The Home Service Expert Podcast - Q&A With Tommy - Moving Beyond Revenue Goals for Lasting Success

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and Elevate, and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $200 million-plus home service business with over 700 employees in 19 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 profitability, mindset shifts, equity incentive programs...

biggest mistake you learned that made you the most money? It's pretty simple. I know you guys have heard me say this before, but I used to always say revenue. I used to always come in a room. I remember back in the day, I went to service-type events. I'd go out there. I'd walk in a new shop. I'd walk into a new party. And I was just so happy to talk about revenue, talk about the size of the company, the markets we're in, how many technicians we hired this month. And man, I got a rude awakening that that didn't mean shit. It didn't matter to anybody. You know what matters to the company's health is bottom line profit. Revenue is for vanity. It's purely vanity. Profit is for sanity. I like big revenue numbers

because it's easy to turn dials to get up the profit. 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. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you.

First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy

of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy.

Now let's go back into the interview. All right. Sorry about that. I got my brother-in-law in town and we were at this thing called Newbie. And oh my God, dude, the workout's insane. They hook up all these electrodes to you. And I'm trying to hit it at least once a week. I've been going twice a week sometimes. My plan is to do that twice a week, hit the gym four days a week, if not five. I've got a gym I'm expanding here at A1,

and then I'm getting at least six miles of a walk between morning and night, trying to get 20,000 steps. And it feels amazing. I promise you guys, getting in shape, it starts with sleep, and then it goes to diet. You want to get a six-pack and have it in the kitchen. But the mental clarity, the focus, the getting on the right supplements. Dr. Jerram is the secret sauce because without feeling like waking up in the morning and switching to a morning person, I would not have this mental fortitude. And I wouldn't be where I'm at today. Seriously, like my energy. I mean, I'm 41, guys. I feel like I'm 22. Like my energy. I mean, I'm 41 guys. I feel like

I'm 22. Like I'm waking up early. I'm focused. It's just, it's a fricking fantastic. And so here's what we're going to do for the, uh, the freedom event. It's freedom event.com. I'm going in to get DEXA. You guys know my goal is to be under 20%, under 10%. I'm sorry. So we're going to go in and then I'm going to have him put the DEXA scan in an envelope, seal it, and then we're going to delete the email. I'm going to have my EA delete the email in real time. And then I'm going to open it up. What's really cool about it is I got till the 20th.

So I'm running out of days here. So I'm going to be going into some crazy ass dieting and crazy ass cardio. But I'm not going to know if I hit it or not until we're at the Freedom Event and I open it on stage. So I pray. Listen, I will not feel like a failure either way. But if I put my mind to something, I know anything's possible. A1 is killing it, guys. I can't even tell you.

I hear all these economies bad. It's a presidential year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The shifts and the momentum we have right now, I cannot explain to you how excited I am about this company. I'm excited about each and every individual that's part of this company. I'm excited about our clientele. I'm excited about our marketing. We've got too many leads. We're fixing the call center. We got to bring them with power selling pros back, kicking ass. We're just shifting some things that need to happen.

We've got a meeting coming up in Sedona with all of our management. We're implementing new technology way beyond what ServiceTitan offers. This kind of stuff, this development, these ideas, this technology is just what's going to take us to the next level. The greatest thing ever is I don't know where we're going to go, but it's somewhere deep in another galaxy. I feel like it's going to be very hard for anybody to compete. And I invite my competitors in here. I love them. And I want them to win. It's just their problems are so much different. They're wondering where to hire and how to train and how to set up the price book.

We're wondering really advanced things. We're looking at really deep into the data and making little shifts. Luke has been working for months and months on this new price book protocol. And it rolled out. And now that we rolled out this completely new price book and the way the guys actually enter in the parts, record, record, record, record, week, day, hour, month, quarter. It's phenomenal.

I'm really excited about it. But I wanted to get into the Q&A. Once again, I apologize for being late. Duty calls. I'm never late to these things, so I am really sorry. But I'm glad you guys are here. We got 38 people here. It's a beautiful Tuesday morning.

I'm headed to Vancouver today. I'll just go spend a couple days one-on-one with Dan Martell, the buyback your time guy. As you guys know, I spend how I want people to spend with me. I didn't get a discount. I didn't ask him for a deal.

I spent a lot of money on coaches. I'm only getting started. Can you imagine? Mill millions and millions of dollars spent and I can't wait till I spend 10 million a year on personal development. I can't wait till I'm putting in a minimum of 10 million a year. And people are like, oh my gosh, that's so much money. I get back 10 times more than I spent. So when you do the math, you're like, well, I don't want to hire a personal

trainer. I haven't hired a landscaper yet. I don't have an executive assistant. Like what in the hell is going on in your mind? Like what is going on? You're still doing everything. You're a worker. That's what you are. And I was a worker and I did everything. And I jumped back into projects all the time to fix them. And it was my ideas. And then I hired people that are so much smarter. When I walk in a room, I'm like, your ideas are better because you're a specialist. My chef, literally every single person I hire is to get back time. And people are like, yeah, but you're so far ahead of us.

You don't think, it feels like yesterday I was where you're at. You don't think I was driving a used truck living at the apartment complex. All of a sudden, I changed the way I thought. I changed everything. And my life changed. And a lot of you guys are just stuck in first gear. You're three feet from gold. You know what you need to do. You just, you don't do it. You've got an excuse for everything. You just, you don't do it. You've got an excuse for everything. You're not working on yourself. It all starts with self-discipline and working with yourself. It all starts with you. Let's go into some questions here. Obviously, if you guys, you need to come to the Freedom Event. If you want to meet guys like Paul Kelly,

monster in the home service space, Ken Goodrich, Leland Smith had an amazing, one of the best podcasts I've ever had the other day with him. Tom Howard, Aaron Gaynor, Ishmael, Chad Peterman, Cristiano, like Ellen Rohr, one of my mentors, where'd the money go? What should we do? Like she wrote, where did the money go? Jocko Willick, Steve Sims, the people we've got, Darius Livers, it's going to be absolutely phenomenal. So let's go to questions. John said, I'm starting a small garage door service repair company as we speak. What's the most important thing I can do to get the phone calls? The most important thing is just show up everywhere.

Every single B&I meeting, you need to go meet the people. You need to build a stream, whether that's property managers, realtors, you need to start building relationships. You need to get your ass out there every day that you're not running a call. You need to be talking to designers, landscape architects. You need to be building relationships all the time. That's all you need to do. Go out there and do cheap tune-ups, nine bucks a piece, and get reviews. Get as many reviews as you can on actually Google, Yelp, Nextdoor, video testimonials on Facebook. Be posting in the neighborhood boards,

join all the city boards like Paradise Valley and Scottsdale for me, Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler. That's the best thing you could possibly be doing. And then be building manuals because you need to build SOPs. If you're going to scale this business, all I got to say is good luck. Because if I had to start over again, there's no way in hell I'd do garage doors. Not a chance. No way. I would never, ever do garage doors. Too low of a ticket. I would never do power washing or window washing. I would never do gutter cleaning. If you think about it, I would do flooring, roofing, HVAC, plumbing. I think the solar is wild, wild west. It's still too much government

subsidized, so I don't like that. But I would go after big monster tickets. You could get lucky and sell one job a week and hire five guys. Garage doors, you better be able to make the phone ring off the hook. You better book every call. You better have a high conversion. You better sell a lot of garage doors. You better get a lot of reviews. The competition is so much higher because there's no trade school you have to go to. So I'm not talking you out of it, John. Obviously, I've been doing this now almost two decades. I love my industry. I love where I'm at. But starting over, not a chance. Rich Prater, I recently purchased your book on performance pay. How do you ensure that performance pay aligns with the federal labor laws? Well, they're a necessary evil, but getting a good payroll lawyer is important.

You're going to build, we've got lawyers, we put everything. We spend a lot of money with our lawyers because it's a big deal. I cannot tell you exactly how to pay people. This is what costs money is you got to run it through lawyers. You got to have the tax professionals like, look, you can go on the stupid cheap sites. I've been burned so many times by not doing things right. You need a lawyer to look at things and you need to spend good money. If it's 500 bucks an hour, it takes five hours. You spent 2,500 bucks. I'm just being real rich. In my area, seven HVAC companies have been Faced Fines And been forced to back pay employees

Yeah, no, you need to hire a lawyer That understands HR and understands payroll Anthony Moore How do you schedule time for selling technicians To do a follow-up I don't have selling technicians doing follow-up I've got a separate team of rehash team. I have two full-time people that that's all they do.

There's no way. I want my top guys doing what they do best, selling, not following up. So I don't have my sales guys doing follow-up. Selling techs, techs who sell and install. Currently we're scheduling selling techs to go out and handle new leads. But when they don't, bring it to a conclusion.

Do you set up? No, I don't set a follow-up time on their schedule because I want a second opinion either way. Maybe the client didn't love them. I want a professional. I want specialists in every piece of my company that they master the art of follow-up, that the sales guys master the art of sales.

I want the CSRs booking the phone call. And I don't want my CSRs being dispatchers. I want my dispatchers move up revenue and getting the right guy, the right time, the right parts to the right client. Jake said, I own a power cleaning company who's 90% residential and 10% commercial. Our average ticket is $1,847. Our residential is $1,341 and our commercial is $6,900. I'm wondering on selling purposes, does it look bad to private equity to come mixed in commercial residential? I know our industry is different. Well, here's the deal. Private equity is going to say, if you lose a client or two, what does that do to your revenue?

Commercial's okay, especially in that industry, if you've got a lot of different commercial. I would not look at it like they're going to give you a discount, but I'd say, why do you do 10% commercial? Why haven't you got big? And why is your residential so small? Why don't you have 5,000 customers a month? What would it take to scale? Because it looks like, in my opinion, I'd say, Jake, you're a small company. I'm going to give you a low-ass multiple because you have not conquered the marketing to get enough clients through the spoke. What it looks like for a lot of people is, hey, I'm going to do front doors because I'm not very good at garage doors. And now I'm going to do flooring. But if you got so much clients that you brought on another service, it makes sense. But a lot of people, they just say

yes to everything. I remember saying yes to a job I should have never took. It was a commercial gate job and it was run off of solar. And man, I spent a fortune. I spent double what I literally, I lost my ass and it was a friend of mine and it was the biggest mistake I've ever done. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying today's podcast. A quick reminder, the Freedom event is happening on September 25th to the 27th. And today's tough economy with PE firms invading, lead costs spiking and customers cutting back,

it's time to protect your bottom line and your future. At Freedom, you're gonna learn how to bulletproof your business from home service legends like Paul Reed, owner of Northwest Roofing, a $30 million a year business. Aaron Gaynor, the owner of Eco Plumbers, a $75 million business. Ken Goodrich is chairman of Gettle, a $250 million business. And Leland Smith, founder of Service Champions, a $500 million business. Listen, you can keep doing what you're doing and hope for the best, or you can arm yourself with the proven strategies I've used at A1 Garage for a service.

Get your tickets at freedomevent.com. That's freedomevent.com. Now let's get back to this episode. John Ray, I've listened to every single Q&A for a few years now. I own a gas piping company called Gas Masters. We're in our second year of business. Number one, can you tell me more on how your virtual product specialist position works? Specifically, the integration between the homeowner technician and product specialist. So when you get a turnover, for that, it's a replacement door. Our goal is to get a specialist on the line that could build the door on the home and know what's in stock and understand the financing better than

anybody. And the key is that they know more about doors than anybody. And there's, if you ever read Robert Cialdini's book influence, there's a lot of influence into this process because it's like, I got to call my boss. He's the master of the garage doors. I'm not like, I make my money fixing garage doors, but if you were my mom, there's no way I would fix this. It just wouldn't make sense. You're throwing, you're kicking the can down the curb here. You're literally band-aiding it.

I don't feel right trying to fix this. It's falling apart. It's a non-insulated 15 year old door. Let's put something nice in here. I'm going to call my boss, one of the best guys atold door. Let's put something nice in here. I'm going to call my boss, one of the best guys at garage doors. Let's see what's in stock. Let's see what options we have.

We're going to go through the options, get you into something that's going to last. Does that make sense? If they say just fix it, then we just fix it. And we just do it on a phone call. We don't do Zoom because Zoom doesn't work some of the time. We want something that's going to work every time that we can master.

Once again, I don't want things that work 95% of the time. I need things that work 100% of the time. That's all on a phone call. Virtual product specialists get credit for the revenue commission. Yes, the virtual product specialist gets commission. In our case, they get a little bit less than the technician because the technician, I think that 80% of the turnover happens from the technician, maybe 85%. So the virtual product specialist

has an opportunity of 15 calls a day. The technician only has got an opportunity of four. So yes, the virtual product specialist makes less, but they get more opportunities. And typically, they make a lot more money overall. Mike Braun said, your top key players, how do you give them equity or upside? Well, it's called an equity incentive program. I've gone over this plenty of times now with PE backing. It's called profit units. But basically, we got the pinnacle club. If they sell a certain amount and their scorecard looks correct,

very little callbacks, not calling out the same day, they get granted equity. It's a chunk. And then every year, it's a little bit more than they make it. We have amazing talent that wants on board, but wants some upside of the growth or in his words, ownership. I don't think he understands what that means,

but I'd like to present him with a couple of different options. Well, it's phantom equity. The way that I do it is equity incentive program, EIP. They don't get decision-making rights. They got to be there on the change of control. Equity means nothing, by the way, if you don't plan on selling in the next three years. You can tell people all day that you're going to give them something, but it never really comes to fruition. Equity means nothing if you don't want to sell and if you got a plan and a target date of selling. So people could ask equity all the time. If you never plan on selling,

it means diddly squat. Other than service 10, what would be your second choice for a field service CRM? I like service fusion and I also like house call pro. They both have their advantages. Those two, I think there's some other good ones out there, depending on the size and the scope of the company, depending on where you need the most help. Most people need help in marketing. They don't have attribution. They're spraying and praying. They don't know what they're doing.

Quincy said, I read on Quora that you've interviewed over 100 door-to-door salespeople for your garage to repair business. How did you find them? I hired Lanny Gray, the door-to-door millionaire. He runs that program. I just hired a specialist. I don't, guys, the door-to-door millionaire. He runs that program. I just hired a specialist. Guys, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to do anything if there's someone out there that does it better. Lanny Gray is the man. He's the best door-to-door guy on the planet.

So you hire that guy. You read his book, Door-to-Door Millionaire. He's got two out. And you get him to come help you. You do not figure out... Why would you reinvent the wheel? Do not reinvent the wheel. Find a specialist who knows what they're doing that's done it a million times over. That's why I hired the seven power contractor. There he is. Because he's the man.

Some of you guys haven't done manuals yet. You still got a shitty brand out there. You haven't hired Kick Charge. You're wondering, why isn't my marketing working? Listen, I did a podcast with Dan. We haven't aired it yet. I did it like eight months ago. There were so many people that were on the fence. He could go through dozens

and dozens and dozens of people that didn't want to do it when they did it. You should hear their stories. You should hear what they're saying. Robert John, what phone software does anyone use for their call center? So right now we're all through ServiceTitan. It's the VoIP service.

I forget. It's crap, but they're switching it over with their new phones, bro. It's called Dialpad. No bueno. Not very good. They know it sucks. Applying to ServiceTitan next week to go make a plan on it. So let's go through some of these questions.

Yeah. to go make a plan on it. So let's go through some of these questions. Yeah, you know, Ronnie said, if you're not going to invest in yourself, you're not going to invest in your business. Most people here, the large majority of people, they say they want stuff, but they really don't want it. If they want it, they do it. You know, there's so many people I meet them two years later. Yeah, they're still trying to break a million dollars.

It's like, dude, I've never, ever had a year where I didn't murder the last year. And I never will. If you're not growing, you're shrinking. And here's the deal. Go take your shirt off. Take it off. Go in the mirror right now and look at yourself. Look at every single problem you have and say, it's my fault. It's my problem. I'm the cause. I'm the one that did this. I'm the only one that could do something about it. Do it today.

Like if you're a freaking man or woman, go in the mirror and say, everything good is I'm responsible for. Everything bad is on me. The people not showing up to interviews, the people not showing up, the bad reviews, the bad driving, not having money in your account, the shitty ass brand. It's all on me. I've got choices and I'm deciding today to change it. Now's the time. Did the techs lose a point or so on their PP when the follow-up team has to jump on the job no eric i don't make the people lose any credit because you know when you start taking percentages away from people it can get really toxic it could get really really really bad because here's what happens

is your technician will say that his wife's out of town or they got to talk to their hoa it It's not my fault. And what we used to do, we used to do something kind of like what you're saying. And the guys would like defend, they book a next appointment and they say they got to talk to their dad tomorrow. It was always something. So it blocked the follow-up team. So we only said, let's price the product right in the price book so we can pay them both if we have to. My job is not to continue to buy parts cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, renegotiate with my suppliers, figure out a way to get my guys' commission down or performance pay. That's not my job. My job is to get the prices where they need to be in the price book and make sure our gross profit's where it needs to be. But with paying everybody very generously, like most of you guys, you should double your

prices today because you got to double your service. You're not getting out there the same day. You're not at your first appointment at the right time. You're driving old shitty trucks. You're not delivering the best parts, the best warranty. You don't have a good uniform. You don't have training every single morning for two hours where you're role playing because you can't afford a trainer. But look, it takes five years to get to that point. If you guys have been in business longer than five years and you can't afford to do those things, either you're extracting money out of the company for your boat and your nice

house and being selfish and not putting it back into the one thing that's making you the money. You're extracting money or you're a shitty businessman or woman, period. If you don't have the money to hire the right people, maybe just maybe you're in a bad industry. And I don't think there's any bad industry, but there's easier ones than others, as I described earlier. But if you've been in business for five years and you can't afford to bring on really great people, either you're extracting money or you're not good at business. And by the way, I was really bad at business, but I went and did the work and I'm still going out there visiting other shops and getting coaches. I mean, how many coaches do you have? Who's consulting

you? What books are you reading? What podcasts are you listening to? I mean, it takes an army. Everyone in your team's got to be doing it as well, not just you. Todd said, Tommy, I would enjoy visiting with you. Let me know if we can make that happen. We have approximately $45 million in the annual revenue with eight units pushing $1 million a month in profit with the next few months. We own two major platform companies, Houston-, COO, Adam automotive care. Yeah, no, it's, it's cool. I'd love for you to come out, Todd, you know, come, come do a shop tour. It's Tommy mellow.com forward slash shop. See if you could come in a little early. We can meet. I love talking to big businesses. You know, we can learn a lot from each other. Can you be my CEO for a few months? I'd love to be. Here's something, by the

way. When I'm able to help a company, you know what I do? The first thing I do, I go over mission, vision, core values. I look at the manuals. I look at their numbers and usually they don't have good numbers. I look at their data integrity team. And then I look at their org chart and find out who they're missing. There's no way being the CEO of this company. Like if I invest in a company, I have no time to go in and run it. I never want to be the CEO again. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. I will not be the CEO of another company past A1 Garage.

I don't want to run the company. I know where my strengths are and I'm great at what I do. I'm better. I love my position. I love being CEO of this company. I've been doing this a long time, but this is not... I'm more than a CEO. I've got more power. I've got so much more to offer. I'm not trying to belittle what a CEO is because everybody thinks it's the chief executive officer execution. I think you can plug and play a good CEO as long as the vision is printed. The vision, the culture is around the vision. I think I could be more in the company, not being the CEO personally.

I want to be the glue. I want to be the growth arm, but, but a CEO, a great CEO is a, they're, they're the one up up front one up front, whatever this guy is called, playing at the symphony. They're the orchestrator. So if you're doing it correctly, you're able to see problems around the corner, way around the corner. And usually, it's the right people on the bus. Usually, it's knowing when to do a price increase.

Usually, it's seeing your marketing's not doing as well. Go back to the fundamentals. How's the call center? What's the conversion rate? What's the average ticket? And then really having attribution with the call center. I mean, the marketing, having attribution for the marketing and then pushing your vendor partners harder. They're making a fortune off of you. When you become so big that they rely on you more than you rely on them, if their marketing is working that great, have them fix everything and say, we've got the highest KPIs in the market.

Why isn't this not working better? I mean, and if you go after gross profit, it has nothing to do with what the executives are making. Negotiations, one of the most important things in the world. Do you buy books for staff or Audible? I've always buy books for staff and anybody's allowed to come in my office and take a book i will never buy a book for somebody unless they know they read there's no point i do buy gopher no for everybody i'm going to start buying and

giuseppe's going to take a note to make sure allison buys these as raving fans i want every single uh of our technicians and installers and csrs and dispatchers to have the book raving fans. I want every single of our technicians and installers and CSRs and dispatchers to have the book, Raving Fans. And I'm more than willing to buy it for them, but I need to know they listen to it. I sent this online last minute, but what advice do you have for options for low ticket services? I'm in house cleaning and beyond weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. I'm coming up short. I don't want to do the cleaning differently because I want to keep it simple for the cleaners. Should I bundle services for other companies

like carpet cleaning, mobile auto detailing, and bronze, silver, or gold package? Ronnie, you need to get different and systematized and start paying the people based on performance. And you should be doing something above and beyond, but you might not be charging enough. I'd like to know who your avatar is. Is it rich people?

Is it dual income people that make $100,000 a year? Is it super affluent that you're working with property managers and you need really, really trustworthy people because there's Rolexes lying around? Have you even figured out your perfect avatar? So now you're trying to supplement the business's income by subbing out and becoming an affiliate. That's not what you do to try to make money. figuring out your perfect avatar. So now you're trying to supplement the business's income by

subbing out and becoming an affiliate. That's not what you do to try to make money. That's icing on the cake down the road. But now you're talking about divesting your time to figure out how to sell mobile detailing and carpets. Focus on your core business. Figure out how to make that profitable. Don't ask for a miracle. I'm not making much profit. It's not really working. So I'm going to start selling other products for other companies to fulfill. Talk about devaluing your company. That's not the solution. You know what you need to do. You need to figure out how to get the right clients and make sure you got SOPs and make sure you're tracking how long they take to get in and out and very little drive time

in a cleaning business. And if you can't get that profitable, then I would not stay in business. Don't try to fix it by becoming an affiliate for other products. One month, Ryan, I'm in. I know you were kidding, Robert. I do speak at some company conferences. Not a lot.

The closer it is to Phoenix, the better off. I love doing it. I really do. I enjoy speaking to people. I enjoy it when people wait afterwards and they said that really touched me. I enjoy it when people lose weight and get focused on their kids.

I enjoy it when someone gets touched and starts calling their parents again that they haven't talked to. I enjoy it when marriages are saved. So yes, I really do enjoy it. It's just, it's always a time thing. If you were a 2.5 million electrical company, 18% of the bottom line and had very minimal debt and at $700,000 in the bank,

what would you be doing? What is the next step you'd be bringing in to get to 5 million? Are you buying an electrical trade? No, no. At two and a half million? Hell no. Dude, I'm taking market share. I'm making sure my technicians are selling every single job and getting reviews and building my, I got to build my reputation. I need to get that thing to at least 15, 20 million. I mean, and make sure I'm 20% of the bottom line. I'm not talking about doing acquisitions. If there's a layup, a guy retiring that wants to sell me a phone number with a hundred thousand contacts for cheap, maybe. But there's no chance in hell at $2.5 million. I don't even have my training wheels off yet.

I need to become a talent recruiter and a trainer and make sure we're training every single day and make sure I'm getting reviews with pictures in them and make sure I'm branded correctly and make sure I can do this and spread out the market and get bigger. Take market share. Don't add services. Do not buy companies. Take market share. Get good at just green, get good at growing organically. You don't have the people. I've got a massive integration team. I got a CFO. I got three FP&A people. I got people that dissect companies three ways from Sunday to buy them and integrate them properly and show leadership and onboard them in HR. Talk to Chad Peterman about buying companies. He'll tell you it's difficult. It's not as easy as it looks.

What mindset shift would you put would put you ahead of 99% of people? What mindset shifts would put you ahead? Well, here's the deal. Look in the mirror. Like I said earlier, the mindset shift that everything falls on you. Every single thing that's good in your life is you're responsible for. Don't try to fix people. Don't try to look at everybody else and say, man, I wish they would just do better. Look at yourself before you criticize anybody

else. You better be in shape. You better be getting eight hours of sleep. You better be drinking a lot of water. You better not be drinking alcohol more than once a month. You better not be smoking cigarettes like chain smoking. You better be calling your parents and hanging out with your kids and spending time with the people at your company. Before you criticize anybody else, you better be focused on you. You better be dominating.

You better be 10 out of 10. You better be focused on you. You better be dominating. You better be 10 out of 10. You better be kicking some ass. You have no right of criticizing anybody else but yourself. Look in the mirror and say, am I the best I can be? Imagine you go to heaven. You're sitting in heaven and Jesus comes up to you and says, hey, listen, I want you to meet this person. Look at this.

Look at this guy or gal. That's who you were supposed to be. When I or gal. That's who you were supposed to be. When I design you, this is who you were supposed to be. And you meet this person and they're smiling. They're happy. They've got energy. They've got love. They've got affection. They're consistent. They're accountable. They wanted to be the best version of themselves. They're just oozing with energy and aura and passion. And you look at them and said, that's who I was designed to be. And you would attract greater people. When you walk in a room, people would know who you are. You would talk with confidence and love and passion like I

was talking about. But no, you want to point the finger at everybody else. You want to say nobody wants to work in these days. Oh yeah, these millennials and Gen Z. Oh, yeah, they don't want to show up on time. Everybody wants, wants, wants. They don't know the sacrifice. Oh, my God. Get out of your shit. Yeah, you took some risks. You signed up for that. You're the one that signed up. Don't forget. It's you. You wanted this. You said I'm willing to put everything in. You didn't get the fundamentals. Thank God. Thank God I met Al Levy. Without this guy, without getting his shit, like without doing everything he said, the org chart, the depth chart, going to visit Dan Antonelli, one of the

took the pictures in black and white. He rode with my technicians and told me nothing is the same. Without meeting him and listening to whatever he said, he told me exactly. He brought on Alan Rohr and Gail, her sister. And without him, I wouldn't be here. If you don't have mentors, this program exists. Nobody's just, you guys can't afford it. You can't afford it because nobody wants to pay you either. You know why? Because you're a cheap ass. Nobody wants to spend money on you because you're afraid to spend money on yourself. That's the facts. I get excited.

We run a sales and marketing company for home improvement contractors. What should I build to sell in the next five years? Well, obviously, you want stickiness. You want clients that are using you all the time that are addicted to your service, right? You got to make yourself so necessary and so easy. I think sometimes with marketing people overcomplicate it. Look,

dude, but most blue collar guys were running 90 miles an hour, all in different directions, trying to clean up the slop every day. We're trying to get organized and, and you know, we're with a marketing partner. That's's okay at a bunch of stuff. Number one is specialize. Become the best of the best of the best of the best of one thing. Don't build a company where you do everything. I meet these commercial guys in garage doors. They're locksmiths. They do docks,

levelers, storefront. They'll do rolling still. If somebody wants to pay them, they're hiring a manager to figure it out because someone's going to go somewhere else if we don't offer it. That's like saying, hey, I was in the landscape business, but I was afraid that someone was going to call someone else. So I got in the pool business.

Then I got an aluminum siding. Then I started doing concrete. And now I'm making a million dollars in each. When you can make a hundred million dollars in just one. So figure out your niche. The riches are in the niches. Yeah. If you want to get ahold of me, just reach out to, I'll have Giuseppe put Bree's email in there. It's bearevelo at a1garage.com. Bearevelo if you want me to see if I can come out and speak to you guys. How do you look at market share as one of your KPIs? Does A1 calculate?

You know, there's a primitive way of doing it, but the fact is I know what we're doing in Phoenix. And I generally know where we're at because we paid $600,000 to a company called Parthenon. And you can tell a lot. The research they did on home starts and Google searches and all this data they bought. We know where we're at in Phoenix based on population, average income, all this stuff. So we've got a general idea, but most of my markets

I want North. I mean, I want five markets over 50 million each next year. And that's not even scratching the surface, by the way, every market I'm in, I can get to 100 million. I mean, look at, I was just at Morris Jenkins in North Carolina. Those guys are just animals, but they've been around since 1953. There's another thing for you guys. Don't try to build it all quickly. When it requires human capital, you'll build down a house of cars when you're not building slowly. I tell you, you want to sell quickly, but if you run hard for three years and you get the right people stuck on an EIP plan, because that's stickiness, that's the glue, that'll change a lot of the stuff on how quick you can hire. But I'm telling you guys, it takes two decades to do what I did. So don't have this goal. Oh, I want to do a hundred million.

Why? Why the hell do you want that? You guys would not even be able to know what to do with a hundred million dollars. You wouldn't trust your friends. Your family would be coming after you. You'd hate your life. You wouldn't even know what to think. You get a hundred million dollars in your pocketbook.

You can't wait to spend the money. Like that'll tear somebody's life up. It'll tear up your marriage. It you can't wait to spend the money. That'll tear somebody's life up. It'll tear up your marriage. It'll tear up the relationship with your kids. Figure out what to do with $5 million. Figure out how to make your dreams come true and make experiences mean more. Where are you going to travel to? Start manifesting these things. Don't ever want to walk in my footsteps. You don't know what those footsteps look like. You don't want my footsteps. Thank God I don't give a shit. if someone likes me because I have money great You know, i'm not I've got a fancy little bracelet on here that costs 10 cents

You know at the end of the day if somebody wants to be with me because i'm successful or money or because I work out Great someone wants to be with me because they like me as a friend great. I don't give two shits In fact, if you don't like me if you get to know me I think you will because i'm a straight up dude. I don't give two shits. In fact, if you don't like me, if you get to know me, I think you will, because I'm a straight up dude. I don't lie to people. If I shake your hand, I mean it. I come with passion. I come with energy, but I'm not negative. And I walk around here and I've got nothing but compassion. And I'm so grateful. And people talk shit, just like all the haters are like, oh yeah, that guy's fake. Whatever, dude. I don't give two flying shits. If I care what people think, but I'm telling you

with money comes great responsibility. And to get a lot of it, everything changes and it's going to make you who you are more. And these value systems that you have, we'll see, don't wish for just a billion dollars. Why? What are you going to do with it? You probably don't know. I'm telling you this, get to five to $10 million in your bank account as quick as possible and watch what life increases. Watch, watch how beautiful it is because money does. It's fun tokens. You can do cool stuff with it.

Recommendations for performance pay KPIs for retail employees. You know, I would need to know a lot more. What you're going to try to do is find three things that make the company stronger, faster, better, less turnover, higher capacity, more sales, whatever you're trying to do, more recruiting. You find three or four things and you figure out what that'll do to the bottom line, what that'll do to gross profit. And you implement those things where people can make more money, but the company is healthier. And then what happens is you start attracting eight players and winners. And somebody might get paid a lot more money, but the company makes a hell of a lot more money

because those people can do a lot more than three B players combined. So let's put it this way. Let's say you got three people making $19 an hour, right? That's $57 an hour. You find an all-star, you pay them $50 an hour. They run circles around the $57 of the three people. So you actually save $7. This employee is not going anywhere.

They're happy as can be. 50 bucks an hour is not a bad couple grand a week. So that's how the math works in my head, is if somebody wants to come crush it, they can make what three people make a little bit less than three people, but they're doing more. They're not living. They're happy. And what happens when you're in an environment or culture where people are working, everyone's working. When they're screwing off on their cell phones, chit-chatting about the weekend. Now, there is a time for that. There's lunch. There's breaks.

There's time to catch up with your best friends at work. But I like productivity. It makes everybody more productive. When I was a busboy, I'll never forget these days, man. When the restaurant was slammed, there's no better busboy on the planet than me. I mean, I could bus five tables at once. I was filling up the waters. I was filling up tea.

I was talking to clients. I was helping run food. I was folding silverware. It didn't really matter. I could do anything. I was a machine. When we were slow, I was probably the worst busboy. Non-productive.

I'm like, ah, I'll bus that table in a little bit. I was bullshitting in the back. It just wasn't busy. It's not productive. That's how your place is. When you get off this call, I want you to walk out in your office and I want you to look around.

I just want you to shut up. Take a deep breath. Walk around and see how productive it feels. Walk around and see what, count how many cell phones, count how many people are screwing off. Go look at your desk. I want you to go into your office

and look at your desk and say, would I be proud of this if this was an employee's desk? This was my CFO's desk. I want you to walk around and say, how does the bathrooms look? Do they look clean? Yesterday, there was some paper towels

all on the ground in the bathroom. Of course, I picked them up. But it really made me feel like I was embarrassed. When I'm in the parking lot, I'm out there cleaning up. I look at everything and I say, how would I judge myself if it was the first time I was there? Let's see. This next question is, are your texts that sell jobs getting a bonus percentage or something like paid off? Are your texts that sell jobs getting a bonus percentage or something like paid off are your techs to sell jobs getting a percentage bonus i mean yeah they make part of the ticket

but there's a lot of other things we look at like callback ratio their average review the stuff that matters to the company it's more of a performance pay but uh no we don't bonus with pto that would be stupid i don't want my top guys having to take off two months. That's not healthy for the company. It's not healthy for them. I need them to take great vacations and use their vacation time. Look, if you come to me and you say, I want work-life balance, I want to work four days a week, but I'm going to go to town. I will be your top player. I'll do more than people do in six days, but I want more time off. Then that's something we can talk about if that motivates them.

Every single company and every single employee, my coworkers, they need a separate prescription. So I want you guys to understand that to give people PTO as a reward, that's not healthy for a lot of people. Let's see what Parker said. Recently stepped in to help my family business that fell on its face last year.

I've become obsessed with the fight. My question is, if you're in debt and stuck at a certain size, as in every profitable dollar is going towards debt from a previous failed scale attempt, do you suggest staying at that size and perfecting the systems before scaling up or throw every dollar towards marketing

to scale up and fix the system while growing again? Well, I'll tell you this. You might not like this answer. I need to know what the profit to the bottom line is because if you're not north of 10, 12%, then you don't really have much money to invest and I'd start paying off the debt. But if you get the 20, 25%, I would start scaling. Now, minus the debt. So let's just say you're bringing in a 200 grand a month profit and your debt payments are a hundred grand. I'd probably start paying off the debt. I mean, I got to tell you, digging yourself, look, if the market was like super, super strong, I might have a different answer. I don't mind debt. But when you're so far in debt, it limits the company's

ability to scale. And I'm all about kind of jumping out of a plane and building the parachute on the way down because I'm an entrepreneur. That's what I do. I don't like perfection. I'm a big, I'm really against perfection because you find a company that's perfect. You send me out there. I will rip them a new asshole. I will rip them apart. Nobody's perfect. I have so many issues. There's so much money all over the place. I could walk around this building, man, and find money, money, money, money, money.

It's the ability to prioritize those in the most money. It's the ability to look at what the holes are in the business. Imagine we're in a massive, massive ship. It's a massive cruise line. And the boat starts to sink. We look for, there's a thousand holes, but the first thing I need to do is patch the big holes where the most water seeps in. The biggest places were bleeding. And if you patch a lot of those holes, I'd start growing again. But that means the gross profit's where it needs to be and the EBITDA, the bottom

line is where it needs to be. I start making extra payments to the debt and start scaling. But if you're just breaking even after the debt payment, do not think about scaling. You failed once. There's a way to kind of start scaling just by cleaning up, making sure all your reviews are responded to, making sure you're getting a picture on every review, making sure you're doing stuff on Nextdoor and Angie's List, making sure that your ads look better than anybody else in the ValPAC. Making sure you're ranking better than everybody else on LSA. Making sure you guys are trained two hours every morning doing role play, even if they're great. Make them continue to... I can work out four hours today,

you'll never see a change. I can work out four hours every day for a month, you might see a little bit. But if I work out every day and eat right for a year, you won't even recognize me. The same thing exists for technicians, installers, CSRs, and dispatchers. You guys training every day with them? You could floss all you want before you go to the dentist, but if you're not flossing every day, you're going to have cavities and issues and gingivitis and all that other shit. So you better figure out how to do it every single day and make that part of your culture. Guys, I know I was late, but Blake asked me, what's the biggest mistake you learned? What's the biggest mistake you learned from that made you the most money? Biggest mistake you learned that made you the most money? It's pretty simple.

I know you guys have heard me say this before, but I used to always say revenue. I used to always come in a room. I remember back in the day I went to service site and events. I'd go out there, I'd walk in a new shop, I'd walk into a new party. And I was just so happy to talk about revenue, talk about the size of the company, the markets we're in, how many technicians we hired this month. And man, I got a rude awakening that that didn't mean shit. It didn't matter to anybody. You know what matters to the company's health is bottom line profit. Revenue is for vanity. It's purely vanity. Profit is for sanity. I like big revenue numbers because it's easy to turn

dials to get up the profit. And you know what? I always used to tell Adam back in the day, I say, Adam, listen, I'm not worried about profit right now. We've got enough coming in. I live very, very, very, very below my means. I'm more focused on scale. I'm interested in market share. And then I realized I could have both because I'm a badass. And people know that work here, that if I put my mind to something, I'm going to do it because I'm going to go get the help. That's another thing, Blake. I'm going to go get help. They know.

You know what people call me now for? They say, who do you know that could help us? I had a message from one of our main managers today said, who do you know that could consult me and work with me to become a better leader? They come to me for my relationships. That's one thing that I can tell you that not a lot of people have is I know who to call when or what. I've got trusted advisors that I know are elite badasses, Navy SEAL Team 6, that when something goes wrong, I know who to call exactly when. And I do it before I get to that point. I do it before everything blows up. I do it before people get hurt.

I see around the corners. Most people are looking next day, next week, next month. I'm looking three years ahead. And I know, listen, I'm telling you guys this. Another great thing I learned is you're only as strong as your weakest link. I thought that old cliche didn't mean much until I realized if there's a hole in the operation and you don't do something about it,

look in the mirror. It's you. You're the problem. You knew it was a problem. You keep putting it out because you don't want to jump back in and do the work. When's the last time you jumped back in and did the work? Now, I'm not a big fan of this,

of the CEO or owner or founder jumping back in and did the work? Now, I'm not a big fan of this, of the CEO or owner or founder jumping back in and doing the work, but guess what? If you're jumping back in to create systems, standard operating procedures and checklists and talk to the crew and understand their concerns and their ideas, now it's very valid that you're doing the work because you're reforming the process.

And very few people want to do that. They're like, dude, I'm just, I'm so busy. All I do, you get home from work, you get home on a Friday and you're like, oh my, what a busy week. I am just beat. Here's what I would ask. What the hell do you get done? Just show me. Write down all the projects you finished. Show me the systems you worked on. Show me the checks and balances you created. Show me the culture. Show me the powerful meetings that motivated everybody. Show me how your training's more effective. Show me how you held your vendors accountable. Show me what you did. Or did you just do busy work the whole time you worked? Put out fires. Didn't get shit done. You didn't do anything for the business and you go back Monday and

expecting a different result. You know a mistake made twice in a row is not a mistake. It's a choice. And a lot of you guys choose to run in chaos and firefighters and continue to just run around and then go back to work as your relationships are your sacrifice with your family, your kids, your wife, your husband, your parents, and you continue to go back and do more without asking for help, why are you too good to ask for help? Why would you not ask for help? Are you just above it? Are you afraid that people are going to judge you? Are you afraid that people are going to think about you because you asked for help? Because you asked somebody else? Why do you keep doing the same stuff and expecting a different result? You keep putting out fires. You keep tolerating B and C players.

You keep allowing people to show up late and roll their eyes during meetings. You don't actually praise people when they do a great job. You're so busy shitting on the bad people. You're focused on the bottom 20% instead of praising the top. You don't have a culture of excellence. Listen, guys, I know I was late, so I wanted to go over. Submit your questions if you got them i'd love for you guys to do this right now copy and paste it so they go to the top of

my list if there's a question in here you just literally put in homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions yeah copy and paste click them there and i'll get to them next time. I want to leave on a good note. You know, these things are passion. They're not negativity. They're like, some people need a wake up call. Some people need to hear these things. My meetings, I don't have people to call out to look at KPIs and tell you how great you're doing. Because most of this would be praise.

But when people, you know, if you really listen to this podcast, you get a lot of the answers. But some people are like, what would you do if you were me? You know I like marketing. You know, like driving phone calls and making sure my booking rates up and making sure I got a high conversion and making sure I'm training SEAL Team 6 badass salespeople that leave a smile with a five-star review. You do those fundamentals, right? You're going to win. And if you don't know where to go, listen to some of my podcasts. Listen to the ones with Lauren. Listen to the ones with Sterling Sky. Listen to the ones that really show you how to dominate Google.

I've got so many good podcasts. You guys just got to listen to them. Listen to the one coming up really quick with Leland Smith. It'll blow your freaking mind. The Home Service Expert podcast, Leland Smith. I know you're busy, but you're busy putting out fires and doing nonsense, getting nothing done. Educate yourself. Spend 15 hours a week. Go to A1 Garage. Giuseppe's going to put this in the notes. A1Garage.com forward slash game day.

We've changed it to four podcasts from Waste No Day, Brian Burton. And these four I specifically picked because they're lights out gangbusters for your technicians and your installers. Anyone out there selling. A1Garage.com forward slash game day. Brian Burton's the man. Waste No Day. It's no joke. Your technicians should be listening to that. But if I had to give you four, these are the four. These are the ones that all my team is listening to on repeat over and over. Let me ask you this. You think you guys are going to listen to it? You think they're going to do the work?

Are you going to check in to make sure they're doing it? I doubt it. You can't even get them to show up to work on time. You can't even get them to come to a meeting. You can't even get them to stop stealing gas. Look in the mirror. It's you. It's you. It's you.

You're the one that did it. You're the one that built it. You're the one that allows this to happen. You're the one sitting there going, if I do something now, I'll lose my company because they'll quit because now they control me. That's a problem and you're going to have to work through it. But if you want more, you better start going in and acting like it. And you better accept accountability and responsibility.

Get your ass in shape. Your brain will never think clearer. Go to Dr. J. Listen, if you guys need to reach out to Dr. J to get a simple blood panel to find out why you're not sleeping, why you get headaches, why your brain fogs there, why you're not remembering stuff, why you're showing up with low energy, reach out to me. I'll get you his contact. I love the guy. I did a podcast on his podcast yesterday in this exact studio, but listen, make it a great day. I really appreciate you guys being on here. There's

a lot of people here. We have 82 people. I really do apologize about being late. That's not like me, but at least I can say I was late because I was building the guns. You guys got a band-aid because I'm pretty cut. You guys got a sewing kit because I'm pretty ripped. Is there

a vet around here because these puppies are sick? Anyways, you guys have a great day. Make it a great week. I'm out. Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking

to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast

and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.