The Home Service Expert Podcast - Maximizing Your Assets to Expand Your Business Quickly Without Losing Momentum

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $150 million-plus home service business with over 500 employees in 16 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy answers your biggest questions about culture, competition, managing tough conversations with employees...

We think we can make a better place for people to work. And I keep going back to this. When I sit down with somebody, I want to know their dreams, their vision, their goals. And then I want to have a chat with them to work on their daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. Just like I build a budget, they should build a budget. And we should help them understand what they need to do to make their goals and their dreams come alive. And if their goals and dreams aren't big enough, then we're going to work on that. And we're going to have them reach to the stars and really watch them come alive and hit their goals. 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. All right, we are live. Q&A podcast. It is October 25th. As you guys know, I've got the book, The Home Service Millionaire. Go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast if you want the book. It's also available on Audible. You can buy the course. I've got a new course coming out too, but the old course is course.homeservicemillionaire.com. And you've got to join Home Service Expert Group if you're not already part of that. We share a lot of information in that group and we're going to 10 times the amount of knowledge drop there. Got a lot of people like Al Levy that already contribute to that.

Today is going to be a great day. Things are just another record month, another record week, as usual. A lot of people are wondering what's going on out there. We have not felt it at all. But we've implemented financing, the best CRMs, the best call center, the best training center, and made this a great place for people to work. Very exciting times here, day one. As usual, if you guys got questions, drop them in, say hello. And we had our vertical track, it popped off like crazy. So much knowledge dropped. So many great speakers, just a great

way to collaborate. And the biggest thing that I think a lot of people took out of Vertical Track is everyone could win. We don't need to not share great ideas. Just because your business is doing well doesn't mean mine needs to fail. We don't need to be selfish. And that's what this whole Vertical Track and Home Service Freedom is all about. Home Service Freedom is a buyer's group. That's something we've worked really, really hard to build to where you make your money back by a lot because we put our best providers in there. Then we get the buying power of the group. And yes, there is some training in there as well. And then we spoke at Victor's event. Absolutely phenomenal service rocket. Killed it. Had a really fun time with him. He's amazing guy, amazing group. Lots of good speakers good speakers next week i'm off to authority brands

and speaking to a bunch of inspectors so i'm popping into houston the uh inspectors which i think is going to be an amazing referral partner and then we're popping into tampa for authority brands gonna bring the fire and every single one of the speaker gigs i do i have a whole different message so i met with their team and i think we're going to drop some really, really great bombs on these guys and gals. And can't wait to do it. Let's see here. Questions are good. Thank you guys for everybody saying hello.

We've got 30 people on so far. Let's dive right into it. Build a place where people actually enjoy coming to work on Mondays. I think I can't say that enough. Give to your people, celebrate their wins, make it about them instead of you. Make it about their dreams, their goals, instead of saying these are the company's targets that you need to hit. Not everybody's created equal. Somebody asked me the other day, what would happen if you went back into a garage with the best technicians in your company? Who would win at sales? And I said, I'm not even sure I'd win anymore, but I know one thing. I'd walk out with four reviews a yard signed. I'd walk out

with three of their neighbors' names, and I'd walk out with the HOA president, his phone number, his cell phone, with a Facebook post sharing on their online to everybody. What do they call that? The public profile. And that's one thing is I'd end up with a lot of reviews and a lot of referrals from that. And then I'd also talk to them about hiring. So all I care about, give them a five star experience, five out of five, offer them everything that I would do to my mom, learn about the customer, diagnose the person before the problem. All these things matter. And I think when we really diagnose, look into these things, we really get a good training program. And the training is a work in progress. It always should be. We've got a lot of manuals that we worked with without leaving in the beginning,

and then took them and built them into our own. They're living, breathing documents and every person should get awarded for finding a problem and being able to solve it. That came from another consultant. We've invested in a lot of consulting. I'm getting a speak coach. I'm getting a CEO coach. If you're not learning, you're making a lot of mistakes. If you're too good to get coaches, there's an issue. If you don't have enough money for coaches, that's another issue. But invest into yourself, invest into your people. That's the best investment you'll ever make. Let's go ahead and jump into a question by Matt Sanford. Hi, Tommy. One thing I've been attempting to implement is performance pay. I own a standby generator installation franchise,

and I'm curious to see if you could share some examples of how you have utilized performance pay for your installers. Appreciate any guidance. So my dad used to run Amco Transmissions. He was part of the Pinnacle Club every year. With installation, I find that hours to install, customer referrals, and customer satisfaction. Net promoter score is another word for it. With installation, you got different levels, level one, level two, level three. Level three could handle the most complicated things.

So number one, if a guy could do more in a day and more complicated things, he should get paid more. And typically what you want to run it is, let's just say you pay $250 for a generator. What I would do is say, this generator takes six hours to install. If you get it done in three hours, you get the same amount of money. But you want to motivate installers to have your outcome. You want it to be a perfect job. You don't want callbacks. You don't want warranties. And you want five out of five stars on Yelp, Google, Facebook, Nextdoor, and every other meaningful site like the BBB. So pay attention when you're building your scorecard. First thing I would do, Matt, is I'd write down the five, four, or three things that I expect out of the

installer. How do I win? And then I reverse engineer the pay structure and the scorecard should reflect the things that helped the company and me win. And then I'm going to figure out how to make them win. So that's the first thing is, what do you call winning? No warranty calls, more efficient, five out of five service. And then I'd have a checklist for cleanup. And then I'd have a video, the before and after, having the customer share that on Facebook. All those things are huge opportunities that I would really be inclined to want to invest in. And that's where I'd start. Start with the outcomes that you're looking for and then reverse engineer how to pay accordingly. And then what you also want to do is take the current pay

structure, take three months in an Excel sheet and compare the difference and make sure that they're sort of in line and the good behavior is going to cause a lot for you and going to make them more money. Yeah. So we bought Don's garage Doors. Absolute phenomenal. We just had set that to Denver. There was a question there. We just did a deal in Denver and we've got four more coming this year and lots coming next year. Lots of opportunities. We think we can make a better place for people to work.

And I keep going back to this. When I sit down with somebody, I want to know their dreams, their vision, their goals. And then I want to have a chat with them to work on their daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. Just like I build a budget, they should build a budget. And we should help them understand what they need to do to make their goals and their dreams come alive. And if their goals and dreams aren't big enough, then we're going to work on that. And we're going to have them reach to the stars and really watch them come alive and hit

their goals. We had two new homeowners and a new baby brought into this world last week. Super excited. That's one week. So we celebrate those things. Dan Given said, when I heard you were doing 200 million in sales, I figured it had to be through franchising, but it seems everyone is an employee. That's true. We don't franchise and everybody is a W2 employee. I am currently running a home't franchise and everybody is a W-2 employee. I am currently running a home service business in Toronto doing 3 million a year, growing about a million per year. But I always figured we would cap out scaling when we get close to eight figures. I'm curious if you could provide insight on how you grew into different

states without losing control. Number one, we built a training center in our hub, which is Phoenix, where it all started. They got to go through their passport where they meet the CSRs, the dispatchers, they meet HR, they meet me. I go through an orientation. The best thing to grow is within two hours away that you could be there. You need to be on a fantastic CRM that gives accountability. We've got dual cameras in every vehicle. We know if they've been speeding, we know if they break hard, we know if they turn too fast. Checks and balances built into the business, but going back in time, if you're not maxed out in your current location, there's real issues there. We've got markets that aren't even doing 2 million right now. And that comes down to leadership. And when you talk to Julian Scadden

about the growth we're having, he'd say the number one issue you're going to have is finding leaders. So if you could pull leaders from out of the industry that bring people with them, you'd be much better off. But so many people are, how do I buy a company? How do I grow out of my current market? You don't. You maximize where you're at. If you can't get your market in any industry to $10 million. Parker and Suss is in Phoenix. They're going to do $240 million this year in one market. So what I would advise is keep your eye on the ball, stay focused, put your blinders on, and don't take other opportunities until you're maxed out where you can. If you don't have manual center operative procedures, a great checklist, a CRM,

checks and balances, a data integrity team. Don't consider moving out of your own city. Some people have two different aspects. I wanted to focus on retrofit residential garage doors. Some people I know want to own their audience. They want to do HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and possibly some other things. They want to do air quality, water quality. So they own their clients. They're able to sell a lot of things.

That's a great opportunity to own your audience. I tend to want to take my whole vertical. And the great thing is about what we're doing at A1 Garage Door Service, I don't even call it a company. It's a movement. People are seeing what happens when we partner with them. And they're saying, everybody's life is better. The owner is a millionaire. They get the dream job they've always wanted with uncapped PTO. And all of a sudden, it's a win, win, win, win, win. Hence my new book, Elevate. I think the new book, let me just do this real quick, Elevate and Win. So there's a building a company in which every single person wins. The clients win, the customer wins, the internal customers win. The partnerships win. Our vendors win. We win. I win. Everybody wins. And I don't think anybody has ever thought about business. It's always been, we played soccer, we played football, we played all these different

games. And there's always got to be a loser. But when Starbucks came out, there were no losers. So I want you guys to seriously think about how to build a company that, here's what we tend to say as owners and managers, is I took all the chances. I'm the hardest worker here. If I don't do it, it's not going to get done right. I'm the only one that cares. Well, if I had 10 other Tommy Mellows out there, I'd have 10 competitors. I'm willing to take chances.

But when you really have this attitude that other people are allowed to make several hundred thousand dollars, get to go on vacations and spend time with family, get home for dinner. It changes the whole mindset of the company. And listen, to pretend like we're perfect, we got a long way. We're ever changing. Charles Darwin, he figured out that it's not the species that is the smartest that survives. It's the one that can change and adapt the quickest. And it's something to definitely think about.

Let's see right here. So as a new HVAC business that has been in business for the first year, how does one compete online with bigger companies that have thousands of reviews and a bigger presence online? Well, there's four algorithms on Google. Google My Business, Local Service Ads, Google Guarantee, the organic, and then there's your pay-per-click. What I'd recommend is starting with your just getting your Google My Business page up and running. And you've got to network, go to your church. You got to go out and meet the people. You got to ask to do free tune-ups. You got to figure out a way to be top of mind and go quickly into a market and just use your network. Networking is everything when you're small. You could ask for four reviews where some of the bigger guys don't have time to do that.

Have them write long reviews, take pictures in their reviews. There's a lot of things you could do to optimize that, but you got to go in knowing you're not going to make a bunch of money in the beginning because you got to invest in getting those reviews. You got to go in knowing you're not going to make a bunch of money in the beginning because you got to invest in getting those reviews. You got to invest in taking the time to network and build the connections. There's what's called the dream 100 list. What I would look at now if I went into business is I build referral clients, the biggest realtor in each city, not county, each city. And I take them out to dinner. I tell them that how can I help you win?

What is winning for you? What if I told you that every house you sell as a gift to you, I'm going to go program their cars, especially in the beginning. And I've got time on my hands. I'm going to go program their cars for free. And if they need something, I'm going to put up my stickers. I'll offer to replace their bottom rubber, put a new opener in, put the MyQ system into the phone. But you've got an unfair advantage just that David and Goliath is what can I do differently that the big companies don't have time to do? So that's what I would tell you is focus on your Google My Business page. I would call every friend, every family member.

I'd go around. I'd send a handwritten letter that you could get from Dave Carroll or simply noted. And it'd be a handwritten letter saying, hey, I live in your neighborhood. I'd like to come out and look at your system, give you a free inspection at no charge. If it needs something, it's going to be heavily discounted. I just want you to let me know if I'm giving you five out of five service online.

So let me just, should have known this. I apologize, but let me just check something here. One second. Here it is. So I give away a chapter and this book's coming out in the next couple months and i spent a lot of time money energy putting together a formula for everybody to win and i just posted it here it's book.elevateandwin.com. I don't know why it wasn't working. The HH, HTTP, I guess, wasn't right. So you guys check out that book. I'm not selling anything. It's literally, it's a gift. It costs, I don't even know. I haven't even figured that out yet. I

got to read it on Audible. The book is barely finished. I'm still making edits to it, but there's a chapter in there. And if you guys want one of the first copies i'll be signing them and sending them out here in a couple months but that's what i would do for if i had a new hrc business i know guys that dominate i just talked to a buddy of mine he's up north phoenix he does 36 million a year and focuses on one city out of 32 in maricopa County, which is the Phoenix area. One city, 36 million, and it's built by relationships and taking care of people. So thank you for doing the live stream events.

You're bringing great advice. Thank you for that. I appreciate that, Phil. Anthony, I'll work for you for free during the winter to learn more about the home service business. I run a landscape business, and would love to one day build something like you built at A1. Yeah, listen, you're more than welcome to come out, do a tour of the facility, hang out with my people. I can't teach people to care. You know, when I'm doing my orientation,

I say, here's one thing I can guarantee you. I think you're going to like me because I do care. And I'm a pretty fun guy, I hope. Number two, you're going to love our new trucks. You drive a new truck. You're going to love our software that we run. Service Titan's a good company. We built a bunch of add-ons. You're going to love the tools we give you, the parts we carry, and the warranties. You're going to make friends, and you're going to develop a brotherhood within the technicians.

We have one woman, so a little bit of sisterhood. But the one thing I can't do for you is to build your mindset and to make you believe in yourself. You see, I believe that this company could do multiple billions of dollars. And everybody around me says that's impossible. Well, it's always been a long shot. I'm a long shot guy. No one has ever given me a golden spoon. They told me how much I couldn't do.

They told me I had ADHD. I wouldn't be able to learn. I was in the worst reading class in first grade. My mom and dad somehow scraped up the money to get me a tutor. I went into the second grade, one of the best readers. And once I learned how to get help, that's all I do is get help. I've got coaches that you guys have never even thought about. If there's a book I like, I talk to the author the next day and I ask. And one of the things I realized at the rate we're growing, and I'm not saying this to

be conceited, is a lot of people would be better off being a millionaire, being part of the company. We have an equity incentive program. We've helped lots of people out. And the one thing that you'll see when people come in here is they're like, everybody follows your vision. Everybody's bought in. You see, I never told anybody I was going to do something that didn't do it.

My hands shake. More of the people here than most people's agreements and their bullshit they put out there. Everybody says something and then the money comes down and it ruins them. There's one thing that I'll never let happen in this company is money will never ruin me. I'll never not come into the office. Every single person has my cell phone number. Everybody, I can make time. I don't have time to spend 10 minutes

with every single person, but I'll tell you what, I'll just go through my phone real quick just today. Kelly's our dream manager. Kelly just texted me this morning. This is from a technician to our dream manager. Good morning. I just want to let you know how much I appreciate you. You are consistently helping me think through things, consider different perspectives, set goals, have conversations that I need to have, perform tasks that I need to undertake, be mindful of situations. Every time I get off the phone with you, I am uplifted and in more direction of what I need to do.

Thank you. You are amazing. And what I sent to this tech, because she asked me to reach out, is I said to do. Thank you. You are amazing. And what I sent to this tech, because she asked me to reach out, is I said, Mr. Mark wanted to tell you how proud I am of you and really appreciate and love you. And I owe him a phone call. But if you've got 10 people and you can't at least once a day tell one of them or write them a small note or take them to a dinner, then it's not going to get any better. Just like I tell my technicians, if you don't know how to save money when you make $40,000, you're never going to save money when you make

80,000. See, part of what we do here is we give financial literacy, things they don't teach in school and most parents never taught us. It's how to spend money, when to spend money, when to save money, how to pay your future self. Because every one of us think we think we're the man of steel. We think we're going to live forever. But when I was 16, I was putting $300 away a month. I worked my tail off to be able to put that money away. I mean, there was a time in my early twenties where I was bouncing checks, but I never took that money out of my account. And I think that story is important.

I never bought a Harley. I've never really bought anything for myself. This is my first new truck and it had 7,000 miles on it from the dealer when I got it. But I made sure everyone else had a new vehicle before I did that. So I'm not bragging. I'm not telling you guys I'm better. I understand that a reinvestment into the business makes the most sense. Gary Keller, The One Thing Essentialism, those are two books you should probably read, is focus and find out what's going to make the biggest impact. I can't tell you guys enough. It's so powerful when you give a shit and when you really knew how to invest in the company. A skill that takes years to develop is really

understanding where you should be spending your time and most people don't have any clue. Let's see here. So ask more questions here. Miguel asked, do you have any books where I can grow my mind and small lawn care business in Canada? Do you have any books? I don't know any books where I can grow my mind and small lawn care business in Canada? Do you have any books? I don't know any books, but I'll tell you guys, some books you have to read is the E-Myth Revisited. It's the golden standard in home service. As you're starting to understand money, Michael Michalowicz wrote Profit First. Island Roar has a couple of books, Where Did the Money Go? How to Be Priced Right. The Ultimate Sales Machine.

Amanda Holmes just came out with a new version of it. It's got all kinds of gold nuggets. The Richest Man in Babylon is a great book. These are books that were my foundation that are still, they stand the test of time. I love Jim Collins' Built to Last. And I'm trying to think of the other book. Get the People on the Bus. Lots of great books. If I just looked at my bookshelf of books you've Built to Last. And I'm trying to think of the other book. Get the People on the Bus. Lots of great books.

If I just looked at my bookshelf of books you've got to read, The Four Disciplines of Execution. My favorite book of all time is How to Win Friends and Influence People. There's Robert Cialdini, Influence, Persuasion, and Yes. All I would say is figure out how to read books faster. I read them very, very quickly. And I skipped through the 80-20 rule, Pareto, because I know what that rule is. When I go through books, a lot of great authors reiterate certain things. I know what Parkinson's law is. I understand a lot of these principles. So when you read enough, you could skim through

books and you could find the gold nuggets, you could skim through books and you could find the gold nuggets and you could actually go through books and I can fly through books and then I can reread them if I loved when I skimmed through them. I'd love to tell you I've read every book on the show, but it's just not true. I have a podcast that you guys know of. This is it, the Home Service Expert, and we bring on great people and they each give me three books to read. And that's just not possible. One of the books I'm reading again for the fourth time is The Automatic Customer.

If you haven't read John Warlow, The Automatic Customer, you're crazy. And then he wrote another book called Built to Sell. I think everybody says, I don't understand. What you need to get very clear on is start with why. And that's Simon Sinek. But why did you start your business? So you could have freedom? to understand what you need to get very clear on is start with why. And that's Simon Sinek. But why did you start your business? So you could have freedom? Or was it because you want to leave a

legacy? Or you wanted a movement? Because if it was truly freedom you want, then I could help you figure out exactly how much you need and how to be part of a better company. Most companies now are looking at PE or a strategic buyer. A lot of people don't want to pass it on to their kids because their kids, frankly, don't want it. So there's three things that could happen. You could die. You could give it down a generation or you could sell it. Great other book, The Private Equity Playbook. And then Adam Coffey came out with a second version of exactly how to sell a company and what you should be looking at.

What brand of polo for A1 do you recommend? It's called Sport Tech and they're great shirts. They breathe well. They don't ever stain. They don't ever get lighter in the washer. I've seen some guys that get greasy where they'll get like a red tint to them. I go around on Thursdays and I'm like, you need a new shirt. You need a new shirt. I just make them turn to the old ones. They get new ones. We're working on special hats that don't leave sweat lines. One of the things you'll find out if you ever get a chance to work with me or just around me is we take a process and are always working on the process, always making it better. From Good to Great is the other book by Jim Collins. It was killing me. Built to Last and

Good to Great. Let's see. Other questions. I'm not confrontational. How do I manage to have hard conversations with my employees? That was very easy. I'm going to show you guys something here. And if you guys could watch the video that are listening, that'd be fantastic. Let me just pull up something for you guys that'll help you guys that are watching. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to read this out loud for those of you guys listening. What did you spend time on this week? So I'm teaching you guys one thing. When you make it about their dreams, their goals, you're not having hard conversations. These are not hard conversations when you make it about

what they want. And so it's very easy, especially with technicians, people in the company. What did you spend time with this week or significant activities? What observations, insights, or ideas? On a scale from one to 10, how did you perform this week? On a scale from one to 10, how did your direct reports? Nobody should have more than five direct reports. Why? You know, Jesus only had 12 disciples and that's the Lord. What did you do well this week? Can you improve on next week? What is the most important decision you're facing?

What's keeping you from making it? What help or direction do you need? What are the key activities and priorities for next week? And then down here on the bottom of that, you should put the goals here, but you should also put things like their kids' names, their dogs' names, their anniversaries, their wife, their husband's name. You should put their dreams on here. And it's a pretty simple conversation because when you talk about their

goals, it's amazing what happens when you can change the dynamic of the conversation. You know, you told me this is what you wanted. This is not a hard conversation because you wanted this and I'm helping you get what you want, not what I want. Now, because of the way we pay at performance, I know one thing's possible. I know that if you get what you want, then I'm going to get what I want because we helped you dream big. And the way that we pay, when you win, I win too. And so does the company and so does our vendors. It's an amazing thing when you're able to make it about the person instead of about the company goals, right? It's an amazing thing when you talk about what they want out of their life. And then they're like, oh my gosh, not only are they paying attention, but now you're actually helping me achieve what I want in my life and for my kids and my family

and what's important to me. So those hard conversations become a lot easier with that form and getting in the regular practice of that, which I've not done a great job of, but our team has worked very, very hard for that. I've got layers between me now. I'm a visionary. It's taken years to accomplish this 15 years to be exact. And all I would tell you guys, you got to start somewhere. I'll tell you guys a really sad story that I'll share with you guys. 2020 came around and one of our guys, Steve, he texts me on July 4th to have a great day. He loves the company and make sure I'm safe. And I'll show you guys this gentleman. This is him right here. And four hours later, he was lighting up fireworks.

He hit his head and his brain went dead right then. And he passed that night. You know, on a sentimental note is what if you only had a week to live? I was watching Ed Milet speak about this at Victor's event. It kind of hit home because who would you call and tell that you love them? Who would you be spending time with? Maybe you'd get over those brotherly or sisterly fights. Maybe you'd call your mom and say, listen, I'm sorry. I don't know what you would do, but if you thought that that's what's going to happen,

it's going to happen to your mom or dad. Sometimes it's going to happen to all of us. That's one thing that's your, your thing that's going to happen. So I'll tell you guys, it's so hard. We did a GoFundMe. And Bree said we raised about $75 million. Our insurance covered $10,000. So it's just those two little girls are left without a father just because of some fireworks. And what would you do? I mean, really think about that for a little bit. Would you work seven days a week or would you spend more time with your kids? Would you take your dad on a fishing trip? Because tomorrow's not promised. It's pretty deep. It's really sad what happened to him. And that's the hard part of when you get a lot of people, it sucks that that happened.

Leonardo said, I have $20,000 to invest in my business. We do roof cleaning and roof coating. How should I invest that properly? Well, $20,000. Number one, here's what I would do. I'd go find the biggest company I could find that does the same thing. And I'd be on the opposite side of the country. And I'd beg that owner. I'd find out everything about him. And I'd say, listen, I admire you. And I'd spend $3,000 on that trip. I'd take them out to a nice steak dinner or her. I would ask a lot of questions and see what it looks like to have a shop at the next level. And that way, you know what you need to create. You'll come out with about 50 good ideas, implement one, it doubles your business. Number two, I'd invest in some coaching. Obviously, I invested in Al Levy. I had Jonathan Wissman. I had Ellen Rohr, her sister, Gail.

I could go on and on about some of the coaches I've had and some of the things I've invested in. I'd always... People are really... The biggest mistake I see is they cut marketing when the economy starts to fade, double down on marketing. When everybody's buying stocks, it's time to sell. There's a movie called The Big Short. The funny part of the movie was the stripper owned five houses on self-stated income. And when you see the signs out there, that's when they should have been selling house because the economy was going to collapse because there's no way it could sustain itself. Well, when you see everybody starting to get scared and the first thing they cut is marketing, you don't cut marketing. I'd invest in a small training program if only one trainer. And I'd say, how can we focus on what we have now and get more out of it? How can we squeeze more juice out of this orange? I think that there's

marketing and training are the best two things. But if your booking rate, like I said at the last couple of events, the number one thing I see in most small companies is their call center is not living up to the expectation. They don't sound great on the phone. They start the disposition, the call's wrong. They say this was a parts call, even though it was a bookable call. So that's what I would do. Do you use Angie's List or HomeAdvisor? We're on Angie's List. We did HomeAdvisor for a while. I know there's a lot of money to be made on HomeAdvisor. I don't really use those abundantly now. They're not my first choice.

I talked to a CMO at a huge private equity company. They use HomeAdvisor heavily in one market and not in the other three markets. Certain markets pay. They work a lot better. It just depends on the competition. And Speed Elite is the name of the game on those. If you call right away, you offer a great price to get out there. They act like they're doing the consumer a favor by having five people estimate, but a lot of them are chucking a truck without the proper insurance, without a warranty that they won't, they don't

have anybody to work when they're busy. And that's not giving the client the best service, in my opinion. So what are my thoughts on Gary Vee? I like Gary Vee a lot. I think he's great at what he talks about. I think he talked a lot about NFTs and crypto that aren't doing so well. I think he could be wrong and he admits he's wrong and his opinions are wrong. Although I do agree that he's a force to be reckoned with. He understands that TikTok is where you should be paying attention. He'll also tell you LinkedIn is where you should be paying attention just because of their new social side of LinkedIn. First to market's great,

but I think going into one thing and owning it is the most important thing. Luckily, I picked right on Google, but there's also YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. There's a lot of other sources that if you're going to go into it, don't just dabble in all of them. Try to really get a core in one of them and then go on to the next one. Did you end up visiting Quick Trip corporate office? So I got all the way to the decision

makers and they didn't feel comfortable sending me out to their area, but I do go into the Quick Trip by me and spend a lot of time there speaking to their area. But I do go into the Quick Trip by me and spend a lot of time there speaking to their staff. I worked really hard to make that happen. It's in Tulsa. But I'm identifying other companies and getting introduced to other companies that are over a billion

because I want to learn from them the mistakes they've made. And I want to... Look, somebody else out there has been where you want to go. And if we simply ask ask my favorite three letters in the whole world you'd be surprised what you could get but you gotta have the balls my keychain i don't know this is appropriate but you gotta have the webos or whatever they're called to ask and if there's one thing i know is i like to be the dumbest guy in the room and ask the most questions a lot of people like they can't wait to talk. I definitely like to talk when I'm getting interviewed.

I'd like to share. And I don't have a lot of secrets. That's what's crazy is I put it all out there. You guys could tell there's not a whole lot of secrets. People will ask me, what do you get out of going to HVAC events and speaking? Do you know how much I've learned from HVAC, first of all? Do you know how much I've learned from plumbing? Do you know how much I've learned from roofing? Do you know how much I've learned from gutters and painting? It would be countless, countless spiral notebooks of information that I've implemented. On top of that, everyone likes to use our service to test it out. And sometimes it's not perfect, but a lot of times it's great. And it's almost like my form of secret shoppers. A lot of times people will tell me a company that might want to sell when they get to know me because they know

I'm the real deal and they know I'm not out there hustling and taking advantage of people. They also know that there's a lot of people that might want to work with me. You'd be surprised just from this podcast, how many people say you should go talk to Tommy. He's hiring. If you're in this market, you need to go work there. And then they come here. I just signed a bunch of passports. We call it our passport. They got to meet people. And they say, this is so much more than I've ever like, I heard it was cool, but this is nuts. You've given me a chance to build a family, to put the fire back in an individual, to really be part of something that's bigger than just one person. And that to

me is the ultimate compliment in the world. Every day is the most important day of your life. Yes, that's so true. Addie Daniel just said, it's really important to recognize that today and the now, make those phone calls. Don't listen to me, listen to your heart. Listen to the people that have helped you come up in business. Listen to that voice in your ear saying, this is petty. We should move on. One of the things we used to have demotions based on the scorecard. We got rid of demotions because can you imagine going to your significant other and saying, hey, I didn't live up to the expectations of the company and I just got demoted. We had 10 technicians want to come back when they found out we got rid of that. And I didn't realize it at the time, but the people around me, the coaches, the great coworkers that I'm part of were listening. And they came to me with that. And I said, absolutely.

It wasn't my idea. It was their idea. And that's what's so nice is we've got grownups here that make great decisions and they don't need me. Of course, they'll let me be the final sign up on certain things when it has to do with the bank account and bottom line. But you choose the bottom line over people, you'll get screwed every time. You choose people over the bottom line. Now, you can't go broke. If you're not making money, there's bigger issues there. One of the best things I can tell you guys is invest in your infrastructure.

We've got eight people working on our finance team. We had two for the majority of the best things I can tell you guys is invest in your infrastructure. We've got eight people working on our finance team. We had two for the majority of the company. Now we're able to make insights into certain markets, certain things. We've maxed out the discount rate. There's so many things, so many things, so many softwares we're about to launch in the beta stages or beta testing. It's the unfair advantage of having an amazing team that cares and that's running in the same direction.

How many of you feel like you're out there alone? You're on an island trying to figure out what's next, beating your head against the wall, saying, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to get bigger. I'm afraid of this recession. I'm afraid of the midterms. I'm afraid of Biden or Trump or whatever. Christmas is coming around.

Then we got tax season. It's going to get cold and I'm not going to have work. There's answers. They're all around you. Just open your ears, open your eyes and realize you're not alone. We've all been there. There's a lot of people in the home service expert, just the forum there on Facebook. Fire away questions. Another question was, what do you think your biggest failure was? How did that shape your leadership style business choices? I would need about a hundred more hands to try to figure out my biggest failure. I think looking back, the largest thing is I didn't know the finances like I should have. Eight years ago, I didn't know how to read a balance sheet,

even though I got a master's degree. I could read a balance sheet at Home Depot's annual report. I didn't know what to look for, but I really wasn't excited about it. I didn't understand what this meant. I didn't understand the ramifications of certain things on the balance sheet income statement and P&L. I didn't know what I was looking at. I didn't know my KPIs. I was a victim of my own success. I would say, yeah, we're doing just fine. But when I really got the reports and then I had somebody that was super educated that actually decades of experience and showed me what to look for

and told me this is what needs to happen and this is a leadership issue and this is a problem here and that you need to go look into this area and then started pointing out the great things and started examining what was so great about it. And how could I redo that in other markets? Yeah. If I had to say my biggest failure was not getting clear on what's making it into the bank. I used to say I'm reinvesting everything into the company. Little did I know I wasn't

making any money. That was a bullshit excuse. That was an excuse I told myself. Well, yeah, I didn't make much money this year, but we reinvested a lot. If you can't see the money in the bank, it doesn't exist. Now, if I take the money out and invest it and it's clear on our reports and our finances, then that's one thing, but it shouldn't be every month, every quarter that, oh yeah, I just reinvested it. It's so easy. It's such a cop out. I say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just put it back in the company. Oh, I'm not making money. Who cares? I'm melting away out. I say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just put her back in the company. No, I'm not making money. Who cares?

I'm melting away relationships. I don't spend time with my kids. I don't have a great relationship with my wife or my brother or my sister. I'm a bad son, but I put it back in. I'm just working hard. And then a decade goes by, a decade. And then you say, shit, was I cut out for business? You may have a dream and say, it's in the life of an entrepreneur,

but there's a great, great, great, great chance you will fail. There's an even greater chance you won't make money. One in 10 businesses make it. I say one out of 100 actually enjoy the journey and don't give up on everything that means everything to them because one day you're going to move a little slower. Steve Jobs said, if you don't take your food as medicine, you'll be taking medicine as food. Tell you guys, you got to really think about what you want out of life.

You need to define what you want. Put your dreams, your goals, how you want your life to be. And then you need to reverse engineer how to live that life. And all of us, we're taught if we don't have our own business, it's the only way. I promise you. And this is not to get out of business for anybody. This is not the goal of this. But I promise you that everybody doesn't need to have a business and they're watching their dreams come true. And there's entrepreneurs that have complete control in this company to go ahead and make decisions and have their own meetings and be coaches. And they enjoy every minute of it because we're having a lot of fun together.

There's other people that insist going out and building it on their own. And all I would say is if I wasn't 24 when I started and be willing to work seven days a week, walk out of movie theaters and run jobs Sunday night, be willing to do what everybody else wasn't willing to do, then I would never be here today. Because to go where you want to go, you got to be able to go and do the things that a lot of people won't do. Anybody that thinks, oh man, I'm just going to start a business, pay myself $200,000 a year, go to Sturges every year,

buy a new Harley, because we deserve it. The minute the money hits your account, you don't say we deserve this money to go spend it. That's the most foolish thing in the world. First thing I would do is go invest in Dave Ramsey and learn how to balance a bank account and learn the profit first mentality before you even get into business and make sure you don't think, oh God, my first five years, I'm going to be a millionaire. The businesses that I know of that are doing 50 million plus, those owners don't have multi-millions in the bank. They're not even some of them millionaires except for their real estate. Their asset is worth money. The way they make their money is at a small exit or a partnership.

You think these guys are running around with... Ken Goodrich sold ghetto five times, he said at Vertical Track when we interviewed him. Five times. He was taking chips off the table the whole time. That's how he made his money and invested in real estate. He sold his business. He sold lots of businesses. You think you just build a business and the income you make from the business, the revenue, and it's going to grow by continuing to pull money out, out, out, out. You're wrong. That's just stupid advice. Work hard every day, put all the time into your business. I think it's just going to give you millions and millions

of dollars a year. Look, there's a great thing called the EBITDA, and you get ad backs. But when you look at growing businesses, there's not pouring out cash into the owner's pocket. There's a lot of perks. You can write off a lot of things. There's the Augusta rule, which allows you to write off your house for 14 days at a good price and actually write it off real. There's a lot of tax laws that I know of. Just like I said, if I would have had the right CFO controller in place and understand the financials and the tax benefits of owning a business and accelerated depreciation, if you buy a truck, you could accelerate the depreciation 100%, next year, 80%. If you don't

know any of these things of why you should lease a truck versus own a truck on a five-year period, if you don't understand what a cost segregation study is when you buy a building or we bought the building next door, it's in an opportunity zone, it's the unfair advantage that the rich don't want to talk about and the wealthy don't want to talk about. What are your most important things to include in a contract to stay safe in a repair service call? So number one, if the person client declines any service, are they signing something saying they declined that service? You understand and you have been warned the family to replace the indicated part

collegiate injury or death releases us of all liability and maybe a future warranty work. Get a signature on everything. Have pictures. Every single job is a picture of the door on a scale. We've got pictures of the old parts and the new parts. We take 50 pictures on every job. The guys hated it at first, but now they love it. It gives accountability. It lets them know what we did last time. It lets them look at everything. Lots of opportunities when you get systems in place. I'm not a lawyer, but I know that there's specialists that work on contracts and they tell us exactly what we should have on those. We couldn't afford a great lawyer. We probably went to one of those online places for it.

And then we got a better one and a better one and a better one. I think one thing you need to look for is an escalation clause with your vendors because Home Depot and Lowe's and Costco have all these escalation clause where their vendor wasn't able to raise their prices dramatically when supply chain was hard to get. So they were kicking the shit out of us for the first six months. And then our vendors turned them off and said, if we don't raise your prices, we're just going to stop being your vendor. There's nothing that could stop you from being their vendor or there would have shut down because they had to raise their prices. People are like, well, our price is ever going to come back down. Well, think about it. Our vendor called us, one of our main vendors, and said we had to give a $2 raise to each and

every employee in the manufacturing plant. And then he called me two weeks later. We just gave another $4 raise on top of the $2 raise. And we had to add more benefits. And we had to add more PTO and all these other things. And then their rents all went up, and then gas prices went up, and then it's hard to find drivers. So to ship stuff out went up. Do you think all these things are going back down? Not in the foreseeable future. So people say, well, prices ever come down?

Well, do you think minimum wage is going to come down? Have you guys heard of inflation? It's not happening. Juan said, how much revenue should you make before you can add office staff and an estimator well the first thing you should do is have help some people call it an office manager some people call it a uh an executive assistant but if you're doing every minimum wage job in the company there's issues so how important is your time? And when you can divide, figure out how much your time is. I was good at sales. I was really pretty damn good at sales, getting reviews, making videos,

talking to HOAs. I was good at speaking to realtors, going to B&I groups. So going in and doing office shit did not make sense for me. It just didn't. So you got to ask yourself, how much is your time worth? And what's going to give you more time on your schedule? That's the best advice I can give you. Because there's no way you could catch me doing payroll. It didn't. So you got to ask yourself, how much is your time worth? And what's going to give you more time on your schedule? That's the best advice I can give you, is there's no way you could catch me doing payroll. It didn't make sense for me to do it. I could pay somebody a good fair salary, but way less than I do. The best time that you could spend as an owner is in relationships and acknowledging and recognizing people. The people that go to train at A1 headquarters, do they have to stay with A1 or can a company from out of state send guys over to get gold training?

We've opened it up to people in Garage Door Freedom. We've given them some training. It's a week course. We help them identify. It's hard to train somebody because these guys kind of want to come work for us because we're cooking every day. I would never take somebody that came to train with us. I would never, ever hire that person, but they go back home and they go, man, I work for a real asshole, man. Well, they don't give us tools. They don't give us new trucks. They don't give us the PTO because listen, people talk. We don't go feed them all kinds of great stuff with a one, but they see me come in there. The last class we took, we did this as an experiment. Everybody left there double their performance the first week because they believed in themselves. They learned how to make better

eye contact, how to ask questions. I say, what should we do? That's Joker Sara training. And people say, why would you even do that? And I say, because they're allowed to win. And those individuals are allowed to win and they deserve to get recognized. And it's something that we've talked a lot about. We're not conclusive on what we're going to do, but I don't want our industry, I don't need people to fail for me to win. And people think I'm crazy for putting so much out there.

And what I would tell you is, we'll see if giving back to people helps. The way I was raised, it's always helped. The way that we donate time and money to all the causes we're part of, A1 Cares, we'll see if giving back to people helps. The way I was raised, it's always helped. The way that we donate time and money to all the causes we're part of, A1 Cares. We'll see. But I think I'm nothing even close, but I was built in the image of Jesus Christ. And I think if he could go back in time, he would be doing a lot more than I could ever do. But giving never hurt anybody.

Garrett White. I'll write down that name. That's the name they wanted me to look into. So bottom line, guys, invest in yourselves, smile more, enjoy Mondays. It's something that's been coming out of my mouth a lot lately is enjoy Mondays. I'm in this office because I choose to be. I'm in this office because I love to be here. I love changing lives. I love walking Finnegan. I love every piece of what I'm doing. I love speaking at events. And it's that speaking and getting in front of people that I love. I love it when someone walks up and they say, oh my gosh, you just changed my life. I'm going to go implement this. Or when somebody says, hey, last 10 years, I haven't been able to show up to a soccer game for my kid and now I'm their

soccer coach. I didn't do it for them, but they implemented something they heard. When someone says, I never thought I was going to be able to afford kids and we just had our first kid and things are looking good. You'd be surprised. Give a little bit to the people around you, other industries, talk to your vendors and find out what's important to them. You're allowed to ask them too, for things to help you. It's got to be a win-win. I pulled up this book here. So this is it. It's a book.elevateandwin.com. Reserve a copy. There's the early access to chapter one. You guys tell me what you think. Literally go on to Home Service Expert, check out the first chapter. I'd love to know what you guys think. It's a passion of love. You never write a book to get rich and famous. You write a book because you want to make an impact

and you want to leave a calling card. Instead of giving a business card, I could give the book out. And I think people will really, we're partnering with a company and the guy somehow heard about the company that was partnering with us. And he said, hey, I'm really worried about my team, man. And I want to know what's going to happen. And I'm just really worried. Are you guys going to come just corporatize us? You guys are a big company. And I said, first six months, we're going to take whichever benefits are better. The one thing I won't do is that somebody is depressed and somebody has every reason why they suck and why they're going to fail and they hate their life. It might not work out. But I said, if you give it your all and you're part of this and you want to win, this is the company for you. I talked to him for 45 minutes, shy of 45 minutes actually.

But he said, I can't believe you could be at a company your size and still care this much to even want to talk to me. I said, what better could I be doing than talking to a guy like you and making sure that you're excited and make sure that I'm going to give you everything I got. You decide what you want. I know we could win together. I know we can. So build a win-win situation, focus on the outcome for people because we're all individuals. We all have our own dreams. We have our own goals. I had a banker ask me, what happens if this guy goes out and starts his own company? I said, I hope he looks back and say his life was better because of A1 and Tommy Mello. I said, I never wish anybody to do bad. I don't have to. We'll be fine.

So hopefully you guys take that into consideration. i'll answer a couple more questions here tell us what you say if the customer chooses not to fix a dangerous problem how do you help them see value to move forward first of all i never use the word recommend secondly i say this is dangerous this is unsafe i looked them dead in the eyes i explained to them analogies like have you ever gone down the freeway with your emergency brake on hopefully not but that's what this roller is doing it's skidding along we do a lot of show and tell and we make them sign something saying that we're not liable because it's not a question of if it's win but they got

to believe me they got to believe that i have previous experience i'm building a whole new software that talks to service type that shows them what'll happen. 3D animations and pictures of parts failing. People are visual. So it really helps to be able to show them what can happen. Thanks for going live. Enjoy your evening. I hope you're around late November when I come for a tour. Absolutely. Do you do commercial if not why? Well, commercial is a lot of AR. It's different insurance, a different truck setup, different training. I do residential retrofit because we can be specialists. You see, I go find these companies that are doing $2 million and some of it's new home installation for builders. Some of it's residential, some of it's commercial. They don't even have an AR team. They got to carry three different types of insurance. It's asinine to me. Now, of course you take every job that will come when you're

money hungry and you're an optimist. You're an opportunist. But if I could go back in time and tell myself, you idiot, focus on the one thing, master it, set up the business to scale like no limit, and become an expert at what you do. Not a jack of all trades, a master, a specialist in this. And you will succeed 10 times faster than trying to learn. I'll tell you what, the home builders, completely different setup. Retrofit, residential, different setup. When you get into commercial, way different. Well, I could still do it and make money. Sure you could. You throw me, I could buy a bar tonight and make money.

I could buy a strip club. I could buy a library and make money. What are you kidding me? I'll make money no matter what I do. The question is, where could I make the most and be the specialist and scale the quickest and put on blinders? Figure that out. Figure that piece out. Because if you're going to just take every time you can make money, shit, why don't you just, if the customer's got a full garage, haul their junk away. If they got a drywall hole, fix their drywall. Shoot, while you're at it, why not fix their swimming pool? If you're going to do everything, you're a jack of all trades, a master of none. You can't specialize. You can't get good at your manuals.

You can't set up standard operating procedures. You don't have the right AR team. You don't have the right CRF. That's the facts. So I would say own what you do. Become the master. People will know you for your work. You think I'm ever going to hire somebody that does a little bit of everything?

I don't want a handyman. A handyman could change out my toilet. A handyman could put up my towel racks or change out a fart Fan, they're not coming in to remodel my house Unfortunately, that's what you see a lot of handymen do they take on projects and you look at an opener installed by a handyman And you go what in the hell was he thinking? This is ass backwards What oh, yeah, I could handle that and you look at it The j bar is upside down, the motor's running, the belt's loose, the door needed new rollers and it's cockeyed.

It's amazing what I see. So become a specialist in what you do. Put on the blinders and focus. Guys, I love this Q&A. Hopefully you enjoyed it. If you guys got questions, make sure to think of questions for me. I don't have the source here, but I'll tell you where you can send the questions on the next Q&A. But hopefully you guys took something away from this. Care for your people. Put them first. Leaders eat last. Simon Sinek. And I promise you, you'll be more successful than ever. I hope you guys have a great week. Set some records. Don't be afraid. Lead with power, not fear. And you'll be more successful. Have a great day, guys.

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

forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club.

It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.