The Home Service Expert Podcast - Playing the Penny Game to Guarantee Business Growth and Profitability

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

Patrick Long is an expert on sales, scaling, recruiting operations and growth strategies. As the President of BizPAL, he helps residential plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical services in improving their sales, profitability, customer loyalty, and overall management. In this episode, we talked about recruiting, business growth, pricing...

Before we get the podcast going, I wanted to let you guys know that the Home Service Millionaire book is available now at homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash success. And it's for free. All you got to do is pay for shipping. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash success. And it's a hardcover copy. And I put a lot of extra things in this book. So please be sure to order your book. And I also made it available on audio. Go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash audio and download your own audio book. Thanks. This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business.

Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and I'm here with Patrick Long. Patrick is out of Indiana. He specializes in sales, scaling, recruiting, operations, and growth strategies, along with social media. And he's the president of BizPel right now, where he helps residential plumbing, heating, cooling, and electrical services, boosts their sales probability, customer loyalty, and basically just helps

them coach all together. He used to be the contractor's friend. He was a junior trainer and a consultant. He's also been an account manager at Mr. Reuter Plumbing. Pretty strong on social media, and he's very focused on teaching contractors on flat rate residential plumbing, pricing, heating, cooling, electrical services. And I'm excited to have you on, Patrick. You got a ton of knowledge. You know a lot of the same people I know. And I think we're going to get a killer show today. How's your day going? Excellent. Excellent. I'm very happy to be on the show and to be talking with you and be able to get my message out there to contractors.

Yeah, you know, it sounds like you've had a lot of experience just from your dad and growing up working at the age of 11 and just really hustling out there and then getting the opportunity to work in the HVAC world as long with plumbing electrical. You want to tell us a little bit about how you got there and just a little bit about your life, and then we'll dive into some good questions. Yeah, absolutely. So the short and skinny, the life story, if you would, I was born into contracting. Like you said, my dad was a career contractor. I kind of joked that he could build a house, but he really struggled to build a business. And I feel like that's really relatable for a lot of contractors out there. But with those struggles, of course, there were financial struggles with the family. And so at the age of 11, like you mentioned, I literally just had to start working. I had to start figuring out how was I going to get school shoes for the year.

That's where it all started. But yeah, I mean, I've gone from paper routes to, you know, being a waiter to, you know, when I was just 15, I actually got started in sales at a furniture store that my parents tried to start up. And, but yeah, so, I mean, from that age on has been, you know, a kind of never ending progression of figuring it out. So yeah, I figured a lot of things out with time and with plenty of experience, plenty of mistakes. And yeah, so I'm happy to share that. So you've dealt a lot with companies from a million dollars all the way up to over 100 million. And I'm just curious to see what did you find of the things that you noticed about the smaller companies and what gets you to that next level? Yeah. And I know this is kind of like the cliche word, but a lot of it deals with

processes and systems, right? In the business. And I would say, you know, over the last couple of years here, a big difference between, you know, the small guys and the extremely large guys comes down to a couple of things. And that is delegation and automation, right? So, you know, the small guys, they are checking a truck, stuck in a truck, staying in a van, I'm staying in the van. And some guys just kind of have that smaller mindset and that's all they really want to go and grow to. And that's fine. If they've set the goal and they've reached the goal and that's all they want

to achieve and whatever. But for other people that's all they want to achieve, then whatever. But for other people, they want more, right? They want to be more. They want to do more. They want to have more. And what it takes to get from one end of the spectrum to the other, again, comes down that help to support that are either delegation, so you're hiring people and tasking them with certain responsibilities within the business, or you're automating where it makes sense. So as an example, when I scheduled this call with you, Tommy, how many times did we go back and forth trying to figure out what time works for you, what time works for me, or any of that. And then as far as the follow-up process, getting the pieces of information, questions, notes, and so on that are going to be necessary for this conversation, preparing for the conversation, you delegated that to your assistants. So perfect example right there on just a small scale. On a larger scale, maybe it's using different pieces of software or delegating to other agencies outside of your own company. Whatever makes sense. But there's kind of the old adage that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So it takes a team. It takes building that team up

and finding the right people, again, whether it's through internal delegation or external delegation and automating where it makes sense to streamline your processes. I was just dropping a guy off at the airport, very successful businessman. And I was talking about a financial director, kind of what we're looking at to get that in businessman. And I was talking to him about a financial director, kind of what we're looking at to get that in place. And I said, other than just a straight salary, what's a good bonus structure on what type of things? And he's just said, there's things that obviously time,

when are your reports coming in? Are your October reports coming in at the end of November or like November 3rd? And then we talked about accuracy and reporting to me is just, it's so important to make accurate decisions. But the one thing I told him is that I feel that when you're working with somebody in that department, that you really need to have checks and balances and you need to have processes. I'd rather a guy spend a whole day building an automated report than do the report for one hour each day. So let's spend two days, spend a week so that you hit a button and this report generates

and the computer software we use with ServiceTitan and all the other things I'm using like grow.com and I've integrated three different softwares into ServiceTitan so far the other things I'm using like grow.com. And I've integrated three different softwares into ServiceTitan so far. And this is only the beginning. So it's all about automation, but it's all about making sure... So I have a whole data integrity team that checks each invoice. And every day... It's interesting, Patrick, I think you'll like this. I got a guy named Pat who gets with each manager of each department. So I've got my service department. I've got my door department. I've got my CSRs, my dispatchers, and my data integrity team. And anytime there's an inner department mistake,

it causes a chain reaction and it's a domino effect. So, so Pat brings me all the write-ups and most of them, most of them usually are their first time and it's a verbal warning. And then it goes to Darlene to get put in their file. And that's all done through Paylocity. So we've got this whole thing, this machine, and then there's what's called a depth chart. And that means if Pat's not here, who does it? And I got to tell you, it's not rocket science and it's not always perfect. And believe it or not, it's not about the mistakes that we make.

It's about how do we handle those mistakes. And I think that's where we lose a lot of the people out there because a lot of people quit when you got a real asshole you're working for that's always yelling at you and only finding the wrong stuff. So what I asked Pat to do is tell me somebody that's done exceptionally well. When you deal with each team manager, I want to find somebody that's improved a lot or just spectacular day. And I want to give them gift cards as well. Because too often, we just point out the negative. on the problem and we dig ourselves into that hole that we lose sight of potential solutions, right? And that's where you've got to kind of, you know, take a step back. Or if you can't remove yourself and put yourself into a third party kind of perspective, find somebody who can attack it

from a third party perspective, right? You know, a lot of times, you know, these problems become emotional, right? And when we get emotional about this problem, we're losing our ability to objectively look at the problem and determine solutions, right? So that's where, like I said, it becomes very important to find the more solution-driven people who aren't emotionally tied to this situation or problem and develop the solution, right? Develop something, some process, some system that, you know, effectively resolves the issue or solves the problem, and then figure out a way of replicating that. And as you were saying, it is much more cost effective in the long term and in the long run to, you know, invest more time, more energy, more resource upfront

to building something that is going to handle that process on a recurring basis via automation, right? I mean, it's going to be more of an investment upfront, like I said, but the return on that investment is going to pay exponentially in dividends by way of giving you back your time, freeing yourself from the business and giving people more empowerment to take a hold of these situations and solve them going forward.

Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. And it's really thinking very hard about our problem. It's almost meditating on it. And I need a whiteboard when I do that. And I think about all the outliers out there. And I really, I study my outliers. I study what's being done well. And then I try to replicate that

and I try to automate as much as possible. And it's the ultimate goal is to be able to scale faster and be better. Now you've had a lot of experience with training people. And one of the things, when I was just at a shop in Naples, Florida, they do about 50 million a year. I was lucky enough to be able to see NextStar at work. And I talked to everybody over there. I've taken a lot of Sandler training. I'm a disc

instructor. I teach people how to personally profile. And what I noticed was when I talked to them, they don't necessarily teach you how to get over objections. They teach you how to build a perfect presentation so you don't get objections. And it's completely different than a Sandler training that's all about overcoming objections. And so tell me a little bit about what kind of training that you've done and what you've experienced on just options, selling financing, getting them into a service agreement, being eye contact, building rapport, educating the customer. Let's go through just some good steps

that the people out there could learn from. Yeah, absolutely. I would say first and foremost, I agree with you and I agree with the training that you were referencing there. And it's, if you can figure out how to avoid objections, you've got the problem solved, right? You've beaten the objection before it ever even occurs. And so, you know, a lot of that is presenting options, right? It doesn't have to be a high pressure type of presentation where, you know, a lot of people, they say, you know,

what we need to do is this, or my recommendation is this, and forcing their own opinion or their own perspective onto the customer. And that might not always be a good fit. I'll give you an example. I've dealt with contractors too. A lot of it is just figuring out who's out there and what are they doing and what's good and what's bad. So I mystery of mystery shop, you know, companies. And I had one individual who, it's a long story short, we had a humidity

issue in our house and he kind of was pointing out different things like carpet. You know, well, you guys have carpet in your house and, you know, you're taking showers and, you know, you've got a microfiber couch or whatever. And I kind of challenged him on, you know, what he was saying. It didn't really make sense. He's attempting to say or trying to say that because we have carpet, our house is holding on to humidity. And so I kind of challenged him on it. And I said, well, aren't these things present in other houses? Isn't this kind of like a normal thing? And his response was, well, where's your HVAC license? What do you know about HVAC?

And so that's bad. I mean, that's bad business. It's bad customer service. It's a bad sales presentation. Yeah, it just left a really poor taste in my mouth. And yeah, so don't be that guy. Work with customers. Ask them plenty of questions about what their concerns are.

And educate them. Be truthful. Be honest. I think that's kind of the basis of it. There's plenty of information out there. Obviously, I'm very well connected with other HVAC contractors. I'm very close with HVACRschool.com. Brian Orr, if you're familiar, runs the podcast for HVACR School. And so I know industry experts quite well. And I know what this guy is

telling me is not truthful. And so yeah, you don't expect that you're going to be able to pull the wool over people's eyes like you maybe could have 20 or 30 years ago when they didn't have access to information like this at their fingertips. So anybody can do a Google search and figure out why is the humidity so high in my home? Well, your unit's probably oversized, right? It's short cycling and it's not running long enough to draw the humidity out. So, so yeah, I mean, that's part of it. I mean, just being truthful, being honest with people, enlighten them, don't over-educate them. And the difference there is, you know, a lot of people want to get into the technical nuts and bolts and tonnage and, you know, all sorts of different things, BTUs.

And this is how that works and this is how this works. The end thing that is in a customer's mind is what is the result, right? So they don't invest in an air conditioning system because it's a two and a half ton versus a two ton or because it has 32,000 BTU versus 24 or whatever. They're investing in a central air system because they want to be cool and comfortable. You see what I'm saying there? So focus on the result, not on the technical stuff. You'll lose a lot of sales if you get too bogged down in the technical stuff. But yeah, so there's being truthful. There's presenting options, enlightening, don't over-educate, ask plenty of questions. I think questions are one of the biggest things

that a salesperson can do to gain more information. Again, what's important to the customer? What do they like? What do they dislike? What are their needs? What are their wants? And then, I don't know if you've ever heard this or not, but use silence. Right. Sometimes the best thing you can do is zip it. Listen. Right. Somebody maybe throws out an objection like, oh, my goodness, that's expensive. And we immediately want to roll into the training that we receive says, you know, say this. And so we jump into it. And now we're in a back and forth with the customer. But I've been on calls and this comes from my experience in doing ride-alongs. But I've been on calls where the customer says, man, that's expensive. And you just kind of zip it, maybe nod your head a little bit. And then they say, can we use a credit card? Or do you have financing available? And ideally... You heard that, he who talks first loses. Exactly. Yeah. And I would say this, whoever talks next is buying. You're either buying

that person's excuse and their objection, or they talk and they're buying. But yeah, I mean, in presenting options, you mentioned it, financing is huge. The cost of HVAC, plumbing, electrical services has only gone up, right? I mean, it's not going the other way. It's not decreasing. Equipment is getting more expensive. Labor is definitely more expensive.

And when there was an abundance of labor and everybody was looking for a job, labor was pretty cheap, right? But the supply has dried up. And now it's really hard to find good guys. And so companies have to pay more. So expenses are going up. And naturally, homeowners, customers are more inclined to finance, more so now than they've ever been. There's tons of statistics that are out there, but over 71% of people have less than $1,000 in liquid cash, right? And the use of credit cards has gone up. So yeah, financing is a very attractive option. When you're presenting what their repair options are or what the replacement options are, include a cash purchase price and a finance price, right?

So not only do you have options in what we can do to resolve this issue that you are facing, we have options in how you can pay for it too. Does that make sense? 100%. Darius Levers taught us a lot about just at the service type convention is, and he wrote a part of my book on financing. You know, the problem with financing is the technician doesn't believe in it. And if

you can't get the technician to get on board and buy into the parts. This morning, we had a company-wide meeting and I said, guys, I had a long discussion on listening versus hearing and then active listening. And when you ask a question, just don't ask a question to ask a question. Be genuine about it. And we have several questions we ask every single customer. But to be genuinely interested in something, because I had one of my guys go up there who's a field supervisor. And he said, guys, I want you to spend at least 20 minutes. I want you to ask three different 20 minutes. I want you to

ask three different questions and go out afterwards and write down the ones you asked and how they responded. But I said, I got one caveat. I said, don't ask a question that you're not interested in. Don't talk about Harleys if you're not interested in the Harleys. There's enough in their home and in their garage and in their neighborhood. And when you talk to them to talk about something you're definitely interested in, and it comes from practice. But then I do show and tell with the parts. And I'm looking at a graph right now. And it's interesting because a guy sent me this and it says, here's how or incentives, 10% indirect labor, 15% admin costs, 10% marketing, 5% equipment, higher, and then there's 10% profit. And everybody looks at that $1,000 ticket and goes, my parts minus my labor equals my profit. And that's the indirect costs add up so very, very much. It's not profit. And after you pay yourself, the company should still be being in 10 to 20%.

And I agree. It's a tough concept, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, especially, I would say there's a lot of contractors start out, you know, the fly by night, you know, single man kind of operation. And in that regard, whatever the customer pays them, they're thinking, well, that goes in my pocket, right? And then they start paying expenses and all this other stuff. And then slowly but surely, they end up starting to borrow money and then they're in a negative equity situation pretty fast. And technicians think the same way, right? Because you hand them a paycheck every single week, right? They're thinking, well, I just get paid, right? It's not an attractive thing to look at, right? Expenses versus income. Income is very attractive, right? We all want to focus on

the top line revenue. We all want to focus on money coming in from the sale. It's hard to force yourself to look at what your expenses are and ultimately what your bottom line profit is. Are you familiar? There's like penny game. This is something that we did at the Mr. Reuter that I worked with. No, I've never heard of penny game. Yeah, so you take a roll of pennies, which is like, you know, the equivalent of a dollar. You have, you know, your technician,

you know, one technician called up to the front of the room, right? During a company meeting or something. And, you know, he gets 15 pennies, which represents, you know, your material cost or, you know, whatever it is. And this guy gets, you know, 20 or 25 pennies, and that represents administration costs or taxes or whatever. Do you see what I'm saying there? At the end of it, there's one, there's one guy holding the profit and you go, here's what the company made. Exactly. Yeah. And that is referred to as a reduction,

ridiculous, right? The company didn't make a penny, right? As in like, that's all they ever made, but it reduces things to the ridiculous and helps the technician to buy in on, on the pricing. Right. So when they're asking, they're not actually asking for a thousand dollars, they're asking for one or 10% of that. They're thinking of the penny. They're not thinking of the $1,000. So we reduce things down to, yeah. So reduce it down to ridiculously small scale.

I will say that's one step towards getting in on financing. The other thing that, you know, as far as getting people to buy in on finance, the other thing that I've done personally is, you know, have a conversation with the technician who is so against financing and start asking some questions. Do you have a vehicle? Out of curiosity, Tommy, do you have one? I have a vehicle.

You do. Do you have a vehicle or do you own it outright? I own my truck outright. Okay. You probably have other vehicles there, right? I mean, I have a house. Oh, I have the, Oh, my, my company vehicles. I make, I'm on a payment plan at least to own them. There you go. Exactly. There you go. So, so you have vehicles and traditionally, typically when you're talking to technicians, they're going to have a vehicle more than likely it's going to be financed, right? So you're going to say, oh, okay, so you make a payment on that. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Okay. What about your insurance that goes along with it? Do you just pay for that one payment every single year? Or do you have like a lifetime membership with insurance? Or do you make

a monthly payment on that? So, oh, I make a monthly payment, right? What about your house, right? I mean, do you own your house outright or do you have a monthly mortgage? Yeah. You got a monthly mortgage, right? You got a monthly payment. OK, so a lot of things happen over payments. Is it easier for you to budget all of those expenses all at once? Or is it easier for you to budget those expenses on a monthly basis? Do you see where I'm going with that? Yeah, no, I got you 100 percent. It really brings a lot more that makes sense. I got this thing that explains the work life of a technician and I want to go through it with you. Sure, yeah. flat light pricing is anywhere from $350 an hour to $600 an hour.

So this whole scenario that you go through, and it goes through everything, and you can actually put in all the numbers, and it shows you how you get to these numbers, and it's super cool. But a workday in the life of a tech, 8 to 8.30, arrive at the shop and schedule the day return calls. 8.30 to 9, pick up the material at co-op. 9 to 9.30, call first customer and travel to job. 9.30 to 11, arrive at job and sell one hour of service. 11 to 11.30, return pages, call the next customer, travel to job.

11.30 to 1.30, arrive at job, sell two hours of work. 1.30, you take your lunch, take a late lunch at 2 o'clock to 230. Return more calls, restore truck at supply house. 230 to 345, travel to the next customer, sell one hour of work. Return to the workshop, more calls, meet with yellow page rep, handle price complaint, go home. So technically, you're only getting a third of your utilization rate. So you got to charge customers. He's working the whole time to get

your stuff. So people don't understand that. I see a lot of these Facebook groups and the problem I have with these Facebook groups is it's one man running his own calls all the time. And usually, or it's three to five. And trust me, when you got three to five guys, you barely have any office staff. You don't have the office burden. You have a tiny warehouse if you're not working out of your own home. It's not a business. You don't own a business. You own a job. Yeah, you own a job. Yeah. You're self-employed. And the difference is, yeah. You can't walk in there. There's nobody there to greet customers when they walk in. So you're comparing apples and oranges as my main thing I want to explain here is you hear these people go, they rip people off. And I'm like, man, if I do 30 million, I want to make 15%. I mean, 15% is not very, it's not over the

top. And I just feel like the people go, how can you charge people that? But they have no idea where they charge. There's a good book by Alan Rohr called Where Did the Money Go? And it's just, you set it up and you write in all your expenses. And what you understand now is indirect costs. And I talked about this the other day, Patrick, but think about this. For my inventory, which is probably the biggest obstacle for most people, is taxes and inventory, is I have to pay the building.

I have to pay the rent insurance if anything gets stolen. I have to pay for all the stuff in there that I lock up, that I got all these cabinets and shelving and everything else. I also have the big warehouse piece. I also have the big warehouse piece. I also have the alarm company and the cameras I pay. I also have within there, the air conditioning bill, the swamp cooler bill. I also have the guys that work overtime. I pay for their insurance, their health insurance. I pay for their taxes or at least half of their taxes.

I also pay for the truck they drive in, the insurance for the truck. I also pay for the shrinkage, which is theft. I also pay for the spoilers. Batteries go bad when I'm holding onto my own inventory. Shit goes bad. You add it all up and I'm telling you, you're spending a fortune. So I used to think, man,

if I buy a thousand of these widgets at that price, that's how much I'm paying for that widget. Well, no, it's not even close. Add about another 50% out of that widget at least. And that's why people talk about just in time. They talk about going lean. They talk about, in manufacturing, talk about Six Sigma and all that.

But what are your thoughts? I mean, where did the money go? You know, these small companies, they wonder why they can't grow and their booking rates are garbage. You know, there's no plan on how they're going to do checks and balances within their company. They're handling all the phone calls and everything.

Yeah, and I was gonna say, you referenced the book from Ellen and there's another book that she wrote, How Much Should I Charge? And that's a really great place to get started, right? And I would say this, the number one reason or, and place to get started, right? And I would say this, the number one reason, and there's several reasons, right, that contractors struggle to grow.

But one reason is they are not priced to grow, right? They are priced to cover their immediate expense, you know, a relatively short period of time. They're starting to borrow money, right, because of shrinkage or loss or unforeseen expenses or other indirect costs. They're starting to borrow to cover that. And then, like I said earlier, they very quickly end up in a very negative equity type situation. So it's important to price yourself to grow and understanding what your direct costs are,

what your indirect costs are, and making sure that you're asking for enough money to cover all of the above. And the future growth that you plan within the business. So I talk with technicians all the time. I learn a lot about what their perspective is. And for them personally, asking for several hundred dollars an hour feels like too much, but they're not taking into account the expenses of the business. And that's where we talked about the penny game. Getting them to do that exercise helps them to understand more of what the business has to pay for. And ignorance is bliss, right? They're just totally unaware of this. But it also helps to reduce things to the ridiculous where, you know, we're not asking for, you know, several hundred dollars an hour, we're asking for pennies, right? An hour, that's what we're asking for. But yeah, to the point you made in, you know, what you're referencing there, there is so much opportunity that's lost, you know, throughout the, your technician's working eight hours or 10 hours

a day, but he's only selling a couple hours. He's really only on the job for a couple few hours. And that's your efficiency rate. How many hours are we billing versus how many hours are we being billed, in essence, via the technician? So the other consideration is there's a lot of callback issues. Guys have to get called back on a job or whatever that might be. Or you're on one side of town doing this call and you can't be on the other side of town doing a new garage door installation as an example. So there's a lot of lost opportunities as well. And that's a cost of doing business just as much as your material costs or your insurance as an example.

Yeah, I agree completely. I think one of the biggest things that you said is, here's a little drill that I give people is every 15 minutes, write down what you're doing. And you'll realize how much fires you're putting out and how much little time you're putting on the business instead you're working in it. And do this for a couple of weeks

and really start identifying where you could be more efficient. Efficiency is the ultimate. And when you do this with technicians, remember one thing, I always say you wanna keep Tom Brady in the Super Bowl, not on the bench, you don't want him sitting. So think about your best technicians with the least warranty, not on the bench. You don't want him sitting. So think about

your best technicians with the least warranty calls, with the best conversion rates, all the metrics, the best customer satisfaction, and look at your dispatchers and figure out a way. And what I'd like to share here, a couple more podcasts down the line, is I'm coming up with formulas that'll pay every single position on performance or they'll make minimum wage. And how do you keep that A player utilized more often? So rather than saying, I'm gonna run this guy to all my best opportunities,

but he's windshield time, he's waiting for customers, that best technician or those best guys you have or gals are gonna be better off utilized inside of the garage or inside of the home on the AC unit or working on that electrical box. So figure out a way to get them less drive time. Figure out a way to call customers ahead. And it's a lot of work to get a great dispatcher. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it. But if you get the right one, you're talking about a six-figure swing per that technician a year, all day long. Six figures by just being good at optimizing and efficient. Does that make sense to you? with you on your plan, right? To automate that, right? The optimization.

And there's a lot of different theories that are out there on, you know, who gets what call and when. And obviously it makes sense. Put your best technician on the best opportunities. You wouldn't send your worst water heater repair plumber to try to go close a new water heater. Do you see what I'm saying?

Like that doesn't make any sense. You always want to have your best guy on the best call. Yeah. And that makes, that makes sense. Unless your perception of a great call. So let, let, let me give you an example. I get a spring job that breaks in, and I don't know if you know Phoenix, but I get a spring job that breaks in Cave Creek. And then I've got another job for a remote call in Scottsdale. You would think I want to send the guy that's converting, the guy with the good average ticket, all that stuff over to the Cave Creek. But after doing a little bit more research, I noticed this Scottsdale home, I do a Google Street View. I

noticed they have four doors. I noticed when I talked to the lady, she said those genies are 15 years old. It's a better opportunity to send my guy out there because I know the average income. I know their credit score because that gets reported to me. I've got all these tools to say, look, now I don't need to go sell anything, but I do need to give them options because she might want the new lift masters that have that open and close from your cell phone. She might want her doors. They might've never got tuned up. She might have bad bottom rubbers on four different doors. It could be wood overlay and it could be heavy as heck. But the problem is it's really hard to say. There's so many things. Every opportunity is an opportunity in a garage door. I know they're a little bit different with HVAC and electrical

and plumbing. So it's apples and oranges. But let's talk about CSRs for a minute. Like right now, we rolled out a new plan. They get paid on attendance, first of all. Second of all, it's interdepartment errors. So we set up a survey monkey. And I've got a third party listening to 10% of the calls and guests and checking, especially the negative ones. The next one is the booking rate, where they get a huge lump sum if they book over 90 percent per call

And then you can either get paid minimum wage or my top person would have made And then I look at the cancellation rate, but my top person would have made about 35 bucks an hour in my call center And uh, the bottom ones would have made minimum wage. So it's just something that Is worth thinking about oh, I agree.. Yeah, and I'll say this. I mean, A-plus players, they want that opportunity, right? Like, they don't want to be bridled, right? I mean, they don't want to be restrained to, you know, you make $10 an hour or you make $20 an hour or whatever it is.

Like, put me in, coach. Like, I want to play. You know what I mean? And so I think it's a great idea. And, in fact, the company that I worked for, they went to that same model. They offered bonuses to their best performing CSRs based on booking percentage, based on cancellation rates, all of the above. So similar type setup. They had an hourly rate that was guaranteed,

but they had bonus opportunities based on their performance metrics. But not only does that create a culture that attracts those A plus players, but you're going to weed out the bottom feeders, right? The people, they're not going to be happy doing that job for minimum wage, right? You're going to weed those people out. That's the goal. You want risk and reward and the deal is, that's why I don't give a bonus. Mine is one or the other. You either get whichever is more, you get this incentive program or you get minimum wage. Whereas if you take minimum wage and bonus on that, they're always going to make more than minimum wage because there's nothing to penalize them down. So my way breeds swimmers. They're not going to sink. So I'm not saying that I'm a genius or anything, because I'll tell you, my call center manager, Angela, came up with it. And I was just blown

away. And it's amazing when you get a good team together and what you could do. But I think that you guys specialize. I was looking at your site and I know all about your recruiting stuff. Tell me a little bit about how all that works and how you get great players. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, there's a number of things that you want to consider and be aware of when you're looking at A players. Look, I mean, I'm not sure if you're familiar with,

you know, Ryan Levesque, right? Ask, but ask works great in marketing. Ask works great in recruiting and getting to know your own team as well, right? The idea here is, if you really want to know what makes A players tick, ask, right? Just simply ask them questions, get to know them, right? What do they desire? What do they like? What are they looking to do? And what are they likely doing now? Right. So are you familiar with that method by chance? Yeah. I have the book and he was on my podcast too.

Nailed it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there you go. Yeah. So ask, right. I mean, it's not just a marketing thing. It's, it's recruiting and it's, it's everything. Right. But yeah. And I don't know if you've seen any of my other presentations or heard any other podcasts, interviews and stuff, but I always say recruiting really is marketing. It is. Yeah. It is. It absolutely is. So, you know, the core pieces and functions of recruiting are the same for marketing, right? You have to understand who it is that you're speaking to,

what it is they need to hear, right? What's going to motivate them. That's an important part of this. You know, what are they motivated by? And you'll ultimately have to figure out how you can reach them, right? What are your opportunities to reach them? So just kind of giving you an example, A-plus players are not likely,

you know, looking for work, right? They're more than likely, they are where they're at and they're actively working. And yeah, so using sites like Indeed or Craigslist. Don't go to Craigslist. The rare builder monster. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got them all. Yeah. You're not going to get the A players off of that unless they just moved here. Yeah. I mean, by some sort of freak chance, maybe. But typically, you know, those sites are catering to job seekers, people who are looking for jobs. And that's not the A player, typically. So how do you get in front of them then?

You have to be looking for them. So part of marketing could be networking, getting yourselves in front of the right people and networking could mean working with your own team members to find referrals. Who do they know? Who do they like? Who's similar to them? That kind of thing. But yeah, so I mean, I understand they're not looking for you. You've got to go out there and look for them. They're probably not going to be on Indeed. So you can find good technicians, you can find good laborers through sites like that, you know, guys who are looking to switch jobs or get into the field or whatever it might be. But, you know, your top level A plus players, you're going to have to be actively hunting them down. But yeah, so and that's where you can, one, invest your time and do that yourself. Or you can, you know, hire somebody to do that. I don't know if you ever hired a headhunter for your business, but they are pretty expensive, right? I definitely think the main thing that you should do is,

I've got a text system that I could just tell the guy to text the number, then he gets in a drip campaign if I see a busboy. But you got to learn how to make technicians. You can't expect to get them off, take somebody else's great guys. Do you think you're just going to go steal all your great people?

That's wrong. I think you got to be able to make them. Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say, yeah. So it's not just about finding them and attracting them. But you've also got to develop a good retention strategy. Treat it just like marketing. I mean, you wouldn't invest a ton of money in marketing to go find customer leads and then do nothing, right, to develop that lead into an actual sales opportunity while also looking at the back end of retaining that person as a customer with longevity.

You see what I'm saying there? It's exactly the same thing from marketing to recruiting. They're very, very, very similar operations of the business. Oh yeah, I agree. Yeah. But I would say this, I mean, things that you can do to, you know, attract A-plus players, you know, everybody talks about culture, right? But creating a performance culture is one really good way of attracting A-plus players. Again, you know, they don't want to be bridled, right. They don't want to be confined and told what their value is. They want to determine their own value.

And if they're working at a company who's saying, hey, we're only going to pay you $35 an hour or $25 an hour or whatever it is, they may be looking, we're interested, I should say, in an opportunity that is going they may be looking, right? We're interested, I should say, in an opportunity that is gonna offer them more, right? Offer them an unlimited commission-based income, more freedom, right? Time at home, work-life balance is a huge motivator with these guys.

Why should I have to work 40 hours a week when I produce three times as much as my co-worker in half the amount of time. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, I think time's a huge motivator. I wholeheartedly agree. Time, money, sometimes it's just recognition in front of the group. There's a lot of motivating factors. You know, Patrick, I want to have a part two with you because I feel like we're only getting into this right now, barely. But I got to go. Maybe just focus on the recruiting side of things. Yeah, we can just do the recruiting side.

Let me ask you this. Is there any books that you really recommend for the listeners out there? By the way, while you're thinking about that, I am going to sign on this new building right now. So the reason I have to cut it a little short, which I hate to do, I love these things to keep going because it's, it's like counseling for me, but, uh, super excited about that, but we're going to have a part two and it's going to be amazing. So, but do you recommend, uh, any, any books or anything like that to the listeners out there? Yeah, I love, there's a couple. How to Win Friends and Influence People is a huge one.

Napoleon Hill, yep. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think Daniel Carnegie has one that is more like the modern digital age type stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge one. I mean, if they haven't read the book, I mean, it's more than what it sounds, right? But it's really kind of the psychology of what people like and how you can really connect with people.

And that is extremely beneficial, whether it's internal relationships within the company with the people that are on your team and people that you're working with, or external relationships with customers and creating more customer loyalty. But also, it's extremely effective in your, of course, your sales and your recruiting, which, I mean, like I said earlier, recruiting is very similar to marketing. And at some point in time in your recruiting and hiring process, you've got to sell them on the job, right? And so being able to influence the person and connect with them and sell them that job is really extremely valuable. Perfect. Well, listen, I want to... Let's set up another time for next week, brother. I appreciate you jumping on and I got a lot out of this. This is just getting juicy too, man. Yeah. Just scratching the surface. I mean, really, there's a lot that I'd like to be able to share with people on the recruiting aspect of things. And of course, you've been made well aware. I mean, we've been able to...

I would say this. There's no magic bullet, right? No magic bullet solution for any problem that you might be facing in your business. You know, marketing, if you were trying to stand on one leg in marketing, you'd ultimately fail, right? Recruiting is no different, right? I mean, it really is a multifaceted operation of the business. You're going to have to look at things from different angles and try different things and try more than one thing, right? Obviously. So yeah, we're in that regard. I mean, we're just barely scratching the surface on, on what, uh, what value could be shared there.

Well, I'll go ahead and get Eric kind of set up another time next week and we'll, uh, we'll jump back on. Awesome. Sounds really good. Hey man, I appreciate you. I want to talk to you a lot more too about training and getting my A1 stuff set up. So. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be excellent. And best of luck to you. I want to talk to you a lot more too about training and getting my A1 stuff set up. So sure. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be excellent. And best of luck to you. Congratulations on signing the... Yeah, thanks, man. I'm just heading out. So I'll get in touch with you and we'll get the part two going. Excellent. All right. Thanks, Tommy. Thank you. All right. Take care.

Hey, guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I wanted to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at Home Advisor to the CEO of Valpak and of course, Ara, the CEO of Service Titan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation. Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews.

It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples. And it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score. You should have your financial check every week. You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account. You should know when to cut advertising that's not working. And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart,

but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.