The Home Service Expert Podcast - Own 15% Of Your Market Before You Even Think About A New One | Aaron & Zac

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Tommy Mello sits down with two returning guests: Aaron Gaynor, founder of Eco Plumbers, Electricians, and HVAC Technicians, fresh off crossing $100 million and pacing $113M this year, and Zac Dearing, co-founder of Mantel, the AI-powered sales platform behind some of the sharpest shopping data in home services. No rehashed stories, just what is working right now: why recruiting beats leads, the new hire who sold $1M of HVAC in his first month, the labor burden number every tech should know, why 60 to 70% of deals are still alive after you leave the home, the 15% market share rule that tells you when to grow, and the marketing math that separates maintaining from grow-grow. Follow Aaron Gaynor and Eco: https://geteco.com Follow Zac Dearing and Mantel: https://usemantel.com -- 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 🕐 -- 00:00 - Introduction 01:03 - Aaron's $100M Milestone And The New Headquarters 06:23 - Where Homeowners Spend Their Decision Time 08:46 - Two Years On Mantel: Eco's Close Rate Now 10:37 - 69% Shop For Pricing Online And Most Find Nothing 12:23 - The Options Formula And The Sunday Effect 14:55 - Recruiting Beats Leads: Who Not How 17:09 - The New Hire Who Sold $1M In One Month 18:46 - Loyalty, Labor Burden, And The 24% Line 24:33 - The One Truck Exercise And What A Call Really Costs 29:01 - Private Equity, Labor, And Who Really Benefits 34:04 - What Contractors Actually Adopt In AI 35:43 - Charging More Than The Average Bear 42:27 - Sales Is Not A Dirty Word 44:53 - Shopping Beats Selling 49:33 - When Homeowners Actually Read Your Proposal 51:31 - Buy Or Build: The Greenfield Answer 56:30 - Marketing Math: Maintain, Grow, Or Grow Grow 01:00:21 - The 15% Rule: When To Enter A New Market 01:06:30 - Closer Hats, Next Missions, And Final Advice 01:12:40 - Stop Assuming The Deal Is Dead 01:16:09 - The Apollo 11 Close 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Check Out My Social Media: Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

I think it's assuming that the deal is dead when they walk out of the home. For most service businesses, the majority of time on replacement offers, there is more opportunity actually to go home than before you would know. Commonly table close rates 30 or 40%, which means that 60 or 70% when you're walking out of the home, the deal is still alive. Yeah. So I think stop thinking that the one call closed is the end of all deal. We're getting a lot.

We started doing a lot of social media and a lot of people. It looks like we've got a thousand quotes out there. that we haven't gotten back to. But here's the interesting part. After 30 days, still 3% of homeowners are viewing. There's a lot of talk about the same day close. That is less and less the case. And there's a ton of opportunity around what happens after you leave the home.

All right, guys, today's a special day. Welcome back to the home service expert today. I got Zach Deering and Aaron Gaynor. Two returning guests. Aaron's been on twice, Zach once. We're at the Mello Estates. It's going to be a good podcast. So two returning guests.

today, both backed by popular demand. Aaron Gainer is the founder of Eco Plumbers, electricians, and Ace Rack technicians in Columbus, Ohio. Since his last appearance, he's crossed $75 million, expanded into electrical, acquired a company and just one EY entrepreneur of the year. Sitting next to him is Zach Deering, co-founder of Mantle,

an AI-powered sales platform we talked about back in February. Today, we're not rehashing the old stories. We're talking about what's working right now, where the industry is shifting, and what both of them see coming that the rest of us don't. Let's just get started with a little bit of catching everybody up with a little bit. So, Aaron, why don't you tell us 60 seconds about how things have been going,

I guess just this year? Yeah. And what you're excited about. So I know everybody that has heard my story a lot, but getting to that $100 million mark has been my benchmark. So we've officially crossed that two months. to go with our trailing 12 as $100 million. We're pacing this year to $113 million.

So we're excited for that opportunity. We've grown into a couple of markets. Multi-trade business has grown a lot over the last couple of years, all organic growth with one acquisition, as you mentioned. So we're feeling pretty good. Markets been good. HVC business is coming, plumbing, electrical, and drain. We're all feeling good about that.

We're building a new headquarters, which we've been excited about. It's been going on for a long time. You've heard a lot about the challenges, guys, about our headquarters. We're hoping to have that open in November of this year and possibly get some shop tours coming. It's a 50,000 square foot headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, training center, call center, shared services, all top-notch place. So we look forward to getting that and getting you guys out and getting some people out to come see you the new facilities. Yeah, no, it's really exciting.

Now it's great stuff, brother. Congratulations, 113 million. We can talk about budgets probably later in this. podcast. Zach, what about you? So, you know, you were on in February. What's going on? What's new? We've been ripping. Super busy. I think it was a quick refresher in case folks didn't listen the last one. I didn't grow up in the trades. I got into it because of my mom. She was trying to buy a new heating and cooling system and a really competent, capable woman was made to feel small through that process. And then I got involved. And pretty soon we felt like hostages rather than shoppers.

And if I think about where we are as a company today, it's how do we help the best contractors across the country create shopping experiences for homeowners, right? That both help delights the homeowners as well as help contractors close more. And so in the past six months, we've seen really exciting expansion, both in terms of what the product can do, how it can help homeowners and contractors, as well as moving into new service lines. So super excited to be here today.

Yeah, no, you know, it's great what's going on in the behind the scenes with you guys both. So, Aaron, I know you're really proud of that EY entrepreneur of the year, you know, I've had a convinced Cortech to let us do more of these awards because they really don't appreciate the idea of sharing financial information with the world. And there's so many of these, the Inc. 5,000, they make you share it and all these things. But I kind of got them around it. I said, this is what's going to help us with the LLBs, is winning these awards. So talk to me a little bit about that and could just stop on your last haircut.

Well, I get my haircut every Tuesday, so everybody knows that, right? Every Tuesday at 6. We're not missing that. But thanks for bringing it up. Entrepreneur of the Year was a great opportunity. I never really knew much about it with EY. Some people had reached out and said, hey, we think you should get into this. And they suggested me as an opportunity to be part of the process.

And, you know, I was like, cool, this is going to be great. but I didn't realize it's actually a legit process. Like, there's some work. So it's not a walk in the park type of thing here. Again, financials, interviews. They came on site. They interviewed me. They interviewed our team.

They wanted to see the building. They wanted to go through, see all audited financials. Came back. I had to go to Cleveland, do interviews in Cleveland in group interviews with multiple people and multiple groups of rooms. They came back. Then they had conversations again with our executive team. And then eventually they did a voting.

And then I was fortunate enough to be a winner in Pittsburgh. in May of this year, and it was awesome. The great part I really love about, there's two things I'll say on this quickly, so we didn't stay on it too long as. One, it was an awesome opportunity for me to share and discuss the trades in front of a group of a lot of people that don't hear about the trades much,

and to be recognized for plumbing HVAC and electrical, and I got a chance to really tell a trade story in my speech I did, and for all the people that did all the interview and do stuff were really blown away about what you do and how we build the trades. So it was a great opportunity, so I think that's what I really loved about it. And the second one, it's in January 27, January 6, 27, it'll be 20 years since I started

Eco. It's just about 20 years ago that I was bankrupt and it was kind of bittersweet to 20 years later to go to this and win this award with my son to be sitting there. Yeah, I know. It was kind of wild. Congrats. Thanks. To be able to be there with him, I say, here we are 20 years later, buddy.

This one's for you. And that was the end of the closing speech. That's incredible. Very, very cool. And I like, you know, for me, it's always, I just did the BBB Torch Award, which is the Ethics Award. And they interviewed us and it was me and Luke. And I was like, not anybody smiling. This is like, they're like, we only got 12 minutes.

There's a lot of people. We were the final four. Yeah. And that's the one I want more than anything is the ethics award. Yeah, we talked about that. We've won that twice. And that is a very, very prestigious award to win. Yeah, I don't know.

Now it's like in your own categories because there's all these different levels. Yeah. And I'm like, wonder if I try to do this in like a state with no competition? Because Phoenix is just a, and we're in so many states. I'm trying to like beat the system type thing. How about we just win them all everywhere? That's the plan. That's the plan.

Zach, talk to me, brother. So you've got some interesting stats that you wanted to pull out. You were here in February. What's different about Mantle? What are you seeing in the marketplace? We're going to talk a lot about what you see from your data on this podcast. Yeah, totally. I think one of the really interesting things that we hear a lot of is a lot of people over the summer have talked about just how competitive the market is.

We hear a lot of pressure, leads, a lot of noise. And one of the really interesting things that we think about is against that backdrop, one of the things I commonly hear from contractors is like, hey, homeowners are making decisions quickly. My competitors coming in, offering a crazy deal. But I pulled the data or had the team pull the data, and we looked at views. So 57% of all homeowner time is spent within the first 24 hours. Maybe not that surprising. Maybe aligns with it. Over the next two to seven days, it's another 18% of their time,

which means a meaningful portion is looking sort of over two to seven days. But here's the interesting part. After 30 days, still 3% of homeowners are viewing. And so the market's really competitive, yet there's also real opportunities through follow-up to really drive outcomes and to not just sort of forget about the homeowner when you get in your truck and you walk away. There's a lot of talk about the same day clothes. That is less and less the case and there's a ton of opportunity around what happens after you leave the home. Oh, I agree. I mean, when we started building some of the pricing tools, just simple little

things, what we noticed was we're getting a lot. We started doing a lot of social media and a lot of people and looks like we've got a thousand quotes out there that we haven't gotten back to. Yeah. And part of that is when you start to a social media, your conversion rate goes to shit. I mean, it goes way, way, way, way down because no one is in a need. That's what I love about garage doors in A track is I love the need side of it. But if you listen to this podcast, the last 20 people I've had on have been home improvement. Because home improvement knows how to build demand when it doesn't exist.

Like no one calls this, I need a kitchen remodel by tomorrow. You know, so like learning the improvement side of it is a big thing. And Aaron, you've integrated your online price estimated directly under your sales process. Walk us through. What does it done to your close rate? So I can talk a little bit about a couple of different things here. Well, one, let me say this. We've been on Mantle for officially, I think, two years.

Almost coming up. Almost two years. So the first year under Mantle, we did about 35 million of sales on that program. We're around a 51% close rate that first year. The year year to date, we've sold in Mantle. We obviously have more sales in this in general, but in Mantle, we're about 43 million right now, and our conversion rate is at a 53.4%. So gone up.

Again, these are closed, these are blended clothes for everybody listening. This is not just HVAC. This is plumbing sales, sewer sales, and new equipment replacement sales, right? So, you know, I think these are still pretty solid numbers when you talk about that in the area. And then we also have integrated a lot more around online estimating tools, right? So to your point. And so we've seen a lot more growth around online estimator tools. So we've integrated that.

We put it on our site. We've seen good activity. We've seen a lot of interest on it. We see people booking calls. We realize that we're in a world where people want more price transparency, right? Want to be able to shop to your example, right? We're talking about this a lot. So we're giving the customers the ability to kind of shop freely, check.

out our price, look what kind of systems we have, what kind of stuff we have, etc. So we've been able to do that and then book those online. So they come in, they fill out the widget, we get all their information, and then from there, we've been out what you book call. So we've seen about half a million dollars of sales actually come through online widget, through S-Mater tools. So that's about where we are. Now, I think we still have a lot of opportunity to come back, and I'd like to be able to talk more deeply about that at another time. But we've seen good growth. And people want the pricing available. And our data, if I may tell me, our data says the same thing, right? 69% of homeowners are looking for pricing online. They are trying to educate themselves.

And here's the wild part. Only 15% feel like they can find information that's very clear to them. So 85% of the time, they are not finding the pricing information that they're looking for. And so I think the work that Eco is doing and others, I mean, I know all of us sort of think very highly of Marcus Sheridan and his and his work in the area. I think it's definitely heading in the right direction. And if you think about LLMs and if you think about what LLMs reward, it rewards or they reward that specificity. And so as we think about where the market moves over the next couple months and years, that's going to be really important. Yeah, my comment to that would be I used to trust all the analytics online and now with all these LLM scraping. the web pages, it's changed.

And it's really all about schema data. But I'll tell you, like, you're like, we're getting all these views, but we're not getting conversions. Well, it's going down because every LLM from GROC to Perplexity to Gemini to Open AI to Claude is just scraping your sites. And that's okay. But I look at it now as like,

we're trying to differentiate, is it a machine crawling the site or is it a human being? And that's where we want to get to is no, be able to differentiate that data. And by the way, this is pretty complex things for most companies to listen, but I'm hoping that this podcast, we're still getting the big companies listening. Sure. Because this is what every company should be going towards is getting this kind of data and this attribution. Zach, I wanted to just ask a follow-up.

Yeah. You're seeing data across the entire contractor base. Yeah. What are some top performing companies doing right now that average ones are not doing? Yeah. This isn't going to be shocking to this audience. options, right? When you look at, I know, I know, it's not radical. And if we take a step back, right, if we think about like my mom's experience, and then we can talk about the numbers,

but like let's tell a story. It's like she was given ultimatums, not options, and it wasn't a personalized experience, and she wasn't educated. So like, what do the best contractors do? It's what you would do or what you would hope you would experience as a consumer anywhere. It's personalized. There's options that people listen to you. They respond back. and they help educate you. And so it will vary by specific trade about what's sort of optimal, but in water heaters, we see four, that if you quote four options,

you're going to have a higher combined average tick and close rate than if you do one, two, three, or even five. HVAC, it's right between five and six, right? And so it differs by different service lines and types of products, right? Like, candidly, there's a lot more variety of HVAC systems than water heaters, but what's really clear is that option, and that's something that very consistently folks are doing. Another thing that we see, and it's harder if you're smaller,

is day of week that you're serving homeowners, right? What we see is that the close rate is the highest on Sundays, and it's about six percentage points higher than during a weekday. I would be, yeah, well, both decision makers are home. I mean, Sunday, and by the way, we're running a split shift now from 6 a.m. 8 a.m. and noon, so now we're running from 6 to 10. We flew out to Morris Jenkins years ago. And they're open until midnight every night. And they said it took a couple of years to actually get the workforce excited about those longer shifts, but ultimately meeting the clients where they're

at and being known as the one that's going to be able to come out for no extra charge late, your close rate's going to go up nights and weekends. Period. Yep. And a lot of people say, we're not going to make our people work Sunday as well. What have you hired people that want to work on Sundays? Totally. I mean, I understand it's a Sabbath day. understand a lot of us are religious, but also we decided to go into the home service, home improvement space. Sure. And we got to meet people where they're at.

Yeah, garage doors don't just break Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., right? And a lot of the garage door guys think they do, and I hope they always, my competitors, I hope they always believe that. Yeah. Water heaters break outside of business hours, but garage doors, guys, only break during business hours. You know, here's something I wanted to talk to you about, Aaron, is so many people are obsessed. I hear this every day. It's getting more competitive.

How are you getting leads? Part of garage your freedom, I remember there was about a dozen people on there that go, I don't think my phones work anymore. That's how dead we are. And I'm like, you got a big database. And we can talk about farming through your database, but what I really want to talk about is who, not how,

getting the right people on the bus and taking this. No one's talking about recruiting as important. It's more important than leads. And I'll tell you how I figured this out. It's Tom Howard has a guy that we all know, Phil, that's doing, it did 20, over 20 million in his best year. When most HVAC guys, they have 10 employees that don't do 5 million. Yet you got one guy out in the field doing 20 million.

That's how important the who instead of how is. How important for you is getting the right people versus, you're getting a lot of leads. You've done a great job. You work with the Wizard of Ads and everything else. And you figured that piece out. But how important is, I don't think anybody's talking about recruiting as much as important as it is in training. So yeah, I agree.

So a couple of things there on Pack there. One is I think you got to think of recruiting similar to marketing. We talk about this a lot too. So we're actually an idea of like here, Marcus Sheridan, you brought up the idea of endless customer. Well, you need endless recruiting, right? So we're trying to build something you and I've talked about this, our own website, everything we do, endless recruiting.

So what does that content look like? How are we pushing content? What are we creating? How do we have a whole website that's dedicated to recruiting, hiring, bringing people into the trades or having people that already exist join our team with real content, real information that can understand the business

because a lot of times we're like, if you go around and so I did this thing like most of us do today, right? I took all of our ads, our recruiting ads on all of our platforms, and I said, okay, tell me what makes our ad any unique different from anybody else on Indeed or any of these other stuff.

And AI basically came back and said, no, you guys are all, everybody's the same. There's nothing different about any of these ads that anybody's doing. So I was like, oh, wow. So, and we all. kind of know that, but we just kind of know we just do the same thing. So we're trying to reinvent that whole idea of how we how we pursue that. But I think the recruiting is super important. So

for example, you and I talked about this recently, Tommy, as we kind of went out, we went really hard recruiting some HVAC comfort advisors and really top premium people in the marketplace that we knew about from competitors and other areas. And we went all in on it. And having them come over, and we, you know, everybody who consider us a pretty successful business, I think, in the big picture. we were nowhere near where we could be until we brought on these new, new talent and real top premium players, because they also had finally got a chance to hear about us properly, what we offer, what we do, how many leads we have. I think there's a misconception. Sometimes people know we had a lot of leads, but we've been historically known as a plumbing business. Yeah. Right. So people

were like, oh, you're a plumbing business, right? Mostly. So we ever bring them over, and it was game changer. Immediately, the first that we brought over one of the top, top guys in the marketplace over to us, he had never done this before, but under our system and rid it, he sold. a million dollars in HVAC in one month. It's incredible, right? One guy, a million bucks. Another guy had over 800,000. Another guy, 750.

These were game changer people by getting the right people in the right system with us. So they came on. We just didn't say, hey, do whatever you want to do. Here's how we do stuff, but now we have the right people in the system. So we recruited hard there. And then we also realized we had to recruit really, really hard to bring on installers. So one of the things was, you know, try to figure out who do they like to work with? Who are the best installers in the marketplace?

and you got to work hard for it. I know that that's a hard thing in the game where people want to walk that line on what recruiting looks like. And I do think there's a line respecting your competition or if you're part of a network group. I get all that.

But at the end of day, like you got to win. And you need to be able to put yourself in the position to get the best talent. Well, let me ask you something about loyalty because a lot of people are listening and they find it so hard.

Like the person shows up, a lot of time they've got a smile on their face. Some of the time they're willing to pick up a Sunday. I think our dispatchers seem to love the guys that aren't the top players because if you're not a top player, you've got to do more, you've got to be more agile. But from my perspective,

you parted ways with how many people? Four? Yeah, four. So you part ways with four different guys in the field. And this is me and Luke go back and forth with this. Like, let me lower the marketing spend. And this market, so we could down,

so we could shift away. We got to fire some guys. And he's like, no, no, no, they're going to take a year to get better. And I'm like, oh, that kills me. We've done an analysis, Luke, it takes 90 to 120 days. And so what's your perspective on loyalty and when's enough enough? And how much do you warn them? Maybe not Pips, but what are you doing?

So I think it's a great question because this is a hard one. I'm historically always been pretty loyal to the tax and the guys because I get it. I'm one of them. I come from the field. I'm a plumber by trade, right? I want to see him win. We want to see him win. I think you do too, Tommy, right?

We root for them. But I think what we ended up doing is we sat down and not that long ago. We've done this a couple of times, but I really sat down with all my management team. I said, hey, look, we've got to draw a line in the sand here. And I said, what I want you to do is I want you to get everybody to understand. They all understand the revenue they have to produce by truck, right? Everybody understands this is a job. They have to produce a certain amount of revenue to be employed, right?

That's fair, right? All of us understand that. I said, what I want you to do now is we're going to get together. We're going to get their payroll. And we're going to get the percentage of their revenue to their payroll. and tell them exactly how much of their payroll to the percentage of their revenue they're producing and where that line is.

So they clearly understand the difference between what it is, not just my revenue, but what my labor burden is the organization. And when they can understand that, now we have a better conversation, because a lot of times we come in more emotional, hey, you're not producing, you're not doing this, you're not doing that, so let's step back and let's lay it out and let them know,

like you have to be under 24% labor burden to provide enough resources to the organization to work here. Right? And that's how we pay you. If not, then if you're at 35, 40, 50, or 60, you're stealing from others. And others now are covering you. So we sat down and did that. And that was actually a very big change mindset for management.

Go into the labor burden. And if someone wants to figure that analysis out, what is the math behind that? Well, we kept it pretty simple here. So we just went and said, what's their revenue they produced by truck? And what is their actual pay? Right. That's pretty much simple, right? You can go into many layers of it, but we did the basic fundamentals.

Like, here's what we paid you last month. Here's what your revenue was. And we did that over a quarter. And then we did a previous quarter. So now what they're doing is every quarter or every month, some of the guys come back is we're sitting down and they're going back through this with the tech and saying, hey, we're going to give you a chance to coach you up, right? Coaching up means you got to start hitting this because we can't afford to have you work here

after so long running at this labor burden. It's a business, right? It doesn't make sense. So that direct conversation has created a little bit better. clarity and alignment. And I think this is where we go sideways as organizations, my opinion again, is we assume that all these people know these things and they don't, right? And all we do is you start saying, you got to hit this revenue in a truck. And all they hear us saying is, you got to make me more money. You got to make me more money. It's like, no, of course we need to

make more money as an organization. But the reality is if you don't, you don't make enough money, I can't pay you. So you have to understand that line because all they ever hear from us and we produce sales or revenue is all you want me to do is making more money, but it's like they have to understand their labor burden percentages. And I don't know if that's something you guys do, Tom, or other people do, but I can tell you that that conversation has been pretty eye-opening for everybody and all the techs, and now they kind of know where they stand instead of it just against a KPI. I don't know if that's helpful what you want to talk about. You know what's interesting is you talk about transparency, clarity, right? There's Kim Scott wrote a book, Radical Cander.

But what's interesting is if you think about what homeowners want when they're shopping for home services, it's a lot of the same things, right? They just kind of want to know where they stand and what's needed and be educated because it sounds like by educating the guys, it makes those conversations easier by helping them understand. 100%. So I know we're going to get in some sales stuff, but I think this all connects to this, right? Because then they can start to understand why they need to use the tools, why this stuff is here. Similar to this, I just did a sewer sales training with my team. And I brought in, I think we have about 24, 25 sewer sales guys.

And what I realized in that is obviously going through the process coaching was the candor, right? So I said, we're going to be in this room and all we're going to do is tell the truth today. We're going to tell the truth about where you are, what's the base, who's good, who's bad, who's not. And if we leave here today, we're going to move up. But one thing I didn't know that I realized when they go around at the end of day, the biggest aha, was the fact that only less than 3% of every single family home actually replace, has a chance that was going to replace their sewer annually. And they didn't know that.

I never told them that before until that day. And they are like, I can't believe that. I said, so when I drove that in, I said, think about the odds that we got you there when only 3%, less than 3% of every single family home in the United States may replace a sewer annually. So us doing all the marketing, all the stuff, and you're standing there now, it is your job to show up as the best version of you because that's only 3%. Tell me if you want to go start a business that only has a 3% replacement rate. Yeah, it's tough.

Right? But that's what it is, but nobody knows that, right? So when they had that, that literally clicked giant again. So the more transparent we are with the text, the more we're able to give them real data and tell them the right story, like anything, the more they're willing to take action for the right reasons, not because it feels like we're just pushing them. This guy from Australia gave me this cost break analysis from like the 90s,

and it had the yellow page ads, the pager. I mean, this is like antique, like way long time ago. And he said, if you were a single truck with like one employee, and it went through like how often you're actually working in the home versus driving. Sure. How much you need training. How much to go pick up parts. It came out back then that you need to charge like $450 and all.

And it broke it down. There was like 25 items, which there's so many more items. Sure. With CRMs and every other tool. And it was like, and I need to get back to that as explained to guys. Like right now to get a PPC booked call in Phoenix on PPC. It's $330. Holy moly.

So that's just. to show up. Yeah. That doesn't include the truck costs. It doesn't include the time. It doesn't include the CSR, the dispatcher, the CRM, the air conditioning that we run. That's a great exercise and that's been around for a pretty long time. I think it's fundamentally good to do. It's called one truck. Yeah. One truck. Yeah. I'm going to break that through an orientation. Yeah. Well, we've been working on bringing that back too for the transparency, but we can all work together to make that make that even better. Or maybe there's the example we can put together that you can share with all the guests that listen to that made. Like, I don't

know what that exercise looks like. So we can work to put that there. Yeah, no, I'll get that out to everybody. I mean, it's old, but I want Adrian. But it works. But it works. It's, it's like a lot of people see what we pay for parts. They don't think about gas prices going up. They don't think of, like, I was, I understand that they only see what they can see, but it's so expensive when you add it all up. And then when we don't run a job or a job cancels, that's one thing we've been focused on. The biggest thing this year is capacity plan, By far. Zach, you six months ago, we talked about homeowners and their buying journey and how it's changing. What are you seeing in the marketplace right now?

We're seeing a lot of competition among contractors, right? We are seen as more and more contractors have dialed in numbers, commonly driven by partnering with private equity, commonly also is driven by like the skilled independence getting more and more sophisticated, that folks are being more nimble with price, right? And so homeowners are commonly seeing contractors that are willing to really move price dramatically. And so therefore, what does that mean is it's more important than ever to understand and to educate and to do right by that homeowner? Because almost certainly they can go find another truck that's nicely wrapped that might nominally sell the same equipment for $5,000 less, right? Yeah.

And so I think what we're seeing is that there is this level of trust that's ebbing from homeowners. And so therefore it's really imperative on the contractors that want to win and want to win the right way to make sure that they're showing up and they're putting their best foot forward and they're really putting the homeowner in the driver's seat. Yeah, you know, you brought up PE. We see a lot of roll-ups. We see a lot going on with franchise expansions. and my thesis, and I'd love to hear both your perspectives are, I mean, the data that I'm starting to get access to and the things that I'm starting to know and the level of sophistication is getting so much. I think the big guys are going to become giants. And I think it's going to be hard for,

like, I remember when I just wanted my guys to show up the next day sober. That was like a big win. Don't get arrested today. Don't go to the strip club, you know. For sure. And if you're wearing the company polo, even better. You're in uniform and you're sober. It's a great day. That was like, hey, can you make it to your jobs on time? That was a big win. And now I'm like way more analytical.

And I know there's a lot of people that are like, how do you find great people? Sure. How do you get good leads? And those are the questions I was asking myself well over a decade ago. And so I've kind of graduated and I'm not cocky about it. But I think that if people don't get really serious about finding a company, I think this built to sell John Worlow book is serious.

Like build a business and a lot of people, I'm not saying you can't come up, I'm saying it's harder to come up like we did. I agree. Because back then it was like Google just started. My first two years was Yellow Pages. And then all of a sudden we heard of this thing,

Google, then Yelp came out and then it was like, so where do you guys see the world of, Zach, you could go first, private equity. And private equity's kind of got a bad name, but it's just really just a sophisticated investor. Totally. I mean, I think there is a lot of capital dollars flowing into the space, right? COVID in the last several years has proved that this is countercyclical, right? You see multiples and there is a lot of interest from that perspective. I think what becomes interesting is one of the other things is like we work with large private equity owned shops, we work with large independent shops. And so I think one of the interesting things is how does the labor market speak for itself? Because there are stories that you will hear, right, that when private equity gets involved, tech start to wonder about where they want to spend their time in the future. And so I think to your

point, that recruiting piece becomes more and more important. And interesting, I was listening recently to a podcast with Brian Chesky, and he talked about how he spends 50% of his time on recruiting. And so I really see that as the world gets more competitive and as there's more options for techs, which I think overall is very much a good thing, it is more and more important that the contractors are not just delivering a phenomenal homeowner experience, but also a really good employee experience. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree.

I think Tommy, I speak a decent amount about this. I agree. So on private equity standpoint, like, you know, I think it's like, look,

you hear horror stories on both sides to be candid. Like, there's great private equity companies. There's not great independent companies. There's, it's all, you know,

whatever you want to call them independent or family has usually been the historical name. So, you know, I think all of it's good. And, but I do think to your point, going to be harder to start. It's getting more complex. The dollars are larger than they've ever been. It's harder to buy into ad spaces and do stuff. Will there always be an opportunity

for a great entrepreneur or a great, I don't even think really when we get trade that you're considered really an entrepreneur, you just started a trade business. Like I don't consider myself really technically like an entrepreneur, I guess, in a sense, right? It would operate a business at a good level. We have some entrepreneurial ideas. I mean, this is kind of red oceans and blue ocean things, right? But it does get little, but there will always be a space for, you know, for good providers, good people that come out, take care of people. That is the fundamental.

But I do think as you move along here in this journey that it is gets more complex. There is more data than you ever thought. I mean, there's more information, more ways to break things apart, more ways to look at reports. There's more ways to train people, the resources to train.

And the thing I think that you really run into is like the labor pool is not that large. And we've seen this for a long time. So we started our school in 2000. So even if you are smaller independent or smaller stuff, It's like, why do I work for you when there's so many grander, there's all these other options out there. And it might be, I want my freedom.

I want something that may be a little bit different. But what I've seen historically is the great trades, people that want to do a great job, actually want to have a standard. They want to work somewhere where there's good expectations. They want to work somewhere there's growth and opportunity. Those are what they want, right? So we've seen more of that. I actually think that we've got better when we've got harder.

Like, so when we've got harder on the team about stuff or harder on stuff, When I say harder, I say how about bring our standard up a little bit more as we've gone along to your point? Like it used to be like just get people to work, right? And now it's like, hey, now you've got to be to work. This is what you're required to wear. This is what you're required to have. Sure.

You're required to have. This is all the things you're required to do. That standard actually, I think, has pushed people to actually make themselves better. And because of that, I think we've become a better business. So I don't, I don't have a disagreement with private equity. I actually think it's been in many ways a good thing. It's so good. It's so good for the.

Anybody that has private equity is, dude, to think about how many people have $100 million, that literally there was no opportunity. Nobody was looking at us seriously. This is a good thing that happened to real estate in like the 40s or something. I agree. This is amazing things. I think it's a great thing. It's pushed the industry.

It's created a lot of wealth in the industry. It's brought new technology into the industry. I mean, these are things that people should not be pushing against, right? Again, there's going to be good and bad on both sides forever, like in general. But I think it's been more good than bad. You know what I've found is if I can get the whole family and the wife, most of our technicians are male. If we can get the wife for this significant other involved and have them understand the opportunity. I mean, there's things out there like ownership works.

Like we do the pinnacle where we can do an equity grant to installers and technicians. And like the other thing, there are just so many opportunities to bring the whole families together more often and do the stuff outside of work. Like today, I give away those 10 tickets to the Cardinals and Dallas is playing. Like, I could have called anybody and gave those away, but I'm like, let's give them to all A1 people. Yeah. And like, that's kind of what, like, but now I'm like, how do I do 10 times more of that? Great. Because, like, yeah, you might be able to get a little bit more pay, but are you going to get more respect?

Are you going to still have the brother? Like Victor Rankor, when he left Leland's company, he's like, dude, I was still the baddest ass too, but there was only two other guys. Because there was no real meetings. I didn't even know what I was making exactly. Like, I had to go figure out the math and I lost what we call is a brotherhood and sisterhood your company. Zach, you're building all kinds of AI tools for contractors.

What have you learned about what contractors really adopt versus what they reject? Where's the resistance and how do you overcome it? It's great question. Something we think about a lot as a team. It's like the hardest part about building for and with contractors isn't the tech itself. It is actually making sure that you're building something that's used by the frontline person, right? I think there's like generally speaking a few things that's really clear. One, as we see it in all of our businesses, right, across businesses, friction, right?

Can you just make it easier for folks to do the thing they want to do most of the time rather than adding more steps, right? Like, can you deliver that value prop to that end user? I think two, it's like really deep empathy. One of the things that I really appreciate about partnering with A1 and with Eco is whenever like, hey, we'd love to have someone from the team come out and spend time. and you holler like, absolutely, bring whoever, right? And so I think it's really being close and being proximate to that end user to really

understand the motivation. And three is just on all of the small things that folks don't really want to do, that is a great place to use AI to automate things, right? You're not automating away the tech or the salesperson. You're automating away the root follow-ups that they weren't that interested in sending anyways. Like you allow them to spend more and more of their time focused on the, with things that they do really phenomenally well,

the tech diagnosing a system, the salesperson building trust with a homeowner, building trust with my mom, so then you use AI to do the more meaningful task that they don't really wanna focus on anyways. You know what's interesting is a lot of people wonder, like how do you guys charge quite a bit more than the average bear?

Sure. You know, the average mom and pop shop. And what I've always learned is apples to apples to sell oranges. Like when you look at our door makeup, Like we've got 80,000 cycle springs, 100,000 cycle rollers. We give a subscription to Chamberlain. We install an extra camera with a solar panel outside.

So when you're comparing, you're like, yeah, go try to find somebody that sells what we sell. It's like, it's like comparing a Volkswagen bug to like a Ferrari with like all the additional things. And so I've always said, we had a technician out of a job and the person pulled up Chad Chabit and said, hey, the spring should cost $4 to $600. And he goes, could I ask Chatsubit something? and he said, what are the cycle of those springs? They said 10 to 15,000 cycle cycle. He goes, so how much should an 80,000 cycle spring costs?

And it came back and they said three to four thousand. And he's like, so we're actually giving you a really good price. And that's like, I want my guys to be equipped to handle that stuff. It's a homeowner has more opportunity to get that information. You know, let's talk a little bit about what companies are going to need when it comes to a tech stack. You know, the question is, if you were to start today, what would you build it on? And I gotta tell you, service time is 10,000 clients. We built a lot of things around service time.

Sure. When it comes to like lace and chirp follow up and like all these different things and adding mantle. And by the way, Mantle, you didn't really weren't excited about the garage door side of things. But we convinced you to do it because we were like, look, we can make this work. We got him excited. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it took months and months.

Aaron introduced me to Zach. And we were like, yeah, we could definitely use this. And then it took a while. And Luke, Luke was super involved in that. But turns out Tommy and particularly Luke can be very persuasive. I found out. Well, at the end of the day, I'm not the guy to implement anything. I'm not the guy to be out there trying to, I'll get the guys to push, but I'm not the guy

to work on the software. Like, I'm not an Elliott on your team. Yeah. I mean, I think I've learned to stay in my own lane, honestly, like get out of the way and let the guys that are actually doing the day-to-day get more involved. But what do you guys think? 10,000 clients on service, Titan. I think there's a lot of people going after service tighten.

They will tell you the truth. I mean, there's companies now that are just kicking off. Sure. Like, we just heard about podium. Yeah. Podium just got booted off because they're trying to create their own kind of ERPCRM. And service tank's going to be like, no, we've got this client. We're not going to let you build something.

Sure. That we fought for this client. I don't blame them for that piece. So what are your guys' thoughts on the tech stack? Well, I mean, there's a lot there. Well, I think one is it's faster than ever to build stuff, right? And so we did something cool this summer, I guess, kind of around this topic, but we get in, I guess, how detail you want to get into tech stack is we went out.

We got two interns from Ohio State that were in the program, basically software development, et cetera. We brought them on. We said, hey, we just want to build a bunch of cool stuff, go work with our teams, here's some ideas, here's some things we want, go to work, see what you can build, work with Elliott and our team. So right now we have three technically, like people that their life is around data. building in general. So we're going to expand that team now because we actually offer both those intern full-tied jobs because they just built so much cool stuff. Yeah. Right? And we can move so

fast today with all the things we can build. So I guess the world has just expanded out so large in this tech area so it could go many different ways. And it's so easy to build an app to be able to track something to report something now than it's ever been. So I think that that area's off the back of pig, off the back of service tightened data, have you been in it for years and years. Do I think that there's a lot of competition coming in in that place that can now build something similar to Service Titan that may operate better or similar? Yeah, I mean, that's probably definitely happening, right? I mean, we've been loyalist to Service Titan for a long time. Still, I technically still don't have any real issues with the Service Titan Foundation software at all.

I think it's been solid. It's changed the industry. Some of the Pro products is where they get a lot of, they get a lot of Flag from Pro products, for sure. But I mean, in general, if you go back to when we started, Like if we think about how tech changed our businesses, right? If service time didn't roll out what they rolled out, we were all on the hunt. How do you think we all met each other? Well, they brought everybody together. That was their smartest thing is bringing everybody together in Pantheon. Yeah, through Pantheon and through other areas, we all started meeting each other,

and they brought tech to our space where we were really challenging with tech. And now look where tech is. Tech is everywhere in our space, right? So I think it's just being able to say, what works for me? Be an early adapter when you can without letting things go too long. Somewhere like Mantle is a pretty early adapter on that, right? you be able to start doing that and be able to pick the right ones because it's not always that easy there's some that are not going to you know going to work out and i think we've we've had

that same tommy with us so i think it's okay understanding that you're going to have to get some tech you're going to try some sometimes it's not going to work and then you got to move on quickly and pick the next one but you also need to not move on too quickly because you got to make sure you're integrating it you're giving your team effort to use it you're working on it because tech is tech can change your business only changes it if everybody works with it properly like anything right so i think a lot of times now everybody thinks, well, I'll get this new thing. I'll sign up for this AI phone or, you know, a voice recording thing. And all of a sudden, my whole business is going to be magically

better tomorrow. It's like, it's not true. Yeah. It's just not true. Totally. Totally, totally. I think what's interesting is like if you think about the total time we spent on this podcast, probably 10% and just now has been spent talking about service time. So they clearly totally change this industry for the better. I think the thing that we think a lot about is one is, I think, we're seeing there's this been this proliferation, right? You guys go to conferences and there's probably like 100 AI vendors and there's 50 that you like weren't even there a few weeks ago. And so I think one of the things we're seeing among sort of the contractors

that are a bit more sophisticated is they're starting to see that they're really making a few key bats, right? There is service tied in, there is their ERP or accounting system and there's a couple other key. Yeah, HR and then the phone system. And then the connects to the void. Yeah. Consolidation around a few other sort of key bets.

And so I think that that's obviously really meaningful and is also just a reflection of like, it's really hard to run 50 different tools, right? Possible, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, we also think where the things we talk about a lot, uh, inside the team is, like, where could we be the most additive to the conversation, right? And where we really see that is how do we help contractors create shopping experiences and do delight homeowners and help them close more.

And so that's what we're really laser focused on. and like candidly service time has been great partners to us. And I think that's partially because it's very highly complimentary. Yeah, I agree with that. And that's, I did want to speak to sales a little bit. I mean, look, sales has gotten such an evil bad word. It's like, and all I tell my guys is smile more, be courteous. Yes, ma'am, absolutely offer coffee on the way.

You don't have to sell, just be a good person to give options. And be convincing because you're the expert. You're the doctor. You know what I mean? Like, can you imagine people saying, I don't like sales. And the first thing I do is say, and anybody listens to the podcast,

let me say this, who here sells things that people don't need? No hands go on. And I'm like, wait a minute. You're wearing Jordans. Did you need those? You got a freaking $20,000 watch on. I'm like, nobody needs to look at their cell phone

to be able to open up their garage. Nobody needs an automatic shutoff elf. But they wanted it because it makes sense. And like I would say, if the plumber comes to my house and they say, look, Tommy, how long does it take your hot water to get hot in the shower? And if I say it takes about a minute,

would you like if I could get it hot within five seconds? Totally. I'd be like, yeah, let's do it. Because it still takes about a minute. But nobody's never offered it. So I'm not going to beg somebody to, you know what I mean? So it's like. I bet you know a lot.

I haven't solved this yet. Yeah, if only you knew a good farmer. It sounds like it was a hit at me. You were here when we got the hot water here. Remember that, the tankless? I was like, you got to get all the tankless. Yeah. No, and there happened to be what?

eight of them? Yeah. There's a lot. No, but I do think sales should be like the pastor was telling the story at church last week and he said, you know, there's this scripture and I can't quote the scripture exactly, but, you know, Jesus was there and the church was raising money and of course the wealthy people were all giving the most. It was like all this.

And then this little homeless woman came, she gave everything she had. Sure. And in God's eyes, it was like, wait a minute. She gave everything. The reason I bring this up is because at church, he talks about giving. And that's how they make their revenue. Sure. Is the best person in that whole congregation as sales is the preacher.

I mean, he's able to collect that allow them to go on their missions, allow them to get involved with the needy and allow them to scale their church. So I just, I think sales has just got a really bad perspective. And I don't think it's a bad thing to take people. convince them to buy. Totally. And I think that's what your tool does. People love to buy, but people hate to be sold. 100%. And it's even interesting our own evolution. We talk about what's changed from six months ago. Six months ago, I might said, we're a sales platform. Increasingly, we think

about shopping, right? And here's the crazy part, right? How many contractors, if you talk to you, like, hey, do you want your homeowners to shop? And their gut reaction is what? No. Right? Because they think shopping means they're going to go talk and get other competitive bids. Yeah, that's just not what it is. Totally. And what we see in the data is really clear is homeowners are going to shop. They could shop with you if you give them five or six options, or they could get one option from you and then go get six other proposals.

And so I think that's one of the places where, and you can even hear it as I talk quicker and my voice raises where I feel really visibly passionate about how do we help contractors. Like if I think about what I'm riding along in the truck or the teams running along in the truck, we see these really technically capable, incredibly sound. people. How do we help make it where they can deliver a phenomenal experience to homeowner, which is two parts. Like, yes, you need to install with incredible quality, but you also need to empower the home, or not need, you also get the opportunity to empower the homeowner of choice. And we've seen that. Like, I will say that when we rolled out Mantle, I remember

the first day Matt Fink called me, he's like, this was a three-star guarantee. They didn't have the money, but they added windows and decided to go to the five-star because it wasn't very much more money. And that's one of the things I like about Mantle is we're very clear on the pricing that we do that it's going to cost a little bit more to use our finance tools. But it makes it affordable. Yeah. You know, I sat down with the guy service finance and he's like, most people, they do a 10-year plan. They pay it off in 2.6 years. It's not a bad thing. There's no prepayment penalty. And we see people do all these upgrades. And that's what Aaron convinced me. He's like, Tommy, we're just murdering it on people getting the better packages.

And this is the wild part is if you use the tool successfully and if you empower homeowners to shop, it actually becomes the seller. It's actually less work. It is right. Like if you give them and it's something that I've heard you talk about and your team talk about a lot, which is like it's interactive. It reduces the sales pressure. Like it becomes a more enjoyable experience at the kitchen table for the tech or for the salesperson. You don't have to quote unquote sell. Yeah.

Right. Like that's the whole thing. It's like everybody feels like they got to sell. But it's like, but nobody really get, when we all shop, I think the biggest thing we go back and I sit down when I talk to the techs. And I do our onboarding every two weeks too. And I talk a little bit about this is, you know, the way that the shopping experience has changed. Like, we're thinking home services, we still want our sales team and the company or the techs.

We still want to be able to act the old way. But the reality is all of you buy that are sitting in this room right now this way. Yeah. And they all, everybody kind of gets it because they're like, yeah, I do shop. I do look for prices online. I do all these things. So we're like transparency on all this is better. Giving more options is better because that's actually how you buy.

And everybody thinks about it. But when they go to sell, quote unquote, sell, they don't want to act the same way. They don't want to operate the same way as they purchase. But I think once people can kind of connect the dots between the two of how they behave when they shop and buy also to the way that they actually do it with their customer, it changes a lot. I'll tell you, I will spend more money to get it today or tomorrow.

And I think connecting something, like Mantle. The problem is we're a little bit like archaic and primitive in the garage industry with what my distribution centers will allow me to have. I just can't, I'm going to have warehouses full across the country full of broad doors. But if I could know exactly what's into the distribution center and say, listen, I mean, my best guys are pulling down the door on that service call and the installers coming on with the new one. For sure. And speed is the only thing that I think could beat price. If you could beat on speed and say I can do this right now. Well, yeah, it's no different than Amazon, right? You're looking down your own stuff. Exactly. And it'll say, it'll be like,

seven days or seven a.m. or you pay $2 and you get it today. I'm like now. Everything you want it now. Even though you don't need it right now, but a lot of times like, why just want it? Let's get it done. If you want it, you want it done right now. You're in the buyer mood. Why wait on this? And what's interesting about speed is they might be in the buyer mood right now or they might be in the buyer mood five days from now, which is that's where responsiveness. Like what do really exceptional organizations do? What's a really phenomenal buying experience? It is that you are responsive and you're following up in an appropriate way that's personalized to you. You're not calling every five minutes, but that you are dialing it into their needs at the moment they are ready to

buy. And that's what Mantle does. Mantle alerts us when they're looking at the invoice so we could reach out to them. And it might be five days, might be two months. But bam, they just looked at it. And they're kind of like, how's this possible? I just looked at my invoice. What are the odds? What kind of voodoo is this? Well, I do, I do have one other, one other fun fact for y'all, if I may. So we analyzed all of the time. We analyzed all of the time. that homeowners view proposal across the day. Maybe not surprisingly, 21% of that time spent is 5 to 9 p.m. right in the evening. Here's something interesting. 22% is 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. So in the morning, people are getting their morning cup of coffee and looking at their garage door

options. But here's the wild part. Overnight, so midnight until 5 a.m. local time, 1.2% of all homeowner time is spent where the person in the middle of the night is considered like, you know, that takeless water heater. Well, you only mentioned like 22, 22 and what, where is the other 50%? The other 50% is between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. And then also you see 5% between 9 and 12. Okay. So let me ask you this, what's not a client?

Because me and you have talked quite a bit about this is, from my understanding, it's just a small company that can barely get their shit together. Yeah. Like you'd rather, and it's not necessarily, if you're going to take the time, everything that you build and everything I think is being built is specific to a company now instead of like this one size fits all. So what's not a client? What's a perfect? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. It's great question. For the contractors we partner with, I think a few things. Like one, you need to be bought in to like what we're about, right? Like if you have been shaking your head as you're like listening to this podcast, probably means you're bought in. If you believe that you know what's best and you only want to give your homeowner one option, that's phenomenal. Probably not a great partner for us. The other thing, is size. Like today, the way the product is built, it's really designed and it's best fit for a shop that's probably roughly 10 million plus. We're definitely working on some stuff. And so maybe when

we're back here six months from now, that that starts to change a little bit. And the other thing is it's really today, HVAC plumbing, electrical generators and, of course, garage stores. So, Eric, we talk a lot about to buy our build, right? Greenfield versus going out and buying. I think there's pros to both. I think people don't understand just how hard it is to integrate correctly. And the PE world is starting to understand. Throwing a bunch of stuff together to get EBITA is going to actually devalue the business. And a lot of people think integration is they're on the same CRM.

They're on the same HR tool. They're on intact, your QuickBooks. And now they're integrated. And that's just not the case. No. I mean, these companies are waking up going, man, that's what the model was. And the biggest HVAC roll-ups, they're still like that. They are.

They're still running kind of independently within this bubble, but there's still like a different brand, a different price book. They're buying from different vendors. There's all these other things. So integration is just, it's a lot of work to get everybody trained that if I fly into your market or this market or this market, it's the exact same thing. Yeah. So from your perspective, I mean, and I think you're interested in still doing quite a bit

of both. But if you had to choose, what are the differentiating factors that help you decide what you want to do? So I personally like Greenfield. We've had more success from a Greenfield standpoint. because it feels like we're starting ground zero, culturally wise, intervision. Hopefully we're bringing somebody from one of our markets already that exists, understands the business, understands what we do, what we stand for and what we stand

against. When you try to acquire, we did one small acquisition, I say small, I guess it's like $8 million. It was, you know, we think $8 million is like, oh, that's okay. I mean, it's a big business, but it's like, you know, we think of people acquiring, sometimes you're here and buying these big businesses, right? I mean, it was a challenge, and you've acquired businesses too, right? it's a challenge. They just barely were on service tight and we had to try to integrate them in on our HR and just those things alone took months, nor less than trying to get integrated with our sales

process and who we, and what we do and how we do it, the training on our service system, the way that we run our calls, just the company policies, all these things, right? It just, there's a lot to do. But there's a lot of opportunity in that too. I mean, you can't move. But I agree what it was heard and seen as we talked to, you know, P.E. guys and companies more. as I guess I'll use for lack of better term, is really looking at one brand as much as possible, super regional brand. How are you scaling that? Greenfield is, you know, for anybody who doesn't know, kind of you heard different terminology for this, but Greenfield is basically just going to the market, you start from ground zero. We ought to like that idea of just going into a market,

you know, buy enough radio, which you know, radio, buy radio at the right multiplier and percentages, and then just coming to put a stake in the ground and go to work for 18 to 36, months. And so I think that that's it. It's organic growth. It's not a bunch of packaged up stuff that has become messy. We've seen multipliers and other people that have done that have not had as much success. People are kind of getting away from that for say from what I hear. And I think what you hear too, Tommy, you guys have done a good job. You have a couple of real big solid brands that you're going to put together and operate. But you know, you see a lot of places that are kind of in a bubble. It's just like, cool, somebody owns it. But really, they're still acting as 20 or 30 different

absolutely different businesses. There's no synergies. I always love the word synergy because I think it sounds, but there isn't. There's no buying power between what manufacturer you're buying a lot of times. You know, what are you doing? You have websites for all different people all over the place. Are they using the same product? These people like Lennox, they like carrier, they like this, and you're like, so you can't get volume buying. So there's a lot of things that kind of happen in there, especially your marketing department trying to understand what to do and how to market and what to message and where to buy the ads and not the ads and what's going on. It's, There's it's hard.

So, you know, I got to give them crab to try to do it, but it's hard. Well, I think there's these economies of scale that come from one call center, one dispatch center, one CRM that's set up the same way, one type of insurance you're buying. And the problem is, like, there's always, you still got to wait to your, the expiration date of all these different things. Yeah. But sometimes you just got to cut that as a loss. Yes.

I say, we're just going to cut over now. I get this stuff done. And that's where you get the economies of sales. scale because everything from workers' comp to insurance to how you buy your trucks. And then that's another big thing. The truck set up. A lot of these big companies are operating way different types of trucks, way different types of leases. Some of them own, some of them lease. And they're like, it turns into a lot of big mess. What I love is to buy a company that's been around for a really long time spending very little on marketing, still keeping guys run. What's crazy? Six to eight jobs a

a day. Now, we run three jobs per day per tech. So like if I could buy a company, that's because you run a process. Yeah, we run a process and we get to know. the customer, we actually give them, we try to become, like, trusted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just wham, bam, bam, thank you, man, we're going to trip. A lot of these people still think fixing the minimum viable products versus giving them an opportunity to reset the clock. And I think we should give the opportunity.

And I got lucky. I mean, I tell people all the time, I'm mostly lucky. Garage doors, when I got into it, I didn't know it was going to be 268% return on investment in today's. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of things that I'm like, man, me and Luke got into the right industry at the right time, but we've made the mistakes all the way up to here. I want to ask a few more things.

So, you know, everyone's saying Google is just getting crazy. And I mean, you're paying the tariff when you go to Google. But I started to look at canvassing leadags, box stores, YouTube, meta, TikTok, M&A, tuckins, doubling down on TV and radio. I just think when everyone's going, Google's getting expensive. Well, yeah, it is expensive because you suck at booking calls, conversion rate, and average tickets. And you don't sell anything different.

So I could afford to still do Google where nobody else can. But when you do the TV and radio and you do it. do the billboards and the social media right, what you find is that your Google cost goes way down because they're searching your keywords. Yeah. I mean, what are your thoughts with marketing getting to the point that it is? What are you willing to spend as a percentage of revenue? What would be like if you're, and I know Greenfield's different because you got to go in and lose money for the first 18 months. But if you're looking, what would be like, man, this is crazy, but you would spend that much? So, I mean, I've spent a lot of money on marketing for it. As a percentage of revenue. No, I

So I think, okay, so the model, so there's a couple of layers of this model. One, six percent is the idea that you're just kind of maintaining, right? So if you're spending about six percent, you're basically just maintaining who you are, what you have today. That's about what it costs you just potentially maintain. And then if you want to start to grow, you know, you start to move up to eight, but technically, you know, somewhere between that six and eight is kind of maintained. You want to start to grow, it's somewhere between eight and 12 percent to start moving growth.

If you want to grow, grow, you're going to start moving into more of this 15 number, right? And so now you're going to start getting the 15. and that's investment. When they say grow, you have to understand that's also an investment into what you talk about grow. That doesn't just mean

I'm just going to buy way more, spend way more money on AdWords, let's use that for an example, right, or Google, but I'm never going to run that call. What do you want to do in this case is you're building a plan out

to say, I'm going to push forward and I'm going to start buying TV. I'm going to start buying radio. I'm going to start maybe creating a better YouTube campaigns like you and I've talked about more, right? Or, you know,

all these other areas, I'm going to start investing in that. board messaging, building out better ways to have marketing structures as we go along. So that is all of that. I don't think, I think sometimes people overthink that and they think, or you get a new partner that's going to take, you know, of months to get whatever that is done, right? If you're redesigning a site and then you've got to rebuild that, and then you've got to

let that work its way and grow. So those are investments in the futures. You've got to kind of understand that investment. You can't just turn it up overnight. And if you do, that's where people go wrong. They turn up AdWords. They overspend. They go back, but they haven't really built a brand.

So I think investing, I still, I still personally love top of funnel. I still, I know people don't, don't, but I can tell you this. You get kind of a jingle. So ECO, if anybody's heard the odds, do stuff. Like, it's, I can go almost anywhere in Columbus, Ohio at this point, and people know. We had a study done, which I shared with you recently. 49% of the population that they talked to in Columbus market knew who we were. That's impressive.

Right? And that's actually dead on point with the strategy of how we bought radio and TV was to reach 50% of the population, right? So 40% of the people know us. So now they know us. Whether they need us yet is it. So only less than 1% of the population technically need any of our services every day. Yeah. So you're fighting for that. So right. So but again, at Google is still the place to be, Tommy, right? I mean, it's still the place to be. It is. It's still the number one spot going regardless of all the things that are happening. The LLMs are great. growing. You need to start, again, that's an investment. So right now you want to go and say, all right, I'm going to put X amount of dollars investment into the future of my LOM product, right, like we did. So we started to say, we're going to hire blog writers, full-time video content.

We're going to work on rebuilding, designing our sites for the longevity of this. That's an investment to that spend. So pushing up. I don't know if I'm in, hopefully I'm answering your question. Yeah, it is. I like the number 15. And I almost think you go above that. But it's got to be strategically. And that means you're really trying to like, I'll tell you this, private equity, the only thing they talk about is how much have you penetrated the market. They don't care if you're in 50 markets, if you got popsicle stands everywhere. They're like, how do you take market share of where you're at? And it's the one thing I tell a lot of people is, why are you going to expand?

You don't even own your current market. You think scaling is going to make this your current market easier or no, you're lending all of your resources to this other market. And if I can go back in time and I know people are like, well, why are you in so many markets? Well, the fact is, we slowed down with Cortec dramatically. and we had to build more Phoenixes. So in Denver is now, you know, $50 million market. Houston's murdering it. Detroit's murdering it.

And the idea being is we've got a big enough team where we can walk, chew gum, and still shoot a hoop at the same time. So this is great. It goes to talk about this sometimes with Chris and chat, right, on a podcast we do. Because it comes up a lot. People are like, when should I move to another market?

One should I start another trade. Look, I think the benchmark is this, Tommy, to your point. I'd like to hear your opinion. Until you own 15% of the market share you in, you shouldn't do anything. Okay? Now, and you might go, well, what does that look like?

It could be different in the market cap size, but 15% historically has been kind of the area. For you to own 15% of the market in a Phoenix, that's a big number. It's a big number. So that just tells you how much is still available. So if you look around and you go, okay, let's say today you're sitting there and you go,

let's say, you know, if you're fortunate enough to own a $5 million or $10 million business, you go, how many of those do I know of in my market right now? And if you could identify that there's 10 of those, there's 60 million sitting right, or 10 of those, I'm going to start 100 million right there, right, with you. So it's 100 million that you can identify in your market. You go, all right, so that knows how I kind of get an idea because I know Jim has a 10 million. I know Bobby, right, all these, whatever people you might know in the industry. And that starts to give you an idea of what you can attack, right?

So if you can understand that, now you can start to say, I can attack without having to go do some crazy math equations to be able to get there. And now you go, and I only own this much, I can start taking. market share from these people. I don't need to move to another market because there's already more competition in that market and you get, you delete yourself. So I think understanding what market share is and when to grow and when to expand to another trade, another market, but I think 15, I don't know what your number is. I think you go higher than that, but in major metros, 15's yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a good thought. I'll tell you what I think a lot of people do that I think could go sideways is they figure out one marketing source, whether that's LSA or GMB

optimization or social media. Like I know these guys that are coming out with all these advanced social media tactics. And they'll go to 10 markets really quick because they can get leads cheap. Sure. And you can make a lot of money in the interim. And then the algorithm changes. Yep. And it's not, you need to have an Omni approach in your current market and not just be relying on one or two or three lead sources.

And the guys that get really good at it, they're like, I scale like crazy. Then all of a sudden, it's Doomsday. Yep. Facebook just allowed this. Or they just changed this. Right. Oh, it's only a matter of time. Yeah.

Because a lot of them are doing the new strategy with the hook, right? So they're doing the hook ads. So they got the hook, and then they have the body of it, and then they have the clothes at, right? And those are working right now definitely in that marketplace. They're doing those three kind of line. But again, just the other day, even YouTube, just changed their reporting just two days ago. Not only YouTube right now, I'm just focusing on Reddit and now Open AI switching to YELF. I mean, it's like, so you get these strategies like, we're winning big and it's like, but they're not doing Top of Funnel.

I mean, it's expensively top. Well, top of funnel is. And this is why I've always in and you and I talk about this lot. I'm always stone advocate because I own my brand still at top of funnel. I went bankrupt by owning a construction business that ain't own my brand. And if you're dependent on all this, so I've always lived at this at my heart at some point. I'm going to own my brand no matter what. I like all these tools.

We've started working with Yelp more. They've been very helpful. We've seen a lot of improvement there because of some of that stuff. We've been fortunate enough Tommy to have conversation with the CEO of, CLO of Yelp, CEO of Angie and all these other platforms. But they keep changing stuff. right and they're great they're all great partners and they're good stuff google's a perfect example but again you never actually own you don't own it you don't own the outcome they change an algorithm

they change a bidding price they do something different you know we're going to figure it on win but there's too much changing what doesn't change is top of the funnel i run ads i build relationships with customers uh they get to know know like and trust us yeah the top of the funnel and then we work our way down the funnel do they show up in google yeah of course right we're going to win there. So I still very much believe in that because you own your brand at the top of the funnel. Where did we, where do we order a lunch from today? You ordered it. I ordered on DoorDash. But what do we eat? What is it? Pitot Jungle. Petit Jungle.

But I got this text at 1030 today from Peter Jungle and I was like, ooh, that sounds good. And I said, let's order Peter Jungle. And all I was, I was like, what do you come up with Peter Jungle? Well, I love Peter Django, but it just happened to pop up on my phone. I was hungry, and I'm like, it's healthy. I think all you guys will enjoy it. And I was like, let's get Pete a judge. That's just a one thing.

That's just an SMS campaign that I opted into. Yeah, yeah. Which we use those too, so we can get into that too, is how do you write those text campaigns properly. You got to get the opt there. There's so much compliance. But you got to know what you're doing there, right? But there's a ton there that is really beneficial too. Oh, yeah.

I mean, those are great campaigns that get a lot of, if you write the campaign right, you know, We started using somebody from Champion Group that writes all there. They send out more real mailers to their clients than any company on the planet that I know of. And they're like three pages long. It's not like this small little email. And they get a massive response. If you're going to make a company with no weather in Southern California work where Leland started the business, you got to be good at selling memberships and getting those memberships coming back to buy more. I kind of want to start asking some closing questions here.

I think you got something for us. Yeah. And then we're going to, I got a bunch more questions. Totally. Totally. So as we close out. I think, gentlemen, there's something I brought today that I want to give to you. And it feels very fitting for each of y'all.

As you all both know, we have this like closer brand. And you two truly are closers. So, thank you. I wanted to give you all the hat. You know, I like a good closer hat. I mean, I know you do. Also, given the phenomenal hair, any hat gracing those heads is like no, no, no, no, no, no small accomplishment. So I wanted to make sure you guys had that.

Okay. So, Zach, where does Mantle go from here? What's the vision in the next 12 months? Yeah, next 12 months. We are deepening into the service lines we're in already. We're ready starting to see. We started on the replacement side. and people are pulling us into repair, including even Eco,

like it's starting to experiment with that. So it's that and it's also just helping contractors expand the shopping journey, right? Today, most contractors are using us at the kitchen table or virtually in the case of A1 and then through our really powerful, personalized follow-up engine afterwards, but going both earlier and later.

And so we're incredibly excited about what the next 12 months holds. I think what becomes a really interesting question is with the next 24 and 36 months. hold, but, you know, we'll save that for when we're off the, off the mic. What about you, Aaron? Where does, uh, Aaron Gaynor and Eco go from here? Well, we're now, um, we're onto our $250 million mission now. I love it. So, so that's the next 12 months? Yeah. Well, I've given myself a lot less time. Last time I gave myself a decade and

took just a little over a decade and, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a plumber. I might be a little little bit of a slow learner, I guess, but, uh, you know, but we're moving on to that. That's our next iteration, right? So it's like, how do we do it faster? Well, can we do? How do we create more jobs in an industry that I love and care for? Dearly has changed my life and I know change yours very much. And now you're part of it, right? Trades have done everything for me. So how do we create drives? How do we bring people into this workforce? How do we create better lives in the trades? Part of what we want to do. So that's part of that while creating a super regional brand and just setting the pace for what the industry can do.

I love innovation. I think one of the things is one of the things I do when to go through our orientation next three years is I want to eco to build great trades people, advance their life and I want to win big. That's our mission as a company, but I also want to be a leader in innovation in this space, right?

What are we doing from learning the technical part of the trade, but what are we doing to bring innovation into home service and into the trades? So I think that's what I'm excited about, and I'm talking with you guys and doing tools like Mantle and many other offline conversations that Tommy and I'm fortunate enough to have with you, buddy.

is exciting. I think the future, as you say this a lot, I feel the same way. I feel like we're just kind of getting going. Totally. And there's still so much. Yeah, I think it's so crazy to think that, you know, if you were to told me a couple years back, like building these businesses that are, I don't know, 10 or 20 years ago, we'd have felt like that was the end. No, yeah, absolutely. And now it feels like it's just the beginning. Totally. And I'm excited for that. So, I mean, I guess as a long answer, I could get into more details, but we're on to that next mission, uh, energizes me every day and wakes me up and the people on our team, uh, are a excited to go take over the Midwest.

I got one thing that I'm kind of focused on. There's hundreds of things and mostly recruiting, but how do that happen? People come in and they say, I wanted to work for a guy like you. They didn't say I wanted to work for a one. So how do I build a 5,000 times bigger personal brand? And part of that, you look at a guy like Alex Ramose, Grant Cardone. I could go down the list of like Patrick, but David, and any guy that I'm around that's done well, is they spend five to eight hours a day building a plan on social media.

And I just don't have that kind of time. But I think it's super important that the founders build a strong personal brand and they're out there in the ether. All right. What's one piece of advice, an operator that's listening? Aaron, what's one thing they should start doing? And operators should start doing. I guess it depends on the scale of what you're thinking about to operate.

So I think there are a couple things to do. if you've got larger, get back to the field. So one thing I think what happens is never forget what happens in the field. So if you're 10 or 20 or 30 million, get some boots back out, put your boots on, and go walk out to a lot, go walk out to a job site, start operating again, go see what's happening with your workforce in there, right? If you're getting going in this area from the other way, stop going into the field, start sitting down and start working on your business today, right? I think these are all fundamental things we understand, but start sitting down and brainstorming, mapping out, and listening to the right content and getting to work and learn things you don't know. Look, I didn't know all this stuff.

I'm a plumber. I started from the ground up, boots on, dyslexic, didn't, you know, really always challenge with different stuff. And finally I said, I'm just going to go sit down and I'm going to learn us all. I'm going to own everything I have and get to work. So I think that's important. So if you're at that stage didn't, I imagine many different people listen to your podcast at smaller shops to larger.

But just understand that. But I think the one area we can never forget is we've got to get in the field, we've got to get in the trenches, and we got to go see what's happening because it's easy to get caught behind the desk. And I know we just talked about this the other day, and I've talked to talk to my team

is just getting in there. And I thought one other interesting thing that we're trying to do, too, that for an operator maybe to do, we talked about recruiting hiring. And so I did a big, we called a manager mixer, and we do them every month.

And I said, hey, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come in and you're going to interview me because I want to understand how you interview because interviewing matters because people have to understand difference between recruiting and hiring and two different things.

So one of the things we're working on right now is basically that as an operator's go, how do you just get better at interviewing so we can get the right talent and the right people in here? Very smart. Zach, what's one thing that some of these shops should stop doing?

Stop doing. I think it's assuming that the deal's dead when they walk out of the home. That's a good one. Most service businesses, the majority of time on replacement offers, there is more opportunity after you leave the home than before you leave home. Commonly, table close rates 30 or 40%, which means that 60 or 70% when you're walking out of the home, the deal is still alive. So I think stop thinking that the one call closed is the end of all deal.

Yeah, that's really good. That's good. That's good. That's good. That's good. All right. I know I'm going to give you you guys each a chance to close us out, but where do people find you an eco-plumber, Aaron? They just want to touch base with you. What's the best of them? You just hit me up on, you know, LinkedIn is where I get most of the message. If you want to hit me up, send me an email, Aaron, I get eco, for sure. I'll get it. You know, try to get back to you best can. And you can always see me around at all the events back and forth. I'll be at Freedom and Service Titan.

We're going to talk about that. Yeah, they're going to have a great. You're always close. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we got freedom coming up with something excited about. We have Pantheon. We got a bunch of stuff coming up. We're coming into the season. So I'll be around.

Come up and talk to us, man. We love talking to everybody. But we got you getting ready to do something over at Pantheon. Totally. Totally. Yeah, definitely come by our booth at Pantheon. I'm pretty confident that it will be unlike any other booths. And I'll leave it.

I'll leave it there. And I will assure you that the piece, the giveaway we're going to give is truly one of a kind. Very confident of that. I love it. So we don't even know what this is. Yeah, no. This is. Top secret. You know, you guys might get a little sample afterwards, but, you know, top, top secret.

But yeah, I think Pantheon will be great. Freedom of Canada will be incredible. So it's an exciting fall ahead. And what about people that want to get a hold of you? Yeah. You can go to our website, use mantle.com, U-S-E-M-A-N-T-E-L.com. T-E-L.com. T-E-L. Common mistake. Common mistake. T-E-L.com. You know, as I'm also dyslexic, and so has a dyslexic person. I just really wanted to challenge myself to see if I can get it right. Everyone I type it in, I'm like, geez, I'm not doing that right. What is it? Also, Apple iPhone, like, iPhone tends to autocrect.

It auto-corrects less, which means, you know, impact is expanding. It's good. And also give his email, me, ZAC, and use me in a file. And you guys could both close a side. And I know you wanted to close a son on some whiteboarding session. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll give you guys each a few

minutes to give the audience one last thing. I'll just say, these guys are amazing. If you get a chance to hang out with them, we text message constantly. Zach's a constant researcher growing himself. Me and Aaron and we were together usually a couple times a month. So get around the right group of people. And like Zach said, make sure, I think Aaron said this, too, implement the tools that you use before you go on to the next one. It's very easy to beat the shiny object syndrome with especially founders like us. Last thing I'll say, and these guys are going to close us out. But get out of your own way and start trusting your team.

team and actually get excited about failure because if you got the right team around you and you embrace failure, some people walk on eggshells because they know the owner or founder is going to literally like cut them down if they make a mistake because they have the answer. And what I would go to that founder is say, show me where I sprinted down. Show me where the processes are that shows me how to do it the right way in the systems. And most of the time, that's not the case in smaller businesses. But Zach, go ahead and talk about this whiteboarding session and give us one last thought. Yeah.

And then Aaron could close us. Wideboarding session this afternoon, I'm super excited about thinking through some of the stuff we've got cooking. Can't share more on the mic right now. I think my final thought, and I recently heard this and it blew my mind, on the Apollo 11 mission, right, the rocket that went to the moon, as much energy was used to get it three miles off the ground as was used on the rest of the 500,000 mile journey. And so whenever you're starting something new, that actually, activation energy and that energy just to get it off the start, just to get it off the ground, whether it's a business, whether it's a new process, whether it's a new tool.

It takes a lot of work at the beginning, but it doesn't always stay that way. So may the Apollo 11 mission be an inspiration to everyone to really invest that energy and start something and see it through to make sure you can get into outer space. I love it, man. That's so true. That's great, great thought. I agree wholeheartedly. Well, I wasn't ready from Apollo.

follow-up, but we're watching on our again. We're just on the screen here. Look, I think it's like anything is find the things that you can actually execute on. Don't go too wide on yourself. Get down in the

trenches and get dialed in with your team. Look, I think right now the market is still such a great opportunity and I think people need to lean into all the things that you hear, the stuff you're doing right now. I'm excited. I think there's still so much that could be done. But I think there's a

one thing in all of these operations, all this stuff, it's all about your team, the leaders, the foundation. Are you recruiting and hiring the right people? Are you developing the right people? Are you developing yourself? Right? I think the end of the day, it's like if you're not a leader, if you're not somebody that people want to work for, you're not going to get, you're not going to grow the organization the way you need to. So I think just again, spending the time to become the best version of yourself, which then you hopefully you trick over and invest in your team. You give them all the same tools and resources that you get for yourself to them and you just keep doing that all the way up and down the ladder over and over. And I think the thing I heard the other day that stuck with me,

and I wrote on my board the other day that juggling is less about catching and more about throwing. You share that podcast. But I think it's interesting because when you think about that, it really is. We think that everything we do is about throwing the end result, but it's real, or about catching when the end result really is about if I can throw one ball and catch it properly, then I can throw two and then eventually I can throw three. Right. But the problem is everybody tries to throw one or two or three of them at a time and think it's about catching. And it's the real strategy is about how do I actually throw this one properly, get it here, and then do that over and over.

And we were sharing this back and forth the other day. So not as great as the Apollo, but I think still something to consider. Now, it's brilliant. You guys are wonderful. You know, I'll just say this. The guys that are very important to me, I get with often. And typically, it's kind of nice because they're willing to come here, which is I'm honored. but this is where we kind of,

this is the battle station here in the game. It wasn't not that long ago. Vahey was right standing over here. We were going through a bunch of stuff and Boris comes out here and I love it when Zach comes out and Aaron's got a son that's out here finishing up his master. So get around the people that are successful.

Sometimes we get caught in our own little circle and sometimes it's only work people. You've got to get out of that bubble to be able to see what's going on and let people come into that bubble and tell you what's going wrong. So I really appreciate you guys coming out here and doing this. We got a lot of work to do today, some fun stuff just to catch up.

But thank you for listening. If you love this podcast, leave me a review. Thanks.