd be fascinated with this company. He goes, Walmart, Amazon, all of our clients. He goes, we literally buy them broken with like one broken board or one nail coming out for $2.

And then we sell them back to the same company for five. And he goes, a lot of times they need more. We've got a whole facility that fixes them and makes them. And that's pretty good ROI. You could go there and they got a whole assembly line for this and there's money in everything. I look at some of these things and it's like, I'm getting fascinated with business just to see, but you got to go into it with this goal in mind of what are you going to do to it? And I think for me, and I've changed a lot in the last year, is you can make some good money, but you told me one day, and I promise you, you said this, you said, let's face it, Tommy, the way we make real money is by making a partial or full

exit. That's the way to make generational wealth. And timing is something that me and you, we don't have a crystal ball. We don't know when the best multiples will be. We don't know when they're going to come up or down. There's a lot of economical issues that may change. If it's harder to get money, theoretically, the multiples should go down a little bit because it's more expensive to borrow money, and that's how PE companies work, but where do you think the current trend's leading as far? These multiples are unheard of that people are getting in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and a lot of other home service industries.

I mean, yeah, they're coming down. Multiples are coming down. Valuations are definitely lower than what they were this year versus last year. They have to be with interest rates. I mean, just simple math. If you buy a business that's doing 10% EBITDA and it costs you 11% for the debt to buy the business, the math doesn't work. Your private equity is not buying that business. So we're still going through this tightening and interest rate hikes and inflation is still high. We still have more rate hikes to go, I believe.

And it hasn't even sunk in yet. Valuations are going to keep coming down because they're going to keep rates. I believe they're going to keep rates high for a while. Valuations are going to keep coming down. So businesses that maybe you were paying 8X for in 2022, in 2024, we may see those businesses trading for like six times. Right.

Still fair. And so, I mean, that's just common sense. But what will happen is I think that you and I and a lot of others, and we have an opportunity where when valuations are down, what do you do? Just go into growth mode. You become the buyer's market. You buy at a discount and you scale. And grow, scale the business. Because guess what? Eventually, these interest rates will come back down. And it takes time. It takes, you know, six, 12 months to raise rates. It takes six, 12 months to lower them too. And then it takes time for it to bake in. But once they lower the rates, guess what? Private equity is going to be on fire again because money's going to be cheap again. And guess what? Valuations will come up again. And so it's

just a cycle that repeats itself. And it's pretty easy to understand. That's where I think things are at. I'm a little concerned with the economy during an election year, because typically what they're going to do is they're going to flood the market with gas to pull gas prices down. They're going to try to artificially stimulate the economy. Democrat, Republican, Independent, I don't care. This isn't a political statement. This is just election year knowledge. And 2025 is a really important year for me. And I'm hoping that who knows what the economy will be. And I could weather any storm. But I think that's the thing is setting yourself up to grow. It's

always a good economy. And the richest, wealthiest people of all mankind, they make their money in, for example, the great depression. That's where mega wealth was created and being, putting yourself in the right spot for that. And I'll tell you this, the harder it gets, the more advantages we have, because some people are not prepared. I look at the budgets that everybody made in HVAC and plumbing, and you know how close I am with a lot of people in that industry. They planned on having this demand that COVID gave them. And now that it's coming out, you know, now that it's going pre-2019 demand, they're like, we're not making our budget. It was a late summer and they're making all these reasons of why they didn't hit it. And I said, did you guys really think that's when everybody was

spending time? The AC was on blast. The kids were stuck at home. So I'm curious to see what will happen next year. We've seen this in HVAC before. So back in 2009, 10, maybe part of 11, there was a thing called a tax credit, an energy tax credit. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. And man, you used to be able to get 1500 bucks like nothing, just tax credit right off your AC. You buy an AC 1500 bucks you get

from the government. And so you had this flood in 2009, 2010, 2011. You put in all these air conditioners because of this tax credit. You're talking about what the government's going to do in 2024 election year. Well, this was the government stimulating the economy. And what it did is you really, you swallowed up all of this demand that was there. You ate it all up. So then when that ended, 2011, 12, 13, you had this lull because you replaced four years of air conditioners in two years. And the same thing happened in COVID. They replaced four or five years of air conditioners in two years. And so now they're going to go through a little bit of lull. We've

seen this before. You know, there's this book that I read about a decade ago and I definitely recommend it. It's called the Clippership Strategy. And back in the 1860s, there was the gold rush in San Francisco, and they used to take these clipper ships, the fastest boats of the time. And they used to buy the stuff out of New York, go all the way around and sell them. They buy it for a dollar, sell it for four, or buy it for 10 cents, sell it for 50 cents, whatever it was. And this book talks about where the government unproportionately dumps money into the economy and to be there at that spot when they're doing it. And it's mostly based on stimulus, like opportunity zones, which my building is next door. And it's understanding

that right now, this green new deal that's out there and the way that they're pushing green, unfortunately, garage doors don't get a stimulus. and we're working on some stuff with lobbyists and whatnot, but it's got to be what's called a star rating to prove efficiency. And right now it doesn't exist, but in 2010 to 2012, during the Obama years, they gave a tax credit to anybody that bought an insulated garage drawer. And I think that comes back, we'll be golden, but you know, I'm getting back right now to the grassroots, yard signs, B&I groups, finding out who the HOA president is, relationships, stuff that we got. We were kind of privileged throughout COVID because we couldn't find the workers to keep up with the man. And now we're kind of in this back to this period where everybody needs more

leads. And what are you doing right now? Not you personally, but what are people doing that are listening to go back to where they started to get resourceful again? And I think anything you could do to create repeat business, anything you could do to find those clients, those realtors, those HOAs, those people that are gonna use you often are important. What are you guys doing right now? What are you gonna do?

I don't necessarily think a garage or his demand is going to just die. But I think everybody's seeing as far as budgeting calls, it's getting tougher. And as PE gets in, the PPC costs are going to go up. Digital is going to go up. The cost of doing business is going to go up. Everybody wants more money now to recruits going up. It's getting more expensive because inflation.

What are your thoughts of how to weather the storm? Well, I mean, I'm fortunate. I've bought very old businesses, some of them as old as 60 years old. And I do very little marketing right now. I'm growing about 43% this year. And with very little marketing, right, less than 3% of sales. So I'm fortunate, but that's not going to last forever. And it's going to be exactly what you just said. COVID, in my opinion, made people lazy. It was too easy. You didn't learn the fundamentals of marketing and how to make the phone ring because it just happened. And then you you know,

you look at all these businesses and you look at these companies that they went in COVID from being a $3 million company to a $15 million company. And you look and you said, if you dig into it enough, you can see that they didn't really drive a whole bunch of calls to get to 15 million. It just raised their prices. The price of the air conditioner went from being 5,000 to 15,000. That's what happened. And then they didn't get to learn any of the fundamentals of business. And so I think that once evaluations, once prices of goods, consumer goods, as soon as

we break the consumer's back, which that's what the Fed is doing and they're going to, as soon as they break this consumer and the spending stops, prices are going to come down. Manufacturers will have to adjust their pricing. And when prices come down, you're going to see the businesses go down. So if you look at all these businesses that grew so much, their call volume didn't grow as much as you think it would. And I think that everybody's going to have to learn once this COVID environment wears off and maybe we do go into a recession, they're going to have to learn how to operate a business the right way. Well, I tell people, listen, a lot of people, they feel like it's their duty to be obligated to their people. And I agree with that, but it's not stay. So many people are like, I got to keep my crew together. This guy that's loyal for 10 years is a bad performer. He's not bought in.

He rolls his eyes during the meetings or it's maybe not the right seat on the bus. But the fact is so many people, what's the first thing they cut if they're a bad business? Marketing. Of course, that's the death spiral. When it should be getting leaner, it should be figuring out. One of the things that I prided myself on is making room when I need to make a new hire. It's not just adding expenses to the bottom line. It's making sure I'm getting the right people on the bus. And it's extraordinary what a really great hire can do in a right C-suite position. And it's mind boggling to me watching people hold on to bottom performers because they felt loyal to them and ruining possibly the whole business because they kept four people

that they felt loyal to that really aren't as bottom as you think they are. Yeah. And I think you're pretty good at that. You let the information make the decisions, right? I do. I'm in a different role now where I'm not actually, you know, I'm not the president in there running the business. I'm more of a chairman and I have to watch them make mistakes, my own team. And I've lived these mistakes a hundred times and I have to watch them. And it could be, you know, somebody that is cancer in the company and I'll, I'll give them hints and say, how's this person doing? Tell me more, tell me more. And then finally, six months later, they'll terminate the relationship with the person.

And I just go in and say, you know, guys, I'm not the type of person that says, I tell you so. So I'm not going to say that. And they'll go, we know. And I said, I told you six months guys, I'm not the type of person that says I tell you so. So I'm not going to say that. And they'll go, we know. And I said, I told you six months ago, I saw this coming. So it's hard, but you should, if you're the one running the business, you got to make the tough decisions. If you've got cancer, if you get the wrong person in your culture and the business, you

got to weed them out. I love what you said. You let people make mistakes and it's so hard for a small business to sit there. What do we say as business owners? I'll just do it myself. And we became this firefighter that is responsible for turning around bad reviews, making sure we're doing the training, and then it stunts your growth. And what I tell people is we're going right up to 800 employees. And if they perform 70% of what I could do, that's 56,000% of what I could do. And allowing them, when you get a personal assistant, and it's amazing, an executive assistant, how many people I know that can't hire

somebody because they go, they do everything wrong. And I'm like, what did they do wrong? They're like, even booking a simple trip, they can't get the ticket right. And I'm like, show me where you train them how to do that. Show me how you delegate it. Show me your SOP for that. And they go, well, it's not that hard. They got to book a flight. Well, what airline do you like? Do you like to fly a morning or night? Where's your TSA pre-check? Are you part of clear? If you get delayed somewhere, are you okay with a connection flight? And they're like, well, no, I don't want any of that. And I'm like, where is that? Is that just in your head? How do you like your email process? And I watch very successful entrepreneurs that can't delegate. And they say, I'm just going to do it myself because they're not,

you really got to take two steps back when you hire somebody and you got to say, I'm going to let them grow like you do. And people aren't prepared for that. They're not financially stable enough to let them make mistakes. So they got to go in and fix things. And then they realize, I didn't sign up for this. I started a business for freedom. And now I work seven days a week and holidays. I don't get time with my kids. My wife wants to divorce me and I might lose my house. I barely make a payroll. And I'm like, you let it get to this level where now I say revenues for vanity, profits for sanity. And you should be a smaller business that's making way more profit than just always having your foot on the gas, which was me a long time.

Yeah. The personal assistant is one of the hardest positions to hire. That is extremely difficult. And it takes so long to train that person. Because you've got to dump everything that's in your head into that person. It's difficult. And it takes so long to train that person because you've got to dump everything that's in your head into that person. It's difficult. But once you find it, you don't want to live without them. Well, you've done a great job. I'll get this kind of, ask you some closing questions here in a minute, but you've got right now. And listen, by the way, guys, Keegan's a very modest guy. I mean, overall, he likes the nice things in life,

but he's lived probably worse, equivalent to me, which was in a small apartment. And the deal is, is right now you've got your EA, you've got a person that handles the house, you've got someone that cooks for you. You go around on a PJ because you're buying your time back. Well, how do you decide if you're going to do something or have someone else do it? What does your decision-making tree look like? It's time. It all goes back to time.

How do I want to spend my time? I ask myself, do I want to spend my time doing it? I'm perfectly capable of doing it. I mean, I'll throw something simple out there. I'm perfectly capable of doing, I mean, I'll throw something simple out there. I'm perfectly capable of going to the grocery store. Is that what I want to do with my time? What else could I be doing that's better served for my time than going to the grocery store? Can I have someone on my staff, like the chef, go to do that for me and I can spend my time, you know, mentoring one of my executives in the business. Is my time better spent that way? And that's how I look at things.

Or somebody in the business, maybe it's my time just better spent being with my wife. Maybe I'd rather walk my dogs, you know, it's time. Yeah, I always look at things that, you know, a lot of people have kids and if mowing your lawn, getting away from the family and listening to a podcast is your personal time and you appreciate doing that, then all by all means, mow the lawn, be a good father, take your time away. You enjoy that. It doesn't mean you can't hire somebody, but if you enjoy doing something a lot, like every once in a while,

like fixing something at the house, I very rarely do it, but I like to do it sometimes just because I like to impress Bree. I take my shirt off and fix something. What do you think life looks like? I think about this often, Keegan, is what does life look like in five years? And I don't have it down to a science, but I just say I like to spend time with my mom and dad. I love my niece and nephews. I love hanging out with you guys and some dear friends. I love golf. I love fishing. But I know, see, when we get together, we talk about business. We don't talk about football and sports. And we very rarely talk about relationships. Like it's, we enjoy business. That's our game. That's our gift. And so I'm never going to take business out of the equation, but in five years, you probably already will say it's

similar to what it is today. It's you're involved, but you're more of a chairman position. You're watching your investments grow, but you're making enough time for your personal development, for your friends, and you're growing as a person being around the right people. But I'm curious, is there something that you see different in five years in your life, or does it just continue to do what you're doing, taking care of yourself and being around smart people you know i i do i think you know i'd really like to uh work on my executive team even more they're all equity partners in a lot of the stuff i'm doing and i'd like to see that come to fruition on some deals. I'd like to be able to make them wealthy. I'd like to teach them on what to do with wealth when they get it, what to do with it,

how to behave, what not to do, and work on developing their lives more. And again, I really value, I think you've probably seen that I've put extreme time into it and it's important to me, is traveling and just being away with my wife and our dogs and living different lives. I'm fortunate and blessed we're able to live different lives at different homes. And I really value that and I want to keep doing that. Well, you've got three main places you stay in all different quadrants of the states. Do you see yourself being in more places, more than three? No, I don't. What I'd like to do is just make sure that I can spend enough time at each place because what a lot of people do is they buy a second home or whatever, a third home. I've got

friends that have like eight or nine homes and some of them they haven't been to in five years. So it's really just making the time to say, I'm going to spend three months at this home, four months at this home, five months at this home, and it's doing it. It's one thing to talk about it. It's another to do it. So if you were to tell, pick three books that really moved you you it doesn't even need to be business it could be physical it could be relationships it could be negotiation it could be for all i care it could be fiction is there three books that you remember that stand out to you or just even one really i mean i'll give you you know probably my favorite author is john maxwell i've been to his conventions and he's probably my favorite author you know one of the books i've been rereading several times over

recently is sitting here next to me is is winning by jack welsh and uh i've read it several times years ago and it really probably is just a one size fits all book for running a business. And there's parts of it about just being an employee as well. You know that if everybody could read Jack Welch winning, the guy was just so not, he happened to be a huge Nantucket guy out here as well, but he was an amazing CEO. You know what Jack Welch said? He was on his deathbed. Now he's still alive and he's doing well, but he almost passed away. My brother-in-law worked under him at GE, one of the best CEOs of all time. And what he said on his deathbed was, I wish I spent more money. I wish I lived a little bit more. I wish I would

have done more while I had the time. Now he got a second chance. And it's not a bad thing to want to make money. You know, it doesn't say in the Bible, and I've seen this a lot on the podcast, money is not the root of all evil. The love of money, praising money, thinking money is your only, it creates relationships.

It allows you to invest in your community. It allows you to take care of the people you love the most. So you're in business to make a profit and make money, period. If somebody wants to reach out to you, Keegan, what's the best way if they want to pick your brain? Obviously, I know you're a tough guy. You've got a lot going on as far as you don't like to just make yourself available. Your time's important. But if somebody wanted to reach out, what's the best way? I'm not on any social media. I haven't been in a long time and don't plan on it. They can shoot me an email, keegan at hbmanagement.com. Okay. And this is the final question. You know, we talked about a lot

of things. We talked about the economy, about rolling up companies, about Greenfield, talked a little bit about leadership. There's probably something out there we missed. And what I like to do with the people on the podcast is give you an opportunity. It could be anything. It could be a way of living. It could be something to watch out for. It could be towards working out and getting healthy. But I'll give you a few minutes to close us out on whatever topic you'd like. Maybe something we missed. Maybe just something that the audience needs to hear. I wouldn't talk about health. I think health is, uh, so I hope that I've been able to influence you recently with your help. I've been trying, I don't, I don't see pictures of myself to just every guy.

That was a kick in the ass, man. And you said, how long did it take you? You said about eight months yeah and uh it's just uh you know without like i said i've been around a lot of older people and if you don't take care of your body you can have all the money in the world you can have the hottest wife in the world all that and if you're not healthy enough you can't enjoy any of them you know you can't all the things that we talked about today on the show you can't enjoy any of them. You know, you can't, all the things that we talked about today on the show, you can't enjoy any of it without health. And it's really, if you walk around any street in America, any mall in America, well, I don't even know if we all go to malls anymore, but anywhere in America, you walk around, just take a look around and try and find a percentage

of the people that are overweight. It's incredible. Now we all have a different perception of what overweight is, but overweight, you know, let's, let's just say that, you know, maybe 30 pounds is considered to be overweight or whatever. It's a huge percentage of our culture in this country. And it's not that way in all the countries around us. And, um, it's going to be a huge, huge, you know, epidemic probably in our country. And it's not that way in all the countries around us. And it's going to be a huge, huge epidemic probably in our country. It's going to be so huge, the government's going to start passing laws on us telling us what to eat and what not to drink. Well, they're the ones that got us into this. Dana White said, I'm never going to go to a doctor again. He goes, the doctor tried

to get me on blood pressure medicine, heart regulation medicine, cholesterol medicine. He goes, I went to a Gary 10X. I went to this doctor. He said, you got to lose weight. You got to do this. You got to eat right. And he said, within six months, all those chronic issues are gone. I've been on blood pressure medication at 28 years old.

In June 1st of this year, I stopped taking it and I'm doing great. And that's just Western medicine. Steve jobs said, either you're going to take your food and as your medicine, or you're going to be taking medicine as your food, right? On his deathbed.

And that's why people, you know, people sell, you know, why do you have a private chef? Because I can't eat healthy going out in these restaurants. It's horrible what they put in the food. And so I want to watch.

It's all nutrition, everything I put into my body. And that's why I have a private chef. And I understand everybody can't do that. But if you cook your own food, you can certainly control what you buy at the grocery store and what you put in your body. And you'll be smarter. You'll think faster. You'll run faster.

You'll jump higher. You'll run your business better. You'll be a better boss. You'll be a better husband. All of that with your health. Well, we're going to talk about this a lot more in the future of just getting yourself to where you need to be. And a lot of people, unfortunately, Keegan,

they lie to themselves. They say, I'm going to stop smoking. I'm going to slow down the drinking. I'm going to start exercising. And they get too busy for it because it's not a priority. But they got enough time for Amazon. They got enough time for Hulu. They got enough time for their favorite Netflix series. And they say, if you only knew how hard I work.

And I'm like, well, that's going to end abruptly because your health is so very important. I appreciate you jumping on here, brother. You're the best. And we'll do this again. But this is a great interview. You guys, Keegan is literally like one of the reasons I'm successful. It's just seeing his business, seeing the way he treats people, just watching it, and then just having a confidant. If you don't have people like Keegan in your life to tell you, listen, keep your eye on this. Get a coffee machine. Make your place nice for the employees to come. The bracelet. All these little things add up to a great business. So I've had Keegan

and a couple other guys come in, and I welcomed them. And Keegan didn't even charge me. He probably won't do it for you. I got lucky. This was at the right time, right place. But thanks for jumping on today. All right. Appreciate the time, Tommy. 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 that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward 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.