The Home Service Expert Podcast - Servicing Your Customer’s Needs the Right Way to Build Lasting Brand Loyalty

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $100 million-plus home service business with over 400 employees in 16 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy answers your biggest questions about onboarding, employee discipline, advertising, insurance, operating manuals, sales...

When we're teaching our employees, we like to do a little bit of classroom, a lot of hands-on, a lot of Q&A, a lot of lecturing, try to mix it up. And what I find when I go through and I look at people's training program, it's 90% fluff. They take a long time to teach somebody the core values and the things they need to know. The majority of my time when people come to Phoenix, they spend four weeks in their market, four weeks here. I'm trying to get that down to six weeks because even we have fluff. I think you should be thinking about things like eye contact, body language, tonality, when to pause, questions to ask, when to smile, offering coffee on the way, the questions to ask to get over objections, the right way to deliver value, understanding

buyer's habits. If you don't understand the buyer cycle, who cares about the sales journey? Figure out how people buy and then service those needs. 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, really, really looking forward to today. Today's going to be an amazing day.

I'm going to answer some great questions. If you guys have not heard of the book, go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. If you guys haven't heard of my course, go to homeservicemillionaire.com and join our free Facebook group. It's Home Service Expert Group. We just got done with vertical track. It went absolutely phenomenal. Things are happening that I never thought possible. The ducks are all lining up. The stars are aligning. It's going really, really good. Training centers built out. Graduating 30 guys. They just got done signing their graduation certificates. These certificates could take them to any company. That's the way that I feel about it. I read a book for the third time. It's Seven Secrets. I want to start with this real quick.

Seven Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. How to Make More Money, Take More Time Off, and Live Your Best Life. I call him Brian K because his name is fairly difficult. But let's go ahead and read a little bit of things that I kind of highlighted here recently. My business exists to satisfy my needs, to fund my lifestyle, and to give me the ability to live the life that I want. I hope you all could say that loud and clear. I also highlighted some other things here. I want to read this quote to you and hopefully it stands out. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is the elementary of one truth, the ignorance of which kills countless

ideas and splendid plans. At the moment one commits oneself then providence proves to all sorts of things occur to help one that would have never otherwise have occurred a whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. That's by William Hutchinson Murray. And what it says is Murray starts by saying, until one is committed, there is hesitancy. And there really is. You got to be committed to what you're doing.

Remember, you must be very clear about and have a burning desire. This is from Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. For the outcome or results you want, you have to really, really want it, then ask for it, then ask for it, then live and act it with expectancy and gratitude for everything you have, and importantly, for everything you will have. There's one more thing I wanted to highlight here. A goal without a plan is a wish. I want to jump into some of these questions, and I hope a lot of them come, because this is going to be fire today. So let me go through some first things here.

I'm working on my second book. It's going to be coming out this summer. Can't wait. And then I'm going to be writing a third book. The second book that I'm writing is all about hiring culture. I got Al Levy and Jody in the book. We've got a lot of great interviews. I think there was about eight Jody in the book. We've got a lot of great interviews. I think there was about eight different people in the book.

We're really trying to figure out exactly how to be able to build great technicians and just attract them like crazy. And there's a lot of things that need to happen. And I put them all in the book. Lots of great stories. I think you guys are going to love it. I wanted to talk about the third book that I'm writing. I got to thinking about it.

And my goal by the next year is to 10 times my efficiency. So I'm starting to figure out what needs to happen outside of work, my personal life, a house manager, someone to help cook. And I know you guys are thinking, man, this is going to be expensive. And the way that I'm setting this all up is that anybody could do it. It's because your time is valuable. And I'm going to try to show you guys are thinking, man, this is going to be expensive. And the way that I'm setting this all up is that anybody could do it. It's because your time is valuable. And I'm going to try to show you guys how I'm making myself 10 times more efficient, how I'm getting an assistant for my assistant, how I'm learning how to delegate properly. When I put this all together and you understand an executive assistant and a house manager and

someone to help you create special time instead of time with people, you're going to be impressed, I think, by the third book. The book's going to talk a lot about getting rid of email completely. It's going to talk about making efficient time, delegating everything I just said. So you guys will dig that. Let's dive into some questions. First question is by Vincent Johnson. What is a good book or teaching lesson on hiring and interviewing for technicians and CSRs?

We just signed up with Jody Underhill with Rapid Hire to help us for marketing new employees. What I'm looking for here is a better way of interviewing for these positions. Thanks. So I kind of pre-went through these books. There's an amazing book I just read. It's called Recruit Superstars by Jeff Hyman. There's an amazing book I just read. It's called Recruit Superstars by Jeff Hyman. There's another great book called Who. It's by Jeff Smart and Randy Street. You read these three books, Who, Recruit Superstars, and Culture-Driven Recruiting. That's a master's class

in recruiting and training and interviewing. One of the things you want to do is create a scorecard for interviewing, make sure they're all the same. In recruiting rock stars, he goes and labels everything. But there's a lot more to it. You want to have that wow factor when you're interviewing people. You want to create memorable stories for people. I think we think too much about just the interview process, but where are they coming into?

Are they wowed when they come in? Some of the other things, I get guys that interview and they bring five guys with them when they come to interview the next time. One of the other things I wanted to discuss with the interview process is the onboarding. Are you getting their wife or husband involved? Are you doing something above and beyond, something exceptional? Do you have a plan for them when they come in? Or is it, hey, I want you to go follow this guy around for the rest of the day? That's no way to do things. So Vince, what I'd recommend is you make sure to wow them on the onboarding process. You've got a plan. You make sure to get them oriented correctly. Some of the stuff I learned from Ellevee, but I've actually had to learn it firsthand and then read about it in these other books. What software do you use to implement the

onboarding technician employees? So we've got a whole teaching platform that we use called Absorb. And I think Tranual works good, Tranual. There's a couple of really good ones. But you said, where do they learn in the quizzes before hands-on? So when we're teaching our employees, we like to do a little bit of classroom, a lot of hands-on, a lot of Q and A, a lot of lecturing, try to mix it up. And what I find when I go through and I look at people's training program, it's 90% fluff. They take a long time to teach somebody the core values and the things they need to know. The majority of my time when people come to Phoenix, they spend four

weeks in their market, four weeks here. I'm trying to get that down to six weeks because even we have fluff. I think you should be thinking about things like eye contact, body language, tonality, when to pause, questions to ask, when to smile, offering coffee on the way, the questions to ask to get over objections, the right way to deliver value, understanding buyer's habits. If you don't understand the buyer cycle, who cares about the sales journey? Figure out how people buy and then service those needs. So the reason I'm saying this is I feel like the courses I've seen, they're so busy teaching people about a capacitor and all the crap on a HVAC or garage door or roof. They don't teach us these human skills of just how to win friends and influence people.

So hopefully I can teach you the technical skills rather quickly through Jonathan Wisman's perception, predict finding the right people through Jody, bringing them in. We interviewed 22 technicians today. I just got up with our head recruiter. We just talked to her. We've got four internal recruiters now, and then we've got Jody's whole team.

We're up to seven trainers. That's probably going to double. We're working on a traveling team to go help markets and grow them and triple them. But really good questions so far with recruiting and hiring. Greg wanted to know, I have a great group of guys. I'm doing my best to offer the best wages and benefits in the area. I still have trouble when a new guy starts and how to train them in a technical aspect. A lot of my guys don't want to teach the new guys because it typically slows them down. I always tell my lead techs that they're not being rushed. Spend the time with them, build value. They all still have trouble making the time

to teach the new guys. How would you handle this? Pay them more. Are you giving them extra money than quizzing them? And then are you getting some type of response from the trainees? So hopefully you have like a, we use SurveyMonkey. We send a SurveyMonkey out to the tech and to the trainer and we go through and make sure they both felt comfortable. Sometimes I make an anonymous, sometimes I'll go off. You don't want them rushing. So you need to pay them to slow down. Otherwise, it's actually a burden for them. So I completely understand where these guys are coming from. And I've gone through this same question actually not that long ago.

And you're going, man, it's like every other turn, Tommy's telling me to pay for something and do this and do this. It's expensive. That's why I say raise your prices. I mean, you guys have heard me say it a million times, but you can't expect to pay your trainers good, have people traveling around for you, leaving their family and friends and doing these things and just charging a basic price. You need to excel your service and say, we go through eight weeks of training. We do drug tests.

We do background checks. We make sure to hire for personality. We want someone that you feel comfortable with. That's going to be your friend. That's going to look out for your best interests. And it's going to really take care of your needs. And for them to do that, we need to have a good listener. They had all these things. Yes, we need to pay a little bit more, but you got to know that we're not taking any shortcuts and you're getting treated correctly. A lot of people say they have problems with that, especially on social media. Those are the small guys that will never get big So trust me They're going to struggle to go places Joy asked I know LSA is king

Are you doing any pay-per-click? Of course I mean PPC I spend anywhere between $300,000 and $400,000 a month So pay-per-click is the best advertising You could do for demand jobs If you get good at your campaigns You could really rock

out with it. I think LSAs are going to keep getting bigger. One day they'll probably overtake PPC in the home service niche. Believe it or not, painters don't even have their own LSAs out yet. It's because they haven't adopted this stuff. If painters all, they got a subcategory I found out for painters. It's a category within a category and there's just what you need to have is at least three to five people in a market that do something and painters just haven't cut on but pay-per-click is still i believe the best thing to understand capacity planning you can lower it you can speed it up you can get jobs no matter what have you been for that top spot and a big thing about p PPC is you got a quality score.

And I always recommend looking at this. Like if you were to type in ginger ale, it might have a couple big types of ginger ale and maybe Vernors. Vernors might pay a little bit more to be there because the quality score is not as high. So understanding quality scores when it comes to pay-per-click really, really matters. If you're not very familiar with pay-per-click and how it works, I recommend looking up quality score. And quality score is a combination of how much time somebody spends on your page when they click on it because they look at the bounce rate. It looks at things like did they interact with the site? Did they play the videos?

And then the person find out what they need. Did they call? Because some of them on mobile, you can click the call. Google knows you called. So they figure you're higher quality. The person found what they were looking for. So that's interesting to know. Brett Neal asked a question.

What are some options or workarounds for starting a home service business if you don't have a contractor's license? Well, there's what's called a handyman's law. And if it's under $10,000, no, it's under $1,000, you could operate under the handyman's law. I look up the handyman's law in your state. And a full-blown contractor's license or specialty license that are pretty easy to get, you got to take a quick, easy business license. Garage doors, depending on the state, some of them require them, some of them don don't but a lot of contractors licenses are easier to get than you think because it's a specialty license with a full-blown contractor license you need somebody to sign for you that shows you have two years

experience you need to prove all this stuff you need to take some pretty difficult tests that have to do with headers and footers and all kinds of crazy questions. I've taken a little bit of it, but stuff that you'd never really use in real life. So I can tell you guys, if you're going to be a builder, you need it. Joe asked, what would you recommend for health insurance? What I would say on that is it depends. Depends on a lot of things. What I'd do is get with three different brokerages and have them bid against each other. But they're going to tell you your average age. They're going to want to do some tests. They're going to want to understand, are you providing anything for your employees? Like, is there a gym membership, stuff like that? And all I can tell you is I don't know the size

of your company, but what I would say is you want them to compete. You want three companies competing every year for all your types of insurance. Are you still offering the Home Service Millionaire Club? We are doing some stuff with the Home Service Millionaire Club, but it's kind of morphing into the Home Service Freedom Club. Home Service Freedom is actually a buyer's group. I won't go into a lot of detail right now, but Home Service Freedom and Garage Door Freedom is a sub issue of that.

But it's going to offer things like E-squared, schedule engine, how to get your trucks, how to buy wholesale phones and tablets, how to get uniforms, copy machines, how to get payroll systems for way cheaper. Everything you could think of will be through this freedom network in every home service industry. And there's a lot to this, so I can't really explain it all right now. Got some questions coming in. Should you be scared to discipline even though he or she is one of the few technicians you have that can produce? I don't like the word discipline. That's parenting. And I don't really feel like we

needed to do that. So I do feel like you have to have firm control. There should be certain types of write-ups, but that's when my other sheet by Jack Tester comes in is to understand their goals and just have serious conversations. You know, there's a good book called Fierce Conversations. And I truly believe you need to have a conversation to just be open with people. And sometimes it's not easy but you've got to understand that they've got a point of view too and sometimes when we can understand where they're coming from and there's always those assholes that are rolling their eyes all the time and those are cancer so I really want to understand the circumstances on

this particular case but obviously it's a tough answer for what the context you've given me, but I would say you do want to have the ability to discipline, but I just don't like that word. I'd like to say, listen, I'm going to pull you off the schedule so we can train together a little bit more because this can never happen again. I'll pay you, but you're not going to make as much as you'd make if you're out in the field. And I want to make sure you understand that you're important to me. And because you're important to me, we need to work together and make sure we figure this out because you don't want to lose me.

I don't want to lose you. Let's just talk this out. Let me take you for a beer. Let's go out and then let's work tomorrow together and I'll pay you 150 bucks for the day, but let's make sure we're seeing eye to eye. No one should get in trouble that doesn't know they're going to get in trouble unless it's just blatantly light che cheater still in my case you're fired

That's not good Chris to wire said Would you try and get a line? Of credit to consolidate all debts and get a little extra or would you refinance your home? I have a bunch of equity in my home. We have two new vans arriving this month, too Chris I would say both. Why? Because I like money sitting there because opportunities tend to find themselves.

I'm not saying spend all that money. What I'm saying is if you're in growth mode, you're starting to get super profitable and you could spend a dollar to get 10 back, create as much money as possible on the sidelines. Always make sure you've got enough for your future self. Hopefully you've got a retirement account. I've had to pull lines out of my house, but that's when I bought a company or something and I put the money right back. But it really depends. I think one of the things is I've made a lot of mistakes. The more mistakes I make, the more comfortable I feel taking money out because I'm not going to

run into those same mistakes. Like 10 years ago, if I would have took out a few hundred grand, I would have lost it because I just didn't know what I was doing the same way. I've made a lot of the mistakes. Let's see what else we have here. What software do you use for training technicians, employees? So we use Absorb. That's the one that I was saying earlier. it works well but i like trainual too and there's some other good ones they're very simple also they're not all quizzes a lot of the stuff we try to do is get them out actually using the tools and the parts and they go through what is it called trying to think of the name of it but they got to go through this whole phase where they're actually working on the door and they got to prove they understand how to weigh it they got

to understand ipbt they got to be able to do it in their phone so some of the guys can fake it till they make it they're good test takers but this is more of a the word i was looking for is practical so practical is a good idea and a lot of the stuff i want to record them doing it and then them wash themselves and identify what they could do better because i'm really big on the eye contact i don't care how good they are repairing a garage or you can have the best repair tech in the world, but if I don't trust them and I don't like them, then it doesn't matter. If they're mean, if they're cocky, if they're condescending, what's the point? I'd rather have somebody that could get by that I know is replacing the parts and could go a little bit slower and be

proficient, but understands the personality and the people and the warmness that you feel. I think that's where this whole industry, all of home service has missed it. I think we're one of the only companies that teach people on how to be better human beings rather than just how to fix something. Lydia said earlier, how do I go about setting up that first remote location? What does the process look like? So that's called the spoke. And what I want to recommend with this is first maximize wherever you're at. Grow as big as you could in your current market. One of the things I used to say when I first started doing this is plant seeds in all these markets and they'll grow. The problem is you can't plant

a bunch of seeds without good water, nourishment, and sunlight. So you can plant all the seeds you want across the United States, but I failed. I had to close down four markets a few years ago. Unless you've got the time and the resources to water, put the ingredients and get them in fresh sunlight, it's tough. but if you do have those ingredients i get a smaller location that you can get a google my business on i make sure it's good frontage road that this car is going by i do an analysis of where i want to put my google my business location because you don't just want to put it anywhere you don't want to be around like 18 different ones because you'll never rank really quick. So find an area that you can rank in front

of the right demographic, the avatar you want to be in front of. You've got to get a camera system. When I set my first one up, it was in Omaha. I literally, me and Mike Bailey installed the floors. Bree was there. Crystal was there. We had a blast. We really did have some fun, but we did all the posters on the walls, decided here's the posters every location is going to have. We thought we got a great deal on a ping pong table until it showed up and it was like this big. It looked real size in the Amazon. So we ended up getting a real nice big ping pong table. We got the same computer desk, the same computers. We've got the same eight by seven training door. We ordered all the same things as far as toiletries, a coffee machine, the same copy machine to

print things on, the same paper. And we built an Excel sheet full of Costco, Home Depot, and Amazon. We made sure that we got the same thing every time. Now the computers get updated once a year. The camera systems get updated. Some of the technology gets updated. But for the most part, everything stays the same. You got a quick link.

You open up a new location. It's already planned out. You're going to open up new spokes as quick as you want. What I recommend too is trying to be within two hours drive time because you want to be able to drive there within two hours if something goes wrong. You don't want to open up if you're in Tennessee and Washington. It just doesn't make sense. So think about a place you could be to quickly and then get from there quickly. And then you can start expanding further. I went to Milwaukee for my third location after Tucson. I don't know if that's a great idea. Can you share how to gather the information for the operating manuals? I want to start now, just don't know how. Okay. So for the operating manuals, this is really, really important. Every time you get a phone call every time your technician screws up

something doesn't get loaded right there's a flat tire there's a mismeasurement there's the wrong thing got ordered that's all things for the manual when a guy shows up with a new tattoo on his face when a guy shows up that he cut his hand because he wasn't wearing gloves. When a guy comes, there's a piece of, you know, he's cutting something and something flew into his eye. Eyeglass wear, steel-toed boots, your feet, your fingers, and your eyes. Those are what get hurt the most. What happens when your car breaks down? Who do you call? There's all these scenarios, and they happen to us every day, except we don't write them down.

One of the things too is go out with two of your technicians and watch how they do things differently and start to create a common, what I would say is the right way to get it done efficiently and safe, and then make sure that everybody understands that and put that in the manual. So there's a couple of different types of manuals here. You've got your general technician manual, which shows them about the meetings and when they got to show up and how their pay works and what happens when the truck breaks down and tattoo and beard policies and A1 provided jackets and when you got to wear it and how you can't go to strip clubs and whatnot. Everything's listed in there. It's 67 pages, I think. Then you got the other one that's the

technical side of things. It shows the safe way to do rollers, when to go up and talk about safety eyes, what questions to ask on a service call. They kind of run through each service call, all the different scenarios and the safe way to do things. And then we got to make sure the technicians know how to do it safely and we got to sign off on it. Then we need to make sure they taught that way. And we're looking at even a camera system now that sits on your chest. It's pretty wild, but it's going to be pretty amazing if we can make it happen. We got seven that we're testing out. They're kind of like police cams. Let's see here. We increased our installers and tech pay by an average of 20% last quarter. Now

they're making excellent money that they don't mind missing a day here and there. From our standpoint, we would like to see more productivity, not less. Any suggestions? Are we now overpaying? So Byron, I would say it'd be 500 easier for guys to show up. You're getting more out of them. For me, when I come up with a pay structure, productivity and performance goes into pay. So I understand California has a lot of regulations, but all of my pay for performance, when I whiteboard the structure, I'm going to make sure that I'm getting a lot more out of people, less warranty calls, more reviews, better. Like one of the things we do is more financing because we've realized our tickets are better

and higher conversion rates. So I love that you're paying your guys more, but just to pay them more is not what I recommend. I'd recommend a performance. And what we look at now is we've got a tech error report that just got fixed. The service had an issue that we could pull all of our jobs out of service Titan, all the photos for every single job and just scroll through and make sure everyone's perfect. So we've got tech errors. We've got callback ratios. We've got average ticket sales with my scorecard is 40% of it. And because you're in garage door freedom, I'll show you our scorecards and the scorecards you could get around a lot of this stuff with even in California, if you just pay them a fair salary and then bonus them the rest.

But if you want to get production out of people, we just decided to pay people an extra $100 a door if it's the same day or next day. Because it means we're jamming it in or we're picking it up. But who cares? If I'm selling a door the same day, first of all, they're getting rid of their 72-hour right of rescission or cancellation. And number two is I want to get that door in fast because we sold it at the best price possible but if you look at hvac guys they'll bring in coolers and they'll get the crane there the same night because they're selling it at the top price they could and it's an emergency uh let's see here expert or stick to outsourcing depends onends on how big I am. I was like in-house,

but they got to understand a few different things. SEO is all about having a clean site with no broken. I don't know a lot of one people that know how to do this, but once the website's dialed in, and I mean, it's talking to each page is a great site map. It's all in a good context. You've got a lot of things on there. You've got your metadata, and then you've got, I'm trying to think of the name of all this thing. It's been a while.

You've got your content, you've got your internal links, and then you've got your schema data. There's a lot of things to dial in with schema data. And once all that's dialed in, the two things that matter after that is a ton of content creation, and it's great content with videos, and the second thing is getting links. So personally, I'd say if you're under 20 technicians, I wouldn't have anybody in-house. As you start to get up there in size, that's when you want to bring somebody in, but still it's broken out into writers, videographers, and link builders. I don't think there's a one size fits all one person. If you meet somebody,

I'm guessing they're outsourcing to probably the Philippines or Russia, or actually there's a few spots that they usually use. And if you got somebody that understands all that and they're able to outsource to get a bunch of VAs, maybe. I'd like to see the ROI and I'd like to understand how much the SEO is bringing in and how much you think it could bring in. And if I was going to do that in house, I'd probably run it for 90 days and see what the real ROI is. You see, I don't want to ever see how I rank anymore.

It's great to look at some of the stuff I look at with the SEO clerks and all that crap and SEO Moz. And I got a bunch of tools we look at with, I pull them up on here before I care dollars and cents. If you could show me how hiring somebody for $10,000 a month brings me a hundred thousand dollars organically, that's still 10%, but that's earned media. That means if they went away, I'd still be earning that for the next couple of years. So I'm willing to commit that much money to doing that. We make a lot more than 100,000 off our SEO. The thing is, we're almost national. I mean, we're in 29 markets. So it makes more sense the bigger

you get to invest more money in SEO because there's search terms that people research. They might search Goodman versus Train. And when you're researching those two versus one another, the likelihood of pay-per-click GMB and LSA ads coming up are not very strong. So the good news about that is it starts to count a lot more when you can rank a national site. So that's something I'd really look to invest in if you got into a lot more locations. There's the little red book of selling that I really am getting into again. It's by Gittimer. Oh, there it is. I've been looking all over for this, and there it just popped up.

This is a book, Jeffrey Gittimer, and it's a well-written book. I highly recommend checking this book out. You guys know I love sales. I love marketing. It seems like everything's falling into place right now. I'm going to look at a house in Minnesota. It's a very, very nice house in North Minnesota. The reason I'm doing this house, thought a lot about it. We're going to look at it in a couple of weekends. I'm just like,

you know how cool it would be to take some of my friends like you guys and also take some of the employees, which are my coworkers, to a great place on a lake that we could go out on a big boat, go fishing, have water sports, do the things that I'd love to do, go golfing, just live the best life ever and enjoy the journey. And I'm like, you know, the house is priced right. You'll never buy a house for what this costs to build it. And I'm excited about the things that I'm going to be able to do with the people I care about. So I'm excited for that, but it's not excited to say, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at this house. Because in my opinion, too many people have the cars and shit to do that stuff. But to have a place that you could actually experience friendship and growth,

mentally stimulate yourself, grow emotionally with one another. I'm just really, really excited for that experience. What I've been doing each week is I create a video for my team because we're in three different time zones. And the video does a little bit of interviews. The videos do a little bit about me talking about books and they talk about me motivating them. And I get pumped up. I get excited. I talk about our big wins for the week. And I highly recommend you guys sharing this stuff and your meetings better sound exciting.

People walk out, they better be fired up talking to one another going, wow, let's go win the day. And if you guys don't have that, you need to figure out what you need inside to get that Kindle burning again and get the fire going because you need to be able to motivate your team. I think that's a huge things that people miss. Let's see here. Lydia said, I use an amazing company. Email me if you want an introduction. They got us the 10th of the nation for water systems. Nice. Question. How do you suggest creating better job descriptions for office staff?

Better job descriptions for office staff. We have horrible lines drawn, but not much vision for each position. I've heard you got manuals for each position that shows five KPIs for each person, but I need to know where to start. So Lydia, here's what you got to do. First, you could look at all my stuff if you go to Indeed.

Indeed, I've got all my jobs posted. So that's a way to cheat. And then I go to the five biggest companies. Go to companies like Gettle. Go to companies like Leland Smith Service Champions in Southern California. You can basically R&D, rip off, and duplicate. And then I'd really, one of the things we're working on is creating great videos for each role and including those videos and we're always trying

to rewrite it in a way that is the way that they're interviewing us why would i want to work for here i think a lot of these templates they look like must be only eligible lip blah blah blah blah and in this book recruit superstars he talks a lot about it's a girl that narrates it but he talks a lot about how to build these systems in place so that book i'd get it on audible change your life seriously and you want to talk about what the mission and vision and the fun and what the journey looks like and why you need them and how you're going to build it together. The people getting ready to retire, they hate millennials. Millennials just want to feel like they're part of something. They want

to grow in education. They want to have a say. They want to be able to move up. Believe it or not, millennials don't care as much about money, but they care a lot more about being involved. And that's what that book talks about. Let's see. I'm trying to sell more service agreements for garage doors. Can you share some tricks on how to sell them? Yeah. And I'm giving you guys all the clues in the world here. When you sell a service agreement, number one, you wait for the next thing you're going to sell as part of the, let's say you sell springs and you sold rollers and now you're selling bearing plates and the customer kind of looks at you funny. You say, listen, I got a way you can save up to a hundred dollars today.

It goes, it maxed out a hundred dollars. It's 10% of the bill. So that would be a thousand dollars. I can get you a hundred dollars back. You send up for a service agreement. If you ever cancel within the first year, obviously, we charge that back. But my best guys use it as a discount. The other way to do it is priority service with the CSRs. They say, we can get you in tomorrow. Or if you want priority service, we come out once a year. We lubricate, adjust, tighten everything. You're always going to save money.

You'll save this much money on today's service. Some of the best companies like Ben Davis, Joe Cresara teaches this. Brigham teaches this with PowerSign Pros. The CSRs are pretty good at it. And the last thing is after you're finishing the job, you tell them everything you did. You go after your 35 point tune up. I've got 151 point tune up we're working on. And then a text message to them, or you can show them in your phone and you show them, you say, listen, let me show you everything I did. It's in their garage. You're scrolling through it and you go, you get the case off the opener. You got everything there. And you're like, listen, we want to protect your investment here. You replaced a lot of parts. Here's everything I did. We'll come out once a year. We'll pull off the case, the opener,

we'll rewire the safety as we'll check everything out. We'll call you and set it up. It's a safety inspection is to check everything we need to do. And it's lubricating, adjusted, tightening everything on the door. Would you like to take care of us or do you want us to just handle this for a cheaper four-week monthly price? So the three ways to do it really are discounting it after a tune-up or having the CSRs do it ahead of time based on scheduling. All those work really, really well. You do all of them, you're guaranteed to be successful. We do mainly new construction and looking to get into the repair side. What do you say to the first few things we must do before going all in? Throw money where? If I had to tell you where I would put the money if I was see new construction who

cares what your trucks look like so first of all get the right wraps get the right brand done number two is i'd make sure to attack google but really here's let's talk about this let's make sure you can sell a service call i don't know what industry you're in but i can tell you that if you don't know how to write a big ticket and replace all the parts and be convincing with eye contact, tonality, body language, ask the right questions, make people trust you, like you, then don't get into it. It's a whole different ballgame, and it takes a lot of work. The reason I don't love new construction is it's straight technical. The reason a lot of guys don't like sales is it's all these other attributes.

So people are like, they look at me and they hate what we are because they're like, oh my God, you guys are sales guys. Well, we teach people how to live a better life, how to smile more, how to ask great questions, how to make eye contact, which is a really big thing to people in life and to create trust. Whereas I could teach anybody a trade in a few months. They'll be amazing. Of course, they're going to get better with time. But I'd say the biggest thing is understanding how to build tickets. You'll never be able to afford to advertise against me or any of the people we work with at Garage Door Freedom

if you don't know how to make eye contact and smile and just be able to do the things we're talking about. So I would put all the money into the brand at first. Then I'd focus on getting my Google reviews up, going to past clients, getting reviews. Then I would focus on the GMB optimization and the LSA. Finally, you could always lean on PPC. PPC is going to be an expensive way until you get really good at conversion rate and sales and booking rates. It's going to be expensive for you to compete with a person like me. Throw money into Google.

And if you're in garage doors, like I said, I'm kind of going to give myself a little spiff here, but I'd say join Garage Door Freedom. We've got literally dozens of stories of technicians that left here that walked away literally with their ticket average just crazy astronomically high. We're here at $1,200, $1,500 sales when before they could only get $300, $400 sales. Asking questions. Do you want to replace your opener? I know it's not broken, but did you hear about some of the features? All of you guys have bought new iPhones when

you didn't need one because you wanted all the new features. You wanted it to be new. Your old one wasn't broken. I talk about this a lot. You could just talk to people about stuff. And of course, everybody in the industry says, oh, no, you can't do that. Don't sell anything people don't need. It's not your house. There's a lot of things people do when they didn't need to do it. I redid my parking lot to get five extra parking spots. It cost me 200 grand, but I redid it in a certain way that I had an exit and it made more sense for traffic and it looks a hell of a lot better. So a lot of people wouldn't have done it. I didn't need to quit. So I would say, quit saying,

I only sell things people need. And start saying, I sell things people want. Change your whole mindset. And I'm not blaming you, Kevin. It's just something I get all the time. Door-knocking sales. What are your best practices? Be the door-to-door millionaire. Lenny Gray is my man. And one thing you always want to do is get the name of the person. Actually, we've got a whole segment from this from Vertical Track. But you say, okay, no problem.

Do you mind if I ask your name? We just write down the names. And they'll say, sure, my name is Tommy Mello. Okay, so when you go to the next site, you say, hey, your neighbor tommy over there he said you might be interested this stuff i've learned from lenny i went door knocking with him one day i couldn't believe it i never want to do it again i'm not cut out for door knocking i get too many calls for me to come out but we're still doing the door knocking thing and starting to really kill it with it so door-to-door millionaire there's two different books there's the first one and the second one. Read both of them.

Stickers, stickers, stickers. Automatically generate service to new construction. Well, yeah, you put stickers in the new construction. Of course, you're going to get phone calls for it. One of the other things that I'll show you guys, my Google My Business, I'm open 24-7 Saturdays and Sundays. Man, owners hate that I say that. They're like, oh, my gosh. You know, we should have a break.

Well, what if I told you there's technicians that their wife is a nurse, works 312s. They want to work weekends. What if I told you that people's garage has breaks on Saturdays and Sundays? What if I told you that people want somebody out of their house past five? Am I saying it's easy? No. But I'm saying if you want to get in the repair game, you can't be half on, half on, half off. You can't turn your LSA's head. Is it harder to turn everything off at five and say, I'm not taking any more phone calls or just figure it out and set it up so you can handle it?

I'd say it's harder to turn everything off every night at five and be closed on Saturday and Sunday. I'd say I'd rather work through that and make the money and someone's life is going to be better. I want to fight the Diaz brothers. So Lloyd asked me, the Diaz brothers be killing you. Would you ever fight one of them? No, I don't think so. Maybe. It depends on the money. What's your favorite thing about service that you think other people don't know about? Well, I'll tell you, they've got the new API coming out. And what that'll allow us to do is build a lot, lot more things on top of ServiceTitan. We've got the new checklist I'm building on top of ServiceTitan. We've got the

website that pulls all the data out of ServiceTitan so I can scroll through pictures really fast. I think what I love about ServiceTitan the most is the fact that I know every single person that touched that job. There's complete accountability. There's complete ownership. There's no way to fool the system. There's no way to fool the stickers. You got to upload the stickers. You can't download the stickers. The accountability, if somebody misses a job, they call the customer through ServiceTitan and attach to the job. We hear the voicemail. We made sure they were there. We've got the GPS trackers through ServiceTitan. I think that the marketing pro that I've got is dialed in. So I know attribution of phone numbers and reviews to each technician or each marketing source.

There's a lot of features I love. I think another big thing for me is the reporting. I love to know right now I can log in. I'll log in right here. I'm not going to log in in front of you guys, but I'll tell you guys what I see. I've got a team. It's going to be hard to explain this, but I got a team that helps close deals. But my technician's at a job. These guys are in front of a computer. They can build a door on the home. Right now we're at 395 in sales, 326 in revenue.

And then I'll tell you what our virtual product specialists have closed today. And this is an amazing team here. Luke, Brian, Mike Bailey, you know, these guys have been working their butts off on this. Our virtual product specialists have closed today, populating $78,000. So probably about 120 by the end of the day. So I like to have the data right here. I like to see it in charts. I like to be able to see a picture's worth a thousand words. What's the best tracking provider using service type? We use Linux. There's different ones, but I like Linux. And I can explain to you what Linux is. It's a dual camera system that's plugged into the LB2 sensor. It tells you

when you need to service anything, but it also tells you if someone's taking their eye off the road, whether they're drinking water, whether they're smoking cigarettes, whether they're on their phone, anything, eating food, those are all called learning sessions. And we're pretty good at monitoring that. I plan on building custom stuff out of the API. I can't wait for it. Yeah. Lots and lots of custom stuff we're building. I can't even tell you guys how many cool things we're doing. It's going to be insane what service type becomes for us, for all the things we're building on top of it.

When you're building a company, anything you could do to separate yourself from the norm, any software you could bring into the game, any standard operating procedure, any type of checklist, any advanced training. The goal should be that you guys end up building something special. And I'm always on the cutting edge of trying to figure out right now. Jim and I are working on 175 projects.

Adam's working on a million things. My team right now, three of them are in Houston, actually learning about job to job management. They're at an HVAC company learning stuff. So it's Brian, Luke, and Mike Bailey are there. It's crazy what we're trying to do. And what I can tell you guys is hopefully you're trying to learn to be on the cutting edge. Hopefully you're trying to figure out what you can do better. And hopefully you made an obligation to yourself to be the best you're going to be.

Because this stuff's not easy. And it's not for the faint at heart everybody wants to be the owner when you're giving out trophies but when the guys quit when no one's showing up to interviews when there's not enough leads that's when the goings get stuff and you got to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and be able to make changes and give it all you've got and call people and ask for help and i will tell, it's not easy. Gene had a question here. What is your feedback on Green Sky? We currently do not offer financing, but I'm starting to research more. Listen, Green Sky is amazing. There's a lot of amazing. Cody said, good leap. There's also service finance

with Chuck. Amazing company, amazing guy. Fin financing will never work unless you practice it you got to practice it practice train train train train train and i've got a whole slideshow the thoughts about financing next time we do one of these but basically never use the word hundreds you never say 586 you just say 586 you never use the word thousands you just say like for 1182 you just say 1,182. It shows you there's only three types of finance buyers, low interest, no interest, and low payment. Why do technicians hate to do it? They hate change.

It's difficult. They would never use financing. So why should they sell it? What are some of the good reasons to do financing? Well, their ticket average is better. They take care of more customers. They give more options. There's a lot of reasons to do financing. While their ticket average is better, they take care of more customers. They give more options. There's a lot of reasons to do it. And the average person,

they only have $2,000 in their savings account and their debt outweighs that. Now, that's the average human being. In America, that's not the average homeowner, but there's a lot of reasons to use financing and your service tickets will go through the roof too. And yes, Cody, it's not financing. It's always promotions. Are the APIs you're working on available to garage door freedom members? Yes. We're going to be doing some crazy things with software and some reporting. And one of the things I'm working on, I was just walking through my neighborhood last night. I'm walking my dog Finnegan and identifying all the shitty garage doors. And the neighbor behind me, they put their house for sale, 1.3 million.

And the house is 1,900 square feet. I can't believe it. And so the equity is through the roof in my neighborhood. So let me show you guys an idea I'm working on. Oh, got a lot of stuff here. So this is, hello there neighbors. My name is Tommy Mello. I live in the neighborhood over on 82nd place. I've been walking the neighborhood through the last decade. I can't believe how lucky we are.

You may have seen Finnegan and me. Home price are shooting through the roof. I noticed some of you may be able to use my help with garage door replacement. The garage door is a smile of your home. 40% of your curb bill could save a fortune on all your electric bill. Remodel Magazine is the only item on your home that delivers close to 100% return on investment. My goal is to make your neighborhood worth more money. That's why I'm offering 20% off to my neighbors in June. You can text me if you're interested on my cell phone, 480-430-1573. My company's day one garage door service. Here's a street I live on. Here's a property we did. Here's another property we did. Here's a street I live on. Here's a property we did. Here's another property we did. Here's another property and another property.

Basically what I'm trying to do, and this is just a rough draft. This is not what I'm going to be. This is super rough, but it's those kinds of thinking. Then what I did is I built a loom. I started going through my street on Google and then Jim's going to figure out a way that we can click on them. Why would I want to mail, whether it's 40 cents or a dollar to somebody that's got a brand new looking garage door? Just think if I can get a VA at $6 an hour to go through 80 houses an hour, 80 houses times 40 cents is $320. These are the ideas. What if I could go through and run it through there? Then I could run it through credit. Then I could give them a guaranteed low monthly payment based on the third-party technology that I could pull in credit scores. Or I could use a line of equity.

The kind of stuff that I'm working on, it's just, I don't think many home service owners are thinking about. And it's like the unfair advantage. And it's some of it's regression testing. Some of it's that digital analog stuff that I'm working on about picking the right garages. Some of it is just being able to deliver a better, consistent message with happier text, with better technology. When ServiceSite shows an Uber-like service of where the technician's at, I get text messages daily, the people that know me through the grapevine. And they're like, this is the most amazing thing. You guys have such a step

above the rest. The experience, they offered coffee on the way. They had a smile. They were prepared. The vans looked amazing. That's what you want to deliver. And it's exciting to be able to deliver that, but we're always striving for more. What's your big goal for the month of June? My big goal, I think we'll hit 11 million. We'll see. I'd like to hit 11. I mean, depending on how few things go, my big goal, that's one of the big goals. And then we've got a couple acquisitions we're lining up to really make a lot of progress with those partnerships, which are going to serve us and the new partner very very well so that's moving more of the Diaz brothers so anyhow guys I love these Q&A's I get a lot out of these too it gets my thoughts kind of flowing getting used to this new bed here in the Scottsdale house we're getting

the house painted in two weeks just had all all the appliances delivered. I don't know. I feel like today I'm drained. I had all this energy. I know why. The painters came at 7 a.m. and woke us up out of my mid-dream. I'm like, why am I so exhausted? Then I walked Finnegan afterwards. Not that I don't get up that early, but it's just out of the blue, the doorbell rang, popped on my shorts, went and walked around the house with the guy for 20 minutes and went in the house but here's what's awesome i didn't lowball the guy i had the painter come inside and outside all in everything and it's decked out painting these guys gonna do the walls and everything fifteen thousand dollars inside and outside everything can't believe it it's a dream come true that's a deal and a half.

But thank you guys for listening. And I will talk to you all soon. 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 lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.