The Home Service Expert Podcast - Q&A with Tommy - Focusing on the Right Metrics to Quickly Grow Your Company

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

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 business growth and strategy, franchising, pricing, marketing, people management...

I'd say the top racehorses in the world are focused. I'd say double down on your data, double down on data accuracy, the KPIs, know where you need to be spending your time. And I would say, do not buy foolish things. Go out there, buy a house. Do not buy a new vehicle. You don't need one.

Do not buy a Harley. I'd say build up your balance sheet with as much money as possible. I'd say invest in yourself. I'd say build up your balance sheet with as much money as possible. I'd say invest in yourself. I'd say make it to every conference you can without distracting yourself from the business. Learn to network. Double down on networking. I'd say don't be afraid to ask.

Ask them the largest, best companies that aren't necessarily in your same market but are in a similar industry. And I'd ask them for their KPIs and ask them where you should be. What should your gross profit be? There's a lot of questions I would ask on that. 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. Hey guys, what's going on? Another Q&A here. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert Podcast. We've got a fun Q&A here starting,'m just gonna get going with it if you haven't bought the book at homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast and you need to join the group all you got to do is go on facebook and go to home service expert it's a group join it it's free and we'll alert you every time we're doing the q a and stuff like that so let's get some questions rolling i'll tell you my new book that i'm recording the audible i've already done

one day it's going to be a three-day process but it's called elevate it's going to be coming out if you go to book.elevatewind.com you can order it and it's a pretty big book. So don't have the hard copy yet. But really looking forward to that. Slept weird on my neck. So Winter Rhino X. And what an amazing event. What a good event to be at. There was amazing people there.

Learned a lot. Always learn a lot. Chris put on a fantastic show. And you had a lot of HVAC plumbing companies there that really kick ass. These guys are very good at what they do and got to meet Howard, who used to be helped grow Starbucks to 15,000 stores from like 40. And he brought them up to 15 billion. What an amazing guy. So lots of great stuff this week. And when I get around all these people

and I get around like really, really smart people and I start looking at affiliate deals and thinking outside of the box, people are talking about how they're buying companies, how they're selling their business, how they're rolling up, how they're integrating, just their why, why they do it. They had the influencer panel, or it was the OGs, and they were talking about how hard they've

worked and why they work and just really figuring out why they do what they do and they work so hard. And I really, really liked Jimmy Hiller's answer. Jimmy Hiller said, why does he work so hard? And he said, well, if I didn't work this hard and I spent all my time with family, they wouldn't have any nice things and we wouldn't be able to have a roof over our heads. So I think there's a real point of view there that's important is like, we work hard to have freedom and be able to spend more time. And it's not easy. Everybody out there was like, look, you're going to be putting in hard time, dedication,

and it's never going to be easy. Legger said, how do you train up and motivate sales guys? I have a base salary and commission. Well, commission, I hate the word commission. I use the word performance pay. We've got a scorecard that looks at five things. Just because you're the highest sales doesn't mean you don't have callback rates. We look at callback rates. We look at the five-star reviews they got.

So we actually put their score of how many great reviews they had. We look at how many service calls turned into door sales because, in my opinion, most garage door companies don't believe this, but they want to just get the money right then and there. It's hard to order a door, have it go to the manufacturer, come in, not get dented, and then install it. But it's better for the client. It's better for us. So how do I motivate people? If you go to kelk.a1garagetools.com, you can understand that we have a way to figure out what they want in life. So I have my dream manager, and we kind of reverse engineer what they need to help their dreams come true.

And we make sure they want it. You've got to hire motivated people. In the interview process, you need to find out if they want more out of life. The people that want it, they want to grow. They want to better their best. They want to improve. I don't really care if they're top in the company. I care that they did better than last month, last quarter, last week. I want them to better their best. The way that we do that is we do a lot of ride-alongs, a lot of training. We do morning mojo calls and we talk about the great things. We do weekly one hour. We've got

one-on-one meetings. And I find that guys need 90 days to 120 days to get really good. They got to kind of get in their comfort zone and get comfortable in the garage. So we prefer to make technicians than get older technicians that have experience. Because a lot of companies say, I need an experienced guy that's good at sales. And they give them a $10,000 bonus. And these guys are just looking for the next best thing. They'll take a new bonus every year. And then you got a contract and then you go to court.

It's just, it's drama. So I just like to make really amazing technicians. And not saying that the other guys that have experience aren't good, but I prefer to build them homegrown. They do two months of training and we acknowledge them all the time. And I think that that's important. Let's see here. Running a small family-owned plumbing company in a saturated city. Would you focus on getting

an Angie home advisor or hiring online marketing? We stay busy on our GMB LSA and our reviews, but need more work. Well, I would tell you this. Obviously, Google's God. I'd reactivate your client list. So make sure you're reaching out to older clients because a customer that already bought and spent money with you will most likely spend more money. And yes, I do think AngelList, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, eLocal, Houzz, Porridge, the list goes on and on. You've got to be very, very good

at answering those leads quickly. And the answer is yes, Yelp works. Those are mostly form fills. So you've got to be very, very good. You've got to have a dedicated team. And back in the day, I had one of my CS guys that I had a separate cell phone and her old job was just to respond to messages and book calls. Now we got spoiled the last couple of years. I think we all kind of got spoiled because we just needed technicians. We had more leads than we could handle. Well, going into January, we're looking at it going, we need more leads. Everybody needs more leads. So you got to look for every source, but here's what I'd recommend. You don't go after everything at once. You call Angie, you call HomeAdvisor owned by the same company. You call all these lead

aggregators and you kind of find out what the volume would be. And if it's high enough volume, you focus on one thing first and get the reviews and make sure you get the conversion rate up and book those calls. Then I look at my average ticket and just make sure it's making sense because we know there's a burden cost to run a call, right? So you're going to spend money running out there. And some of these jobs are just a race to the bottom. How could you be the cheapest? I say, well, people are selling apples to apples. I sell oranges. So how do I differentiate myself? Well, we do drug test background checks, eight weeks of training. We show up in a new vehicle, but more importantly, we make a friend while we're there.

People buy the experience. They remember how you made them feel. So I don't think anything is necessarily a bad lead. The bad leads are people that are like, I just want to do the bare minimum. And I used to deal with those clients all the time, but then I'd explain to them and spend time with them. And they spend more money because they understand that's an opportunity cost if it breaks again. And I can't say how many clients I've talked to in their garage and said, man, the guy

last year told me this was going to happen. I just thought he was a salesman. You didn't connect with that client properly. So I think you got to quadruple down on training. One of the questions we asked at RhinoX was, what do you do in a recession? And the fact is you get really good key performance indicators. You dial in your systems, you go back to your grassroots, you go back to guerrilla marketing, and you've got to be better than the rest. You got to not quit on marketing.

And sometimes you got to top grade. Last year and the year before and the year before that, we were essential services during COVID. And it was very easy. Everybody, if you didn't make money last year, like a lot of money, then you might want to reconsider being in the home service industry because it was the easiest year to make a fortune. But the average person yesterday said they raised their prices five to seven times last year. So hopefully you guys are pricing right. This is about taking care of clients. But if you're not taking care of your internal clients, which are your people, then they're leaving all the time. They're looking for the next best thing. They don't feel like they belong. They don't feel like the structure of the company is something that they want to really be at. So my buddy Keegan walked in years

ago and said, you don't have a coffee machine. The lights aren't right here. It's not attractive and conducive to make people happy on Mondays. So we really worked hard to create a great environment for each and every person here. I'm not perfect. I mean, listen, if I said I was, I'd want to quit because I feel like I'm at the beginning of my career, even though I've been doing garage doors for 16 years. But I got a lot of work to do on myself. And the first thing I would do if I were you in this situation is I'd look in the mirror and say, how could I become a better leader? How could I become a better version of myself? Because believe it or not, if you're lazy,

if you're sloppy, if you don't show up, a lot of your people won't want to as well. How is the content manager search going? It's going really good. There's certain roles now where I don't want to hire somebody that's learning with me. I want to hire somebody. I'd rather pay them triple, but I want somebody that says, here is my resume. Here's what I've done. I know the code. I know how to do this because I'm buying time. Now, a lot of us, when we're smaller and we're doing a few, three, five, $10 million, and that's not small, but relatively speaking, we like to hire people at a better rate and we're okay learning with them and investing and just going in. But at the point that I'm at, I need an ace in the hole. I need somebody that's going to be dialed in. I mean, listen, I got a guy starting on Tuesday and his resume. I mean, I think he's going to be able to double our lead count. Using social media, by the way, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram,

LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, all those ways are possible for leads. It's just cracking the code for one of them at a time, A-B testing. And it's something where you're always having to learn. So you need dedicated people. It's an assembly line. You want a specialist in that thing. Because if you just, I call it spray and pray. If you're just spraying and praying, you're going to run out of money quick. What do you look for in a company that you're considering buying up? And at what point in your business does it make sense to buy up a new business? This is a great question. And I asked that to the panel yesterday because everybody thinks, man, I'm just going to go out and buy companies. Number one, make sure the back of your house is perfect. It's clean. You're making lots and lots

of money. If you don't have a model that's doing 20% bottom line, do not buy a company. It's hard. I think buying smaller companies is easier. And if you're already in a market, doing a tuck-in is easier. I think when you buy a huge company and you're a huge company if you're already in a market, doing a tuck-in is easier. I think when you buy a huge company and you're a huge company, you're also figuring out the infrastructure. It's a lot of work. Sometimes it takes two years to properly integrate it. Whereas you can buy small ones. And what I love to look at for me is I love companies that aren't doing Google, LSA, GMB, PPC. I love it when they have a huge customer list. They've got a lot of stickers on the doors and they're not spending a lot in marketing because they've been there for 30 years because I know what I can do when we buy that company. So I look at things.

Sometimes I need to reduce the marketing spend, but most of the time, pick up their marketing spend, retrain their technicians, increase their booking rate, open nights and weekends. And by the way, some guys aren't open Sundays. I've got guys begging to work Sundays. Both decision makers are at home. I got guys begging to work nights, not every person, but you got the husband and wife for both decision makers at the home, your conversion rates through the roof, higher service to sales. So if I was a technician, because I used to work in the restaurant industry, I would prefer, let me work every emergency call, you know, three nights a week and give me a Saturday or Sunday. And then I would blast pay-per-click emergency service available.

And those jobs are just handy to fix today. I'm willing to pay for it. So hopefully that answers your question. You could ask more. Hey, Tommy, I'm from Australia. Any chance of heading to Australia for it. So hopefully that answers your question. You could ask more. Hey, Tommy, I'm from Australia. Any chance of heading to Australia for a conference? I am headed to Australia in May. So if you want to email me, I think it's Tommy at homeserviceexpert.com or A1leadmanager at Gmail. I think I got like 80 emails, but I'm going to be in Australiaia in may when i come to a conference in australia if i'm there i'll go to it i'll definitely do whatever but i don't know

how often i'll get to uh australia but send me the details and we'll look at it live junk lists what business advice would you give tommy in his mid-20s starting out, now that you have built and grown A1 to what it is? Well, number one, I'd say wear a blinder. I'd say the top racehorses in the world are focused. I'd say double down on your data. Double down on data accuracy, the KPIs. Know where you need to be spending your time. And I would say, do not buy foolish things. Go out there, buy a house. Do not buy a new vehicle. You don't need one. Do not buy a Harley. I'd say, build up your balance sheet with as much money as possible. I'd say, invest in yourself. I'd say, make it to every conference you can without distracting yourself from the business. Learn to network.

Double down on networking. I say don't be afraid to ask. Ask the largest, best companies that aren't necessarily in your same market but are in a similar industry. And I'd ask them for their KPIs and ask them where you should be. What should your gross profit be? There's a lot of questions I would ask on that. I went out and I probably spent

half a year, total amount of time between conferences and going to really great companies. And I'm not afraid to get on a phone call with anybody. And I'll tell you what, there's a thing called reciprocity and helping people. It just seems to come full circle. So I say, pay it forward as much as possible, like I'm trying to do here. And be open to let people come in. But I'd say, make sure you get on a schedule where it's not a distraction. So have certain days where you're going to do that and pay it forward. And just realize giving a shipment goes a long way for people showing up. I try to limit my vacations and get on a cadence. I don't like to be anywhere for more than a week because I get a little anxiety because I like to be here. But I've been out and out a lot trying to speak. And a lot of people ask me, what is speaking at a landscaping event do for you? What is speaking at pest control or gutter con or whatever it might be? And I'm like, it's crazy how you can take one idea from another industry and apply it to

this. And it just, I can't even tell you guys some of the shit. My problem is too. What I would tell my younger self is stick to an idea, get it, get it rolling and make sure you've got a data accuracy team or data integrity team to keep it going.

Let's see. I feel like all I do is run, run, run. Women owned and with kids in this office. I'm zapped. Here's another thing. Hire for your weaknesses. So clake at a1garage.com. She can tell you where we get our polos.

clake at a1garage.com. If you feel like all you're doing is going, going, going, and you need to get control of your time and your calendar, and you need to find out your biggest distractions and try to hire a person to take up that time, you know,

without Bree. And I'm hiring a new executive assistant and a chief of staff, two project managers. You know, I Basically, this year, I'm getting bulky. My payroll is going through the roof. Why? Because we're going to 10x this business again. And I need the right leadership. I need the right people. And I need specialists. It's very hard to, you guys probably heard me say this, but gain in muscle and also get shredded. This is a buling year for me.

I'm going to put on the weight, which is revenue. And then there will come a time that I'm going for the bottom line. Now, I'd like to do both. You don't want to ever fall below like 12% bottom line. But 15 is where I'm targeting. But when I'm going to get shredded, I want to be about 25% to 30% bottom line. And people say that's not possible, but they don't really know me very well. Hi, Tommy.

What do you think the best resource for learning how to hire in today's market? Well, read the book, Who. I had him on the podcast. It's going to be coming out. I did it on a Facebook Live as well. So I read the book, and then realized that the average person spends two and a half hours on social media. There's a few key things here. You want to be very good on Glassdoor, and indeed, make sure you got happy employees and good reviews. And I tell you what, Jody Underhill

has taught me a lot, and Vanessa. These guys are top of the line, and Jody's willing to take a phone call. Rabbit Hire Pro, Jody Underhill, he's got so much data and so many interesting things, and what he's building out is a way to understand all your metrics when it comes to hiring. Why didn't a guy work out? Ride along forums, blind surveys out to your people. Because really what it starts with is culture. And I know that sounds bad to a lot of people. How do I build a culture when no one's showing up? And if I don't do it right, it won't get done. And it's just not the way a great company works. So Jeff Sanford said, it's all about the people.

Jared said, I run a small low voltage AV smart home and security company in Southeast Florida, trying to grow it like you have. What advice would you give me to grow a luxury based specialized business on a larger scale like your own? Well, I love larger scale. What I would read is no BS marketing to the affluent because first you got to figure out where your avatar is. Then you need a data analyst to figure out what zip codes. You can grab things like credit card score,

square foot of the house, how much do they pay for the house? So when you're working on a business like that, it's important that you have your avatar. Now I used to think I'd do anywhere with a garage door. But if I showed you guys the heat map and service type of where we're making our most money, it's dark green. It's a heat map of where we're making the most money. So what I would do is get with a data analyst, plug in every

one of your customers, and start to pull out some analytics of what your perfect customer looks like. And then you could use data. And you can buy the data to find out where all those customers are, what they're looking at, what their habits are, where they go to the grocery stores, do they buy Yacht Magazine? And I'll tell you what, Joe Polish wrote a book, Piranha Marketing, years ago, but that's a book I would read too if I were you. What are the next five things you have on your personal target your own personal target list I mean look I'm moving into a new house the 25th of this month I've got a lot of things on my list

but hiring the right people Is basically the next five things I've got a list of who I need and i'm not the best interviewer Because you know, I have adhd and I'm not the best interviewer because I have ADHD, and I don't want to scare people. But if they can't speak fast, think clearly, and get to the finish line, then it's very hard for me to have patience with people. So getting the right people around me is my number one priority. I'm trying to 10x my efficiency

with systems and processes. To do that, I need great people to facilitate for my weaknesses. So identifying your weaknesses quickly and then building systems and tactics around how to make yourself more efficient. And I'm looking for efficiency everywhere I go. It's called Lean, Getting Lean. And there's another good book. It's called The Two-Second Lean Action. If you want to realize how to always be making your life easier, read this book, Two-Second Lean, Paul Akers. I had a podcast with him about five years ago. It's in the Home Service Expert Library that I would say I've grown a lot for podcasting. I'm not the best.

I'm not perfect, but I've come a long way in the questions I ask the way I think through the podcast. So if it's not great, don't get mad. How does the booking process go between the customer and the salesperson, estimated at the office and the admin if necessary? The booking process. So you've got two types of bookings. Are they booking online just through our schedule engine, which is beautiful, takes the CSR out of it. We have a $40 service call.

We waive it sometimes depending on if we're at capacity or not. And if the customer is pretty serious, we make sure they're a decision maker, but the CSR books it. Now, we've got two windows, 8 to 1, 1 to 6. And then in the morning, we don't have any jobs assigned because I don't want. And trust me, the dispatchers are always smarter than I am. But they take it and they say, based on this zip code, this routing, here's where we're going to schedule it. Because my goal is never to give my technicians a timeline when they got to go to their next job. So they're not allowed to see their next job because it's not fair to them to let them see all their jobs and then say, I got to get to this next job. No, if you're at the house, you're in the kitchen, you're bonding

with the customer, building a friend, you should be allowed to stay there all day if you're fixing four different doors, doing all the work on them. So it's our job as a dispatcher to figure out that next job, figure out where that technician needs to go next. Now, the routing systems and that AI is creating, unfortunately, is not where it needs to be yet because they're not taking into consideration the number of doors, which if you look at regression testing, you could take in certain

things. In statistics, you could add a data set and see if there's a significant data to tell you that that job will be better. And what we realized is the number of doors really makes the difference in the garage door industry. But I'll tell you what, if you're not looking at a BI tool like Power BI or Domo, we use grow.com. You should seriously start looking. But that, again, takes a dedicated person with a brain, a very large brain, a very large IQ to take analytics and actually apply them to your marketing and your routing and your dispatching. What's the first thing you would do to break through that 5 million ceiling HVAC contractor here? Well,

service agreements are fantastic for HVAC. I'd figure out how to be busy in my slow season, which are service agreements. What I would have to figure out as a way to keep my installers and my great sales guys getting paid through the slow season. And what I would do is double down on reviews. I'd ask each customer for a review. I might service their HVAC unit in the winter, and I'd go after all marketing.

I'd go after a review on Angie's List, review on Google, review on Yelp, review on Facebook, review on Nextdoor. And I would use my downtime to create better marketing for season and make sure I got all the labor ready for the summer. And I would invest in somebody like Al Levy for manuals. I'd invest in Joe Cassara for training. I might join Nextstar. Sometimes people can't join Nextstar because they're not big enough for those zip codes taken but the next era method works it's a system that's created lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of people that have well over 10 million in the bank so i think there's a lot of help out there in hvac plumbing electrical we are focused on garage doors but it's the same mentality as hvac plumbing electrical just a different widget and i'm going after affiliate deals like crazy. Actually, I got a call after this.

If I pull this off, and I've been working on this for years, but I'm right to the point now where I've got, the one thing that we have is we're in 20 states and we'll be in 40 here in the next 18 months. And when you get to that scale, you can do a lot of cool things because people want to work with you. Advertisers will make you way better deals. You can do performance pay. Nobody wants to do performance pay in one market. And I'll tell you what, growing out of

your market is the hardest thing. It's funny because I look at Jimmy Hiller. I look at Paul Kelly. I look at some of these badass companies and they just dominated their area. They grew to hundreds of millions in their own market. And I think that's what private equity is looking at is why do you want to take a little bit? My buddy Doug said this, why do you want a bunch of hot dog stands and a bunch of markets. So my job as the CEO and the leader is to figure out how to get deep into that market, penetrate a big market share. And that's what I'm focused on. Tommy, I love how you have pounded the payment first and been on the front lines. That testimony is worth huge respect. So with that said, I'm new CSR. I would love to hear

your rebuttal to customers that call in for parts only and a phone quote only. I would love to hear your gold nugget on overcoming these calls and setting an on-site appointment. Thank you. Well, Sylvia, you call in for a part. And what I usually say, and it depends on the industry, but if you're in the garage door industry, what I say is, first of all, I've got your address. I know your zip code. I've got your phone number. And I say, what kind of partner are you looking for? And usually what I'll explain to them is, listen, there are a lot of different parts for a lot of different things. Just giving you a spring quote or just giving you a remote, you need there's a good chance we're

not going to get the right stuff so here's what i like to do what are your crossroads i get their cross streets right and i say i got a technician in that area and he should have the parts on the truck if it's something easy and you want to do yourself we could possibly sell you the parts i don't know some of it might be dangerous we might not sell it to you but i would need an exact circumstance but i say listen he you the parts. I don't know. Some of it might be dangerous. We might not sell it to you, but I would need an exact circumstance. But I say, listen, he has the parts on the truck. What I can do is have him stop by. And there's a good chance we could just get you the parts then, but I want to make sure it's the right parts. And let us just get a look at it because I know my job as a CSR is to do one thing, get the technician to the house. His job is to build rapport educate smile and earn that

customer's trust because if you just want a part go on amazon and buy a chinese piece of junk and you'll be calling me in six months and you know listen a lot of parts come from china it's not always garbage but ultimately my goal is to just book that call and say absolutely my guys carry parts on the truck let's make sure you get the right part where he can probably, I'll let him know, I'll send him a memo in our CRM to make sure that if you feel comfortable doing the part, installing it, whatever it might be, then we'll be able to do that for you. Now, if I've got a full calendar of demand service from real customers and this customer's out of my way, I don't think it's best to book those calls. You should be a 90% booking rate. If you're over 90, you're probably booking some calls that might not be worth it.

But I'll tell you what, every time I got a parts call, I said, have you ever seen how dangerous that is? I've got technicians that have lost fingers. True story. And if you're okay doing that, you have to have the right tools and the know-how because there's a lot of tension on that garage door and it is dangerous. It's not safe and people get hurt there's over 35 000 serious severe injuries each year and deaths let me get someone out there let's make sure you feel comfortable with it but i got to diagnose what's going on do you have a fractional cfo? I'm looking to make a few tweaks in our 2023 budget. Yeah. This guy, Ryan Tansom, does this for a living.

And he also had a podcast with me. Ryan Tansom. 612-720-6530. Ryan Tansom. T-A-N-S-O-M. That's the guy I'd be calling. Hey, Tommy, what's your advice for an entrepreneur that wants to buy a small electric business but doesn't have a state electrical license? Seller's willing to qualify the company, but only for six months. Well, that's the one way to do it is you're going to have to study and get the qualifications.

There's a few things you could do. I'd go to my lawyer and I'd get an agreement and I'd hire a lot of my buddies and electrician. He's getting his license right now and he's still going to stay working for the company. So you could hire a guy like that or go under his license and just pay him. There's several ways to do it. You can pay him a percentage of revenue. You can pay him for every call you book. You could rent the license from him. There's several ways to do it. You can pay him a percentage of revenue. You can pay him for every call you book. You can rent the license from him.

There's a liability that comes with that. And the insurance has to go under his name. So you can make him a small partner, depending on if you're ready to take the test and how you want to do it. But me personally, the way that I would do it is I'd find the best badass technician in the world and make him a partner or her a partner. That's the way that I would do it is I'd find the best badass technician in the world and make him a partner or her a partner. That's the way that I would do it. What do you think makes a successful person stand out from other successful people and how to pick the best from the best? Well, I think people

that have a big want in life, they've got a mindset for abundance. They want more. You know, right now I don't work for money. I mean, money is a KPI that tells me where I'm at, but I do it because I enjoy the work. I enjoy leading. I enjoy helping others. And I love bettering my best every day. I want to be the best version of myself. Yes, there's a lot to work on. But the people that make eye contact that want more, that they live a life of abundance, you could see the people because they don't settle. There's a lot of people out there that settle. So I look for people that just don't settle. They want more. They want to get up into a company. They want to move up quickly. They want not necessarily be a manager and I hate the word manager. I like

the word coach, but what I would tell you is they just, their mindset is different. You look at the top performers in any company and you just see that these people, they're charismatic. They know how to build rapport. They definitely care. They take pride in their work. And they tend to take pride in everything. I was just talking to a buddy of mine, Andrew, and he said, I've been teaching my two boys how everything you do has got to be 100%.

Or just don't do it. I don't play euchre, pinochle, billiards, bowling to not win. I don't go, I'm just going to go have fun and enjoy myself. I play to win at everything. But the book of life, it's an interesting book because I can't necessarily win at life. I got to continue to do the best I can every single day. Read the infinite game. That's the book I was trying to remember yesterday.

Damn it. And what he explains in the book is a businesses that are playing for the short-term wins always lose. I will take two down years to keep the company together and make the right decision with integrity to be ready to scale. I was talking to Doug at Cortec and he said, hey man, listen, we play our cards right in some of these deals in the funds. And he said, we're ready for when the time comes, the market will turn into a great market. I'll tell you what, a lot of people make their money

in a down market, but read that book. I think you'd really enjoy it. Between buying leads or hiring an online marketing team, which would you focus on first as a young company? You know, I used to have this thing in my office at the last shop. It said, he who pays more per lead will always win. I have an e-commerce site that I hired the best company in the country to be able to pay to play. But I don't think it's one or the other because there's the long game of SEO and getting reviews. So I wouldn't say pick one. I think building your online resources is

so important because that's something you want. No one's going to be able to take those reviews and your ratings away unless the platform closes down. So it's easy to buy leads. I'll tell you what the hard part is. A lot of people, they say, I just need more leads. Oh, man. Chris got behind yesterday, so I got limited time to speak. And one of the questions I wanted to ask,

but I only had 15 minutes was, oh, I did ask this actually, but there was a lot of things I left out. But who here needs more leads? Every hand went up. Who here needs more technicians or more CSRs? Well, not a lot of hands went up. The fact is getting leads is the easy answer.

My guys need more leads. What if I told you there's three ways to make money in only three ways? Get more customers, get the frequency up to your customers are coming back with service agreements or charge your customers more money. And everybody says the first one, I need more leads. I need more leads. I need new customers. The people that have already bought will buy more. So you need to use your existing customers and reach out to them and figure out how your KPIs, your booking rate, your average ticket, your conversion rate goes up before you're just going to buy.

Buying leads is the easy thing to do. Make sure every single one of your people are top of the line. Run a family sign company that has been open for 28 years. Feels like everything is missing and we still make $8 million a year and have more work than we can handle. And we didn't have the systems in order to get this big. Trying to start Traction right now as a starting point, but do not know what to start on. Well, Traction is a great book. Gina Wickman's a genius. I had him on the podcast as well. The first thing is start with a foundation. I love L.E.V. I think L.E.V.'s manuals work in any type business because the manual tells you how to play the game.

And then the KPIs or your CRM tell you exactly what the score is. So I think in any business, starting with a foundation of manuals, standard operating procedures, checklists, getting a data integrity team built, you know, without seeing the business, all I would know is I need to know the score. The first thing people need is systems to see the score. Because then that tells you where to put the time

and effort and energy into. And what your job is as a leader should be to find the weakest link and put all your attention into that. I can give you an example. A year ago, we were at a 10% abandonment rate on the phone calls. Now we're at a one and a half percent. 10% of the calls of demand customers were not getting answered. So knowing that data, I mean, I almost shit my pants when I saw that. And I went into fight or flight mode and that's what we focused on. So knowing what you need to do is by getting the score and understanding what those numbers mean and how they help with the revenue or profit. Those are the two goals. Core values, training,

data, SOPs, it is all missing until super important. Yeah. Where do you start? Get the data first. You can't train on something you don't know where the winners are. Yes, core values are important, but you just don't start with core values. You don't say, I've got core values. I thought of them last night. You need to live and breathe them. My favorite core values is aspire to be number one, because I think that that's an important one. And people that want more out of their lives, the mindset. So that's where I would start is getting the score first to understand how you're going to develop the training. Well, if you don't have a score of the best employees in your company, it's hard to build

training because you want to learn from the best people. You should be involving your team. And here's the real truth. If you don't plan on your culture, your culture will happen regardless. You don't know what the culture is, but if you walk in that room and you have someone in your family or friend walk in and say, what does this feel like to you? Howard yesterday talked about just sitting in a room when the walls talk to you. It says something. And hopefully it's a great culture. But if you let the culture happen sometimes and you don't plan on it, it's not great.

And I'd be careful of that. Do you have great mentors in the construction industry that you would recommend? Depends on what construction industry that you would recommend? Depends on what construction industry, but I can tell you what I would do is I'd go find the biggest, best companies out there that have probably either partnered with PE or gone public. And I'd find 10 of them and I would literally mail them. There's a great book called Giftology.

I'd send them a gift. I'd send them a nice letter. I'd make it heartfelt. And I continue to follow up with them because success leaves clues. And find people that really did it. Because a lot of people brag about their revenue and say this, this, this, this, this. They're full of hot air.

A lot of people I've seen that say they have the best businesses are about to go bankrupt. Success leaves clues and success actually happened to them. And they can prove it. And they've got millions or hundreds of millions in the bank. So I don't just find a mentor. I find a success leader who's done it and who has. You know, Mike Tyson said. He said he could never coach another fighter.

He said, yes, we could do some stuff. But he said it's a different mentality to find a coach. And most of the best coaches they've never played in the game but they're there to cheer you on along the side but depending on what you're trying to do right if you're trying to train technicians are you trying to grow revenue there's different specialists for depending on what you're trying to do so i'm at a weird spot because i know how to tech and i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but one of the things i'm focusing on is spending more time with csrs dispatchers and I'm in a weird spot because I know how to tech. And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

But one of the things I'm focusing on is spending more time with CSRs, dispatchers, and installers. Because I feel like they're not as... I need to do a better job with that. But, you know, that's a hard question without knowing exactly. How long after purchasing another company do you do fully away with their NIL? You know, my controller and my CFO handle that. It depends on the industry. Yeah, I'm going to need a little bit more details than that. But first thing I do is get them on our chart of accounts and get their whole team out to retrain, get them onto our CRM, get them onto our Paylocity account,

which is human resources. And then there's a few things there, but let me know the industry. What benchmarks do you look for for mailers? I look at a mailer being under 10% of revenue. And that's an interesting topic because how do you get to 10% of revenue? See, ValPak doesn't work for a lot of people because they don't have the right conversion rate or average ticket and they don't have the right booking rate. So fortunately, it works for us. But ultimately, what I would tell you is I'm able to send mail for under 30 cents, But I have to buy the data. So I stay with mailers as I look for when it hits homes, is there any other mailers hitting at the same time?

And then I make sure I have attributions so I don't have call tracking numbers. Ultimately, I think I need more context to that question too. Where do you find a good data analyst? Upwork. Find somebody that's expensive and does a great job and has a resume. There's data analysts all over the country, all over the world. Depends on what you're looking for exactly. But the first thing I would do is I go on Upwork and hire a consultant.

And I might even hire a consultant to help me find a data analyst, like a recruiter. Painting business in South Florida is rough. I bet it is. Yeah, South Florida had the hurricane. I would really look into... With painting, I always think that you could

charge more and do other things if you offer other things. How do you split up the marketing budget between BBC, Billboard, TV, Radio? What performs best for you? Direct response, I'll say GMB Organic is the best.

Pay-per-click is the most expensive, but your goal as you're putting more money into TV, Radio, Billboard, your pay-per-click will go down because people are searching for you. So that's called branded versus non-branded. And that's something I really look at. I'm actually working on some new data sets, so I got to include that. That was just a note to myself.

Mike from Any Hour said, all of my TV, radio billboards, they generate phone calls. He tries to create a direct response. And there's a great book called No BS About Drug Response Marketing that Dan Kennedy doesn't believe that there needs to be any marketing that doesn't make the phone ring. So I'd read that book.

How do you handle drug screening for states that have marijuana legal? We've always been a drug-free company. I don't really care about marijuana. Just don't show up to the job site on any type of THC. So wait a minute. Let's go through this. This is interesting.

So I want somebody that's presentable. Hopefully not a bunch of face tattoos. I mean, that's tough. I want somebody that knows sales, that smiles a lot. I want somebody with a clean background check, hopefully not on any major drugs. I want somebody, it's a driving record, they need to be able to sell, they need to be technical. The marijuana thing is not my highest care. I just don't want somebody that needs to stay high all day, every day. If they smoke marijuana

on weekends before they go to bed or whatever they do, literally there are guys that used to have a fully shaved policy. Well, now that they're letting their people have beards, this is the new mentality and I don't see people, if you show up and you smell like marijuana or you're hitting a vaporizer during work, that's a no-no, you're going bye-bye.

You're not going to get around that. You just got to have good systems in place to make sure they're not doing it while they're at work. We are mid-branding process with Dan and team as well as building manuals off of Al's books. Would you launch both at the same time almost a company relaunch?

Yeah. My buddy Cody Johnson launched both at the same time. Listen, branding has nothing to do with manuals. In the manuals there's nothing about how to do branding correctly. The manuals tell you how to run the business, and it's and the context and how your whole pay structure works and when we're expected to meet with each other and hold each other accountable. That has nothing to do with branding. So I would do them both. How do I plan my day? Well, it's shifted a lot in the last 10 years. I mean, look, Breed plans my day. My Google calendar is

my day. And I'll tell you one thing. Once I get in this new house, I'm setting up 20 whiteboards and I'm going to start working a couple of days from the house. And I'm going to have really, really important brain sessions. And I'm going to get to the full system who we're hiring, how we're planning it, how we put it into effect, because there's a lot going on, man. If you knew what I had going on, we've got damn near 700 employees. I've got a million things going on. I bought two houses last week that were flipping. I'm looking at a property down the street to build another warehouse.

It's incredible. So my biggest goal with hiring is planning my day is how do I hire better people, not better people, but more people to help facilitate the scale I'm at today. Elon Musk has a lot of great people around him. I promise you that. And he delegates, he's become a master delegator. So delegation is a skill and you can learn how to do it. The Infinite Game, thank you. That was a while ago. Cody, will do, got to buy leads when starting out. Then rebrand the truck. Good location. Top notch site. Once you're prepared for 50k rebrand, ads will cost less too.

As leads have gone down, I've seen with our clients, booking rates go up, closing rates show up, and revenue went up. Congrats, Wright. I'll leave his website, 7powercontractor.com. I think there's a discount if you put HSSM at the back. Recent moonlighters in my market are starting to drive me nuts,

stealing my yard signs and such. Oh, that'll stop eventually. People give up. What is your morning routine or routine you think that sets you apart? I can just tell you guys this. I'm more of a night owl. I've got a very clear routine as far as my calendar. I've surrounded myself with excellent people and hired for my weaknesses. I think that's a strength. What I'm going to be doing is I'm hiring a chef and I'm going to make sure my diet's perfect.

I'm going for a blood test in the next two weeks to find out what foods cause inflammation. I'm going to be planned on when I go to a restaurant of what I'm going to eat. And this will be nothing I do. You put it in front of me, give me the vitamins, you tell what I need, you give me the pack of vitamins. I'm starting to realize there's two things I can't buy, time and health. So I'm investing in everything to reserve as much of that as possible. And I work out, I've got an amazing trainer. I'm planning on 10X efficiency. So I'm getting a cold plunge at the house, although I'm not looking forward to it. That's something I haven't done a great job of. So my goal is just to hire all the right people because I've worked really hard to get where I'm at, to be able to afford the resources I need to get 10X efficiency. So starting to fly private, things like that.

Look, it's not because I'm cool or anything. I've just worked really hard and now it's 10X time. It's going to save time where we're looking at a huge van and hiring a driver because I can get those hours back that I'm in the car. And although I use Bluetooth and stuff, it'll be more efficient time. So I'm looking at 10x my efficiency. So I'd say eating healthy, working out, getting cardio, getting me time, which is my brain time on a whiteboard and helping people prioritize my time, which I my brain time on a whiteboard, and helping people prioritize my time, which I'm hiring for that. What systems need to be in place for business to scale?

Every system. How do you get new trucks? How do you get iPads? How do you get ride-alongs? When you're doing a brand new person, what's the ride-along form? I mean, what systems need to be good? The four KPIs I care about. Average ticket, conversion rate, booking rate, and cost per acquisition.

You nail those four, you're making money. Then you just dump more fuel in. But you still need to have great technicians, great training. You need to make sure they have trucks and iPads and gas cards. You got to make sure you've got inventory systems. You don't know what systems are bad until one's broken. Tough answer on that one, I know. If you were a $3 million electric company, what would the main focus be to grow to 10 million? Well, I'd look at my average ticket

because that's the first place I'd grow. I'd really look at my marketing. What it takes is great people and great leads. You match those two things up, I'd really have to look at the financial statements to make a judgment call. But I guarantee you, I'm going to find a hole. And if I don't find a hole, then we just got to dump more gasoline, like I said earlier, into the marketing.

If you've got a high conversion rate, good average ticket, you're buying your parts right, you're getting co-op from your vendors, you're putting time and energy into the people, you're going to win a lot more and you'll get to 10 million easily. I continue to read and hear more about KPIs and reports. We currently have service 10, but what are you missing and how are you running these for daily, weekly, monthly numbers? Well, listen, we've got our own API. We use grow.com. We use HubSpot. I probably use another 27 softwares, literally, no joke. I've got Jim working on a bunch of custom dashboards and a whole other software. ServiceSite does not do your financial statements. So by not knowing

your overhead, your burden rates, all these things, ServiceSite is the best software out there, but ultimately, you still need a great accounting software. So accounting software, certain types of reports that you could extract from Service Titan, but the way you use them, Service Titan is kind of a one-size-fits-all for home service. They specialize in HVAC plumbing electrical. But we need to customize stuff. You need to extract data. You need to manipulate the data. You need to see. The main thing I care about is that the data is accurate and I can see it in an easy, congestible form that a 10-year-old B student can recognize what's going on in the company. If you get that data to there,

you'll be way more successful. I follow a great marketer mentor called Ken McCarthy. He once said that the most powerful selling tool of all time is demonstration. My clients in the service industry sells a lot with demonstration videos. Love it. Thanks, Tommy, for sharing your awesome content. You've grown organically and through acquisition. Have you considered franchising as a growth option? What are your thoughts and method of growth? I think franchising are great, but you got the FTC breathing down your neck and what businesses want when they buy a franchise business in a box. And unfortunately, if I was to do a franchise, I'd be smart like Chick-fil-A and pick the best people. I would not sell franchises to anybody. I'd make you qualify like McDonald's. You would not just get a franchise because without the

right person that's going to put the hard work and get the training most franchises here's what they do they say i've got a pretty good system i'm doing okay let's go sell this system and sell for 20 grand a pop or 50 grand a pop or whatever it might be and let's pop a six percent percentage because i can't make it in the real world not everybody the best franchises in the world don't work like this a lot of of people say, I'm not willing to do all the hard work, so I'm going to try to take an override on all these businesses, make money on the supplies, build a decent website, business in a box. If I get 100 small ones, I'll be making pretty good money on the 6%. Plus, it's a startup. I get that 20 grand every time I sign up a new franchise. That's for the weak at heart. You want to make real money, you grow Greenfield.

And if you can figure out how to Greenfield on top of an acquisition, which is fix your KPIs and take market penetration, I think that's the best of both worlds. But you got to figure out how you're going to integrate and get the culture right. Best books on time management. You know, there's this book. It's called How to live on 24 hours a day I just bought a DeLorean

So I had to get this Sports almanac So cool I got some questions here I got to answer too Let's see here Daniel Hi Tommy we have acquired two other businesses that have been

established for many years, well-known brands that are different states. When is it a good time to rebrand them so we are under the same name as a company name, or should we leave their original names and capitalize on the good names and reputation in the areas of the state? Our company is not well-known in these states and territories. Ken Gooders would tell you he wants to catalyze the country. Any smart PE firm would tell you keep the company name, apply the same logic, rebrand it, rebrand the new brand of the same

name to make it sexy, make the trucks look good. I know my methods work in any home service company, in any garage door company. I don't need it to be a one. Now, there's some downfalls to that because I've got to change my invoicing, which service that allows you to do. I've got to change my invoicing, which ServiceTite allows you to do. I've got to have different guys with different shirts so I don't get mass quantity purchase price.

I don't get the national type stuff I would get. What I would do is, first of all, if you want to go the same company name, make sure you've got an uncontestable trademark. You've got copyrights on everything, and it's not a common name. But I'm a big fan of leaving the companies around that are existing. Oasis Plumbing Miami. Hey, Tommy, can you share some ideas to increase my team's effort in using drop cloths and having more care in a customer's home? How can I make that something my guys actually want to do for themselves, not about me and what I want. If you explain to people and you actually care when you're explaining why you do these things and the processes behind them, like if you explain why you charge these amounts,

they got to see it and understand it. If I was you, what I would do is probably start with a carrot and say, before you start the job, I'd build a standard operating procedure. And I'd say, this has to be a service site, not to mention it's timestamp and geotag. You can't upload a picture, so I know it's real. And I would say, before you can start the job, I need to get this picture in the service site. And then I would say, for everyone you do for the next two weeks, I'm going to give you an extra five bucks. Then after that, this is just to build a new habit for you guys, because I know you don't love doing it.

So I'm going to pay for your time, but this is what's expected of the job. I'd add it to the manual. Every new guy would initially, that's his job, and it's at ServiceTain or Housecall Pro or wherever. They upload a picture of it. It's there. Done. It's a checklist. Mark Morrell says, Tom, you talk a lot about having processes.

Can you be more specific on what they are? Which ones are the most important? Well, I've got, I mean, if I go on a service time, the way we put our stickers, the way we put the scale down, their checklist, their operating procedures, the way we train. We've got a checklist for how we bring somebody into Phoenix, how they get their truck, their tools, what apartment they're staying at. I mean, there's processes. Every part of your business is a process. If it's not a process, then how is it scalable?

That would be my question. If it's not a process on how you train and how you call a customer, if there's no SOP behind a standard operating procedure, then how do you duplicate it? You can never get to expected results, and that's a mistake. Jody Albano said, hi, how do you suggest performance paper CSRs? Well, booking rate and data accuracy and empathy, and'd have a q a i'd probably use call cap they've got a thing called call assurance and they listen to each call and they'll give you a scorecard and i would use that scorecard that they create to create a bonus system

and i build it in excel so i can reverse engineer their hourly and make sure that when we started our bonus structure for csRs years ago, the bonus structure actually paid a little bit less. But then when performance got really good, my payroll went up, but the juice was definitely worth the squeeze. So it was more of a financial modeling process. It wasn't shoot by your hip. When we figured out the average ticket and the booking rate was it went up and data accuracy from not going to the street instead of drive. And we actually looked at the facts. It was really easy to see that our performance pay made us more money. And therefore, we're willing to pay a lot more money. And then we're able to track more A players. So it all works in an amazing way. Admin employees, their bonus structure. Listen, you got to start out with an OKR, outcome and key result.

What's your goal? How do they affect the outcome? How much is that worth to you? And then you can build the exact financial modeling and performance pay. 99% of people shoot by the hip. They come up with a bonus structure and they say, hopefully this sticks and hopefully it works.

And then it's a mess. John said, I've heard you reference equity incentives a few times. Have you developed anything in your business for widespread employee ownership? If you want widespread employee ownership, do an ESOP. And I could talk about an ESOP and what that means. Oh, well, you said ESOPs seem to work for medium to large businesses, retirement vehicle, but current profit sharing schemes with equity schedules are more of what I'm hoping to find examples of. You could get a hold of my lawyers. I use a company called Foley.

And you could just search employee equity incentive programs. And there's ways to do – there's usually a five-year vesting. There's a lot of things that go into that. And when you start an equity incentive program, there's what's called a benchmark or a shelf. The company's worth this today. So let's just say it's worth a million dollars. You don't get equity in that million. You get equity. So when other players come in, they get equity of whatever the business is worth that day. So if you're doing equity incentives programs, you got to have a way of recalculating how much the company is worth every six months. And then they've come at that previous one. Then the bar gets set at this level

and this level and this level, but it's a great way to retain people. It's a great way to attract a players. I mean, it does a lot of things and it's fun to watch people get rich how do you go about breaking into a new market you're out of town or find boots already on the ground so you're talking about greenfield growth there's a lot of things the main thing is how do you make the phone ring and how long does it take so it's all about lead acquisition i've gotten good at recruiting so going into a greenfield is all about getting your Google where it needs to be, understanding a way to get reviews. I go through a lot of stuff with this, but this would take up the whole hour.

So you could come out and see me and I can go through exactly how to dominate a new market, but it takes time. It's sweat equity. It's not easy. It's easier to buy, but then you've got a whole other million issues with that as well. So, no, business is not easy. Co-crew pulls. Hey, Tommy, I'm just starting out. I only have $10,000 cash. I've been debating buying a new truck or wrapping the 2008 Tacoma. I have now.

How important do you think having a wrap on your truck is? And do you think there's somewhere I could spend the money better to grow? Well, I would say I wrapped your vehicle now with $10,000 in the bank and I make sure it's damn sexy. Don't put stupid shit. Don't put a bunch of, I do this,

this, this, this, this, this, this. It should be clean. You should know exactly what you do. Take a picture of your truck, black and white after

it's wrapped. If it doesn't pop out what you do, easy call. Like, look, you should have your brand name, maybe a website, not much else. Don't put five stars on Yelp and all that other crap. And you don't need to put that you do garage doors, garage rollers, garage springs. We know what you do. You could just put the name of the company. Hopefully the title of what you do is in the company name. And yeah, first thing I would do is call all my friends and family. That's how MLM works. And I said, let me come do whatever the service you're doing is. And I want to do it for a very, very good price.

And then I'd ask them for a lot of reviews and see what else I could do there. I give them a great rate and then ask them for who their neighbors are, who the HOA president is, who else they know that could use your service. And that's where I'd see what else I could do there. I'd give them a great rate and then ask them for who their neighbors are, who the HOA president is, who else they know that could use your service. And that's where I'd start. It's through friends, family, connections. I'd get with my church. I'd get with my softball league and I'd get out there and start networking and guerrilla marketing like crazy. What do I say when a customer tells me service is more expensive than the other two contractors? How do I go in that how we're a five-star company and how our installers are paid well? We have nice trucks and uniforms too. Clients don't care about that.

Clients don't care. Joe Corsaro would say, number one is if you're comparing exactly the same things, you're not paying more. You're buying better parts, better service, and a better warranty. If you're not giving options, you're giving ultimatums. Joe says to give six. I want to give them the option. This is top of the line, which means the most expensive. And this is the most economical. And I'll always have a price within the competitors. But this is exact like for like what you're getting. Now, if you choose to make a better investment into your home, this is what I would do if it were my mom's house.

Josh Kelly, most of our customers. Is there a reason you haven't? Most of our customers buy new doors when they become 10 years old. Is there a reason why you haven't done this? It's simple. It needs to be, keep it simple, Simon. I know Let's Go Business in Phoenix was wondering if you had any advice for me. So this is getting leads, how to grow my business. I'm only 25 years old. I want to make sure I have a good foundation. Look, man, you got to be able to spend the money. A lot of people go into business. They think it's easy. You got to be able to train, recruit. Look, people go into business to create a living. If you want to own a business, first of all, you got to get out of the truck. You're

not a business owner. I'm not trying to belittle you because I did this for eight years, but you don't own a business. You're working in the business. You're an employee. You're still servicing stuff. If you want to go own a business, you need to go to business. Well, I shouldn't say you need to go to business school, but at least go hang out with a successful business. You need to be good at understanding your financials and understanding how to use a CRM and how to motivate people and hire and inspire. You need to recruit, hire, orient, train, and retain. That's what I'll leave you with say. And I'm not meaning to belittle you, man. Listen, I was there. Literally, I'm going to wish you all luck. I'll even help you. You come in and see me. We'll talk about producing leads, but leads cost money and you got to get the foundation going.

Scott said, where do I find great talent in the office and field? Where do you find them? Where do they hang out? Take your top employee and find out where they hang out. Ask them to start recruiting. Get their wife involved. Pay them to recruit too. I love doing these because I'm supposed to send something out and I didn't. What is your strategy to purchase material at the lowest price, never run out with the highest quality possible? Well, here's the deal. Sit down with your vendors and say, what is your one-year goal, your three-year goal, your five-year goal? I did this two days ago. They said, I need you to grow into this market. Another note for myself. And I said, okay, what's that

going to do for you? They said, that would really help us out. Find out what's important to them. You don't need the cheapest. You don't need to beat them up. They need to be the best. Of course, buying better pricing helps, but what's more important, a better price or staying on the timeline that you promised the customer? You could charge more because you get it done quicker. People want three things. They want it done fast. They want it done right.

And they want it done cheap. Pick two out of the three years, but you get, you can't do all three. So don't ask your vendors to be all three. Jose, my main goal is to be a general contractor. Would you recommend me go in to get an associate degree, construction management,

or is it better to learn a trade such as HVAC work? Listen, if you're going to do that, Jose, I'd go get real life experience. Boom. An associate's degree, you're talking to teachers that haven't been in the field for 20 years, even if they did, they got tenure, it's crap. I wouldn't do that. Hey, Tommy, I'm curious when creating your training and manuals, did you start with Al Levy's manuals? What other resources did did you use what other advice would you give a business that doesn't have any process yet well i walked in my office and said let me see your manual and i reached somewhere on him somewhere in the office

and pulled a dusty huge thing in that didn't get touched for years and it was his manuals are the best because he realizes the csrs technicians and dispatchers are a triangle of communication and you need to make the technician manual to build the dispatch manual to build the csr manual because they all work in combination and because he's worked with so many companies and had the his is the foundation you tweak it and make it your own if i didn't have, I'd probably still be without processes. So it would be like reinventing the wheel when it's already built.

I would say use that and Al offers five phone calls. Use every one of those phone calls because 99% of the people that get his manuals, they don't do it because they're too lazy to go in and work on the business. Al holds you accountable and that's the worst thing in the world. That's why most of you guys don't have trainers because now you've got to be accountable to work on the business. Al holds you accountable, and that's the worst thing in the world.

That's why most of you guys don't have trainers, because now you've got to be accountable to going and working out. So if you want to be accountable, get shit done, then you order Al's manuals, you make the phone calls, he gives you the assignments,

and you get it done, and you implement right away. You want to know my number one secret of success? It's that I'm an implementer. I don't bullshit. I come to work, and I get shit done. And I'm not lecturing you. I'm just letting you know that if you order the manuals, you start them. You know what the most annoying thing in the world is people that hate the Bible that never read it. It's so annoying to me. So what I would do is start with that foundation, nail it, and then scale it. Can you start a business without working in it first?

Yes. I think it's a downfall to even know the business. You know what I realized? I was pre-dental. I took anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, organic chemistry, 65 credits of science. I took advanced calculus, all this crap. Then I interned with a dentist that was still in debt at 47 and said, make sure you specialize and I'd get a business degree first.

And then I realized every person that owns all these dental dentist service are not dentists. They're not dentists. They never worked on teeth. They're good business people. They understand KPIs. They produce decks each week and understand what needs to happen. Same fundamentals as home service, any industry. Walmart was smarter because they got into the politics side of things and they figured out how to employ a person for under 30

hours a week so they didn't have to give all these benefits to that actually are receiving benefits from the government. I mean, look, the fundamentals are all the same. Some people are able to negotiate. Some people are good at finance. They're financial engineers. I would tell you I wouldn't learn the business now, but here's the deal. I had to learn the business because I didn't have any money. So I had to do the work for a decade. And it's an advantage and a disadvantage. Hey, Tommy, why don't you go into the wholesale pricing space? No offense, but I'm really good at retrofit residential garage doors. And there's still a lot of room to go.

And I'm a specialist. I'm the best at what I do. Why would I go into anything else when there's so much white space out there to go into? So many people are like, I can make money here, here, here. You throw me in any industry right now, anything, I'll make a fricking fortune. But where is the best hour of my time spent? If you guys knew the math on how much I figured out I'd make an hour, you'd say that's not possible. And I'm not going to even say it, but let's just say it's a crazy, crazy number. And why would I go and put any brain matter or activity into anything that doesn't support

what we're already doing? Now, if I went into other industries, I'd just hire the best CEO in the world and say, you go do it. I don't even want it. It would be an investment, but that's not where my time's going. So anyway, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, I love this. Great questions. I can tell you I'm obsessed. One of the little updates is I'm working a lot with AI and I will be at the cutting edge. If you guys are doing anything with AI, reach out to me. I'd love to share notes, but we're going to change this one

to industry in the game. And I'm not letting go of any employees. I'm not trying to get rid of human labor. I'm trying to get more efficiency. So I don't need to hire as many as I go forward. So lots of good stuff. I'm obsessed with marketing. So I'm getting marketing heavily into AI marketing. So anyways, I had a great time. I've got to go record the new book. This will be my second recording. I'm going to try to knock it out in three recordings. This is just massive.

So hopefully I didn't lose my voice too much. So when you guys listen to the audible, elevate, win, elevate, build a business where everybody wins. I'll read you guys the foreword. This is Tom Howard. You guys ready? Some of you are still here. Tom Howard is a dear friend. He's an amazing guy.

I met Tommy in 2017 at a conference. I own a small air conditioning company in Fresno, California. My company had just started doing plumbing as well. We were pushing about 10 million in annual revenue. We thought that we were on top of the world. Tommy was doing a little less revenue at the time, but he was still the number one garage or company amongst scores or the only garage or company amongst scores of HVAC and plumbing shops. He stood out like a sore thumb. It wasn't just because he had chosen a different trade. I quickly realized that he thought differently than all of us. I wouldn't realize how differently he really was until years later, but I knew that he saw things differently and at a whole new scale. While I was building my

company like I built a tree house as a kid. Tommy was laying the foundation for a tree mansion that none of us thought possible. Oh, I love this. I met over 100 different shop owners in my life until that point. Some of them were quite large and some were small, but all of them had plans. Most people had relatively conservative plans, but I had heard a few hot shots with big plans before. They usually would tell anyone who would listen to them about how big they were going to be. Tommy had even bigger plans. I immediately discounted what he was saying and started to pass them off as pipe dreams.

But the longer I listened to him, the more I realized that he truly thought how he was going to pull off all these crazy ideas. He made me raise my eyebrow a time or two, but after hearing his plans, I still was a bit skeptical. I still remember him talking to me at a party at the first conference. He said, Tom, you got to nail it and scale it. He said that three or four times at night. Then he said, I'm going to get everything dialed in. Then I'm going to scale it. After that, you watch. I kind of rolled my eyes. I thought, yeah, Tommy,

we're all trying to nail it. Let me know how that works out for you. After leaving this conference, I kept up with Tommy and got to know him better over the years. I was shocked to see that he was actually executing on what he said he would do. People talk all the time. People have million dollar and billion dollar ideas every day. Almost none of those people actually ever execute. He was the only one executing on growing his company, but he was also executing on ideas that most of us didn't even dare to try. While most of us were looking for our next technician to help us grow or maybe build a better incentive plan to attract new talent, Tommy was building a training center and buying an apartment complex to house all of his new recruits during training. While most of us were increasing our marketing spend, Tommy was changing the way his company marketed altogether.

He built partnerships with real estate agents, manufacturers, and even storm chasers. I can tell you a story later about that one. I didn't know it at the time, but even the conference where I initially met him was not intended for him. It was a service-titan conference called Dispatch. Service-Titan, before that, hadn't even sold its product to garage door companies, and they had turned him down multiple times. Tommy ended up writing an email to the CEO, R.M. Modestian, and convinced him to give the garage door industry a shot.

R. and Tommy both still have that email. Tommy knew Sopper was one piece of the treehouse or tree mansion that he needed. He took the Service-Tite product and ran it hard. His staff learned the ins and outs of it, and he became one of the most successful shops on it. ServiceTite had no choice but development dollars into the features of the garage door industry, and now has hundreds of garage door companies on his platform today. Over the years, I would visit Tommy on multiple occasions. He would come stay at my place or I would stay at his. By the way, most of the time I went to his place, it was a two bedroom apartment at the complex he owned. He started saying they're short term. And then before I knew it, years had gone by. He didn't seem to care.

He was absolutely focused on building his tree mansion. Every time I went to visit him, and I do mean every time, I would stay up until at least 11pm talking about business and Tommy's new ideas. I started to realize that no one was excited about building their business as Tommy was. He would talk until I completely passed out, then at 7am

would start talking again. This is not an exaggeration. There is another side of Tommy, though. Most people don't see unless they are close to him. Tommy mentions in his books that you need to find a way for everybody to win. That sounds like a cliche, but Tommy absolutely lives by it. He told me that he wanted to make a bunch of millionaires out of his employees. He should be reading this. It's easy to get big and forget about all the people that helped you get there. Tommy had planned on making sure they got a cut from everything from

the beginning. Most of them got a cut through performance pay, but he did issue interest units to many of the original employees. He had given so many out that the president of the company had to call him at one point to make sure he understood the significance of what he was doing. Of course, Tommy knew exactly what he was doing. The amount of money that Tommy was awarding his employees, either through profit interest or their work performance, was more than I could ever dream of as a kid. We got married. I had $300 left in my bank account. My wife bought me socks for our first Christmas. That's all we could afford. I remember around Valentine's Day, we agreed we wouldn't get each other anything. We went for a walk and saw what appeared as a piece of trash in the grass. It was soaked from the sprinklers. We went to pick it up and throw it away, but we

found a certificate for a pound of See's chocolate. We were elated. We literally ran to See's store to see if they would still take the ticket in the soaked condition. They did, and we couldn't have been happier. At some point, we got a little more stable. I started saving up for knives for Christmas. My wife had one cock-co knife, and she adored it. I would save up each year for Christmas. I would get the money to order one, but usually didn't have the time to get it engraved. I really wanted them to be engraved, but it wasn't in the cards for most years. Eventually, we got some extra cash. We were able to make a set. Only four or five of the knives were engraved, though, and they were usually all white-handled knives. Ten years later, we were

on our way out the door. My wife and I had gotten up with the hustle and brustle of life. By that time, we owned several companies generating over $50 million in total revenue. We had forgotten all the struggles we went through as a young couple. Just before leaving the house, we got a package at the door. It was a silver box, and we had to open it. It was from Tommy. It was a set full of white-handled cut-code knives, and every one of them was engraved with my name and my wife's name on them. I had to stop. I was shocked. It changed my whole thought process.

The hustle of life had caught up with me, and Tommy forced me to slow down and think about where I had come from. Tommy continues to build this treehouse or tree mansion or whatever you want to call it, but what good is a treehouse without the people to share in it? I hope you will read this book and get the vision into many of the conversations and ideas I have to be able to hear Tommy talk over the years. Most important, I hope you see that Tommy is who he really is, for who he really is. If there is anyone you can learn from about maintaining an elevated mindset and developing skills in leadership, culture, marketing, recruiting, and systems.

While all remembering your team, it's Tommy Mello. Tom Howard owns multiple home service companies in the California area, including an HVAC and pest control company. After acquiring these companies, Tom tripled their revenue, or better, the first four years. In January 2020, Tom also joined service site as the vp of customer experience anyways taking a little emotional because me and tom are good buddies and i just love the guy but i think it's a good book i think you guys are gonna like it and i appreciate you guys listening to my rant hopefully you guys take some notes and apply some of these things i hope you guys have a wonderful week make it great we'll see you guys take some notes and apply some of these things. I hope you guys have a wonderful week.

Make it great. 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 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 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 life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.