The Home Service Expert Podcast - Q&A with Tommy - Advertising in the Right Places to Build your Brand Reputation

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $100 million-plus home service business with over 400 employees in 16 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, host and A1 Garage Doors owner Tommy Mello answers your biggest questions about marketing, brand building, finance, employee management…

the biggest thing you could do is pick something and stick with it. You got to have a website. You got to be doing email marketing, maybe text message marketing. You got to be taking advantage of your list. You got to have some strategy. Google can get expensive if you're not priced right. You know, my biggest thing here is if you're not priced right, good luck. You'll never be able to outspend anybody on a lead. You got to pay to play. You go to a B&I group, spend a few hundred bucks a year, pay for lunch every week. That'll get you enough business to keep a couple of guys busy. But when you learn to price right and you get the high conversion rates and you smile and you love what you do, you're able to charge rates.

You can build a training center. You can get a recruiter. You can start selling things at a bigger level. Because listen, I don't think anybody's wife wants cubic zirconium. They don't want a fake diamond. They tend to go to the best. 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 to the Home Service Expert. I am your host, Tommy Mello, and today is going to be an amazing Q&A. Hands down, it will be one of the best. So a few things before we get started. Number one, if you haven't bought my book, The Home Service Expert, you should buy it. Go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast to get the book. Number two, if you haven't got the Home Service Millionaire course, you can buy it at course.homeservicemillionaire.com. Number three, you need to join Home Service Expert, the group. We give a lot of awesome stuff away in there.

It's free. And it's going to get better and better. You got Al Levy posting every week. Danny Kerr. It's amazing people that are posting. We're getting more and more contributors. And we're going to be giving getting more and more contributors and we're going to be giving away more and more content and be answering a lot more questions. So here we go,

guys. Number one, I've been reading a lot lately. Let me go over a few cool things. So let's see here. This book is called How's the Culture in Your Kingdom? It's a guy that spent 21 years at Disney World. Amazing guy. So how to build relationships with your direct reports. Spend time early in the working relationship to get to know your direct reports personally, including their background, work history, families, and hobbies. At the beginning of your one-on-ones, engage in a personal conversation to build rapport. Reciprocate with your own personal information. Authenticity is a powerful tool to connect with others. Identify your direct report preferences in terms of communication, feedback, and praise.

They'll notice the value in personalized approach. There's a few things I have. 70 is great questions. I take notes on the back of the book. So 30-day check-in questions. So far, is the job what you expected it to be? Do you feel that you have information, tools, and resources you need to do your job successfully? Are you feeling welcomed by the other staff? Are you experiencing any challenges in particular

that I can assist you with? Are you feeling comfortable within the organization in general? Do you feel like you have a good understanding of what your role is within the organization? Do you feel that you are able to be productive and effective in your position? Can you discuss why or why not? If you go back 30 days, is there anything different you would do in this entity? Anything you think about we could do differently? Do you feel you are receiving enough information? And it goes to 60 and 90 days.

You know, a lot of these books I've been reading go back to culture. Oh, I love this. I got to show you guys. To more clearly define your values, ask yourself the following questions. What do I want to be known for? What do I want people to say about me? What makes me the happiest and fulfilled? What are the role models I would like to emulate? So there's a page here that I've got, and I love this. This is called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, and it's got urgent and important. Do it now. Important and not urgent. Decide. Schedule a time to do it.

Not important, but urgent. Delegate who can do it for you. Not important, not urgent. Eliminate it. So that's one book. I'm just going through a few things before we get into questions. So that book was, It's All the Culture is in Your Kingdom by Dan Cockerell. This book is The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. And I've got page 20 and I put profound. So I'm just going to read a couple paragraphs here. As I went on to describe my problem in greater detail, the one-minute manager just listened, only breaking his silence with an occasional question. His decisions got more and more

specific as the conversation continued. He asked me which aspect of my work was taking the biggest portion of my time. I told him about an avalanche of paperwork in my office. It's horrendous and getting worse. Sometimes it seemed that all I did was shovel papers without ever making any progress on the real work that needed to be done. I labeled it in the triumph of the technique over purpose. It was a paradox. I was doing more but accomplishing less. It seemed that everyone in the company needed something from me yesterday. Things that might have been important to them but had little to do with getting my job

done. And when I tried to focus on one matter, it would inevitably be interrupted to attend to another. I was spending more and more time in meetings and on the telephone. By the time I took care of all the paperwork meetings and interruptions, there was just about no time left for me to implement some of the ideas I had for improving our own operation. Does that sound familiar? You ever catch yourself just putting out fires all day? Page 23. Why is it that some managers are typically running out of time while their staffs are typically running out of work? Why is it that some managers are typically running out of time while their staff are typically running out of work? Great question. And this book is, this is the one minute manager meets the monkey. You should read that.

Another book I wanted you to think about getting, and there's so many good things in here. 1,501 ways. I've talked about it a lot, but this thing is just full of gold nuggets. 44, I talked about this earlier. I really love this page. This is what employees want. You can tell I'm really into culture right now. My manager recognizes me when I do good work. My manager makes time for me when I need to talk. My manager has discussed my future career aspirations with me. I feel appreciated for the work I do. I feel I'm a valuable member to the team. So I got a buddy in here, Corey. He's got a gutter company in Minnesota. And I was talking earlier about giving compliments. You know, if you've got a culture that's full of crap and it's poison and it's just not fun anymore, you'd be surprised that people will follow the leader.

OK, they're going to follow you. You're messy. They're messy. You see all this crap all in my background. He's got to come in here. She keeps me clean and I haven't let her in here in a while because I got to get my mess kind of figured out here. A lot of books, a lot of books. I'm always reading books and I don't read the whole book. I'll read like a third of it. Then I'll read another third of it. Then I'll read another third of it because I hate just one book. I like just switching it up with like four.

And that's the way I read. So it's probably not the most organized, but it works for me. But at least I read because leaders are readers. What his buddy does, who is it? Your manager does this? A roll of a hundred pennies and he takes out a penny, 50 pennies. Oh yeah, there's two of those make up a dollar. 50 pennies in your left pocket. And what he does is after every compliment he gives, he takes a penny out per compliment. He tries to go through all 50 pennies, which makes a lot of sense. It's hard to do. C-E-N-T-S. So imagine if you could get 50 compliments out a day.

I might carry 10 dimes. I mean, anything you could say, just great job on getting started on time you know you might say what am I going to compliment on there's a million things we could be complimenting on there's a lot of questions in here already so let's get started with it I know you don't remember me but you gave me a coaching call two years ago for free last year we did 900k this year we'll be doing 1.2 and have 13 full-time staff members i greatly appreciate you thank you for that uh the general was a phenomenal leader the general go to the general and save some time how many advertising platforms do you recommend a new electrical company should have and which

ones are the best to master in well lead sources here's the deal interestingly enough cory came into town and said, I really screwed up. I didn't get a trademark in my business. So he's going to have to rebrand because of that. Not a good thing to go through. So what I'd recommend is make sure your initial things are good. Non-disclosure agreements, non-compete. Make sure you've got your trademarks in place. Make sure you've got any patents. Make sure that's looked over by an experienced attorney, number one. Number two, build the brand. Get the right wraps. The biggest thing I see is don't advertise a company without a great brand. Make sure it's a great name. Make sure it's got a good jingle. Get the jingle. Get

the great brand. Make sure it looks amazing. Go to 99designs and do a contest. And we use Dan Antonelli with KickCharge. But at the end of the day, you can make any brand stick out. There's a great book called The Story Brand, and you got to have a story behind the brand. So when you pick a marketing channel, you need to figure out where you're most expensive, the customers that want to pay for a job well done. They call them the affluent customers. You got to find out where they live. There's a great book by Dan Kennedy, I think it is, No BS Marketing to the Affluent. I tell people you want to own Google. You want to have a great

website. You want to have your Google My Business open all the time. You want to have a secondary call center. Your marketing will do 10 times better if you answer the phone and you're pleasant. My mom used to answer our phones. And when I show up to the job and people are like, oh my God, you guys have the best staff. They'd be literally just like, whatever you want to do, just do it. So when people talk about marketing sources, I hope you have the most favorite important word in marketing is attribution. If you don't have call tracking turned on, you need to get ahold of me and I'll help you up with Susie at call cap if you don't have a sophisticated CRM. But Google has got, there's four different algorithms that run on Google.

I talk about it a lot. You got your Google My Business, your local service ads, your pay-per-click, and your organic. And then you got review sites like Yelp and Nextdoor and Facebook. And you want to own all that stuff. And it's very simple. You go to houses when you're doing a small job and you ask them to leave all four. And then you give them something for their time, like a surge protector. It's pretty simple. Love what you're doing with a1 if only more owners

were getting their brand of workforce instead of working on deer plots boom deer plots are extremely important yes do you have a list of all the books on your bookshelf i don't have a list you don't even want a list of these books, but there's a lot of great ones here. There's books on a lot of different things. In fact, I just ordered seven books all on body language for sales. And in my new training center, I'm building a whole wall. One of the whole walls in the training center. I got like 40 walls.

It's going to be all about body language. So when you're training and they enter that garage, we're going to practice for one whole day Body language tonality eye contact the right questions doing it in front of tommy do it in front of a camera I want you to be so good that when the owner comes in there and i'm staring at you You can do it in front of me. We played a game if you guys are friends with me On facebook and if we're not friends just realize It's got 5,000 limit and I'm not that cool. I don't even know how, if I know 5,000 people, but you know, some go when I

post something political, it tends to lose 20 people. So that's the only way I'm able to rotate you guys in. But I just did a live earlier and we have fun when we do training. So that's what I was trying to say. We are now going to multi-locations and I would like to know what's next tidbit of information you could give me so I can research and take that action immediately. When you go to multi-locations, first study your Google location. Find out all your competitors. Find out what's going to have good street value. When people drive by, they want to be able to see your signage. First thing you got to do, get your Google listing, get advanced verified, get citation sites done, and go out there and get a shit ton of reviews. How do you do that? You give up cheap tune-ups. You give cheap

evaluations, whatever you need to do, but you need to build a lot of content. It's called user generated content. I'd say figure out where you could get in. If you could do a sublease and not have a long ass three-year lease, that's probably the best thing to do. But you really need to strategically pick where you're going to get your location. Make sure it's close to your vendors. I mean, I could write a book just about that on all the mistakes we've made. And do me a favor, make a list of everything you're going to buy and how it's going to look. What are you going to have on the walls? Is there going to be wall art? We've got a rug with our core values. What's the mouse pad going to look like? Create a list of the next location and stick to that list. What kind of

toilet bowl cleaner are you going to have? What kind of coffee maker? Are you going to have a microwave in there? Make a list of every single detail. We've got a list that goes out on three different things. It goes out on Costco.com, Amazon, and Home Depot. We buy everything. There's a huge list. It goes in. We buy everything from even the ping pong table that we get. Let's see. My systems are on place for one location and not looking. What books, what groups, or what can I pay to help me to advance to the next level? Here's one recommendation about your next facility. Make sure that it's within two hours drive time of you. That's one of the things I'd highly recommend. You don't want to have to fly out there because if there's a problem, you want your experienced people to be able to show up there. Yes, it costs some money, but it's a hotel.

They could drive out there. Tucson was a really good thing for me from Phoenix because it's two hours away. That's the best advice I could give you. There's a lot of other little things. I do a competitive analysis. I look at ValPAC. I look at the PPC. I look at what's to spend per click. There's a lot of things. You need to think a lot about HR, depending on the state you're going to, if it's cross state lines. Things work differently. You got to have the stuff on the wall of minimum wage and how people get paid. That's an HR function. I would look heavy into the HR in any other state. One of the things out there too is trading credits. It's not easy to get them, but when you get them, you can make a ton of money. You could also get military when you bring people in from the military or work on a credit for that. There's another thing called

ERC, employee retention credits. Even if you got PPP money and you guys, you need to look into ERC, employee retention credits. Billions of dollars out there for you guys to get money. My peers in the industry or leaders have different business models because I am taking my time. My company, National, will pay for your time if you'd like to answer. Sorry. I like the dimes idea. 10 dimes. Advice, leaving my salary job at 75K to go full-time on my landscape construction biz. Super nervous, but I hated my job. Number one rule, you're still going to have a job. You hated it, $75,000. I don't care. That's a lot of money. But dude, here's the deal. Until you stop working every day at all in a truck, you're still in a job. So first, figure out an org chart. And literally,

every time there's a problem or issue, write it down, put it in a schedule. You need to make sure your time is valued. And so many times, I was on a call earlier, you're wasting time on the dumbest little things. You're doing a $10, $15, $20 job when you should be working on the $200 an hour job or $400 per hour job. I mean, listen, the guy, I did the math. He did $2 million, and he made 21%. Well, that's basically $400,000, right? $400,000 is how much per hour? That'd be a math equation. I don't feel like figuring out, but it's a lot more than 30 or

$40. So when you can get a great assistant, you can get a great number two and start delegating things. You know, I got to leave these steps of delegation here. This is the coolest thing ever. And when the customer signs it, one of my technicians or one of my people signed it, there's a copy for them and they got to sign off. They got to give their John Hancock. What needs to get done? Number one. Why it needs to get done? Number two. Here's what you have available to get it done. Number three. The priorities assigned to it. Number four. When it needs to get done by number five, the meeting schedule for checking on the progress being made. Number six, the consequences.

I only put consequences, but there also could be a bonus involved or some type of prize. And then did the task get done? And what opportunity do we have for feedback? On number eight, does it get filled out till afterwards? And then the manager and employee sign it and date it. And it's great. You can take a picture of this. We're using project management right now on Monday.

Monday is the best tool. I've seen some people like Trello, but when you stick to one major thing and we use Monday for every single thing, anybody that wants anything done, they got to go to the Monday project board. And we agreed upon that as a company. And if you get that early agreement, that buy-in where everybody's using it, people always say they get an idea. Now I'm like, did you put it on the Monday board? And believe it or not, they have meetings every single week that I'm not even involved in of how they're going to get implemented. I throw ideas on there and I also give them how important it is to me to get it done. I need a coaching call. I have so many questions now and I need to see if I'm going to try to go national and where my next choke points are. We

can set something up for that. Let's see. Honeyman's cashflow is so many expenses and money flowing in and out. Expensify, really good tracking. There's a thing called Divvy, D-I-V-V-Y. Making sure your books are set up correctly is very, very important. A lot of people don't understand this, but getting somebody who knows what the hell they're doing. And you know what? I'm not going to lie to you guys. I went to a recruiter and I've gotten a lot of doing. And you know what? I'm not going to lie to you guys. I went to a recruiter and I've gotten a lot of great people and I told them what I'm able to pay and what I'm looking for. And I hired a couple of really great people to help me

interview because I realized that I wasn't the best interviewer. And what these people ask for is a culture fit. You know, I got a guy named Dan Miller. He makes sure everybody could deal with a guy like me, which I'm pretty intense. I'm an entrepreneur. I've got a lot of ideas. I've learned to stay in my own territory for the most part. And I've really learned to let these people do their jobs. That's what the one minute manager in meets the monkey talks about is hire the right people, give them a scorecard and their expectations and let them go to work and tell them the deadlines. Give them the deadlines. Give them the stuff they need to do and watch what happens. But you've got to get the team. You see, Alex Ramosi talks about it in one of his podcasts. It's a 15-minute

podcast with a billionaire. But he says, this billionaire says, dude, we had a ceiling when we were not even a couple hundred million. And then the way we became billionaires is we hired the right team and gave them an incentive to move forward. There's only three ways to pay. Three ways to pay. Remember this. You give some type of salary hourly, whatever the compensation is on a weekly, monthly basis. Number two, profit sharing.

Number three, equity. I'd be very, very careful about equity because you start giving that away. It's difficult. I think that should be for more of a robust company that's been in business for at least five years. Hopefully that helps with the cashflow problem. But here's the greatest thing in the world. Money's really, really cheap. So if you're good about spending your money, you can borrow for cheap. You never borrow money when you need it. You borrow when you don't. What company do you suggest for providing financing to my potential customers? Oh, there's so many good companies out there for this. I like Service Finance. I like Good Leap. Good Leap has a great program. We use Green Sky. There's different programs.

It depends on what you want to sell with financing the best companies have five or six but you want to find one that qualifies for low credit the problem i have when you have low credit usually the terms are predatory so sometimes we're putting our our customers in a bad situation so you got to be careful about that too i like this one okay how do you know when you've capped out on advertising spending? Ooh, that's a tricky question. I don't think you ever cap out. You're asking, there's a point of what's called diminishing returns. And that's when you're advertising budget. You should be definitely making sure you've got a separate bucket for your advertising. So you understand here's my biggest problem with marketing is you got to be able to keep

track of it and you need to set boundaries from day one. What do you consider marketing? If you've got a CMO, does his salary go into marketing? What about your wrap vehicles? What about your stickers? Do those go into marketing? What are your sites going to? Does all that go into marketing? Because it's hard to see an ROI in certain things. What I tell people is if you own all four algorithms on Google and you do TV, radio billboards to spike it, and you actually look at your conversion rate and you track it properly, I can tell you this, you're going to be filthy, filthy rich. But if your conversion rate isn't over 70% and your booking rate's not over 80%, you just wasted a ton of money. So you need to make sure you're only as strong as your weakest link.

Let's see. What revenue does it make sense to start building your leadership team? We're gunning for $2 million this year. I don't think there's a right answer for that. What revenue? I care about more profit. If I don't have profit, I think the first thing you need to do is get a great controller and maybe a CFO slash controller, because they will tell you what you need to be spending. They'll help you come up with compensation programs.

This is something just like a CRM you don't want to cheap out on. And when you use a recruiter and you have a secondary person that's able to help out, here's the deal. You can go on Indeed. You can put all the things on a zip recruiter. You could go on and go to Monster and Career Builder and LinkedIn and put all these posts. A recruiter goes out and gets somebody. Every single person that came to me that I recruited out of the recruiter has literally had another job. Literally, they find out how to poach these masters that have already been where I want to go. Remember that. They've already been where I want to go. And I I gotta get them a sweet deal

Sometimes it takes equity but at the end of the freaking day who gives a crap because it's all performance pay It's performance equity that doesn't get bested for three or four years. And if they do what I need them to do I'd love to have a bunch of owners around me with a little share of it that helped me get to a billion way faster I'm, not greedy. Let's build 25 millionaires in the process. And then I have 25 disciples that'll go with me anywhere that are, they'll literally go to war for me. That's kind of fun to enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Let's see here. Cashflow is only controlled by spending a time and time at QuickBooks or in your financial software. You need to just start spending a ton of time in it or find somebody to do that for you. I'll get with you on that one-on-one. Let me read a couple of these questions here. There's a lot of stuff in here.

I'm only halfway through. So Adi Gaber, I don't know if I said that right, Adi, Adi. I've been running my own marketing so far in a few channels and currently looking for an A player agency for mainly running Google ads. I really appreciate any recommendations for a company with specialized in home services. You know, I can give you a lot of names. I use a guy named Forrest. He's great. There are time to time where I feel like no matter who you get, you just want to make sure they're applying time. Here's the biggest problem with AdWord campaigns. They need to be involved in your call center. They need to understand your reviews. They need to understand your capacity planning. I don't feel like there's any agency out there that is

going to care as much as you do. I mean, it's just, they try to hire a jack of all trades. They try to take over your Yelp spend and they try to take over your organic and they try to do your, your GFB, you know, make that better. And they say we can do it all. And I find that they're good at one thing really, really well. So I typically don't like to hire an agency that says we're going to do everything. We're going to do your Facebook ad spend. We're going to get you in Valpack and buy your newspapers. We're going to do your TV, radio. I like guys. You know what I do? I'm a garage door dude. And you know what? I'm getting good at garage door flooring. I do? I'm a garage door dude. And you know what? I'm getting

good at garage door flooring. I'm going to get a garage door storage. And I'm not a guy that does everything. And when you find a marketing company that says you're, we're the best at everything. I say, bring me the facts. Here's what I'd implore you to do. When you pick somebody, you want to talk to at least five happy customers. You want to find out what type of businesses they are. When they give you references, you need to check them. I want to know who they've used in the past. I want to know what do you guys consider great results. If they can't give you great results within 30 to 60 days, I want the exact what you're offering me on paper. And I want to know that you're going to reduce your fees to zero or give me credits if you don't give me those results. I think those are very, very important things to say. And there are a lot of companies out there. And listen, AdWords,

there's about 10 million Google partners. So really what you need to do is there's certain people that do an amazing job. I've got a lot of people. I think One SEO does a great job. I think Christiana, I'm involved with these guys. They know them really well. I've seen a lot of people. I think one SEO does a great job. I think Christian, I, you know, I'm involved with these guys. They know them really well. I've seen a great ROI with Bill over there. I don't like to recommend somebody all the time. I know who I use. What I like to do is I use a guy named Forrest, but you're kind of screwed.

If you do, you're screwed. If you don't, you do a great job. That's great. But if something falls short, I had a guy that I talked to earlier that was really angry about service time. Didn't have a great experience. So I reached out to a couple of people there. They're going to make it right. But I love recommendations. You know, what's funny is I try to get a lot of referrals to me. So when the pest control companies go there, the painters, you've got guys that are moving. But one thing I vow that if you refer a one garage or service that the

customer is not happy, I will give them a 100% return. I will return all the money to protect your relationship with that client. And I think that that's important. So here's the thing that customers want. Three things. You want from an advertising agency, right? You want it done fast. You want it done right. You want it done for a cheap price. Pick two out of the three, you get the middle finger. The best companies, they're six to eight weeks out before they can even onboard somebody. And then when you want to call them, maybe they're not available right away. So they don't have the best service and timeliness, but the quality's through the roof. It's just one of those things. They might be more expensive too. So I typically find the people that take a percentage of your marketing spend,

it's kind of like not a good thing because they're incentivized to spend a lot more money you know for my local service ads i use search kings lauren over there takes care of me i'm working with jamie over there those guys are really looking out i use so many different companies for so many different things you know i like to always be testing because when you rely on one company and that shit happens, you end up getting burned. What company does your website and SEO? I had Dan Antonelli design it. Right now I use Matthew Woodward. He does a pretty good job. One of the things that I'm starting to realize though, is I need to produce my own content. I need to write our own articles. We've written several hundred articles over the last two weeks.

We're doing expert interviews. Websites are about three three main things listen to me on this one three main things number one is it's fast it looks like google it transfers quickly it's got a good site map on it it's just speed speed speed and you know it's got to look sexy it's got to have the phone number the right spot all that stuff so speed and sexiness and just the way it's got to look sexy. It's got to have the phone number, the right spot, all that stuff. So speed and sexiness, and just the way it's put together. Number two, link building. That's not easy to do. You guys want to know a trick with, this is my trick with link building. Go to every relationship you have, your bank relationship. I want you to go to all your advertisers. I want you guys to spend five hours writing down every single, go through your QuickBooks and write down every single company you spend money on, your janitorial service, your shirts that get delivered, where you buy everything from. I want you to ask every single one of those companies, first of all, I want you to write a testimonial with a picture of yourself from your company.

And I want you to say, put this on your website, and I want to link back to my website. That's a great way to get a couple hundred amazing links. Tell them to put it on the About Us page, the about us page at the bottom of why you should use them. Number one, if you can make a video even better and the video is not anything to do with your company, just. Hey there, Tommy Mello, A1 Garage, your service. I just wanted to say that ABC bank is amazing. They were able to get us the loan. We needed exactly when we needed it with the best terms possible. I highly recommend Greg, one of the best experiences. Every time I called him, the second ring he answered. If I sent him an email, he got back to me right away. Just a great experience overall. If you're looking for

a banking relationship, that's who I approve. My name is Tommy Mello with A1 Garage Doors, ABC Bank approved. Boom. They'll put that on their website, but you got to genuinely meet it as well. Then the other thing, the last thing on the, uh, the third thing for the website is content. You can't produce enough content. You find the businesses that went out of business. You create a page on them. You find out this versus this pools. For example, you could do chlorine versus salt. You know, those are the things people search for. And as your shit gets bigger, it gets better that way. I'm trying to get my business name trademarked, Grassman Landscaping, like you, many other companies use my name. Every lawyer I've

talked to said it's going to be impossible to get. I didn't know if you could remember people to help me with this. Anytime you call a lawyer, it doesn't go good. So what I would recommend, what they do is a full audit. They'll find out every company and then they'll put it out there. And they got like two years to contest it. I can tell you that if I could go back in time, I would have came up with a name and done a lot of research on the name. Came up with something pretty clever. And always, always, always, when you're smaller, you want to include what you do in it like garage door service but i could have called it um mellows you could

add garage door service to anything but be unique i can't recommend anybody off the top of my head i mean i have lawyers for this stuff but you can find lawyers anywhere i'm sure if you paid enough money you might be able to get something but just understand what prior use means. Prior use kind of trumps any trademark, but you still got to go to court about it. It's a pain in the butt. I'm trying to build a service agreement to sell these beautiful, helpful monthly payments to keep clients for a lifetime. Could you share your top legal loophole points that can screw you on these so I can avoid those? I know that typically HVAC companies, they try to get a renewal each year. They try to get customers to sign off on it. I don't think you're going to find a lot of lawsuits over it. Here's what you're going to do.

Someone feels like they got overpaid. The best thing is just to have a resolution for that. I don't think you're going to go to court because you charged somebody 200 bucks for the year. I don't think you're going to find a lot of things. I would just make sure your service agreement goes through a lawyer that specialized in contract law because it basically is a contract. I don't like that word. I like to call it an agreement. But in your case, this is a contract. You go to a contract lawyer for that. You mentioned 90 days for a billboard. It sounds like you don't recommend a long-term contract. Well, I buy stuff on Remnant Space most of the time. I'm trying to get the best price possible and really great billboards come up. I recommend long-term billboards. It just depends on...

I don't recommend a billboard until everything else online is spiked. You got to be buying your own keywords. You got to be on the LSA. You got to have your Google My Business page ranking. You got to say 24-7 hours that you're answering calls to a secondary call center, certain things like that. It's been tough to find a good marketing company. How can I find one that works? It's really networking. Networking is the number one thing. Billionaires know how to network. And if you really want to make a lot of money in life, you need to ask a lot of questions to a lot of people that you respect. I know this is a question for me, and I've got a lot of money in life, you need to ask a lot of questions to a lot of people that you respect. I know this is a question for me and I've got a lot of them. I'd like to have a one-on-one and just tell you who I recommend. A lot of them are already on our home service expert page. So

post it on there. You go onto the Facebook groups, especially mine. People are more than happy to help you. What's the best way to start transitioning into an employee-owned business? We have a goal to either sell or be 50% employee-owned in five years. That's called an ESOP. And there's some really cool things right now about ESOPs. Listen to this. If you form into an ESOP, that means you're 51% employee-owned, but the company is still worth zero because you sold it to the ESOP. So the ESOP, till they make all the payments, are worth zero because you're still part of that. You're still 49% owner. That could qualify under a Roth IRA. Follow me here. You don't pay any taxes after you pay into it. So you could leave your 49% ownership into there in a Roth. There's a company that specializes it in Chicago, which could be a very, very good

opportunity. So make sure you go to the right lawyers for this one. I could actually probably advise you to somebody that's gone through this. I didn't go that way. There big mistake is I would rather own three markets and put TLC and been there and visit them all the time. Right now I'm in 29 markets in 19 States. I say, become the biggest and best in your own backyard, own that market, make it your, your double whammy, do everything you can to be the biggest, best in your own market, in your own backyard, where you're possibly your kids went to school, where you've got all your relationships. I mean, we murdered in Detroit and a lot of people hit me up from Detroit or murdered it in Phoenix because a lot of people hit me up because I got to know people. And I think that that's really, really important.

You know, I'm standing in line the other day. I was at Cristiano's thing and we were grabbing a beer and I don't know why this lady's just standing there and we start bsing and she's like yeah i'm a dentist and she goes i'm gonna go yeah i'm tommy i own a1 garage drawers no that's what i said i said if you ever need a garage drawer let me know she goes you guys don't work in flagstaff do you oh yeah we actually do we got three technicians there we've got installers that go there all the time she goes you guys don't know how to make copper doors like out of complete copper i'm like yeah, yeah, we specialize in that. We can do that.

Absolutely. And she told me her dentistry company, but I gave her a card. I had one card on me and she hit me up the next day. I got her with Luke. And I'm pretty sure we sold a $20,000 door to her. I mean, I got to check and make sure, but I'm always doing this, always.

You know, expand, better my business. If you want to garage your company, join Garage Door Freedom. I'm telling you, it's lights out. This is going to be the biggest game changer in anybody's life. This group that we're creating, Garage Door Freedom, garagedoorfreedom.com, lights out the best company. I spent 15 years making mistakes, falling every corner, reading books, hiring consultants, 250 grand there, 100 grand there, 500 grand there, literally. What I've learned, my Rolodex, the things I've learned, the processes, the standard operating procedures, the key performance indicators, the software, the relationships, I'm pouring all that in to garage door freedom. Because just because I win all the time doesn't mean you have to lose. We

could all win. And believe it or not, I have just as much to learn from you as you're going to learn from me. I was in Florida last week, and I sat down with two other garage door companies. And it was amazing because they poured their heart and soul and gave me all these tips and strategies because they know I'm out there to help them win. And when you get a group of people under one roof that are all trying to win together, truly help each other, truly not hold stuff back. People come into my office and I give them everything and I can care

less. It's on them to do it. Just because they made $10 million doesn't mean I can't. And a lot of people just hold it to themselves. Like, why would you share that? It's a secret. I'm like, good luck. Look, I'll share my secrets. They're not secrets. Just work your ass off. Don't make the same mistake twice and listen to smarter people than you, and you'll be successful. How do you decide what goes on the checklist? Well, anything that you want monitored has got to go on that checklist. I have picture checklists.

Checklist is checks and balances. And as good as your CRM is, you've got to make sure that your CRM is working well. And you've got a data integrity team to check all that stuff. What do I want on my checklist? I'm building this new tune-up that literally we rewire the safety eyes. We rewire the wall button because the wires get brittle. We reframe the opener, make sure it's got a cross member if it's more than two feet down. We go through and we take pictures of the spring pad. We do every single thing. We literally add

self tappers anywhere that they're not in. I mean, there's going to be like 87 steps. It's going to take over an hour long. We take the case off the opener and there's going to be a picture for every single item. And the customer is going to get a copy of the 87 things we did. And they're going to go, oh my gosh, you guys are so comprehensive. They do the same thing every time. It's consistency. And we're going to make sure these guys can do it in front of me over and over and over. And if they skip steps and don't do it, guess what? We're going to know the same day because we've got a data integrity team. Let's see here. Ashton had a comment. Let's see. Companies, just like people, people go through phases of changes that grow and evolve. In today's

rapidly evolving home service landscape, how do you think high value commission only employees should view the coming changes? You know, you call it commission only. You can't pay somebody commission only because it's illegal if you can't pay somebody commission only because it's illegal if you don't cover minimum wage and overtime so no matter what you've got a bottom number two is i don't like the word commission i like performance pay and i like to add in their scorecard i like to make sure they're getting five out of five reviews i like to make sure they're not getting callbacks i like to make sure they're not getting any tech errors i like to get a payment structure that's just not based on sales to pull in those other

things that matter. No more than five things. Our scorecard revolves around five things. Sales is one of them because guess what? I can't pay the electricity bill with reviews. So sales is a part of performance pay. What you could do is pay people on sold hours. So rollers take two hours.

If they do it faster, I think what you need to do is figure out a pay structure that lets the customer win every single time and make sure they've got drug tested, background checked, honorable, great people that are looking to fix it right the first time. Yes, you might not absolutely need something that's not busted yet, but the chances of it breaking in the next two years are great. I'm not missing another day of work because it might last for 18 months. Replace what it needs now. Give me a great warranty. Come out when you say you're going to do it. Make sure you're drug tested. Make sure you're safe around my family and I'll pay you extra. Is there a future in the home improvement for salespeople as we know the role to be today? Well, that's a loaded question. Yes, absolutely.

Do you think that if I walk into your house and I got my head down and I smell like B.O. and I can't make eye contact, you don't want me in there. You want me in there smiling. There's always going to be an opportunity. I don't care what Amazon does. I don't think that women are going to date men and men are going to date women that don't smile, make eye contact, have a good background check and drug test. Yes, there will always be a way to make a lot of money in this home service industry. Will it get more commoditized? Yes. But trust me, do you think Amazon is going to have to pay for a guy to have a clean background check, a great driving record, to be trained a certain way? Amazon and Google can't figure out. They can barely run their own crap. You think they're going to make awesome technicians? No. You know what Thumbtack had a problem with? One of the highest up at Thumbtack called me up and they

said, dude, we don't know what to do. We were after the small guy, the small guy, right? We wanted to give them a chance. We wanted to Uberize the industry. Problem is these small guys, they work whenever they want. You can't get a hold of them for the next few months. They can't get a constant advertising dollars. They can't. They didn't know what to do when COVID started. And they're like, I'm like, you need to go after companies like me. They said, why you? I said, because I could spend 50 grand a month and not even look at it. I will show up every day on time. I've got capacity planning. I've got training. I've got great employees. I've got background checks. I've got recruiters. I've got trainers. I've got a training center. They need us more than we need

them. Trust me. And at times it changes. Companies change. What are the areas within the business that will present the greatest opportunity during that transition? Having a training center, having a recruiting department, having great standard operating procedures that you could make and manufacture great people. That is the key to success. That is what builds value for a company. If you could build a technician, build a CSR, build a dispatcher, use software, and have a comprehensive list of how things get done properly, you've just won the game, guaranteed. I've worked with Vincent Johnson, a graduate doctor, on getting my company together. We are only a three-track company and super excited to grow.

What is the most impactful way for a smaller company to get more phone calls for new customers? It's optimizing your Google, but here's the deal. Are you asking for your customers for a one-year tune-up? One of the biggest problems with most companies is they haven't moved up to the right technology. They can't autopilot their business. We are still working on doing a lot of things. I think we're the most advanced technology-wise. You should see all the softwares we're using. There's not a one size fits all. See, service Titan cost me a half percent of revenue.

And I've got a lot of companies that call me and they're like, how can you afford that? I can't afford that right now. And I go, you can't afford not to. You're not doing shit. You don't even send a picture of your guy. Like you don't get five're not doing shit. You don't even send a picture of your guy. Like you don't get five out of five service. You don't even get one, but then they get on service Titan. And guess what? The problem I have with guys that get on service Titan is they haven't even started the car yet. You see, I'm at seventh gear. We are forcing service Titan to evolve. We're asking more and more from them every day. Other guys aren't even utilizing one 10th of what they're doing.

I got my buddy here. He didn't even know they had a training LMS called Absorb built into it. That if I had to pay for that, they let me use it for free. And I got to tell you, an LMS for free, this would have cost me 30 grand a year. They got it for me for free.

Are you utilizing everything you can from your software? And if you're not using software in the next six months, please call me up because I'll come into your market and we'll rip it up. I don't want a lot of competitors out there. I want people to grow. I want them to partner with me eventually if they want to.

If they don't, I don't care because I know they'll look out after me. And trust me, there will be one day that we're competitive partners together. But I invited precision and overhead door in here. I don't care. Competition for me is fun, but I say the biggest thing you could do is pick something and stick with it. You got to have a website. You got to be doing email marketing, maybe text message marketing. You got to be taking advantage of your list. You got to

have some strategy. Google can get expensive if you're not priced right. My biggest thing here is if you're not priced right, good luck. You'll never be able to outspend anybody on a lead. You got to pay to play. You can go to a B&I group, spend a few hundred bucks a year, pay for lunch every week. That'll get you enough business to keep a couple of guys busy. But when you learn to price right and you get the high conversion rates and you smile and you love what you do, you're able to charge rates. You can build a training center. You can get a recruiter. You can start selling things at a bigger level because listen, I don't think anybody's wife wants cubic zirconium. They don't want a fake diamond. They tend to go to the best. When you want something really great, if you had somebody

really, really important coming into town, would you take them to McDonald's? People understand this is their home. It was an investment. They want the best. My customers want the best. They don't want the cheapest fix. So number one, when you pick your marketing source, pick one that'll attract the customers you want. Don't go to the cheapest places. Listen, I still get customers from Groupon because I'm trying to get my stickers in there. I'm playing a different game than most people. I want to own that home. But I don't need a big sale off the first ones. But if I was to restart, go to the best place for the most affluent clients, I'd rather go to the $30,000 clients.

They exist in certain states. And hit 10 of them a week, then hit $1,200 clients. So really, really think about that. How do I work less to get the best customers that want the top grade? That's what I would be thinking on that question. Let's see. Do you foresee more material availability problems with the current global banking restrictions and shipping costs? Yeah, well, now with Ukraine and Russia, there's a lot of things going on. I think that's going to prevent interest rates going up, but I'm not an economist. But what I would say is, I think what's happening right now is our supply chains are becoming less and less reliant on other countries. They're working on different ways of getting things. They're becoming super resilient because you got to understand suppliers don't make money either. So these guys are literally building plan B, plan C, plan D. If you've seen it, supplies are getting better. They're not great yet, but they're starting to get more resilient.

So what I would expect here in the near future is you're going to see things coming in at Costa Rica. I got one manufacturer that's setting up there. There's amazing things they could do and really close. I talked to a guy yesterday that went to five different places in Mexico. They're relying on the continent now versus overseas. There's a lot things happening so i expect we're american i'm proud of my country and we are badass dudes and women and we're going to figure out a way to make things happen you throw us a lemon we're going to make lemonade so i think we're going to outwit

all the bs going on uh let's see here i'm working out on my truck i finally hired a helper for my electric company monthly gross about 20 000 a month should i step out and hire a lead man oh man that's a toughie i had five technicians before i got out of the truck at least what i would say is when you're in the truck you always always always make that a learning opportunity. You bring somebody with you, you're training every single time and you get a videographer and you start building, you start building videos. You start giving exact processes. You build your manual. Every time you make a mistake, you write it down. You should spend at least six more months in the truck, writing down exactly the issues you have. What happens when you break down? Who are you calling? You see, I think the biggest problem is,

is we get out of the truck and then there's all these issues. And yet we don't even remember all the crap we used to deal with, like when we first started. So as we're doing something, we're bow tying a certain piece of wiring, take a picture of that,

get a video of how you do it and why you do it more importantly. They got to understand what happens if they don't do it. Don't make them make the same mistakes you made. What I would say is spend some more time. I know this is counterproductive, but unless you get a lead tech, that's going to be a trainer and knows everything that you want, figure out the way you want it done. That's safe that you could replicate. We use Divi. That's awesome. I've tried almost everything. Read tons of books,

listen to tons of podcasts, hired coaches during the best practices organizations. I say I can figure out how to grow. I spent so much money trying to figure it out. Our overhead is through the roof and haven't made a profit in three years. Seems like nothing works. One of the biggest issues are recruiting, hiring, training. Number two, marketing.

What do you suggest I do next? Top grade. Number one is I would find your number two guy, read Rocket Fuel. Find out through a recruiter. And I got one I recommend. Well, I don't know if she can handle everybody. You know, you got to pay. Look, when you're doing a recruiter, you're spending a fortune. It costs a lot of money. And you can interview, they give a warranty on it. They give like a six month or one year where they

give their feedback or they find someone else. But I think number one is I'm so lucky to have amazing people. I literally have the most amazing team, but I give them freedom. I get out of their way. I got to tell you, the biggest problem of an owner like me is getting in the damn way all the time, coming up with ideas, saying, I read a book, let's do this. I keep my ideas to myself for the most part. I let these guys operate. Yet I come in, when I come in, I better have substantial proof. I go, I just visited an HVAC shop. There's a 700 million. Here's exactly how they do it. I'm going to send two of you out there and try to make it their idea too. If they buy into it, guess what? They will fricking run through cement walls for you. But when it's always your ideas, when you always are complicating things, when you're always ADD and everything out like owners do, good luck of getting ahead. So what I would say is trust your people to move

forward, but first get the right people. Number one, top grade. And then I like to look, you need a good CFO or a controller to look at those and go, where am I spending too much money? There's percentages out there in every industry that if you're overspending in marketing, if you're overspending, I would say you have a lack of great KPIs and great financials. And once that happens, you'll be able to know what to work on next. Because I could say it could be marketing. I could say it could be sales. I could say not charging enough. I could say marketing to the wrong people. I could say training or recruiting. I can't tell you unless you've got really, really concrete numbers. When I go into a business, here's the first thing I look at. Give me all these KPIs.

Let me see your balance sheet. Let me see your income statement. Let me see your P&L. You look at it, it's all messed up. First thing I say is make sure you've got great data. Data on QuickBooks, data in your CRM. You get those two things figured out, then you know where to spend your time. As long as you built the right training and you've got checklists and operating procedures,

these things, I know it's harder to do than it sounds, but it really isn't. Now, leaving me to sit down in a room for months and months and figure this stuff out. And God, I got to tell you, I was putting out fires as I was working on it, but every fire that happened ended up in the manual. It's not crazy. The easy things, it becomes vanilla. It's like, what do I do when my truck breaks down? What happens if I lose my iPad? What happens if my shirt's not tucked in? What happens if I get a neck tattoo? What's our smoking rule? What do we do if this, this, this, this, this, this, this, there's 70 pages of this stuff, just one manual, but you got to do it.

Let's see. Right now, calls are flowing in. If I hire a lead man and there's a day out of the week that nothing is scheduled, what should I do when the guy's not having anything, nothing set? Well, that's why I like PPC because I can fill things in. You've got to have marketing that is a teeter-totter, okay? You spend money. You pay to play. You could always get leads. There are going to be slow days. That's when you use email marketing.

And here's what you do. I have capacity issues all the time. Trust me. When we're growing in a new market, you got to figure that out. You got to plan on certain levers. As you get bigger, you're going to find levers that you could just, boom, let's do a Facebook special. Let's do a Yelp killer deal for one day. Let's tell this customer, if you do next Tuesday, let's say you've got a bunch of customers that didn't get your bid. Let's say you're at 60% conversion rate. You got 40% that didn't take your bid. You call that customer up. Hey, listen, Brian, it's Tommy Mello, the owner at A1 Garage Door Service. Listen, I wanted to talk to you real quick. Looks like we've got a day coming up that I don't have anything going on for my installer. I know that we were at $1,700 for that service. Listen, I'll tell you

what. If you let me schedule this when we're slow and I need work for my guy, I'll do this for $1,200. I just can't give you the lifetime warranty. Would that work for you? What I'll do is I'll give you a five-year warranty, but I'll tell you what, this is my direct cell phone number. You call me up if you have any issues. I need to get my guy work, Brian. Can you work with me on this? Is that sound okay? You know what, Tom? If you could do that for 1200 bucks, go ahead and do it. Boom, filled in a slot, keep my guys busy. If you're not at 100% conversion rate, there's a lot of work out there. And what do you do when a guy's not working? You go back to the calls that you didn't book. It's pretty simple. Do you use Marketing Pro as service site? And yes, I do. There's certain things I don't use on there. I

don't use it all. There's very good things in there. Thank you for answering. Hey, Tommy, big fan. Love the book. I'm an owner of a garage door business in Ohio. My question is when should I get a secretary? We're under 500,000 in sales. That's another thing. I think there's too many people that you got to think up. Well, three, you got to get your number two, you got to get your secondary number two, which is your assistant, and you got to get someone good in the financial department. I'd say this. If you want to shave off five years of your life of wasting blood, sweat, and tears, hire somebody, but you need to tell them what to do. They need to understand your email. They need to understand what's important to you. They've got to be able to do that $15, $20 work that you can't do.

The problem that I find with most owners is they say, I can't give it to someone because they're going to screw it up. And there will be screw ups. My advice to you right now is start recording every time you email somebody, put it on a quick Zoom call or a loom. Every single time you do something, start recording those things and say, listen, I've got 25 hours of looms and videos for you to watch that'll help you kind of understand who all my relationships are. What I'd like you to do is I will pay you $500 this week. I want you to go watch all 25 hours. Then I want you to come in and we're going to do another interview and we're going to see how prepared you are. I'm going to pay you before you start to make sure you're the right type of person. Imagine if they could give you back six hours in a day. I'd say hire that person yesterday,

but it just depends on what you're going to do with it. Again, I tell people all the time, they're like, can I send somebody out to train? I'm like, well, how are you booking your calls? What is your dispatchers doing? What kind of reputation do you have out there? If I train them my way, you don't stand a chance with them. Somebody asked me if I could come do one of the sales calls for them and show them what I do. I said, do we get to book the phone call? Can I go on one of my wrap trucks? Because I park it in a certain way. Am I allowed to buy coffee on the way? Here's the deal. My way doesn't work for everybody, but my way is the best. I guarantee you there's no better sales system out there, but I can't do it on paper invoices. I can't do it without show and tell. I can't do it with

the shitty parts you carry. I can't do it without having an amazing truck that pulls up to the job. What do you want me to start? Handicap already? Because your CSR sounded angry on the call. Now I got to be handicapped because you suck. So the fact is I need to control the whole process or my sales does not work correctly. You're only as strong as your weakest link. Love this stuff. 30 to 60 days, a large enough sample size everywhere else.

I'm aware that I have them. In fact, yes. Global trends like Google or Amazon are trying to achieve all three cheapest fastest and best is a goal in our space i'm not convinced that mentoring the space is a good thing for our customers as a trade middle within it i agree there seems to be enough garage door home service profits to keep everybody fed, especially if everyone works together, not price fixing. Look, there's no freaking way you're going to price fix. I don't care if we invited everybody. Here's one thing you learn in economics, basic economics.

When there's price fixing in a capitalist economy, it always fixes itself. You want to know why? Because number one, it's not a monopoly unless the two biggest organizations get together. But someone always cheats when there's competition. It breeds lower pricing because someone always has to come down. That's a fact. Right now, the reason why prices are up is because everybody has supply issues. OK, when they stop these supply issues, someone's going to go. If I come down lower, see what demands how you never lower your prices. Your suppliers will never lower their prices while they got a three month wait. When they can't even service, most of my suppliers will not take on new customers. Until that changes

and they're hungry for more work, when they've got more work than they can handle, you raise your prices. When you need work, you lower your prices. Supply and demand, baby. Tommy, what's the best way to sell annual memberships? Well, it's interesting because I asked a bunch of guys at Service Titan, and they said your CSRs. They said our CSRs expose them to it up front, and then they call afterwards. We give a 10% discount up to $100. If you cancel the membership, we take that money back out. But it's got to be systematized.

Again, you want software to handle this stuff. I can't understand companies that complain about software pricing. I'm like, well, you just don't know how to use it. If you can't get it to be a fraction of a percent, then you know what? I want you to write this down. Write down ID10T. Write it down right now. Just write it down on that piece of paper. Here, the pen. ID10T. That's the issue. Software does not work if you're an idiot. Listen, I'm not talking to any individuals here, so don't take that the wrong way. Oh, hey, brother. Thank you. It was great being at the expo. I really enjoyed that. I got to meet some cool people. Got a lot of phone numbers. Listen, the main thing I spoke about there at the Power

Washing Convention is it's amazing when you treat people with respect in your company. It's amazing what happens when you give them the benefit of the doubt and you let them come up with their own ideas. And they're involved in it every single day. They're part of the war. They're part of the mission. How can you empower them more? How can you give them a better life? If you start asking yourself, you know what I want more than anything is when I give them a diploma that they graduated from A1, that they could take this anywhere and say, man, A1, that my life, I've learned how to take direction. I've learned to own it, make it my own. When there's people out there that can actually learn to take it, make it their own, make it better. I tell none of my guys to make my sales process their own. I say, use the exact same words, use the exact same body language.

We need to teach all this stuff. Some people say, go out there, you take what I give you, make it your own. I'm just saying, listen, I can't tell you to love Harley Davidson's. When you talk about their toboggans in Michigan, that's you talking. I can't tell you to love Harley Davidson's when you talk about their toboggans in Michigan that's you talking I can't teach you what to like and not like I can't tell you what you know about Harley's I want you to have your own mind but I need you to learn my process and we need to continue L.E.V. has taught me over and over again continue to beat the process process standard operating procedures make sure you're keeping them accountable. Trust but verify.

I mean, the things are, some of my people here have said, we don't need to take inventory on everything. Yes, we do. Because if the employees find out you don't take inventory on the screws, all of a sudden they got 20 cans of screws at their house for extras. I love my employees. I don't think they're stealing from me, but I don't make it easy. You don't lock your door at night to keep the bad people out. The bad people are getting in. You lock your door at night to keep the good people out. I've seen a lot of good people do bad things when you leave the door

open. That's all I'm saying. Let's see here. What do you normally say for email marketing? Keep it simple. Yeah. First of all, here's the deal about email marketing. Tagline. What did you title it? Number one thing. Number two, the first sentence number three is i'd like to include a video there's software out there that tells you who opens it who actually watched the whole video i like to ab test i think the most important thing with email marketing is ab testing running a few systems and having a clear opt out because you do not want to burn a server with a bad email list. It depends if it's cold or hot list. And what I like to do is get them to opt in in the beginning.

What I would say right now for the people out there, if you're not getting a double opt-in for text messaging, which I told Adam to do this a few years ago. He's awesome, but we didn't get this done. You want to get a double opt-in. Forget email. You want to be text messaging your customers. And you want to make it short sweet and simple and sexy So if you guys need me to be in a video, I understand But anyways guys, I think I answered every question And I appreciate you guys as always. I hope there was a lot of great stuff in here

What is a great cost effective method for client? appreciation A card is one There's a lot of things to method for client appreciation. A card is one. There's a lot of things to do from client appreciation, but I think it's just acknowledgement, a text message. I just created a video earlier that I acknowledge my clients and thank them personally, but it's a video. I think that if someone spends a certain amount of money with you, maybe you get a nice picture before and after, and you say, we really appreciated the business. But right now you put on top of it, shareable link on Facebook and give them an award. If they share it and someone opts in, we're using this thing called

get the referral. Don't use it yet because I'm going to master it. But we were on the phone today. I've had it for a while now, just haven't had the time to implement it, but I've got a couple of great implementers now. So this is going to be amazing guys. I've had it for a while now. Just haven't had the time to implement it, but I've got a couple of great implementers now. So this is going to be amazing, guys. I guarantee you, listen, we're working on things that are crazy. I'm always doing a lot of things at once, but the thing is, is I'll drive it home.

We'll get it done. And I'll keep giving you guys whatever I got. I think you're going to really enjoy what comes out of the next few months. I'm building a promoter program for my internal employees because I want each of them to make a lot of money. They get $1,500 to recruit, but they don't know how to do it yet. Wait till you see what I can teach them. I'm going to teach them how to post, where to post, what to do, when to do it, smile, how to get that bus boy, how to get that hairdresser,

how to get them to share things, how to get them to promote you, micro-influencers, how to become a micro-influencer. And I'm going to teach all of them this. And imagine if I got 500 people that are able to get in front of 500 people a day, that's 25,000 people. You think that that's a pretty cool thing? Watch, watch what happens. Cash and checks and breaking necks. I'm out guys. Thank you for everything. Thanks for watching. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me and I hope you're getting as much as I am out of

this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion

dollar company and uh we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically and people say why do you give your secrets away all the time and i'm like you know the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them so we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it. you