The Home Service Expert Podcast - Million-Dollar-Plus Secrets to Hiring, Training, and Managing a Sales Team

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Jonathan Whistman is the CEO of PerceptionPredict, an organization composed of a pool of data scientists and leading experts that focuses on building high performance sales teams through human-centered data-driven AI models. He is also the Founding Partner of The Sales Boss, a sales consultancy built around the concepts of his International Best Selling Book, "The Sales Boss: The Real Secret to Hiring, Training and Managing a Sales Team."​ In this episode, we talked about hiring, profiling, interviews, leadership, performance assessment...

I don't want to over-index just on having the right hiring profile because that's certainly important. But it's also important that you take the entirety of your hiring process and realize that you're creating a stage play for that new employee. be interested in coming to work for A1. In my book, I talk about the five truths about humans. One of them is people do things for their reason. The only reasons that matter are their reasons, or things are only good or bad by comparison. So right from the very first job ad that they see down to the email or the way phone calls are answered, how you interact with them the first time they come through the door into your location. All of those things end up having a very strong correlation to how quickly somebody ramps and how long they stick with your organization. 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. Welcome back to the Home Service Experts. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have a special guest. He's been working with me now for quite a while. Read his book, actually got introduced to him way before that because of his personality profiling test, but read his book. The sales boss became obsessed with the book. Sat in this office, had a few other managers read it with me. We listened to it on Audible. The sales boss, Jonathan Wissman himself,

he's in Phoenix as well. So how's your day going? It's going great. Hottest day of the year today, as you're experiencing putting your sign out front. Yeah, it's crazy. But you know what? As I go to all these other states, which I've been traveling a lot, I don't mind it because it's not humid and there's not bugs. It's not near as many bugs everywhere. So it's hard to say 110 is not hot, but go 95 degrees in Houston and you're drenched. We actually are hosting an outdoor dinner tonight at our place. So we don't let the heat stop us. Outdoor dinner tonight. I love it. So, oh, by the way, I'm having some people

over this weekend if you want to come by on Saturday. So Jonathan is an expert in employee performance, team management, business consulting and sales. He's based in Scottsdale. He's the CEO of Perception Predict.

It's a software company that helps you pick the right employees with the right sales skills. And he's the founding partner of the Sales Boss since January 2005 to present. The Perception Predict is an organization composed of a pool of data scientists and leading experts that focuses on building high-performance sales teams through human-centered data-driven AI models. He's also the founding partner of

The Sales Boss, a sales consultancy built around the concept of its international bestseller, The Sales Boss, the real secret of hiring, training, and managing a sales team. So first, I'd like to welcome you to the podcast and love if you just kind of caught us up on the history of where you've been, where you're going, who you've worked with, and what the plans are for the future. Yeah, that's a tall order. I started out working for myself right out of school, started a cleaning company, sold it a couple of years later, over seven figures.

So pretty good for a cleaning company. I promptly lost it all because I thought I knew everything. And so then I really had to hit the books, learn how to do business. Had a couple of successful businesses. And along the way, realized that really nothing ever happens unless somebody sells something. So really got into understanding people, what drives performance, and how do you find the right people? And then more importantly, how do you bring them into an environment that's self-sustaining

so that you're not always having to manage a person. So that's why I use the term sales boss because I hate the term sales management. I really like somebody that is leading with style and flair where people show up, want to do their best work because of who they're working for and the things that they're accomplishing in their life. Yeah. You know, when I read the book, one of the things I really liked is you do have some prima donnas, but you don't really refer to

them as that. You just think they want some freedom. I think sometimes we want everybody to conform perfectly. And I've never met a company with top performers that you, there's always the outliers and you study them and you work hard with them, but you've got a lot of great things in the book that kind of explains to me, as long as they're not rolling their eyes at every meeting and just really Debbie Downers or their team players, they're outgoing, they want to win. You're not going to get these people that just conform and do every little thing you say. And just to explain that to me, because I think a lot of people, they get ran by their top performers instead of working with their top performers.

Yeah. One of the things you see in organizations, especially from sales leadership, is they're almost intimidated by really high performing salespeople. Number one, oftentimes that salesperson is making more money than they are. And so there's a little bit of jealousy that happens in that. And then the need to control somebody and fit them into sort of a box. And so my approach is really to, I talk a lot in my book about sacred rhythms, meaning that there are certain cadences and rhythms that happen within your organization, and you really need your top performers to hit those rhythms. But in between that, they can pretty much do anything else that they want. You hire people because of their personality, because of the special things they bring to the job. So you don't really want everyone to be exactly the same. I think of it

like a jazz club, right? You bring in a visiting musician, they rift over the top of the rest of the group, but they're able to land right in harmony with the music because there's structure there. And so if you're building an organization, deciding what that structure is going to be so your high performers can come in, understand immediately how they can add value, and then they can go out and be themselves, but land right in harmony with the rest of i kind of got to know you with is bill hillestad who works with jim piccolo was talking about this guy that did this 180 with a mercedes dealership can you talk a little bit about that story about how and then we'll talk a little bit about the psychology and some of the stuff that happens with the data scientists and the psychologists i'm not exactly sure which story you're referring to. I have a dealership. I think you're referring to Mercedes-Benz. And Mercedes-Benz is an

organization that uses, with Perception Predict, to predict the success of a sales agent on the sales floor. How many cars are they going to sell a month? And when we first started a project with them, they gave us a dealership that was number 23 out of 23. They were the worst in terms of dealer profitability. They had about a 70% turnover. And within 18 months, their turnover was down to 10%. They were on average at the time selling about three or four cars a month per person. At the end of 18 months, they were selling 14 plus cars per person. So dramatic difference. And the real difference was deconstructing what does it take for somebody to be successful in

that environment and understanding the psychographics that are contributing to performance. It's very similar to the work that we've done with A1 in building a model, because it doesn't matter what your business is, even if very similar businesses, they're a unique profile for people that are going to show up and work well in Tommy Mello's A1 versus some other garage door company. And you really have to do the work of understanding what that is. So there was about, I want to say 21 factors out of, was it 21 out of 50 that really mattered what was that for a1 so when we started with with a1 after we got to understand the job we assessed your existing organization over about 71 different psychographic measures and we ended up with a fingerprint that

has i believe nine in it that from that we're able to predict pre-hire how much somebody is going to sell on average, their average ticket size, sales less material. Last number that we ran over a 90-day period in Kansas City, we were within $40. That was our worst prediction was $40 off of the actual prediction for what somebody would do. I got some stuff up here. So if you guys are watching this right now, what I'm doing is I'm going to take the file and I'm going to go to slideshow view. And you can kind of see here is they've got a lot of things here, success mindset, optimistic, sense of urgency. These are the top traits of a great tech by A1. They tested all these technicians and desire to compete, lively and energetic, zestful. Zestful, I asked the psychologist what that meant. She went into detail. It kind of says tech performs tasks

wholeheartedly and approach work and life positively with anticipation, energy, enthusiasm, and excitement. And then we looked at all the data models. And what we learned was, there's what's called a regression analysis. When you're closer to one, it's better. So it's got evidence to say that this is significantly more valuable the closer you reach one.

And if you're looking at this line chart, it's plotted very closely to, you can just see the correlation here. And then here, I looked at this recently, so I knew. Yeah. So those are the 62 items that we looked at for your organization. And the ones in purple are the ones that ended up having a strong correlation. And that could either be a positive correlation, meaning when they have it, it contributes to results, or it could be a negative correlation. When they have it, it leads to results, or it could be a negative correlation. When they have it, it leads to a liability hire. And you're really not looking at any of those things

individually. You're looking at them in combination. And this is really important to understand because oftentimes our gut feel and our intuition can be wrong. I'll give you an example. We did a project with Samsung retail store associates, and we looked at 1,500 of their retail store associates. They had a very defined process for how do they bring people into the organization. And they had decided that two things were important. One is that somebody would have a customer orientation

and that they would love technology. So think of a retail person in a technology store. When we looked at their 1,500 existing employees doing the job, we found zero correlation between customer orientation and success in the job. It doesn't mean that it's not nice to have somebody that will treat your customers well. It just means spending a lot of time in the hiring process and sourcing people. It really doesn't matter if they have customer experience or not or how they treat the customer. And worse, we actually found a negative correlation for love of technology and success in the role.

So here they were out looking for people who self-proclaimed having a love of technology, hire those people, and then 50% of them wash out or don't hit quota. It's crazy how that works, isn't it? We always think we know the solutions for the client, but the client's got to know what's best for them. And you diagnose the person before the problem, and you're much more successful. Let's talk about psychographic profile and why it's important. I think you've kind of hit on it a little bit, but let's dial into that a little bit. Yeah. So I think we're at a unique time in history where scientists say that there's a whole realm of things about humans that we can test reliably with an online survey most people are very familiar with like the disc profile where it says introversion extroversion or some level of cognitive test like you might think of that as a proxy for iq it's not exactly the same thing but right how fast

does somebody think what's their mental flexibility, but there's really thousands of things that scientists say we can measure. So what we've done is we've decided to take the approach that we really don't know what leads to success in a one or in Samsung or any organization that we work with. What we do is we test the organization. These are people doing the job today against many of those items we don't obviously do thousands of them but in your case 61 and then we ingest actual performance data so you guys gave us two years worth of sales data out of service titan about the sales results of those people we also looked at their is the ttl that's that's what you call it right or sales material no the scorecard oh yeah they're yeah they're scored a card i don't even people. We also looked at their, is it TTL? That's what you call it, right? Or sales as material?

No, the scorecard. Oh yeah, their scorecard. I don't even know what they call it. Yeah, so their scorecard. So those are the two things that you gave us data on. And we were able to run a statistical regression analysis and multivariate regression analysis, which is just fancy term of saying, which of these things matter and in which combination? And we end up with a performance fingerprint that then you can apply to the hiring. And we make a prediction ahead of time. This person is going to sell 750 average ticket size. This person is going to be 1200 average ticket size. This person is going to be 300. So,

you know, the risks that you're taking prior to offering somebody a job. So what's really cool is everybody that listens to the podcast kind of knows I'm not a big secret person. I kind of put out there everything. And if they learn how to replicate it and hire the right people and do what I tell them to do, most of the time, and I would say a high, high, high, high correlation, because I test it out and I make sure it works, they actually get great results. So recently, why don't you talk a little bit about this Kansas City trip and how that whole thing went down? Yeah, so we were looking together on how can we launch a market and be able to do

that quickly and successfully. And so we went into the Kansas City market and in two weeks, we identified 14 candidates that we could hire from the market. And then we used the hiring profile in order to identify those people. So having a strong correlation that these people are going to show up, ramp quickly, stick and stay, and be able to perform. And so we gave them two weeks of in-market training. At the end of that two weeks, they were actually able to pass the test that you typically give them at the end of two months, after one month of in-market training and one month in Phoenix. And then, of course, they came to Phoenix and also went through the training in Phoenix, many of them scoring in the very high 90s. And I think actually two or three ought to tell me what the

actual number was, got the all-time highest score for that final test. But back in market, already outperforming the people that have been there for many months. So it's a combination of a couple of things. And I don't want to over-index just on having the right hiring profile, because that's certainly important. But it's also important that you take the entirety of your hiring process and realize that you're creating a stage play for that new employee. Why would they be interested in coming to work for A1? In my book, I talk about the five truths about humans. One of them is people do things for their reason. The only reason that matter are their reasons, or things are only good or bad by

comparison. So right from the very first job ad that they see down to the email or the way phone calls are answered, how you interact with them the first time they come through the door into your location, all of those things end up having a very strong correlation to how quickly somebody ramps and how long they stick with your organization. And unfortunately, a lot of organizations just sort of take a lazy fare approach to that. Somebody applies, they give them the job, and then they quit thinking about the fact that they are still selling that employee. And really, the best companies really think of that first six months as they're still hiring the person. The job's not done. It hasn't taken, it hasn't rooted until the end of six months. And that entire period should really be tightly

scripted. What do I want the employee to be thinking, feeling, and doing at every single interaction? Well, you know, you hit the nail on the head. And I'll tell you guys, an embarrassing, on my behalf, an embarrassing whole scenario is Jonathan showed up to Kansas and it didn't look like Phoenix. It was really, it was messy. It was unorganized. I can imagine spider webs, just shit everywhere. And it kind of made me very angry.

Not kind of. And Jonathan said, you probably have heads rolled. Well, needless to say, one of the market managers that was there was not there anymore. But the cold truth is, Jonathan says, do you want the truth or do you want me to just beat around the bush and make you feel good? And that's what he says to almost everybody. And I like somebody that just tells me this is the deal. So he kind of was very, very forthcoming with me and just said, look, these guys that we're getting, it's very important, the orientation, every look they get at you from how clean your place is to how exciting, how lit up it is to the core values, where are they? And, you know, this is one of the things. And even as we're talking now, I'm making a bunch of notes because we all get busy,

but it's just delegating and following up and making sure these things are right. I was talking yesterday on a podcast, Jonathan, as most companies say, Hey, you're hired. This is the person you're going to be driving with for two months. Hopefully you pick up some of their good habits. Maybe you don't, but then then you're on your own forever. Have a good one. Maybe I'll see you around. I mean, in home service, that's kind of like what we do. And people are like, I don't understand what's wrong with these employees. None of them, I train them and they don't stay on. That's their training.

Yeah. And so in Kansas City, something that we did different is right from day one, you flew in some of your very best techs. So they were there on day one and got to ride with these best techs in their market and see people making great money and being able to sell high priced services. And they were happy. And those guys are advocates of the company. They literally go to war with me. Yeah. So that cements a belief in your new hire that if they're struggling, it's them. It's not the market. It's not the company. It's them. Right. And that opens them up to working. Just think about yourself. When you were growing up or even now in business, when you start interacting with somebody and you see them as a mentor, and it drives you towards working harder, accomplishing things.

Think about the leadership within an organization. Let's say you're a sales manager in an organization. That's oftentimes for people that are selling in the field, the next notch up in their career is to move into some sort of leadership capacity. And if they're interacting with you and you're always complaining, you're wore out, you're tired, you can't hardly keep up, you're unhealthy. I mean, just to look at you, you're unhealthy, right? And I'm not saying you have to be a supermodel. I mean, look at me, right? But it's a reasonable level of health and mental clarity. If you're beat down, how can you sell to somebody coming into

your company, work hard so you can have the life that I have? Like spend 30 years and be burnt out and wrecked personal life. And that's why I think one of the things that I admire about what you're doing there at A1 is you've designed your life. I mean, if you think one of the things that I admire about what you're doing there at A1 is you've designed your life. I mean, if you look at the picture just right over your shoulder there, what's the language right next to it? If you switch your camera or pull that picture. Well, there it is. Yeah. What does it say? I will be a billionaire. I'll be the best mental, physical condition ever. I'll be happy for what God has given me. I'll feel fortunate, right? And you go all the way down.

When somebody walks into your office, that's what you're portraying, but then they also experience it. You're not zipping around the office on your scooter, not saying that you're not task-driven with people or holding people accountable, but they can sense your energy, right? And that your life is going somewhere. You're not standing still. That's why people join an organization. I would challenge an owner of a business to just walk out of their business and as clearly as they can, and it's going to be hard, walk in and look at your business like a new hire. Record yourself on video and look at yourself. Would you sign up for that journey if you could, you know, like fast forward and say this, this is who I'm going to be in 10 years,

because that's what your employees are asking when they're sitting in the office. That's why we had success in Kansas city is also, we weren't looking for people looking for jobs. We went into the sports stores. We went into the places we knew had people where this next step where they won would be a good career move for them and painted a vision for them about what life could be like. But if they walk into the building and then it's dirty and dark and the manager's disorganized and the van's disorganized, it says, okay, you're selling me. It's inauthentic. So it has to match up. Yeah. I love that. And really, I got to tell you, I walk in and I spend so much time picking up the parking lot and just looking and it just, I can't tell you enough. I walked into the

bathrooms the other day and our cleaning lady had COVID and shit know shit happens but I'm like what the F like I take a lot of pride in this clean fun environment and tomorrow I'm doing my orientation last three and a half hours and I'm going to talk a lot about just I'm the type of guy that I notice if a light's a different color than the other light and I just I'm like why what do we got to do to get this fixed like literally like these little things the big things bother me a lot, but these little things add up. So it's a big deal to me. And I'll tell you, I ran into Steve Siraj this morning. He came and grabbed me. He's like, dude, I just got back from Kansas.

He's like, I got to tell you, I love the new way of training. He's like, it's come a long way. And it's actually a joy to work around these guys because they're out there hitting the numbers that I'm hitting. And it meant a lot to me. So on my call earlier, I just said, look, I don't care if everything's exactly the same everywhere, but let's make Milwaukee, Arizona, these other big pushes for 10 guys at a time. I don't know if you know this, but the next class is 40, and they're starting to add up.

That's nice. I think what you have to ask yourself or do a mental reflection, especially if you're hiring people or leading people is think in terms of airtime, stage time, right? Like I'm going to get on a coaching call with somebody. I'm going to pass them in the office. Like if you add all of that up, it's really not a lot of time in a year that you actually can influence somebody's mindset and behavior. So are you going to piss it away what you want them to think, feel, and do? You have to mentally engage them, but there has to be some emotion, right? That's why when you have your Thursday meeting and it's an all-company meeting, you put thought into that, especially even recorded. You've got your books that you're reading, your mindset about what they're going to accomplish in their life. That has to go down every level in the organization

where your leadership realizes, hey, it's stage time. I've got 30 minutes. It's only really two hours a month that I have stage time and I have to move the needle in that two hours. There's two mentalities I'm thinking of right now. I'm thinking of one, and I don't want to use kids as an example because you're born with them i mean they're born with you i'm glad you're going there because my mind was going there like when my wife and i got divorced right and we're splitting custody with my son terrible time of life but i actually went through calculating how many hours do i now get with my son like Like total between now and he's an adult. And when you minus out work time and evening time, and it really, if you consolidate all of that over

an 18 year period, you're really not having more than a couple of weeks of really solid, like where you can say, this is influential time. You know know i talk to my texts a lot and they're like i'm spending a lot of time i'm like you're on your cell phone every time you drive your kid to work you're kissing them goodbye or goodbye like what's quality time soccer coaching mentoring being there when they're at their finest moments is really really what's important and i talk about that a lot and I've been able to capture some of those special moments lately. And that's one of the things we're focused on is just really telling people this is a better opportunity and getting those magic moments.

And for me, there's two types of things I think of. Are you making, if I got a call, check videos, check a punch list to make sure your place is clean, or am I just hiring people that want their place? Is it the personality that says i want to win i want to do everything you said and i want this or i know tommy's going to be here next week we better clean up the place and make it look good the more i think about that the more i get disgusted of someone that lives in fear of an owner come visiting or a manager that might just say, okay, I hate it when we're about to have vertical track and everybody's like time to get this place ready. I'm like, let's keep it ready all the time. Yeah. So that's an interesting balance, right? Because you think about your home,

right? Like you normally keep a nice tidy home, you know, a certain level when you have company over, maybe you clean up a little bit more. So there's a natural sort of pulse for that. But in my book, I talk about things are good or bad by comparison. The reality is when you're hiring someone, the number one thing you should be asking yourself is, how did this person get their definition of great? And you can take that in every aspect in life, being a great father, being a great employee, being a great salesperson, being a great, right, fill in the blank. If you can identify how they got there, like as an example, people whose standard of great is as close to the standard you need them to have at the beginning. And then your job becomes helping them believe bigger about themselves.

When you think back to your great coaches, whether it was sports or business, they actually were a little hard on you. There was times when you're like, they should just go pound sand. You didn't leave every interaction loving them, but it was the accumulation of the effect over time that created real change, made you want to be better. And then when you achieved that, you could look back in retrospect and say, I went through this fire, right? And it made me better. I literally had some conversations. I never wanted to have these yesterday and today. And I said, I don't care if you like me right now, you probably hate me, but this is the facts. And I don't have time for this. And you're a bottleneck. And if this doesn't get corrected,

there's going to be repercussions. And we are going to move forward with what I said. And if you don't like it, I understand you can keep it to yourself because I really don't care right now. And I was kind of, in my definition, kind of a douche, but overall it had to be said, and I don't have time. I'm more a i'm ready i'm ready i get started i implement quickly you know um you were at vertical track you did an amazing job on stage i think everybody did an amazing job and howard partridge talked about failure to implement and i think about so many people that just they don't move they just don't go they're like they're waiting for this perfect horizon to wake up and everything the stars are aligned it's finally time and i'm like ready fire aim i mean

that's what i heard the other day ready fire aim fire fire fire fire fire then you can aim as you're going before the target goes you know we had an opportunity to close a company in february we didn't and now it's a different price and i'm like the deal is is that i want everybody to make out the owner's going to make out but i'm like what are we waiting for the lawyers what the hell's going on yeah and i know you i know you're vociferous reader so you've for sure read the five dysfunctions of a team yes and i love the way he describes conflict because most times people think conflict, they go, oh, he's being a douche, right? So I have to always have this friendly relationship with my co-leaders, co-managers, my employees.

And when he talks about conflict, healthy conflict, you don't have a doubt that they love you and care for you. There's no agenda. It's just honesty. And the continuum is, you know, if you think about a balanced pivot, he says, on the one hand, there's artificial harmony. And on the other side is the gates of hell, right? And you can tip either way. And he asked the question, where's the perfect point of conflict? And if you think of sort of a, you know, a teeter-totter, the best place for conflict is right to the left side before you would tip over to the gates of hell. Like you have to have conflict because healthy conflict causes you to move faster.

It causes you to think deeper. If you can't sit in a meeting or if you sit in a meeting and you have artificial harmony, everybody shakes their head yes, and we agree to things, even though we don't believe them and we have the after meeting meeting around the water cooler, or we unintentionally drag our feet, we're actually slowing the whole thing down. Much better to have right at the edge of gates of hell where the team knows that there's no agenda there's love there's compassion there and you can have that sort of conversation i see you with your leadership team you guys are you know you've come up together you support each other you believe in each other and that's a great platform for being able to have really

direct difficult conversations and you can do that with new employees as well by understanding right at the beginning, what's driving them to take this job, what's going on in their life. You're like your dream manager, right? She gets up personal. She understands sort of what's driving them day to day outside of the work world. And that allows you to have really transparent conversations because now you're talking to them because of their reasons, not yours. Like, look, you told me you needed to make this kind of money because you wanted to do X, Y, Z. Exactly. Their motives. Rather than, hey, you need to improve your sales lesson material score, which is just going to

sound like an old broken record at some point. You know, it's interesting because Mike Bailey said, we probably made a mistake on some of the ads. We said make up to 65 to 85,000. He wants to change it to clear path to 100,000. And that sounds like your language. And because you have many people in your organization that are doing that. In fact, I believe, you million-dollar club, very shortly, it'll be a $2 million club because so many people will be past that million-dollar point.

It won't be exclusive. It's usually a 5% difference. It's not a massive change people need to make in the organization. It's the thing that people think doesn't matter. Like, does it really matter that my carpets are dirty? Does it really matter that my employee walks into my office and I'm on my phone and my computer? Does it matter that I pushed a meeting because I was busy?

You know, I've read a book and I forget the name, but he talks about the 1%. It's the 1% that guy that walks in and he sees one cigarette butt on a whole 50 feet walkway. And he picks up that 1% of just picking that up and getting rid of that. I talk about this even with employees. So I hired a group of people for another company. And one of the things that I told them was, at the end of next week, you're going to do a presentation to the three founders of the company. So that's a lot of pressure for them, right? They're new hires.

They got to do that. So they sweated it, studied hard. The day of the presentation came, and every one of them showed up dressed nicer than they were the whole week before. Their office was tidy. They looked like it was showtime. And I asked them, why did you make that change? And they said, well, it's the owner, right? The impression we're going to make with the owner. And I said, well, actually you don't have to do a presentation to the owners. We scheduled this because I want you to take a snapshot of that energy. What did you self-identify you needed to change? I need to dress a little better. I need to be a little sharper. I need to be a little more orderly. I said, the owner's opinion of you is really going to probably happen

in less than two hours total worth of interaction. He's going to walk by your office and your feet are up on your desk and you're looking at Facebook. That might be the only time you did that all day, but that's a snapshot. You have to show up like your big break is happening today. So if your tech can show up in the garage and say, it's that one job that's going to make or break his career. And they can believe that, right? Even if it's mental, a mental

gymnastics they're doing with themselves, they're going to perform better. Got to show up every day like it's a day that matters because you think six months goes by, you need to promote somebody into a role. You're going to roll your eyes back, think in your mind, you're going to go, who could I put in there that I can trust? And there'll be some people you'll go, oh, no, they're lazy. If you really kind of dug into it, it's probably three or four snapshots total that caused you to label them out. It's an interesting concept, how quick we can make opinions and how important it is as a leader. One of the things I had to really kind of self-identify in a moment of reflection was during this virus, this COVID stuff is

everything comes back to me. I mean, a guy gets in a car accident, it's because I didn't give him enough training. So there's a good book called Extreme Ownership and just owning the fact that you're responsible for everything. You know, there's good that comes with that. You're a big part of the success, but you can't have it both ways. You can't say it was me that made it successful. This SOB is the guy that failed. It's your business.

And unless you're an ESOP. I love that viewpoint because sometimes I'll start consulting with an organization, the CEO will be whining and complaining about his people and all the issues he has. And I tend to ask, when did you lower your standards? Yeah. Or have they always been that low? Because they're aware of it. They have a feeling about it, and yet they're allowing it in their organization.

They haven't done the hard work of sort of taking it apart and say, how do I make sure I don't end up here again? And that comes down to just architecting, but realizing, go back to the beginning of our conversation, it always starts with the material you're building from, which is the human capital, right? If you were building your corporate office, the quality of that office you can build is going to be the building material that's dropped off, the quality of the concrete, the siding, everything, the parts that go into it. You can't expect to bring suboptimal people into your organization and put them into suboptimal processes and have great results and beat the competition. That's the run of it, right? I look at these guys and they're like,

man, thank God I'm on food stamps right now. I found this job. It's like, that's not the guy I want. It's the guy that says, listen, if I can make 100,000, what would I have to do to make 150? Show me what I would need to do and I'll do it. And one of my core values is aspire to be number one.

I wanted to get to a question here because you were at Vertical Track and I would say only half the guys were from the garage tour industry. So Brian Matthews said, would attending Vertical Track be beneficial for an appliance repair company? Sorry, I was late to the show. And of course, I attended A, because I speaking, and two, because I work with you. But I actually attended all day, both days, which I never do on any conference I speak at. And it's because myself sitting in there and being exposed to the mindset of the people on the stage,

it's very, very applicable no matter what stage of business you're at or what kind of business that you're in. Business principles are the same over and over. So you asked me at the beginning the kinds of clients. I'm working with a garage door company. On the other end, just before I started working with you, I was working with a quantum computing company selling to our national labs and Amazon multim multi-million dollar futuristic computers. It's still people and process that allows you to have results. It doesn't really matter the industry you're in. So I would say, I've missed the name there with the gentleman's question. Absolutely. If you want to be in a business, surround yourself with people that are being successful in your appliance repair

company, you're absolutely going to learn things from people that are also in the home. You're probably going to want to figure out how to totally reconstruct your appliance repair business to figure out if it's scalable or not. What I realized is we decided to open it up because I kept getting all these people that wanted to tour the facility. And I'm like, this would be the perfect time because we're opening up our facility up. We're doing tours. We're really trying to go to the next level and open our doors, show them software, show them the people we're working with, show them, you know, the LEVs of the world and just how manuals and standard operating procedures and just the apprentice program and all these different things and the

stuff that you've taught and Howard and just an amazing array of people from one SEO Lance. It was just crazy. And having next star come out, um, just Julian was amazing. Every business goes through very similar stages, regardless of industry and the same types of problems at certain levels of growth, right? When you get to be a $10 million company, you have different problems than when you be a $10 million company, you have different problems than when you're a $20 million company. You do.

And you go through the same problem. They still fall into the same categories. They're people. They're your processes. It's those two things. People, you know, the processes, I believe just like prediction, predict. The processes help you get the

people and i think that's a misconception is if i hire this person everything's going to be okay the process in which you onboard you go through your um orientation it's what's your favorite casual sport you know golf i guess yeah do you think Think about if you golf regularly with a golfer that's worse than you, what happens to your game? It's like playing racquetball with my sons. My game goes down, right? Because I don't have to try as hard. If I play with somebody that's consistently beating me, I get better. Think about you're taking an employee that is a superstar or could be a superstar. They have everything required, but they come into your company and they realize, hey, I can jog or I can do just sort of a fast walk and keep up. They're going to lower their performance

and they're going to get worse. Some organizations aren't well-structured to support superstar behavior. Because a superstar wants to feel like they earned a spot on the team and they have to fight to stay on top. And they want to feel like they're being challenged. So the way you keep an employee long-term is for them to feel safe, right? There's a safe environment. The company is going to be here for a while. I'm not at risk because of the company's future, but also I can still do my best work yet here. At some point, even in your business, Tommy, you'll get to the point where

you're like, hey, I've done my best I can do in the garage door world. It's all incremental from here. Let me go do something else that's really my next big thing. Everybody goes through that. So why divorce yourself from that? Your employees, what's the next big thing from them? You could get to the point where they're turning in a million dollars a year and they can do that in their sleep. The problem is if you let them do that in their sleep, they're going to leave you. Their performance is going to go down. You got to challenge them. And that's what I love is when you see the top performers in a room, they are looking at each other.

They're waiting, they're learning. And believe it or not, they might act like they're competitive, but they're actually become best friends. They like it. A players love to hang out with A players and they love to challenge each other. And they don't mind it when another person wins.

Cause that when I go golfing with somebody very good, I almost expect them to win, but I'm like, Oh my gosh, show me how you did that. That's why I go hang out with big, big, big companies.

And then I asked them, they're like, sure, I'll help you. No problem. Yeah. If you need your ego stroked, you don't go do that.

Right. You don't put yourself in an environment where you're the dumbest guy in the room. The interesting thing, and I mentioned it in my book, for an A player, if you have an A player, your reward for them should be being really thoughtful and saying, what experience can I give this person that they would never give themselves that will be completely different than what they would self-select? So as an example, I don't know if you've ever been to a Tony Robbins conference, those sort of things. No, I haven't, but I've heard great things. I haven't either. But for some, putting them in that environment, all of a sudden is going to awaken them to something different. Having somebody go experience a way of thinking that they're not accustomed to, where they don't just fit in, that they're sort of the odd person out. You know, I was on a podcast a couple,

at least a couple of years ago. And the guy said, we don't do bonuses. We buy people things they wouldn't do for themselves. Or for an example, we've got a marathon runner. We went out and found the top pair of marathon shoes that were like four hundred dollars and he goes the byproduct of it though it was very strange because we just thought we were doing a nice gift but every time the guy put on those shoes he thought about the company and he thought about us and he thought about that he would have not bought these for himself yeah and let's say you give somebody $3,000 bonus or you send them on a trip. The whole time they're on that trip, they're taking a picture going, Hey, this A1 gave this to

me. Right. And they, every little experience, and now they take a picture, it's on their phone, it's on their mantle. It's they're sharing it with their friends. If you gave them $3,000 cash, they're going to forget where they spent it. They're never going to think of it again. If you ask people, what do they want an employee they're gonna say give me the cash but if in hindsight if you said what did you end up remembering it's never the cash no because they're like i paid a bill but you know i'm like shoot i paid my cable bill yes a wants the best it's like that's coming on. Yeah. But every time you look at that picture and you go, oh yeah, that was my company trip.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this conversation. I just want to take a five second break to let you know that the tickets for my next Vertical Track event are now on sale. Just go to verticaltrack.com to learn more and get a guaranteed seat before the prices go up. Now back to our interview. I love this stuff, but, you know, I just realized you're just kind of reflecting, listening to this podcast and all the podcasts I do. I think I think best during podcasts and for some reason in the shower, the best when you're on a podcast, you know, you're live and you have to stay focused. and your mind goes in seven

directions all at once, all the time. Yes. When you single thread magic happens. Yeah, no, it's great. My brain is like, look, I got the questions here. And I like doing this because I find myself when I do a podcast that it's like question, question, question. If you see me go directly from question to question to question, it's not a good podcast. It means it's like question, question, question. If you see me go directly from question to question to question, it's not a good podcast. It means it's a tough conversation and I'm asking a question because I'm like pulling stuff out. Podcasts like these that just flow that it's just so simple.

There's so many nuggets in here that I'm writing down note after note after note after note. And I've already read your book and I've read it twice because I read it with these guys. Here's an interesting exercise I try to encourage leaders to do. Try to imagine what your employee is thinking, like driving their vehicle from home to go to work for you. And then try to imagine that same thing at the end of the day heading home. And not do it just as an employee, like pick somebody.

Like, what is Mike thinking? What is Mike feeling? Why? It'll force you to single thread for a person, and you'll be amazed at how little we actually know about what drives our people. I always think about these 360 reviews. I fake it in my own mind. Like if I sent out a mass of 500 people, 360 review of me and it's anonymous, what are they going to write?

And my brain never goes to the good stuff. It never, like there's enough good stuff and I can pat myself on the back, but I've never once said, great leader, great listener. You know, I'm always doing a self reflective of what do I need to work on? And the SWOT analysis, I say, not necessarily weaknesses, but opportunities. And I think to myself, some of the things is I wish I could communicate one on one with them more. And that's, that's not a possibility. I know the things that I could do and I can't do. But you, you can enable leaders that can have that same intimacy with them that you used to be able to have with every employee. Now your job becomes, how do I build the system that does that? I don't

know if you remember when I spoke at your event, I said, if Tommy was impressed with Tommy, he wouldn't be Tommy. Which doesn't mean you can't be proud of what you've accomplished. Right. But there's always that next, like, how do I grow? How do I get better? How do I challenge? And that real ability to see your own flaws, which is a pretty rare gift to be very high performing and also highly critical of yourself. Yeah. I see these guys out there. And yet this morning I said, guys, I said on the call, you've been there on a lot of Thursdays. I said, I don't know how to say this any clearer. And I don't know what to do because it's not necessarily commission, but it is a

performance pay. And we know performance and conversion rate and average ticket goes up when we do financing, especially pre-financing. And I'll tell you exactly how to do it. And we've gotten over this. And then I realized, I always go back to this thought process that it's me. And I'm expecting to do group therapy to help every single person individually, but they need individual coaching. And each one of them need to be a little bit different dialed in. And all of a sudden, I can make a video and send it out to 500 people. And then I say, you didn't do it. You didn't watch the video, you idiot. Or if I said, Hey, listen, Jonathan, listen, I want to talk with you one-on-one. I want to go over some things. You're a hell of a guy.

And I'm proud that you got all your dreams kind of aligned now. And I want to work with you on this and go over what we could do together to help you accomplish your dreams a little bit quicker. And so, first of all, I want to know, what did all my coaches do my whole life? They said, how's your mom doing? They said, how are your grades? They cared more about me outside of the game

than in the game. And that's what I think a great coach does. And then you talk to them about what their family's doing, what their goals are, work, vacation. Half the conversation is just getting to know them a little bit better and genuinely thinking about them. And then you say, look, you are living the best life. And I, I envy you in a lot of ways. And here's what I'd like to do. You're a goal setter. You're beating every goal you've ever thought about. So let's talk about a way. I think you could

sky pass, not only number one, but you could be somebody that we get on stage and actually bring up to other companies and give them this big goal. I would take a slightly different approach to that because your job is to guide them to figure that out. Everybody has a thermostat, like a set point, right? Like how much money things are good or bad by comparison. How much money is a lot of money? When somebody starts making 20, 30%, 40% more than their peer group, all of a sudden they feel like they're doing well, right? You think about it in terms of fitness. There is a point at which you're healthy enough and fit enough, and it's not worth the energy to go get shredded. But you have a set point.

When you start doing bad health behaviors, all of a sudden you start getting a little fluffy and you're like, oh, I'm going to cut out the drinking a few nights a week. I'm going to eat healthier. And then when you get a certain amount of on tone, then you relax. And I have the extra appetizer and I do. And I think that's what's going on in a business that for every salesperson, they have a set point where the upside, while it's possible, isn't worth the effort just because they're healthy enough. So the question becomes, how do I get them to relabel what they see as healthy as unhealthy? And that's a harder task. Like when did X employee, Joe, believe that employee Y was better than them? That they should be able to send their kids to better colleges, should be able to live in a better home, should not worry about finances. Because at some point they decided that. I remember walking into a guy's home that was an inventor. I did some work for him and I grew up for it. When I went into this guy's house for the first time, I didn't realize there were homes like that. I couldn't have dreamed it. I had never experienced it. And I think

that's probably true with the vast majority of your employees is they intellectualize what the next level, like, I know I could be more fit, but it hasn't hit them in the gut. Like this is what I'm leaving on the table by not doing these things. I think the magic comes in. How do I surround them where like you heard the old phrase, you become like the five people you hang around. Oh yeah. Right. So who are they hanging around that has given them that thought that this is now good enough? Right. Like I'm making 100K a year. My bills are paid. I'll go home. I'll watch Netflix. Oh, well, that's back and see my life. If you're going to use that correlation, you know, the gym is one of the things I would say is we're going to leave this gym and we're going to go to Gold's Gym or a different gym.

And this is what I do. I bring in HVAC all the time. And I say, look at this. BYB, better your best. We always talk about this is, you know, it's an Internet marketing kind of process. But my buddy, Travis Ringe, one of the things on stage that i had him do was show the boats and the vehicles he's got and i said look at this guy because a lot of people especially males they're like dude if i had that boat and those vehicles in that house and it's like the

dream and so it's material possessions but a lot of people just say man if i had those my life would be better and that's the tool sometimes that we got to use is me personally, what I want, people always ask me, they're like, what is your big goal? And I said, to do what I want, what I want with who I want, but extend that out amongst all my peers and people that I work with. The number one thing I look for, this is a sales boss first time. I haven't given this secret to anyone else. When I'm looking for an employee, all the other psychographics, the other question, I asked myself, is this person gratefully dissatisfied with their life? What I mean by that is, are they living present and happy?

Like they're grateful for their life, right? They're not sour, but they're dissatisfied. They want to grow. They want to do something different. Like, and that's a interesting person. When you can find somebody like in my life today, I have no complaints. Like I don't need more, but I still get up and I go to work and I interact with people and I, right. Take on new projects and invest in new businesses. I'm grateful for my life, but I'm dissatisfied. I'm not dissatisfied with my family, my wife, my relationships, but there's that quiet belief that I can do better and I can accomplish more. I can impact

more people. I think that's the magic ingredient because then you're self-motivated. There's never a day for you or for me, we have to to get up and go it's a good thing somebody's checking in on me or i wouldn't work today but i get that i get that all the time people are like okay you made it you're now generationally wealthy or whatever you you want to call it you've got the money you've got the following you've got the leadership you've got a great company what's driving you to the next level and i I'm like, I asked Gary Vanderchuk in person. I said, dude, when's enough enough? I get that question all the time. He goes, Tommy, he goes, it's at this point, it seems to be getting easier. And now I'm kind of questioning how far can I go? He's like, if this is where I'm at now,

and that's kind of my thought is, is my mom's like, when's enough enough? And I'm like, that question to me, I'm like, listen, I'm just getting started. There's no finish line for me. The finish line is the grave, you know, 10 feet down or whatever. You see hyper-successful people who've made billions in business, they turn and then usually they invest that same energy in something else. And they're in charitable work, they're in government work, it's innate to them to be doing and bettering and spending their life in a meaningful way. I think that's the number one secret to who to hire. Are they gratefully dissatisfied with their life? So you made a comment to me and you said, we're doing these group interviews. And I got to tell you, none of your guys sound alike.

There is no systematic approach to interviewing. And you said this might be one of the biggest downfalls I've seen so far. And this is something you wanted to work with me with. Tell me a little bit about that, because interviewing is so important. And not is something you wanted to work with me with. Tell me a little bit about that because interviewing is so important and not only interviewing, but seeing them in action, getting them not on just this interview actor phase, but seeing them out in the open, just like you took them out for a dinner and you watched a firefighter go recruit somebody and just smiling and being around. So tell me a little bit about your process and how we all can learn to do things a little more systematically and a group interview or whatever you want to do.

Here's a known thing about interviewing. People decide in the first five minutes, do I like the person or not? And am I going to hire the person? And then they spend the rest of the interview trying to prove that to themselves. So I take the mindset of a pressure interview. My role is to keep an imposter off the team. That's my very first interview. So if I had to write a half a million bad for them, bad for me. What people start with usually is the romance interview. Let me tell you why you want to work for A1. Let me tell you why we're doing great things. Let me tell you why. That's a given. But first, enough of that, that they're interested and they showed up. But once they're

there, I really have to sort of deconstruct. The value of having a set sort of list of questions is if you do things differently every time, you never know why something worked and why it didn't work. I want the same sort of questions every time because I'm actually not interested at all in the answer. I don't care what they say. Past job experience, it's all garbage to me. What I'm interested in understanding is their mental flexibility. When they're under pressure, can they still think on their feet? Can they still maintain rapport with me when they're not sure how I feel about them, especially in a sales job?

I'm speaking specifically sales here. I want to recreate that experience right in the beginning so that I just get a sense for how do they handle pressure. I want to know what's the raw material. If I'm running a company, for you, you know how to build a perfect tech. You have to say, I don't really care your past experience. I want to know that you have the raw material for me to build something with. I don't want to get halfway through building this to realize you don't have any flour and I need flour. The two challenges is your people doing the interview are busy. So they show up to that interview and they didn't shift gears until two minutes before. Like, oh, let me remind me who this guy or gal's name is.

What's their background? Okay, i'm ready and then i shoot from the hip the whole time and if i happen to have had a good lunch and it settled well with me and i'm in a good mood that interview is going to go great and if i just got out of a long manager's meeting and i was annoyed at somebody this person doesn't have any chance could be the exact same candidate. If you were buying bad doors from a supplier, what would it do to your business? Destroy it. Destroy it. But that's your raw material, right? You could provide great service. You could do

great install. But if it was a bad product, you'd be done. Your leaders in your organization have to realize there is no greater task than sitting in front of somebody you're thinking about offering the job to. Do it right. It's going to go easier, better, faster. Otherwise, we're just redoing it. When you're in organizations that have 70% turnover, think of the massive, just like filling out 401k paperwork and unfiling it and getting health benefits going and computers turned on and turned off and reassigned trucks. And all of that energy can be spent elsewhere. And that's what happens with leaders. They go, well, I'm busy. I don't have time. If you would spend the right time, Kansas City is an example of that. How long did the previous

leader chase trying to get it going if they just stopped focused on it right all of a sudden it's going to be easier i'm sure inside of a year kansas city is going to be in one of your top 10 markets it's so crazy to me that i understand i'm a visionary i'm a visionary, I'm a CEO, I'm a founder, but it's amazing to me just the things that I just find so simple. And I don't mean to belittle people and their thought process, but I walk in now and maybe it's because I've learned the hard way. Maybe everything I've learned is the hard way, but now I even look at a billboard and I'm like, what is going on? But now I know what a perfect brand looks like. I've had a lot of help from Dan Antonelli and just kind of reading his book and other things like that.

So it's crazy when I look and I go, this person, they got three reviews online, and they're one of the biggest companies. I don't know what it is, but I don't feel bad for them. I don't look at them like they're dumb. So I talk about the five truths about humans. One of them is people are giving you 100% of what they're dumb. So I talk about the five truths about humans. One of them is people are giving you 100% of what they're capable of, or they have what they feel is a valid reason

for not doing so. You don't pay me enough. You don't care. You don't notice, whatever. It doesn't matter if it's true. If it's valid to them, that affects performance, or they're not capable of it. It's true. Some people are not capable of spotting a good billboard or a bad billboard. It's true that there are some people that have not learned how to run an effective interview, period. It's true that some people have not learned how to run an effective meeting. So if the meeting's ineffective, it's one of two things. Either they don't have the skill or they've decided it's not important, right? It's sort of like go back to the employee that shows up,

thinks they're going to present to the founders. They get dressed up nicely, clean, they get a haircut. They could do it, but they had decided they had a valid reason for not doing that every day. It wasn't important enough. You probably have leaders in your team that know how to run an effective meeting with their group. It's just not important enough to them right now. They've decided it doesn't matter. They don't know what great looks like. And that's something that I always got to remind myself is, is I expected that I could basically give these guys a quick pep talk instead of really one-on-one role play, role play, role play. Prove to me you can do it. Prove to me you can do it. Do it again, again, and again, and again, and again.

It was like me getting out of stage for the first time in front of 40 people. Almost impossible. Now I get in front of 1,000. It's nothing. It's like literally because they know my content. It's a muscle I flex over and over and over. I hired a 22-year-old kid into a sales position. Did really well.

We promoted him into a management position right away. Now he's hiring people. He had never interviewed anyone. We gave him interview training, let him go do it. We asked him to record every single video call, every single one of them for the 21st interviews he did. We sat and went and listened to them together, had him critique him, I critiqued him, his other leader critiqued him. And that was inside of a one month period. Now you watch him do an interview. It's night and day. Like you see him on day one with no coaching, no effectiveness. And then on day 20. But what happens oftentimes, somebody gets promoted. It's like, OK, now you're hiring people. Well, how are you going to run an interview? You're're probably gonna run it by the same crappy interview

process you got interviewed with oh boy a life without coaches a life without coaching it's like can you imagine the nfl or can you imagine michael jordan or or anybody with michael jordan had four coaches at all times plus phil so it's crazy to think about a life without a coach. And there's so many people going through life right now, trying to make it on their own. I've got a physical trainer and he's great. And I know how to work out, but I choose to have a trainer and I'm not bragging by any means. Somebody asked me yesterday, they're like, who are you coaching with? And I said, I've always got people, whether it's a book I'm reading, a PowerPoint that I'm going through, an event I'm going to, a business I'm actually going to, or people like you and I, either way, all the time, Alan Rohr, I've got over two dozen

people I've worked with. Let me ask you this question. Why, and I'm going to say this about your organization. I mean this globally to people that are listening as well. Why do leaders in your organization choose not to coach people? The only thing I can think of is because they're busy and because coaching one-on-one takes a lot more time. And I don't think it's a laziness. I really don't think they understand the concept. They really don't know. Well, sometimes it's a fear that I don't know what to coach on. Right. Here's the deal, though. This kid that I hired, he's recording his interviews and then we watch and play it back together. Guess how much coaching I have to do on that call? Almost none. Because he sits there, watches himself. He's like, oh, I can't believe I did that. Oh, I did. But I'm just creating an environment for that employee to reflect. It's the same thing

when you go to a psychiatrist. You don't have to have the answers. You have to have great questions. Why did you make that choice? How could you have done that better? Did that go the way you intended it to go? It's like five or six coaching questions. You don't have to have the answer in order to coach. It's also the belief that you're busy. And as long as you're too busy to coach, you will always be busy. Great coaches. Actually, I have managers that go, my ship is running so good. I could probably not show up for three days.

Don't tell the boss and nothing would change. I'm like, great. That's what you paid the big bucks to do. Because what you're actually paid by the CEO to do is think, sit, reflect on his business, think about his business. And I guarantee you when you're running and putting out one fire after another fire, you're spending zero time quiet thinking. Oh boy. When I work for you, I literally block out time on my calendar with no calls to think about A1. That's the only way you're going to figure out a good solution. You talk to a lot of people, you observe a lot of things, and then you have to have quiet where you're thinking. What does this relate to that I've experienced in the past?

How could I illustrate that point? If we did this, then what? And that's what leadership is about. But you get organizations where the leadership badge is being busy. You ask somebody, how was your week? Great, busy. I'm just running, burning the candle at both ends. Great. When did you get proud of that? Oh, I hate that. I hate that answer. What'd you get done this week? What was the largest thing you accomplished? I'm telling you, I was packed. I stayed busy. I promised you I'd put in 12 hours a day, but where's your time going? What are you getting done? You're getting so lost in the firefighting. You're not getting any real accomplishments done. You didn't finish a manual. You didn't have any solid meetings. You didn't have any coaching one-on-one. Where did you spend your time? Then you look at their calendar and

they're like, I know it's not that organized, but I was doing stuff the whole time. And I'm like, that's bullshit. I can show you what I did today. I can show you what I've done every day because it's listed on my calendar. And there's a lot of stuff in between there. And there doesn't need to be a thing on my calendar for every text message I sent out. But that's the most annoying thing in the world when somebody says, I'm slammed all the time. So let's go back to hiring. When are people held accountable for losing an employee that they hire?

Oh, we've talked about this many a times. We stamp our approval. Everybody's in agreement. You have to sort of go back because otherwise you keep repeating that same cycle. And that takes a lot of time. That's the fire. Let the fire burn while we figure out what's actually causing the problem so we can go out and dig a fire line. And we can say, okay, at some point in the future, we're no longer going to have a 50 or 60% turnover. It's going to be 10.

And here's the reason. And tracking it amongst leaders is important. I want to cut into two questions that will wrap up. Perception predicts, it's an amazing tool. You come in, you analyze the company's training. I call it nature versus nurture. What are you given with? What kind of training do you have? Hopefully it's something. Well, the nurture is that. The nature of it is what's the God-given talent given to these people. So I love Prediction Predict. If someone wants to learn more about it, what's

the best way to do that? And how would you summarize it in one quick elevator sentence? So they can email me, John, J-O-N, at the salesboss.com. I have a perception predict email, but nobody can spell it. So it's easier to do John at the sales boss. What we're trying to accomplish is we're saying, let's use data to tell us what raw material works best for our company. What causes somebody to be a liability hire? What causes somebody to get stuck at mid-performer? What causes somebody to be a superhero? The question that we're actually not answering isn't, can this person sell or can they perform? It's actually more subtle than that. We're trying to decide what sort of person does well in the environment that's your company today with the dysfunction that's your company today and the mangled training processes and everything else.

Right. Because different people work well in a startup environment versus people that are in a well-structured environment. We're actually trying to find who are the people that operate well the way A1 is today. We know you're going to continue to iterate. We know you're going to continue to iterate. We know you're going to continue to get better. And that's why our performance fingerprint model continues to change as well, because the kinds of people that you're looking for change. CrowdStrike, one of our clients that we work with globally for their front-end sales position, in 18 months, that fingerprint changed by more than 70%, meaning that the attributes they were looking for changed by more than 70%.

I guarantee you they were still interviewing the same way they were 18 months. So again, I'm just curious. So when does A1 get retested? Typically about once a year, we re-ingest performance data and we iterate that model. That gives you long enough to smooth out the cycles that are typical in any business and the level of effort that's required to do that. So just the time versus reward. And then, you know, I'm a big fan of the sales boss, but give me a little synopsis of the book and why should people order it right now? Yeah, a sales boss is a sales leader that's operating at the top 1%. but give me a little synopsis of the book and why should people order it right now? Yeah. A sales boss is a sales leader that's operating at the top 1%. You don't have to be in a sales management role to be a sales leader. Any executive in a company, their job is sales,

creating an environment where economic good can change hands. I don't care if your title is HR or COO. They should buy my book because I break down the truths about humans and how can they create an environment that runs itself, where you don't have to show up and manage and measure people constantly. How do you create a system where somebody self-monitors and self-reports? I have that in my book. How do I create an environment where somebody believe bigger about themselves? I have that in my book. How do you get a team where your team members are holding each other accountable for greatness? Because if you put it on your shoulders as the leader, you're going to be burnt out. You're going to be the guy, you know, end of day, knocking back drinks and kicking the dog because you're unhappy. You know, it's kind of funny. Rescue wife, hear me say, kick the dog.

You're the type of guy that I like hanging around because you hate to lose. And there's nothing that I hate more than to lose. Now, I'm a gracious loser, more graceful than I was when I was a kid, but I don't play a game going insane. It's just a game. I don't play anything in business, in life, in anything I do, I'm competitive. And I want to be, I'm not a father yet. I would say the time that I'm trying to spend is useful time with everybody and making sure that I'm being the best version of myself. And I think that's important. And I like that about you. When I lose, I want to have learned. Like, I don't want to lose because I left something undone. Like, we're not guaranteed success.

But if we lose and we go, well, if only I had done this or if I had risked, like, that doesn't make sense to me. Well, it's fun to be around you and it's fun it you know my dad in his early days i mean he loved kicking my butt and everything and i think that that was important because i learned to lose but at the same time i learned i never lay off i always better my best but now i tend to look for the person that can beat me so i can learn and that's exactly what you just said is Is there three books that really stand out that aren't the cliche, Napoleon Hill? My favorite book that I encourage people to read if they haven't read it is the book, The Habit by Charles Duhigg. Because habit will shape everything else in our life. We have a set point, right? When it comes to health, when it comes to

relationships, when it comes to money, they're all driven by habits. And a lot of times it's habits that we don't even recognize. I'm working on my next book. My working title is When Red is Blue. And what I mean by that is, you know, if this shirt that I'm wearing, if everyone that I trusted in my life from the time I was a kid called this color red, I wouldn't even know that I was wrong, right? My core being would know this is red. And the most dangerous belief that a human can have is one they don't recognize as a belief. They recognize it as a truth. The sky is red. They don't know. Everybody's told them that. And everyone in their life, I guarantee you, has something that is a belief that they view as a truth. So that's what I like about Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit, is sometimes

we just have to trap ourselves into doing something that's counter to break a natural barrier. Health, just because that's one that I struggle with up and down, is you have to continue to push the boundary of what is good health. Otherwise, you just have your own set point. You'll have people that that's finances where they get to a certain point and then they sort of self-sabotage. They back up. They get into a relationship. It's going going really well and all of a sudden they it goes negative again it's usually the habit i read that book quite a long time ago and i take it back out and reread it such yeah i'm gonna reread it and then atomic habits is good too

so we talked about a lot of stuff here i I've got, once again, a pile of amazing notes and things. I got to go work out actually in seven minutes. I'll come see you on Saturday. Yes. Come Saturday. There's going to be fun. And Al, you're invited. I think it's important to kind of close us out with something that maybe we talked about.

You know, I love these conversations that we get to talk the whole time about interviewing, but that's not what I like to do in these podcasts. And it is my podcast. So I did what I want. So tell me a little bit about a takeaway, something really strong that, you know, everybody's listeners should take away and really think about. You know, I would say slow down and really look at people. Like, close your eyes and think of a name in your company and really think about that person.

Like, we start just labeling them. They're the secretary. They're the janitor. If you can really see people for people, it gets so easy. My grandfather used to say, people are unique, but they're predictably unique. There is no problem inside of your organization that isn't a people problem. And it's not because you have bad people. It's not because you have people that are hell bent to make your life difficult. It's a people business. People are messy. You got to get up close. So that's sort of what I would take away is like, whatever your gut reaction is about a person, I tend to ask myself this question. If what I believe about Tommy couldn't be true,

what else might it be? So whatever I'm convinced is true about Tom, if I say that's not true, and I do that three or four times, you're going to start making a crazy thing. But as you try on those different viewpoints, you probably get to a more moderated view of what's actually going on. Yeah, you're right. I think too often we ignore the facts. We get so busy in our day-to-day that we just don't have time to open our eyes and see. I mean, it's so clear when you look at it and you just go, wow. And everybody's busy. And I got to tell you, I think we're running at an incredible pace, but I got to tell you, I don't think I'm as busy as half the people here. And, you know, I'm on this podcast. I'll probably do three more by the end of tomorrow. And I'm just saying, listen, I make time to send out six to seven videos a day to my appreciation of each person that gets acknowledged on our A1 winner. And I'm not bragging. I'm just saying,

man, I need to really work with some people and make sure that they understand what the initiatives are. So that was great. And remind them that their job is to make time for thinking. You're right. They should almost sit in silence and just, you know, I don't know. I'm not as busy as them, maybe outside of work because I work all the time, but I don't consider this work.

If I think about a podcast, though, that's sort of thinking time for you. You read a book, that's thinking time for you. That's where the great work gets done. And then you go out and execute it. That's the difference is all these things on here. I mean, listen, I got something for Kelly that I want her to do. I've got something that I want to add in my Thursday morning meetings. I want to get a hold of Chuck at Service Finance. I've got some to-dos here. I noted three different times in the podcast that I want to go revisit that I actually want to take and use somewhere else. There has to be at least 15 things that I take away from just this in this past hour and 20 minutes.

So I appreciate you for that. And I love hanging out with A players. So it raises everything. Well, this was great, brother. I hope everybody got a lot out of this. Jonathan is a genius. You got to get his book and hopefully you find out a little bit more about Perception Predict.

It is a hard one to spell, but it is. So when I got involved in the company, I was like, I'm going to change the name. It just wasn't the most important thing to do. So we're probably a year away. And then we're going to open it to a contest. It's going to be single syllable. You know, I had a buddy to pronounce. It works like magic.

My buddy's writing a book. And he called it ubiquitous, the ubiquitous contractor. And I said, no offense, brother, but you got to change the name. And he goes, no, it's ubiquitous, the ubiquitous contractor. And I said, no offense, brother, but you got to change their name. And he goes, no, it's ubiquitous. It's it's they're everywhere. They're all around. And I said, just call it the all around then ubiquitous is I don't think most people would understand it. So I heard a business name yesterday called the last flame. The last flame. I drive by trucks every day. It's like,

this is not a good thing. Terrible name. I literally drive by trucks all day. I mean, and sometimes I look up their websites and I'm like, what do you even do? You're not Google. They're like,

Oh, look at Google and Yelp. I'm like, you're not them. Like if you're a plumber, you can't call it Rainforest. You can call it Rainforest Plumbing. You can call it Rainforest Plumbing.

We do toilets. But don't say Rainforest and just have Rainforest.com. Yeah. So in my wife's nonprofit animal rescue, I had a division of it to help with cats, right? Lots of problems in Phoenix. We won't go on the podcast. Guess what? We named that division. Cats. Help with cats. Help with cats, right? Lots of problems in Phoenix. We won't go on the podcast. Guess what? We named that division.

Cats. Help with cats. Yes. It's help with cats. When people want to get clever, just say what it is that you do. I've always thought that. It's really simple. And you know, anybody listening,

I hate to say this, but some people need a rebrand. You know, A1 might not be the best name, but it's A1 Garage Door Service. I mean, A1Garage.com, A1 Garage Door Service. What do you do? We're Garage Door Service. We do install, repair, anything to your garage.

But you don't need to say everything you do. Oh, that's another thing. If you put the little things and you put, we do cables, springs, rollers, bearings. What in the hell? And then you got Liftmaster, Yelp, Angie's List winner. Your whole truck is tattooed with different stuff. It literally looks like a horrible tattoo. Here's how we lose an entire Thursday.

We'll just start going from one topic to the next. Well, I love this because I appreciate you very much, Jonathan. I'll be in touch. Likewise. Take care. All right. See you later. Hey, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. Before you go, I wanted to invite you to my next vertical track event. We've opened it up to all home service companies, just like our last event. And people across all industries have been messaging me all the time saying this last event brought them as much as a 10 times return on their investment. You need to go there, check it out, and sign up today. Now, the great news is that we're doing it again in October, and we want it to be the best event of the year in the home service space.

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