The Home Service Expert Podcast - The 8 Profit Activators You Can Trigger in Your Business Right Now

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Dean Jackson is the co-Founder of 90-Minute Books and the owner of NewInformation since 2003. He has been helping entrepreneurs and realtors make more money as a real estate coach and internet marketer. Dean also co-hosts the ILoveMarketing.com podcast and is the author of “Breakthrough DNA: The 8-Profit Activators,” where he shares ideas on how to accelerate business growth regardless of the entrepreneur’s current situation. In this episode, we talked about marketing strategies, client referrals, customer relationships…  

We would take the business and divide it into three parts. So the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit. And the during unit is the part of the business that does what it is that you do. So your capacity and ability to install a new garage door. If somebody called you up and said, hey, can I get a new garage? You've got the team, you've got the knowledge, you've got the ability to go out there and do it. That's the during unit. And they pay you, and that's great.

Now, the sides of that, the before unit, it's like we treat it like a separate business. We treat it like an independent unit of your business who acts like a supplier to your during unit. That's the way to think about it. Okay. Is think about setting up a business that's a supplier to your during unit. What they're supplying is people who want to get a garage. Yeah.

So they find people, educate them, motivate them, make an offer, and they say yes. And then you go into the during unit and you do the job. Now, where most people, most businesses fall down is they leave it at that. They go, now they go back and they try and find somebody new again, instead of, you know, they shake hands, they leave, everybody's happy, and they never contact them again. Service agreement. Yeah. And so now the after unit of the business is everything that you do to nurture lifetime relationships with people and orchestrate referrals. 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 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. Alright, Dean Jackson, thank you for taking the time.

This is awesome. So we're sitting down with Joe Posh, Nevin Carmichael, and they're like, listen, we can help you with events, a 25K group, Genius.Work, and I've always listened. I love marketing, so this is great. I happened to be in Orlando speaking at a car washing expo, and then I had to go look at the DeLorean. got an 81 DeLorean, getting it all done up to the flux capacitor, flux capacitor, and yeah. But Dean Jackson, he's an expert of marketing sales lead generation. He's 45 minutes

from here in New Haven or Winter Haven, the co-founder of 90 Minute Books, owner of New Information. Dean found love of marketing as a young boy when he first realized that selling stuff on commission was an easier way than renting himself out by the hour for a regular job. He's never looked back since. Dean carried that, this days, for the real work into his adult life and focused on a lifestyle centered approach to business using marketing as the ultimate lever of a life of freedom and fun. He's the co-creator of I Love Marketing and co-host of I Love Marketing along with Joe Polish.

You're often known to be the Buddha of marketing. That's funny. Yeah, yeah. Tell everybody a little bit about what your history is. Well, I started out as a real estate agent. I started out in Canada, just outside of Toronto in Halton Hill. And I really started discovering marketing from my own business. I started out cold calling, doing cold calls.

I was 21 years old and didn't know what the business was all about, but they said, well, you got a prospect, got to, you know, get out there and grind. So I was doing all the cold calls and it was working. I was good at it. And the thing that I discovered very quickly was that it was like a hamster wheel. You know, as soon as I stopped making the cold costs, the leads stopped coming, right? You have to manually crank it to make it work. And as I started making more money, I started thinking, well, I shouldn't,

I want to use some of my money now to really leverage myself here a little bit. And so I started thinking, well, I'll do some personal promotion. So I'll do start to get my name out there. So I started, you know, doing all these, you know, institutional image kind of ads, branding things. And I was spending a lot of money. I was getting a lot of recognition, but at the end of the day, it wasn't really turning into converting. It wasn't converting into more business. And then I discovered direct response marketing.

And I discovered a book called The E-Myth to Michael Gerber, right? And then I got to meet Mike Cole later. But I got that on a really deep level, like the idea of working on your business and doing it in a way that you could duplicate it 5,000 times. And at the same time, I started learning about direct response. So I went to work on a system of how can I get leads to come in without me, in a leveraged kind of way. So instead of focusing on getting my name out there, I started focusing on getting my prospects' names in here.

That's a far more valuable proposition. And so I started doing that. I created a guide to Halton Hills real estate prices where I live. And it was such a great system. I'd run it in the newspaper or in the real estate magazines. And in Toronto, there's like called the Greater Toronto Area. So I was in one of the suburbs. Okay. And it was somewhere where like people would live there and they'd work in the city and take the train, kind of like Connecticut to New York kind of thing.

And so I started running that guide. And so generating all this business, I wasn't doing anything. The leads were coming in. I was sending them information on a guide that showed all the house prices and stuff. And it blew up. And then I started because I created it in a way that I could duplicate it. I started this. This was in 1991, 91, three years into my real estate, you know, doing the cold calling of doing the first

slow promotion. And then I hit on the direct response and the franchise prototype kind of model. And then I licensed that system that I created. I did a guide called Toronto and Beyond 40 Great Places to Live Within an Hour of the City. And I licensed my system to one realtor each of the 40 areas. Oh my gosh. So that was my first start in kind of duplicatable marketing, right? I was hooked on it from then.

And then I teamed up with a gentleman from California, Joe Stump, and took that marketing approach. He already had a big coaching company for real estate agents. And we, for 15 years together, we built that into one of the biggest coaching companies for real estate agents. And along that way, I learned all of the things that I was learning now about marketing a business

that helps realtors market their business were things that were transferable to everything. Yeah. And that's how Joe and I met, Joe Polish and I met, 1997. And he was doing the same thing. He was doing some stuff with EAS. For carpet cleaning. For carpet cleaning.

That's exactly right. And so all the stuff, when we in 2010 then launched I Love Marketing, it was coming from that foundation of real world marketing now adapted to online and all the principle based things that, you know, all our eight profit activators that we talk about and the idea of breaking a business into the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit. Those were all things that are durable contexts. You know, that was true 30 years ago, and it's going to be true 30 years from now. The only thing that changes is the technology and the methodologies that we have available to do all of it. So lots of questions here. First, I know you know Dan Kennedy. I do.

And I love Mark. It's No BS. He wrote all the No BS. Yes, exactly. About direct marketing. In his book, he mentions that you don't have to, marketing to the affluence

and other great, but he says, there's no marketing that shouldn't be direct marketing. You get it off of a zone board. You get it off of a TV commercial radio. Yes. And that's it.

So Joe and I sort of met because of that world. That's how we met through the Dan Kennedy world. And when we did our first big out of marketing conference, he's the only speaker we had. We had Dan come and speak at our event. So back in the day when I was mowing lawns, I had to be 14 years old. I used to listen to Tom Hopkins. Oh yeah. And that was to be a big realtor prospecting. Yeah. That was where

I learned. I mean, my manager of the Royal LePage office where I started out in the time between getting your license and getting the actual certificate that allows you to now sell, he gave me free reign of his real estate library, which was two books. There was a book by Tom Hopkins and another one by Danielle Kennedy, which was the same basic thing. Make your calls. Every yes or every no gets you closer to a yes. Count the no's. Just count the no's. Yeah.

Yeah. So let's go through those. This podcast is mostly directed for home service. Okay. It's going outside of home service. But, you know, garage doors, everybody's got one. It's 40% of your curb appeal. It's the number one ROI in the home.

Six years in a row, remodel magazine, more than your kitchens or bathrooms. Is that right? Wow. We trademarked it. It's a smile on your home. What does a garage door cost these days? You know, they range, you know, where our average door sells over five grand,

but you know, when you start getting into nice garages, I try to advertise to people with more than one garage. Yeah. And most people, we sell more garage doors in service than the garage door, because it's whole, it's non-insulated. And when we show people what it'll look like with the new garage on the home. So 40% of our revenue comes from garage replacement.

The rest of it comes from service. So that works out perfectly. Like if I were looking at overlaying our model on this, that we would take the business and divide it into three parts. So the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit. And the during unit is the part of the business that does what it is that you do. So your capacity and ability to install a new garage door. If somebody called you up and said, hey, can I get a new garage? You've got the team, you've got the knowledge, you've got the ability to go out there and do it.

That's the during unit and they pay you and that's great. Now, the sides of that, the before unit, it's like we treat it like a separate business. We treat it like an independent unit of your business who acts like a supplier to your during unit. That's the way to think about it. Okay. Is think about setting up a business that's a supplier to your during unit. What they're supplying is people who want to get a garage. Yeah. So they find people, educate them, motivate them, make an offer, and they say yes. And then you go into the during unit and you do the job. Now, where most people, most businesses fall down is they leave it at that. They go, now they go back and they try and find somebody new again. Instead of, you know, they shake hands, they leave, everybody's happy, and then they never contact them again. Service agreement. Yeah.

And so now the after unit of the business is everything that you do to nurture lifetime relationships with people and orchestrate referrals. They've all got their own metrics. They've all got their own ways of measuring so that we know how the health of it is doing, right? You know, where you're looking at one of the things we measure in the after unit is return on

relationship. So I treat this idea of, I would call it like garages at the garage doors under management is that's the way you kind of think about it that you think about how many garage doors do you have under management and treat it like the asset that it is for people and that if anything ever goes wrong with it that you're going to get that business but also if anybody needs a new garage who knows the person that you've done the garage or that they're gonna immediately think of you and say you need to call you call you guys i love this stuff this is like my jam so one of the big things that i've realized when covid happened is we got really really busy even we're spending a lot more time at home and one eight player i believe could run circles around three neat players

literally and i think we don't use marketing enough right for marketing to people that we And one A player, I believe, could run circles around three A players, literally. And I think we don't use marketing enough for marketing to people that we want to come work with us. So I hire great personalities, great eye contact, great tonality, big smile to tell a story. And they're about relationship, relationship marketing. Cody Bateman sent out a book, quite a bit of books on that. They're in front of the mind. And so the people really matter. And who's running that call?

Who's building the relationships? I mean, I'm getting ready to do some weird things for most people. I'm going to join in every single market to be an anchor. I'm going to have a representative. We're going to start doing a lot of guerrilla marketing. One of the things is influencer affiliate marketing. Talk to me. Have you done much with influencer?

Like you probably have somebody big in the world. Well, I think that anybody can be an influencer. I think that's what I try and get people to think about is being an influencer. How are they an influencer, right? Like, as you look at, I do a lot of work with real estate agents and you look at, they would be influencers. I get them to think about their clients as, you know, homes under management. That when somebody moves into a home,

that now you're there to kind of oversee. You're the one who got them into this asset and that you should be the first person they think of if anything needs to be done with that home. Right. I'll tell you, I told you my water heater just burst two days ago. So I'm in the middle of going through that. But it's such a hassle when you're a homeowner and that happens. You're like, now you're the one. It all stops with you. You've got to now figure out who do I call and what do I do?

I called my buddy, Billy, who owns Top Plate Electric. He's got an electric company. They don't do their stuff, but he knows people. He can recommend me. And I look at that as he's an influencer in that, right? So that's where we need to understand who has influence over the homeowners that you're looking for. So I think that you look at the realtors like that as influencers. I mean, there's inspectors because they're the first ones. What do you do when you go to a, you buy a new house, you change the locks. That's exactly right. We should change the keypad code, change the transmitter code. You should also program your car. It's difficult. We could come out there and do that. Yeah. We're getting into flooring and storage. Yeah. So why not have the inspectors tell the client,

why not move in and have all the shelving you need for Christmas and everything? Do you do all the other stuff in the garage? Like we're doing the flooring and the storage. Yeah. So there you go. So flooring and storage and the garage door and the mechanicals, all of that. Yeah. I just make it simple.

I've also talked to the largest, Joe introduced me to the largest, one of the largest Ford, all of that. Yeah. I just make it simple. I've also talked to the largest, Joe introduced me to the largest, one of the largest Ford dealerships. Okay. And I said, how big of a pain in the butt is it when they call you guys to try to figure out the whole movie? Yeah.

Oh, wow. Why don't you just let me go out there, give me 99 bucks, and then I'll give them a present from the dealership. And then I'll put a QR code right above the opener. And when, every time you need a service, just QR code.

How much time and energy does that save? Yeah. Super smart. I guess I'd be curious, you know, I've seen a lot of, I love marketing. I've been through piranha marketing.

I love marketing. I even do the Valbex located in Sarasota. And we've got a really good, people think that this is the kind of thing that people think some of these things are old school and that, oh, they're online, they're away now. But I'll tell you what, some of these offline things are just so, from an ROI standpoint, they're amazing.

What do you think, because right now everybody's, every single home service company seems to be, the last few years is how to get great people and have more leads than i can handle and there's a teeter-totter and now it's how do i turn the leaks to get back on what are some easy ways that you would if you were to start let's just go generic home service company if you do garage stores air conditioning electrical where do you think other than obviously you get your website, you get your GMB, you get reviews, obviously those are all easy, good things to do. Then your brand, get a great brand. And I use Damien, it's an L.A. kick charge. My brand is beautiful. It says high

end and it's lean and there's not a bunch of crap. But what are some of the things you would be thinking about? Well, so I ran a painting company in college with a friend and we started another company we called name droppers where we would send out uh this was in canada so in the spring and summer is when we're doing all the from michigan so okay you know all about that yeah yeah so seasonal but in the spring we'd send out college kids doing neighborhood surveys. We had a little clipboard with the survey forms and all that stuff. And we knew that we were looking for people who wanted to do painting. But we knew that if we go and send somebody, if we really go out to the door, there's so many other businesses that would love to know. There's so many things that they're going to be doing that are not just painting.

So we had a little form where we had, we would just look for people who were doing home improvement projects over the summer. And we had a space for, you know, roofing, siding, windows, landscaping, driveway, decks, fencing, pool, painting was one of the things. So we turned our lead generation into a profit center that way. So you sell those leads.

That's exactly what we did. And we had a relationship with a pool company that would give us 10% of the pool referral. And so in many cases, we would make more on that referral for the pool than we would in profit if we painted somebody's ears in soffits. So just thinking about, when you think detached and modular and you think about that this business, the real thing that you want

is you want people who want to get their garage replaced or get their garage storage or get their garage storage or garage flooring. But those garages are 100% attached to houses. And those houses are 100% attached to people who have relationships with a realtor or have some home service that I told my guy, Billy, the electrician guy, I said, I've, for years, I've wanted to have one place, one guy, somebody who takes our home, managed home ownership, I'm calling the category. Because there's, you know, for investors and for property things, there's lots of opportunities for that.

But I said, I found out with the perfect articulation for what I'm looking for is that I want to live in my house like I'm a guest in your house. I don't want to think about my house. I want to live there. And if anything goes wrong, I just want you to handle it.

Hey, Tommy, the water heater just broke. Come on. Yep, that's what I'm looking for. Rather than having to scramble. If my garage door broke, I wouldn't water heater's broke. Come on. Yep, that's what I'm looking for, you know, rather than having to scramble. If my garage door broke, I wouldn't know who to call because nothing's ever, I haven't had to have anything done with my garage. I don't have a garage guy. Yep. And so all these siloed people, I look at all the things that I do, you know, I've had to replace the roof on my house, $53,000 roof on my house.

I've had, I don't know how many AC units I've had to do and replace between my house and my office. And nobody keeps in touch with you. Nobody builds that relationship with you. What is the best way to keep in touch? Would you say if you were to, I think you got to understand the value of it first and you look at the economics of it and you say, most people think about it, that they're very short-term oriented. They're thinking Instagram. Yeah. They need that. It would be, they think it's a shorter path from finding a new lead, getting a conversion than it

is to nurture a relationship with somebody. I forget what you said the number was, but about 40% of your business is new. And then we're at 17,000 service agreements. So we show up there once a year and lubricate, adjust, tighten everything. We give preferred service. We give some discounts. And that's where building a customer for a while and building that relationship and going out of your way to make them happy. It's easier to keep

their existing customers and they move and they march your service. Yes. So blow their minds. And referrals. Do you focus on orchestrating referrals? We haven't done great at referrals

and I know in real estate, what is time I would say that the most dearest, kindest thing you could do for me is the best compliment. But I think that's completely wrong. What is the best? Like I've had that,

even Ivan Meiser, we had Ivan on, I love marketing, the B compromise. But I think that's completely wrong. Even Ivan Meiser, we had Ivan on marketing, the BNI. And I've got a whole philosophy around referrals that you really have to understand why people refer in the first place. And you just said it, that what most people think, and they position referrals as you're doing me a favor. Like you're saying, I appreciate your referrals or your referrals are the lifeblood of our business. All these things. But referral, one thing, for one thing is a fluffy word. It doesn't mean anything. And what we really want to have happen is in the moment when there's a referral opportunity that they think about you and they introduce you to the person

they've had the conversation with. So 100% of referrals happen as a result of conversation. And in those conversations, three things have to happen. They have to notice that the conversation is about garages. They have to think about you and they have to introduce you to the person they had the conversation with, not tell them to call you. Yeah. And this is where we say we instruct people,

you know, don't keep us a secret. Tell all your friends about us. Spread the word about us, right? And then what happens is they do just that. They're in a conversation. It's about garages. Oh, you should call Tommy. Those guys are great. And then they leave and they think that they've done the right thing. And then you run into them at the grocery store and they say, hey, did my friend Nancy ever give you a call? I was telling her about you. They need to get a new garage. No, no, never heard from her. Oh man, well, I saw they had a new garage. I thought maybe you did it. But I tell people about you all the time.

And yet you don't see those people coming in saying, hey, Nancy told me to give you a call. So when you get into the position of understanding why people refer, the real reason we refer anything is to raise our status in the herd. And that's a really freaky thing, but we're genetically evolutionarily wired to constantly be aware of our position in the herd. And our modern herd is our top 150, our group of people

that we know. Most people are walking around. Most people don't know many people, you know, to think about we're kind of in a different world that you're exposed to a lot of people and you're famous and you've written a book and everybody knows you got a podcast. A lot of people know you, but most people in the real world, they don't know more than 150 people. And that's been evolutionarily set up for years and years. There's a guy, Robin Dunbar in Oxford, who they've actually called it Dunbar's number,

because he's the guy that pioneered the research on it, that we can only hold 150 relationships in our mind. Meaning, and I say this this to people like if these are the people if you saw them at the grocery store you'd recognize them by name and you'd stop and have a conversation with them and you've got a position in their life right and the reason that it's set up like that is back when we started playing the cooperation game and started banding together so that we'd be better off if you and I go do the hunting and the girls stay home and do the cooking and do, but we'd be better off as a group if we all had our, you know, individual roles kind of thing.

But they had to limit it to 150 people because for the safety of everybody, you had to know and recognize that he's in the herd, you're in the herd, that if somebody you don't recognize there, that's a threat, right? And so that's why when they got to 150, they would split off and they'd split into two herds and build again to 150, right? And so you see that now in so many companies, they've identified that that's the optimal number of employees in a unit that they'll divide off into other units like that. And when they did a study on Facebook, the average number of friends that most people have is 153. So it fits out every in every way. Most people, when you really think about it, even if they live in a city of a million people,

they're walking around surrounded by NPCs, even non-playing characters. They're just, they know they're 150, their inner circle. They talk to the people they know at work. They talk to their friends. They talk to their family, their neighbors, people they do recreation stuff with, and that's it. So they don't have all of that, but they are very influential to those 150 people because we're wired to do it. So how do you, when you go to ask for a referral or do the referral, what's the best way to start that?

So try to give them an opportunity to get the squirts of dopamine that raise their status in the herd. So if we were out herding and I'm out hunting and I find a big patch of blueberries and I'm coming back on the trail and I've got this big bundle of blueberries and I see you coming up the trail, I say, hey, Tommy, there's a bunch of blueberries, the big blueberry patch over that hill. So go get some and we'll have blueberry cobbler tonight or whatever. And you now in that moment, I'm higher status than you because I've added value to the herd. Right. And you're freeloading right now.

Right. So you feel this urge to balance the books and prove your value to the herd, just in case we ever needed to cull the herd, right? So you might say, well, watch out behind those rocks because I saw a lion over there. Now we're even. So we're wired like this. Like you see, if we were to go to Starbucks and I buy you a coffee and then tomorrow we go to Starbucks again, you're going to feel the urge to buy me a coffee, and then tomorrow we go to Starbucks again, you're going to feel the urge to buy me a coffee because I bought last time.

You heard all the thoughts. You got last time, I got it. And if you don't, it might slip that time. But then if we go again a third day and you don't reach for your wallet to buy the coffee, you're going to, in your mind, there's something up with that. And so where everybody is walking around, there's something up with that. Right. And so we're, everybody is walking around.

Nobody has to teach you that. It's the way that we're. It's Robert Ciannini. Yes, that's exactly right. All of those things are hardwired. He calls them the click, whir response, right? That when I buy you, we keep these balances. So if we were friends in Phoenix, instead of you coming to Orlando, if I knew you're

coming to Orlando and I say to you, you know what? You should go to the Celebration Hotel. They got a great restaurant out on the lake. Then you can sit outside. It's fantastic, right? Yeah. Yeah. I would tell you that.

Now you're over here. And then when you come back to Phoenix, the next time I see you, I'm kind of looking and waiting to see if you tell me that you went, you took my recommendation, you took my thing. So I'm looking for you to say, oh man, yeah, I went to that celebration hotel. It was a great place. We had a great night. And now I get the sports of dopamine. I puff up because I brought that good thing into your life. And now you owe me. Right.

We don't say it like that. That's the way it works, right? So we look for opportunities to give your clients, your garage doors under management people, the opportunity to do that. So one way that it might work out, you've said you've got a maintenance plan with a priority service and stuff if somebody's on that. What if you extended that level of service to anybody in their inner circle? So if they say, not only if your garage door breaks, you get front of the line service and no service charge to come out. What if you gave them three get out of jail tickets that they could give to their friends? So now anybody whose garage door breaks, they can say, oh yeah, here, I got you. And give them, because they're a VIP, that's going to make them look like a hero.

And they're going to be very appreciative. And it's much easier for people to give a friend than to refer a friend, right? So they give, and in that giving, they've referred, right? Because that's the most important thing. You want to know somebody that they know that has a garage door need. That's really how it works out, you know? So there's the relationship, and then I'm big on attribution, right? And I have a buddy of mine, his name is Saeed.

He works at a rug company. And he only, I'm telling you, the designers and the realtors, he's built his whole business. And he's like this white carpet, red carpet, white glove. And he goes, the one thing that I do is I pay them a mark. And he goes, I one thing that I do is I pay them a mark. And he goes, I pay it the same way. He goes, it's, I built the whole business up on the thrills. And that's fantastic. I think that's, there's a slight distinction between a business related. I think you should definitely

look for strategic business relationships where you can set that up, but that's not going to be the same. That's almost counterproductive in a consumer side. So, I mean, like right now I'm working with a pest control company, bottom robbers on the garage, and I'm going to enjoy a bug and I'm giving them abortion of every time they suck on it. That's perfect. Yeah. And there's all these B2B, humiliate type stuff, but I've still got to figure out exactly what I should be asking clients. Hopefully we gave them, made them raving fan. Well, you think about what we need to think about is reverse engineer what you need to orchestrate. So one of the things that we do on the real estate side, and we do it with other businesses, is you look at what would be the high probability conversations, the high value conversations that you would want to know about that your clients are having. And so we look at it and say, okay, they're going to be in all these conversations and they're probably going to have

conservatively, let's just say three conversations a day, 100 conversations a month. Oh, personally. That you've got, how many garage doors under management? Yeah. Well, there's 17,000 service. Okay. We do 15,000 jobs a month. So I can't even count that high, but 17,000 times 100 is 1.7 million.

So you've got army of people that are having 1.7 million conversations a month. Okay. Now, if we could plant a chip in the ears of your clients and program it to listen for certain trigger words, and when it hears his trigger words, alarm goes off and says, oh, referral conversation in sector four.

And you could whisper in their ear what to say to turn that into a referral. That would be a pretty valuable technology if we could do that. So how do we do it? First of all, we need to know what are we going to program the chip to listen for? What are the high probability conversations?

We start reverse engineering. What are the situations that people are going to be in that these conversations might come on? So somebody says, oh, my garage door broke. That's the most obvious and clear one. Every time that conversation happens, what do we want people to say? How can we give them, how can we empower them to snap their fingers and things happen so that they look like a stud? They look like they're connected over there. When he snaps his finger, that Tommy even jumps into action, right? He's connected. I love it. And so we look at it that maybe the garage door broke.

Maybe it's cracked. Maybe it's making a noise. Maybe it's driving them crazy. Maybe it's sticking. Maybe the... I had this happen, actually, just recently. The rope, the manual pull. The manual pull thing.

We had a hurricane, yeah, a few months ago. I've never had to use the manual thing, but I pulled it and the rope snapped. So that was a problem. So to reconnect the rope, but my garage is packed with stuff and we just had the hurricane where ours is not. But when it may be somebody got water damage on the stuff, because they had boxes on the floor in the garage and it got wet. So if they had overhead storage for all of this stuff.

Yeah, that's a great idea. So you start thinking, what are all these conversations that we can do? And then we send something I call the world's most interesting postcard. And we send it every month. It's just on the front front it's got all kinds of interesting facts on the side but it's just a carrier just a carrier for the post-it note looking graphic message on the back that says hey tommy just a quick note at least you hear someone talking about insert high probability conversation here uh you know and you so you do

that with realtors we do what we do with all kinds of business how much do you guys pay for them uh what do you mean how much do we earn per mailing piece oh so the mailing pieces cost about 90 cents or one to go out directly to people like variables, so it's personalized to you. But what we do, if we do on the real estate side, hey, Tommy, just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about buying their first house this year. A lot of people use their tax return to tax refund to get uses a down payment for a house. If you hear someone talking about buying a home, give me a call or text me. I'll get you a copy of my Six Steps to Homeownership book to give them.

It's got all kinds of tips on how to buy a home. So it's like a buyer's guide. Yeah. Or we'd look at it for everything. Spring market is coming. Here, just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about selling their house this spring. Spring's right around the corner. Everybody's going to be putting their house on the market. And if you hear somebody talking, give me a call or text me.

I'll get you a copy of my How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar Fastbook to give them. So now they're not referring, they're giving gifts. They're giving something that positions them as a thoughtful person. And they're going to get some social equity for this. They're going to get some credit for it. Have you ever heard of Marcus Sheridan? I know the name. They asked you to answer. He came up with a buyer's guide that comes out and he says it through hosting.

Okay. And then he tells if they spend more than 20 minutes on this buyer's guide, the conversion rate goes over 90%. Okay. And he's got more pools. New River Fools is booked out for two years. Yeah. And what he does is he knows exactly what they looked at when they looked at them.

They know if they look at finance and they know if they look at builder grade versus opposite line. Yeah, yeah. So we've been trying to do some of these things, but there's a lot of opportunities out there. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit. Yeah. I think that's amazing like when you look at even just the things that you can do when you look at in the during unit multiplying things you know like every time you go and replace a garage door we look at when you're there

how many extra jobs does that turn into i don don't know whether you do the circle things right around it or their neighbors. What do you do with the neighbors? We're getting into some of that stuff. People always say I don't sell things people don't need. I say I sell things people don't need all the time. I sell things people want. That's exactly right.

No one needs a new iPhone. No one needs a new car. That's exactly right. I think that's just this old school mentality. It's not broke, don't fix it. But it's going to be broken in six months. If you look at my car, there's a problem that's going to be over the horizon. I want to know about it and get it fixed so I'm not in the freeway. That's it.

One of the things we have at A1 Garage is our service is a rehash team. And, you know, our conversion rate is only about half of the clients we go to. So reengaging old clients, there's only about half of the clients we go to so re-engaging old clients there's tens of millions of dollars what would be your best way to kind of reactivate those old leads and the question i think looking at it yeah i think that's part of the after unit right that's part of the thing is nurturing lifelong relationships so how many of them when you're doing the garage the intake part of setting up a new customer should include looking around, like, what are the opportunities? If you're standing on their driveway and you're looking five houses down and 10 across the street and you're seeing eyeballing, how many of them need a new garage, right?

That you target that kind of thing as a thing there. You look at their garage, you're doing the garage door, but you look inside, do they need the flooring done? Do they need the storage? So you're creating these almost like referral profiles, like a dentist. When a dentist takes on a new client, they do the things and exams

and they build out every possible thing that they could do. Nobody's gonna do the all of it right now, but you've got a sense of what the potential case value is of the new patient. And if you look at that and say, well, they've got a garage, do they need the floor? Do they have the stuff? Those are opportunities that you can start educating and showing those people about. What's the best way to hit customers? Is it through retargeting? Is it email?

Is it texting? Is it mailers? Is it postcards, handwritten letters? It seems like there's a hundred, all of them. You want to go all. Yes. You want to look at, first of all, you want to have a baseline communication that there's at least this going out to them. Right. Like you look at, and it's all just looking at the ROI on it. Right. Like you, you look at, you've got a $5,000 value per customer or average order kind of thing. So you look at that and how frequent, what's the seven to 10 years, right? So there you go. So if you just look at that, that in seven to 10 years,

they're going to need something else. Yeah. Yeah. Or they're moving to a new house. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of the thing is you've got to realize that value of, first of all, we actually call it like a multiplier index. So if you look at, I would call it the garage multiplier index, and I would measure it in your during unit of saying, okay, to get the garage, get the flooring, get the storage, and get a neighbor, that's four opportunities that you have and a referral from the homeowner. That's five opportunities that you have right there. And if we look at your last 10-day drive, how many do you do a day or whatever, but now 15,000 a month. So, wow. Okay.

500 a day. So you look at this as a multiplier and you say, okay, on the last ticket and bundles of a hundred on the last hundred garages that we did, or the hundred that we did today, how many points did we get out of a possible by five? If you take it back over the last 100 and you said, okay, we did the garage, but did we get the flooring? Could we get the storage? Did we get another one? Did we get one in the neighborhood? And you measure what that could possibly be. So maybe now that $5,000 job has the opportunity

to turn into $10,000 or $15,000, maybe. You got two referrals for garage doors. And you start to really look at the value of that. That's the first opportunity. And, you know, there's a guy in Las Vegas who was running the MGM Grand, Gamal Aziz, is the guy that mainly took over from the Bellagio. He went to MGM and now he went to Macau. But he came into the MGM Grand

and this was one of the most impactful things that I've learned. He came in and he has an approach of looking at all of the components of the business and looking at it and saying, how high is high? Like, what could we be doing here? Right. So this is, I'm establishing this as an idea that if you look at, instead of just the one garage door, if our thing is we could be doing five jobs here on this one thing. Right. And so the way he did that was he looked at all of the income producing things

at the MGM, the restaurants, the retail, the gaming, the conventions, hotel rooms, all of it, entertainment. And he started looking at them and said, how high is high? So restaurants was the first thing we looked at. And they had, you know, the biggest hotel in the world, 5,000 rooms. And they had a successful restaurant. They were doing $4 million a year in the restaurant, your main restaurant there. And he would stand in the entry of the hotel every night. And he'd see people getting in limos and actually they'd say, where are you going? And they said, we're going to Spago or we're going to Nobu or these destination restaurants.

And he knew that if we had a destination restaurant in the same footprint that we've got our successful restaurant right now, we could be doing $8 million a year instead of $4 million a year. So he went to the board and he treats that as a loss. He says, we're losing $4 million a year. So he went to the board and he treats that as a loss. He says, we're losing $4 million a year because of our $4 million profit center here. And he said, got them to agree to rip out the restaurant. He partnered with Mike Camina, Open Knob Hill. First year out, they did $11 million in sales. And so I look at that, I'd say that because I look at your opportunity there and say,

on the last 100 jobs you did this month, I would look at it and go as far as create a real metric around it. Yeah. Yes. That you say our garage multiplier index and how you calculate it is we look at the last 100 and we say, how many did you get on average out of those five? So you get a possible 500 points on that. Okay. And you look at how many did you get and you count that as your, you divide it by a hundred and that's your index.

So it could be 1.2, let's say. Yeah, 1.2, yeah. But the goal is to get it to 3.5, or to get it, and you measure that as a leaving metric. What you do is you break down the business into, I love Henry Ford. Yes, they're right. And it's focused.

I wanted to ask you a return on relationships. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where we look at it that right now, the amount of assets you have is those, however many people you said are garages under management, the ones people that your sticker is on their door, you put in their garage door right now,

let's call it 20,000 people or whatever. So we got 20,000 people there. Now going into the year, going into next year, this is how we measure your after unit that 60% of your revenue right now comes from those service contracts. That's an after unit attributable metric, right? That's coming from, it's not from the advertising that you did. It's from nurturing lifetime relationships with the people that you have already. Yep. And so we're separating the 40% that's new business is attributable the year before unit right because that's all that it takes a lot of times people measure their advertising success they look at their gross revenue they look at how much they spent when they say as a percentage of the gross revenue

this is what we're doing yeah in the before which doesn't make sense if we treat the after unit here as something separate remember we just think about these units of the business. Our goal for that is to drive return on relationship, meaning how much revenue can we generate per client that we have, per garage under management. And so as a percentage of your revenue, that's what we look at for the return on relationship. Got it. Okay. So your 20,000 people generated $20 million or whatever the number is.

A billion dollars. A billion dollars. Yeah. Yeah. When it comes to marketing, how do you ensure that your clients are 100% winning before you bid them or ask for their bid? Well, I think that's so many of the things like in a real physical goods type of thing where they're going to get a garage. What you have to really make sure is that their downside is protected, that they're going to love the garage, that it's going to be working and they're going to be 100% half.

So you can hedge a lot of that with guarantees because that's what you want. You don't want them to have a problem, you know? And I think that's the big... It was, yeah, too. People want it done now on their time. They want it done right. Right.

They want it done at a good price. Yeah. It's hard to do all three I picks and get it done on their timeline to make sure it's the best quality. Right, exactly. We're definitely not the cheapest. to make sure it's the best quality. Right. Exactly. We're definitely not the cheapest. Right.

But those are my clientele. Right. The affluent ones are just so I just get it done. Yeah. That's what they want is the least hassles. Right. That's the way I think about any of those home services. I don't want to think about this water heater or any, all this repairs.

It's going to be months to get this all, you know, all the remodeling done now because of it. So you get a marketing to the affluent. I mean, literally their job, if we did a job in Orlando for 125 grand, it was three yards. I could do, you know, we did 160 million. If I had a $100,000 average state and I just did think about the

hundred thousand, if I just did 10 a million a day, and let's just say, granted he's out of there, there's 300 million, it doubles my business. Yeah. So what would you do to drive more of the affluent? How high can you go? Like what is the best, no matter what, at any, at the polls, there's going to be somebody who's attracted to that. You remember the Richard Mill watches? No. Richard Mill watches. And these watches, I live in, I said in Toronto, and where we stay there in Yorkville, at the Hazleton Hotel, there was a Richard Mill watch store in there.

And there wasn't a single thing in the store under $120,000. Now it's a retail store in a hotel in that, well, a nice part of Toronto, but Richard Mill started the watch company with the intention of building the very best watch possible. Like Engvjard, it's the one that Rafa Nadal wears and Bubba Watson wears and Lewis Hamilton and all these like, we are extreme sport guys with their things. And his intention was, he said, let's build the best watt, the best engineering, the best everything, lightest, most durable stuff, and then figure out what it needs to cost.

Then go in looking in the set of thing and he found themselves alone in the market in that there's a lot of 30 50 60 000 watches rolex their average is 185 at richard rio and so his whole audience is there's other there's million dollar watches that are these collector pieces or but they're so fragile that you got to keep them in temperature controlled things that really aren't investment pieces. They're not for wearing around like a real durable daily watch thing. And he realized that they found themselves in a market segment that there was really no competition for them. And you think about all the people, like the guy who's got a $20 million yacht.

Of course, he's got $185,000, half a million dollar watch. You gotta figure out they're, they're reading out magazine. The guy who's got, yeah, six supercars. Of course, he's got another one to wear on his, that's really the position. It was like a supercar on your wrist kind of thing. And it's a status symbol. That's what it is. So now you start to think, what would be it over the top? Make the best garage possible.

Well, think about this. There's people that pay $250,000 for a tape, wood tape. Yes. What if you got that same artist? That's what I'm saying. To build a custom. Now you're talking. And then a signature suit.

Yes. And we just give it that one individual. And now it I'm saying. To build a custom. Now you're talking. And then a signature suit. Yes. And we just give it that one individual and now it's a status. Yes, that's exactly right. Could people walk through this house

and they go, yeah, this is Paul Newman, whatever it might be. Yeah. And this door, it could be a signature suit. Yeah.

How about those like canoe appliances now? The new, you go to all these real luxury homes, they've got the $20,000, $30,000 gas range. I paid a grand just for my coffee maker. Exactly.

And the reason that they get those is because it's a status symbol. For me, I just want to really come. Of course you did. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's outrageous. But that's the thing. Like Birkin bags or, you you know the way you got it because it's uh like it women do this all the time with their purses yeah and you just got to own it

and be uh but that's white glove best best best like and it's probably a separate brand yeah you want to have it called like you'd want to make it like uh Anthony. My last name is Anthony. Ah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. You know, like Thomas Anthony. Oh, you got a Thomas Anthony garage. I mean, the Thomas Anthony signature garage. That's why people do it. That's what they want.

Do you ever watch, do you watch Shark Tank? Oh, I love Shark Tank. We just started with Joe. It's about Damon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had Damon on the marketing too. But Kevin O'Leary But Kevin O'Leary. Kevin O'Leary.

It's wonderful. Yeah. So he was telling a story about going, he was in France and he went to Hermes and he was trying to buy five ties. So he asked, we've got a discount, 20% off, we bought in fives. And the woman looked at him and just,

she didn't appreciate him, didn't know who he is or anything but she's like why do you want so many ties if you cannot afford them why don't you buy one time and then save your money and come and buy more that's right like nobody's gonna get a discount on these highs you know it's so funny but that's you those people, they're not going to be looking for. They don't look for deals. They don't. And that's what's important.

You know, I have 6,200 call tracking. My system tells me exactly attributed her lead and I get to A, B, test different messages. It's perfect. It's fun stuff. And I, you know, I'm just, I'm in the middle stages of my career. I'm having a lot of fun. What are the best business owners they start implementing in their businesses? Get them out of the day-to-day.

Like you said, the e-myth, Michael Gerber was on my podcast. He was in my outfit. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if he follows the e-myth perfectly because I worked with him. Right, exactly. It's an idea, guy. Yeah, yeah. It's a great idea well that's part of the thing is

getting the the engine the core engine to be able to operate without you that's where the freedom comes you know it's got to be operates oh i'm here yeah and i love it i'm doing this still runs and i'm always looking at it from a distance. Like, I always say I'm looking, I'm on Mars looking at Earth, the different volcanoes and the hurricane is where I could dive in and try to see what's going on. But I'm a big fan of the system. Yes.

The system dictates the output. It has to be that. They don't say it's all the people. I'm like, the system found the people. The ride along floors, the backyard check, the drug site, the dinner.

I think one of the biggest things that I've learned is getting the whole family involved about hiring. You know, we celebrate all these things when people retire. Why not celebrate when you start working? Right on. That's smart.

See, it's like, yeah. But, um, what are some of the best books that you recommend? Give me three books that like changed every way you look at marketing. Yeah.

So that was one. I think it's my baseline. Oh yeah. I got to read that. I think Robert Ciald at marketing. Yeah. So that was one. The myth, I think, is my baseline. Oh, yeah. Got to read that. I think Robert Cialdini's influence book and free sway is your phrase.

We'll count that as one book. Read both of those. Amazing. Yes. Okay, then we'll go to something you probably hadn't thought of. There's a book called

How to Argue and Win Every Time by Jerry Spence. And that was a, it's a phenomenal book. We're good. Yeah. What's his name? Jerry Spence. He's an attorney.

Never lost a case. He was a high profile attorney. You probably saw him on CNN. He'd be a legal analyst. I love this. Give me one more. One more that no one knows about. Okay. One more that no one knows about.

Okay. Let me one more that no one knows about. Okay, one more that no one knows about? Okay, let me think here. I think the one-to-one future was written in 1996, Don Cuppers, Martha Rogers. And it outlined what seemed like futuristic thing at the time, because it was just at the very beginning of the internet. And now all of the things that he talked about are super easy to execute now. And it's talking about taking these, looking at each relationship as the opportunity that it is. Yep. I think that's a really good one.

And if someone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to do it? So deanjackson.com is probably the easiest place. It's got everything that I do. Right. In one, Joe Polish and I've got 400 something episodes of I Love Marketing podcast. And that's at ilovemarketing.com. Yep. We do still new episodes every month.

Love it. And we talked do still new episodes every month. Love it. And we talked about a lot of stuff here. So I'm going to let you close us out on a final thought that maybe we didn't discuss. Okay. I think yeah, I think really like a thought for you or for anybody. I think just, yeah, maybe a go-to where this is your best advice or

yeah, best advice for a business. I think that's my best advice is to think about your business. What would it look like if you broke it into three units and had somebody as a driver of each of those? Any one of them is a pretty simple business. If all you had to do is find people and do the marketing and get people who want to do what you do, that's a pretty easy business. If all you had to do was serve the people that want the stuff, that's a pretty easy business. But where the real leverage, real asset, the real unique, only the you opportunity is your after unit. And orchestrating referrals, nurturing lifetime relationships, putting somebody in charge of making sure that even if they don't

get that floor done right now or get the storage right now, that sometime in the next 100 weeks, that's going to happen. I love that. There's so many opportunities that we're not taking advantage of. Let's get some dinner, brother. Yeah, that was great. Thanks. 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.