The Home Service Expert Podcast - Q&A with Tommy - Creating a Thriving Culture Where Everybody Wins

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

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

I'm traveling around the country right now looking at companies that want to partner with us. And we're going to give them great opportunities. What's so nice about this whole concept of elevate is I really think people win underneath with us. I mean, there doesn't have to be a negotiation that doesn't make both parties feel valued. And the mindset of how do I build a company where the vendors get to win and the employees get to win and the clients for sure get to win and the partnerships get to win. And so how do you figure out a way that's not one-sided? A lot of people, they negotiate, it's a win-lose situation and it doesn't need to be that way.

Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. All right. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert podcast. Tommy Mello. book, The Home Service Millionaire. If you haven't, go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. I got a new book out and I've talked about it a little bit. It's not out yet, but the first chapter you can get it. It's book.elevateandwin.com, book.elevateandwin.com. I've got a new course coming out as well, but the old course is course.homeservicemainter.com. And if you haven't joined Home Service Expert Facebook page, just type in Home Service Expert and join the page. We're talking about a lot of

stuff. So let's jump into some questions here. Post as many as you want. And I'm going to go through and answer some very important stuff today. So Adam asks, where are the places to find training on how to sell financing for services? We've clearly seen that the financing is a massive win. We just need the direction on how to pursue to improve implementation of selling the financing. So here's the secret sauce. HVAC and plumbing do the best job of financing. Also, car dealerships do a great job of financing. I would go to those industries and be a recruiter. I would get on LinkedIn. I'd look for job titles. I might even hire a recruiter, but I'd have somebody with a track record and a history of proving that they're really, really great at selling financing. Then I would get

them trained in your service. And then what I would do is use them as an opportunity. Success leaves clues, right? So Darius Livers taught us a lot. He came and spoke at the first vertical track. He gave me a PowerPoint that really does great. The hardest part about financing is proving to your technicians that it's great. It's better for the clients and it's better for the company. So that's the first thing I would do is I would hire somebody. There's coaches, TJ's on here that teach financing. Joe Crisara teaches financing. There's a lot of great trainers out there that do an excellent job.

Okay. So Christian said, how do you deal with insurance and hiring people with a W-2 and not a 1099? How do you deal with insurance and hiring people with a W-2 and not a 1099? How do you deal with insurance and hiring people with a W-2? I don't really understand that question per se, because insurance, there's vehicle insurance, there's what's called a captive. And if you haven't heard of a captive of insurance, you should look into that. It's a huge opportunity, but really what you should be looking at with insurance. I pay a portion of AFLAC. There's what's called self-insured as well. When you get to a big enough size, I recommend a captive first. And I would not make

claims. One of the things that they're going to tell you, if you've got an EMOD score, and this is more having to do with not health insurance, but the workers comp. But one of the things you can do is actually just pay for the bills when they have to go to, like one guy got something in his eye and we just paid that bill. It was like a couple hundred bucks at an urgent care. There's things you're allowed to do, things you're not allowed to do. But ultimately putting cameras in the vehicles are a smart idea. Dual camera systems, a lot of great stuff. Let's take some questions here. Does your mom still work with you? No, she does not. She'll be 69 next year. So she's retired,

but those were great times. Let's see here. Thanks, Robin. Anthony said, what do you think the best platform to ask for reviews is? I've been pushing Google, but I recently heard that Yelp comes before Google. Most of my consumers only leave a review on one platform, not multiple. So what I like to do is ask for, and I try to get a picture in there. So Google's great, especially if it's coming from your LSA. So those ones are tracked differently. Those ones actually have a higher score than a GMB, Google My Business Review. Yelp is super important because Yelp falls usually first on Google. Make sure you're responding to reviews. And then I like to get Google, Yelp, Nextdoor, and Facebook. And if the customer is feeling really great, then I'll have them do something on the BBB as well.

But really what you want to do is once you get past 1,000, you want to look for places. Like on our Google My Business, I had a one-star on Angie's List. So that week we did a competition to see who could get the most reviews on Angie's List. There's no bad place to get reviews, but the better thing to do is have them attach pictures, hopefully before and afters, and have them leave a long review that explained their scenario, why they called you out. The longer, the better. What it's called is user-generated content, and Google loves it. And there's other places you could get reviews, like citation sites. But typically, Google is the most important.

Yelp is great. But the problem is, unless they're a Yelp or like an elite, a lot of them don't stick. So my buddy Kellen does a fantastic job kind of helping with how you're going to spend money on Yelp and just really making sure you're responding to reviews. Let's see here. What are your thoughts on Yelp and just really making sure you're responding to reviews. Let's see here. What are your thoughts on Yelp marketing? Like I said, my buddy Kellen does a fantastic job on how to spend money on Yelp. I do it and we see a good ROI. I like Yelp a lot. I like Nextdoor a lot. I like Houzz, H-O-U-Z-Z. You name the lead source, they all work. So what we're doing is we're getting in, obviously, a little bit of garage flooring, garage storage. We're going to be getting into front doors and home automation.

So marketing does a lot more for you when you're able to sell multiple things, especially using financing. So everything starts to pay a better dividend when the ticket goes up and you're selling more things. And I'm sure you guys have been in a house where the person says, do you guys offer other things? The one thing I wouldn't do is not be huge in your current position. So I'm a garage door guy. But what I'm saying is I know a lot of guys that do like 10 things and they don't even make two million dollars of revenue so until i became the market leader at one thing i wouldn't add anything else because it's just throwing it gets confusing and it's hard to manage different tasks like that

but hvac plumbing electrical that usually most people do all three so i want to do garage doors garage floors garage storage front doors and home automation because of the MyQ system on garage doors. Let's see here. Reading your book, I heard you started lawn care and landscaping right out of high school. How much revenue were you able to bring at the peak of the business? I was bringing in about $40,000 a month. I didn't build it because I was bartending. I was bussing tables.

It was a good little business and there was a lot of cash to be made. But the problem was if I was to go back into landscaping, I'd buy state-of-the-art equipment. I might even use battery-powered things because you spend a lot of money on gas and you got to be a good recruiter. And what I try to do is I'd be a specialist. I did a lot of drip systems. I used to do water conservation analysis and show big facilities and how I could save them a massive amount of money. So you need something apples to apples. You need to learn to sell oranges. Where's the best place to recruit managers? From Anthony. I want someone who is highly

motivated and I can see things through to completion. I've been really good. So Elise is my head of training and she's a great leader. And she came from the casino industry. When COVID hit a lot of hospitality industries, whether it's managing a fine dining restaurant like Steak 44, there's a lot of opportunities to take from high-end hotels, hospitality is where I would look, and then other home service companies that are larger that understand how to write high tickets. They understand how to do a lot of great things. I talk about a lot of stuff on my TikTok.

If you guys aren't on Instagram or TikTok, go to official Tommy Mello, T-O-M-M-Y-M-E-L-L-O. And I put out some pretty great content there are you still doing shop tours yeah yeah i still do probably about one a month i try to coordinate multiple people to come out how would you compensate techs if you enrolled them in outside training and takes a few weeks six weeks to get a certification. I pay my techs around $750 per tech while they're training, but then we feed them and do a lot of cool stuff. That's a good number, but six weeks, it just depends on the industry.

But I usually try to get them around a grand a week. But, for example, if I got a guy coming back to Phoenix to train for a week, I'll usually pay them on average what they make because it's an investment. It's not really a cost. I don't look at that as a cost. Let's see. Work in a family-signed business. Don't have core values, org chart, training, recruiting, hiring ads. We're just trying to overcome with work and the owner does all the pricing. Where to start for the most impact? Listen, you guys know I'm a big fan of Al Levy. The 7 Power Contractor, I would obviously invest in his manual standard operating procedures. 7powercontractor.com forward slash HSM saves you some money on that. I asked Al to give the

listeners a discount. So it's really an investment and no one uses Al. You should be using his couple hours to get on the phone with him. You'd be a lot smarter to use up his hours. A lot of the people buy those manuals and never use Al because buying manuals, making them your own, but making them into effect, like get them being used. I think that's one of the core things I did in like 2017 that changed my life forever. Because people knew how to win the game when they know standard operating procedures, how to set up your office in a way that's functional. He taught us checklist. He said, you don't need more than two trucks, one for install, one for training. He helped me find

Dan from KickCharge to do my logos. Al introduced me to Alan Rohr and helped me get my financial quick check in order. So not only did I use Al, but I extracted everything, all of his contacts, and that's one of the ways we were really able to grow is he had some great resources behind him, and I used every single one of them. Andrew.

Hey, Tommy. How many states do you think A1 will expand to by the end of 2022? What are regions are you focusing on currently? What's up, brother? Things are going really good. We've got seven companies. We're currently under LOI and everything goes right with the deal that I'm working on. We'll be expanding into all 50 states in every region of Canada. And I don't know if we'll get there by the end of next year, but we're going to hire four more integration teams. We're bringing on two consultants that

are going to change the way we do things. I think we will be, you know, people don't believe this, but we'll be multi-billions within two years. Right now we're at just under 200 million, but the fact that I believe that we'll be several billion makes me start with the results and then backfill what I need to do to do that. So what needs to happen? Well, we needed a consultant in the call center. We needed some things in marketing. The training is going amazing, but we could double down on recruiters. We're actually got a gal coming into town. I'm building a leadership training and we're trying to hunt a little bit more. We farm well. We hire people and grow them.

But at the rate I'm trying to grow, I need to be able to hunt a little bit more. We're working on four different softwares that are going to change the way we do business. But I got big goals. I love it when people don't believe me because those are the one reason I wake up and I just want to like prove them wrong. So a lot of people say, you know, that's not possible. And I say, okay, hold my beer. This is not going to be hard. The thing that you'll find here at A1 is people have bought into my vision and the people around me. I mean, the president, the CFO, Adam, Brian, Luke, Jim, Leslie. I mean, look, the people are

everything in a business. And when you treat them right, you give them something to show up for. You make sure they're having fun along the way. There's no limit to how successful you can be. What do you think is the biggest difference between your mindset now and your mindset seven years ago? Number one is I thought I knew what was going on in the back end of the financing. Look, I had to close four markets down because I got a little overzealous. So I'm developing this leadership program. So I'm investing 10 grand into this guy that's going to help us with storytelling. We're having another gal come out and teach us how to recruit.

We're going to have a person come teach us how to have more effective meetings. We're going to try to bring fire back in people's belly to make them excite each person and recognize more people. We're teaching people time management. I'm going to invest several hundred thousand dollars in an internal leadership training program. That's not easy. And it's going to make people better mothers and fathers. And it's going to make people really, I want to invest. I want to double down

on leadership and culture. And I think I had this attitude seven years ago that if I didn't work, it wouldn't get done correctly. And now I'm just, I'm like, how do I delegate more? How do I hire the right person? Outcomes quite differently. I think it's get the right people on the bus, right? Jim Collins, once you get the right people, it's amazing how quick you can go. I used to joke around and say it was the T&A show, Tommy and Adam, because we were the ones working on all the projects. But now there's hundreds of projects being done. We bought a company, Colorado Springs. My cousin, he's an amazing guy.

We worked on the integration, had a great team out there working on that. I'm traveling around the country right now, looking at companies that want to partner with us. And we're going to give them great opportunities. What's so nice about this whole concept of Elevate is I really think people win underneath with us. I mean, there doesn't have to be a negotiation that doesn't make both parties feel valued. And the mindset of how do I build a company where the vendors get to win and the employees get to win and the clients for sure get to win and the partnerships get to win. And so how do you figure out a way that's not one-sided? A lot of people, they negotiate, it's a win-lose situation, and it doesn't need to be that way.

What are your thoughts on paying yourself first? I'm not sure if I should start paying myself or not. I'm sure each situation is different. Well, the whole concept of profit first is a great concept. If you're not paying yourself, your financials aren't accurate. You should be paying yourself. I think I started paying myself 60,000 about 10 years ago. And my CPA would call me each year and say, you got to give yourself a raise. You got to give yourself a raise. You got to give yourself a raise. So right now I'm probably at a few hundred grand. And then the company pays for the vehicle, most of my bills,

most of my restaurant bills. But my lifestyle, it's easy to save money when you just don't live extravagantly. I mean, the gas is probably my biggest bill right now. But my whole mindset is, how do I use money to become more efficient? So Bree is going to get into event planning for the company. So I'm going to have three assistants coming on that she's going to train. Some of the focus is on my travel. My goal is to become 10 times more efficient. I want to hire a full-time chef. I've got somebody helping out right now, but we're really going to figure out where's the

time being spent and how do I spend more time? How do I spend more efficient time to get the goals done that I want? So I think in my position, it's going out and buying more companies. It's showing up to work every day, telling people how much I love them. It's maintaining the culture we have and continuing to build leaders and giving people the resources they need to become efficient. And that's the biggest challenge is I've got a whiteboard now in my office. I got a whiteboard in here, my office at home. And so I literally whiteboard a lot to figure out what's the most important thing to be doing today. And what's so nice about having a great team behind you is

you could do a lot more. You could do like 10 things at once. And it's crazy. This market out there is pretty interesting because I think it's becoming a buyer's market. And everybody's telling me they're having a bad couple of months, the last couple of months. And we just set another record day last week, record week, record month again. And I just feel like I'm in the first inning. I'm just getting started. I mean, the game we're playing as of next first quarter of next year, it's not even going to be fair. So the question is, when I go into a market, I want to meet with the top three companies in the garage industry and ask them politely if they'd want to partner up and I'll make

them a lot of money. Or we're going in here either way in 90 days. Here's what we did to the last market we got into. Because now we're actually, we've got a really deep bench. And with the consultants coming on and some of the stuff we're working on, it's next level. It's taking data and integrating so many systems, so many data points, uncovering every rock. I can't imagine with the data that we're paying for and what we're doing. it literally, it's not fair. We're recruiting better. We're getting better clients. We're maximizing opportunities more

and everybody's winning. And with the stuff coming online in the next couple of months, the new software that Jim's developing, what if I only marketed the garage doors that needed to be fixed? And what if I had builder trends? What if I knew they qualified for financing before I got there? What if I knew how qualified for financing before I got there? What if I knew how many cycles were on the garage before they even did? These are some of the things we're working on. What if I knew every time somebody pulled a permit to fix up their house before they even started it? Those are the type of things I'm talking about. And I just feel like it's an unfair playing field. I really do. I don't know why God has kept his eye on me,

but he's introduced me to the right people at the right time. And I'm just glad everything happened for a reason. And it was tough. Listen, there's nobody that's made more mistakes. If you added up all your mistakes on here that's listening right now, there's about 25 people. And there's probably tens of thousands that will download this over the next few months.

But I would say I'm the king of failure. And I'm proud of it because I don't go down the same track and make the same mistakes over and over again. I love to be challenged. And this next year, I think it's so important. We've got a track record of not losing a technician out of every acquisition we've done so far. And that's a great record to have.

And we've got a really great opportunity to get guys out of the truck. And I think that's something that no other company in our space is offering. Because, you know, my shoulders aren't what they used to be because of winding springs. So how do you build a company where everyone wins? How do you take out equity? Cody, that's a great question. I think you're discussing selling equity, bringing on an equity partner. And there's a lot of ways to do that. You could go find a firm.

There's several firms I know that help with this process, but it really depends on what you're trying to do, how much you're trying to get. Right now, the debt markets are not very good. It's hard to find money right now. So therefore, it's a buyer's market. It's a great time to be buying. But the reason you would take on an equity partner is because you want to scale. And if I was looking at buying a company that I wanted to invest in buying their equity, I would want to make sure they have manual standard operating procedures checklist. There's an expected result. How have you differentiated yourself? Are you a platform company? The multiples are low if yourself? Are you a platform company? You know, the multiples are low if you're not really a platform, but if you just need to get money out, you see, we add our systems.

It's interesting because there's one of two companies we buy. One is a company that doesn't really do any marketing and is busy as can be. And there's an opportunity to raise their revenue like crazy. Then there's other companies that spend 20% of their budget on marketing, 20% of revenue. And those ones, I need to get the profitability up. So the companies I've seen, they're all a different mission going into them. There's a different goal. But there's so many opportunities out there.

And what's so nice is the employees get better benefits. They get more opportunity. The management makes more money. I'm just excited because when you go into that type of situation, everyone's got a whip. And if you could build it like that, you don't need to change a bunch of stuff. But when you give them software that they could see the facts, what ends up happening is people self-correct very, very quickly. They go, holy crap, I didn't realize we had a CSR that was at 40% booking rate.

And so they work with that person. Or they find a different position, maybe in accounting. I don't know. Maybe they're doing outbound calls, but there's a lot of opportunities there. So let's see here. What book on arbitrage would you recommend? I'd like to get deeper in understanding it. The Private Equity Playbook, and then there's a second version with Adam Coffey. I think you'd get a lot out of that. When you talk about arbitrage, there's a lot of ways to make money. It's crazy what you could do. You buy at one marketplace and you sell it in another marketplace for more. Some people, they call it Amazon arbitrage. Literally, they buy springs on Home Depot and sell them on Amazon, and they make five bucks a piece, but they never touch it. They're selling stuff off different marketplaces.

There's a lot of ways to make money. I think the main thing is, can you make it easy and simple? Because really, when you think about arbitrage, you want to think about how you can work the least and let arbitrage happen by creating a system. Other questions, any suggestions on you find a better circle at 40? Yeah. Well, I am part of $200,000 a year companies and I just joined the 25 K group. There's all kinds of associations that you get yourself around people that are like-minded. And I actually had Jim call one of the ladies. She's doing 200 million now for working out and like fitness supplies. And I told him to set up a time for us to fly out and see her because I met her at a hundred million mastermind pay a hundred grand a year. You do got to do over a hundred million a

year. And it's a great group of people. And I've got a lot to learn from her. So I kind of am a hunter in that sense that I find people that are really good at something from another industry. And then I implemented in mine, but that I would recommend probably Joe Polish, 25 K group. I can set you up with that, but look, I get coached all the time. You know, me and Ellie, we were out to dinner the other day. He took me out for a great steak. Jonathan Wissman, the sales boss. I've got two consultants coming on right now. Jim is always, you know, helping me.

I love having smart people around. Let's see here. What are the three KPIs that roll through your head each day? Oh, there's four. Average ticket, conversion rate, booking rate, and cost per acquisition. With those four KPIs, I'll say them slow. Your average ticket, that's pretty simple. Conversion rate is face-to-face.

How much are you closing? Booking rate is simply every form fill, everything that comes through, what's your booking rate? And then I look at my cost per acquisition. Some companies that we're partnering with don't spend anything in marketing because they have so many stickers in the garages. So there's a real opportunity there. Those are the four KPIs that go into any business. I don't care what it is, and I can find a way to make more money. Do you personally train your salespeople? I go in for four hours and I do an orientation and I tell people,

this is the most important meeting you're ever going to go to. And then I'm on a call every morning at 7.30 and 7.45 commenting and asking questions. And I'm celebrating the big wins. And then we've got a meeting for an hour to an hour and a half on Thursday morning. And then I call probably five of my techs to ask them what's working on the field. There's a few guys I call to have them try different things out. And we're looking for other industries. We take these gold nuggets that we learn and I travel and I speak. I take all these things from all these other industries and then I apply them to ours. And that's why we built the Unicorn.

That's why, look, we're paving the road where nobody's been. I know just on the phone with Luke and I said, I'm going to start making history. We as a team are going to start making history. We as a team are going to start making history. Now for me, it's just, if I want to leave an imprint in home service, that's never been done before. And it gets me up. It gets me going in the morning. You know, I'm just getting started. I feel like today's my first day of work because I don't feel like I go to work. I get to do whatever I want. I choose to be here because I actually enjoy it. And people see me, I show up. I think showing up is half the battle. There's a lot of guys that

don't even make a million dollars a year profit and they don't go to work anymore. And maybe they just hated their job. Maybe they don't like their people. I think that's pretty crappy if you don't love your people. But I don't know. I get it, I guess, for some people. I've heard you talk about dispatchers and CSRs. Do the CSRs do the outbound calling? Do you have someone else for that? How many times do you outbound a client per year? Well, we've used HubSpot to build in some automations, but I don't do a whole lot of outbound because I get so many inbound. CSRs take the incoming calls. There's about 65 agents. And then the dispatchers figure out where the book call who's supposed to go where. And we came up with a tune-up tech that goes out to every service agreement. We sold over 2000 service agreements last month. And it's a program that

took years to build. And once it's built, what I love about it is even if you guys built the exact same thing, you had the same software that's taken years to get, you got to hit an economies of scale to make it work. And you need over a hundred technicians to get a service agreement that actually makes money. And then you got to be good at selling doors in the future, build a fence around that customer and know how you're going to. You got to be good at financing. There's a lot of things that need to happen first to make the service agreements work. Oh, let's see here. What's more beneficial, a 1099 or a W-2 employee?

So a W-2 is always better because you have more control over W-2. You're going to spend more money. But if you look at the roofing industry, they use all 1099s. And there's an opportunity to do that same thing in solar. But what I would tell you is the only reasons I like 1099s is if I get slammed in a market, it's nice to have a couple of guys I can call to do installs if you get behind. And they'll put a magnet on their truck. They'll wear your shirt.

They'll understand your training. It's great to have backup as 1099s. But a W-2, you could actually schedule. I mean, there's certain laws. If you look up, how do I know if I should classify my technicians as a 1099? There's all these rules. If you get to be a decent sized company and you're 1099 and your employees, and you're not paying them on their LLC, they can't be doing more than 70% of the work just for you. They can't wear your uniform. They can wear a vest, but they can't dress up exactly like your guys. If they're driving your truck, wearing your shirts, going out on your schedule,

they're a W-2. Release date of the book will be March. Tony, average ticket for service only or install factor in? I factor in both. I think it's important to add in your sales because we sell more doors on service calls than we do door estimates. So I think you should include that. And we built, so Brian actually wrote a chapter in my book and he talks about scorecards. It's an amazing chapter. I read the book again yesterday. I think this book is like my best work times 10. It came out better than you could imagine. And I'm working on a new book in January that'll take six months. It's called ADHD. It's how to harness the power of being able to do 10 things at once, but it's discipline

and it's focus, but it's not a curse. And I think there's a lot of mothers and fathers out there that need to understand that their kids are not bad people. If you take advantage of their superpower, which could be ADHD. So that's another book I'll be working on. I think I just named it The Power of ADHD. But what do you guys think of that title? Let's see here. How do you hold your employees accountable to your systems and processes, scorecards, reviews, repetition? We built a scorecard service and is a really

good product for us because we're able to put in pictures. So if I want my guys to weigh the door, I get a picture of them weighing the door. By building checklists and asking for certain data, and then I have a whole team that's called my data integrity team, making sure that everything is done properly on everything. And then there's another way you could do it. You could build your own secret shopper that you could buy a secret shopper service. But what I would do, if I were you, I would have two friends each month and I'd give them a sheet, a checklist. And I'd say, listen, I'm going'm gonna come out. We're gonna sell you some stuff. Don't do anything over $1,000 and no openers So with these strings rollers cables bearings, I'll still pay my guys on it, but I could ask them to make sure stuff's going right

And that's a smart way to find out, you know, especially if you're curious about a certain technician or installer Yes, there will be a cost associated with that, but who cares? And then tell your friends that we did a good job. You know, let us know how we did online. And they're more than likely to do it. That's not doing anything wrong along to the terms of, you know, as long as you did the work, you're allowed to ask for a review. So that's what I would do. I'd build up my own secret shopper process.

Let's see here. When purchasing a home service business, what would be your advice to create a smooth transition for employees and operations to keep cashflow coming in? So you need an integration team and you need an integration checklist. So ours is like 50 pages. But first of all, one of the things you'll see that be broken is how the licensing gets turned over, who pays for the bills, when does that change? There's a lot of things that need to happen. And that's really what a CFO, Adrian Biltars, we took. Ken Goodrich was kind enough to share his. We added on to that. And then each company we buy, we add 25 things. Right now,

my cousin's company, I think he's just going to cancel his credit card and then we'll be getting phone calls, but we're going to transfer everything in QuickBooks over to us. We go out, we meet their wives and husbands and kids, and we go take everybody to dinner and have a good time. And we've got a plan and we show them how this is a great thing for the company and here's how you're going to win. And every single person in that company needs to feel like this is a good deal for them. This is a good opportunity. And that's how we make people feel. And we're able to train dispatchers, CSRs.

We've got a lot of different roles in finance. Believe it or not, there's a lot of great people out there at these companies. And they know a lot of things, but they're used to wearing 20 hats. With us, they only need to wear one so they get to focus on their... Like for example, a lot of people have a general manager or an office manager that handle all the mail, the bills. They answer some phone calls. They're handling a lot of things. When you're able to get them focused and give them a manual on how they win and give them performance pay, it's pretty fun. They like it because they know how to win the game.

Good resource to figure out a budget plan for your business that has few or no employees, but wants to grow large. So at the end of January, I'm going to be going to Vegas. I'll be letting you guys know, and we're going to be building our budget. And I'm going to be inviting a couple hundred companies to come along. I'm not trying to make a bunch of. And I'm going to be inviting a couple hundred companies to come along. I'm not trying to make a bunch of money. I'm not trying to lose money though. And it's going to be a game changer for companies

to learn how to really build a real budget. We're going to have a lot of resources there. So you might want to come to that. If you want, just email Bree. B-A-R-E-V-A-L-O at A1Garage.com. I think that's a great resource. Tom Howard's a master of that, but having a great controller and a great CFO, they helped to build that. I didn't go to our budget meeting last year because quite frankly, I told them where I wanted to be. I told them I wanted it to be their idea to figure it out because I know that I talk a lot and I know that I have my own vision.

I wanted it to be their vision. I wanted them to understand where we were going to hit. And we've done exactly what we needed to do. And we're hitting all of our goals and it's life-changing. It literally is, but it's not just life-changing for me. It's life-changing for each and every person I get to work with, my coworkers. Well, guys, there's no more questions. we've answered as many as we can here i think i'll leave is a great resource i think bringing on help and advisors maybe in the next one i'll bring on

everybody that i've hired but dozens and dozens of people i'm involved with a lot of different associations and i'm on the phone all the time learning. And one day Ken Goodrich told me, he's like, you're learning so much. He's like, you're going to be outgrowing a lot of people around you. So I started a book club with the internal employees. This is the new book we're reading. I recommended this from Authority Brands, but it's called Halftime by Bob Buford, Moving from Success to Significance. We're going to start this book in December. I'm trying to figure out a fun way to have everybody want to read. I'd want to listen to podcasts. I want to learn. I want to travel. One of the things I started doing is bringing a lot of the managers to different places like

Pantheon with Service Titan and get out of their comfort zone and learn and ask questions and take notes. And I love that they're starting to see there's a different world out there. There's a lot of people that are successful. I learned from so many things, keep an open mind and you'll be a lot more successful. The difference between us and most companies is we actually implement things very quickly. And then we perfect them. And then we keep them implemented. Thank you guys very much. And you guys take it easy.

Have a fantastic day and make it a great weekend. We'll see you guys later. 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 gonna find out all the new podcasts. You're gonna 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 gonna do to become a billion dollar company. And 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 life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.