The Home Service Expert Podcast - The Best CSR, Dispatcher And Tech In The Company Was The Problem | Jim Leslie & Al Levi

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Revenue is everywhere in home service right now. Profit is not. Tommy sits down with his mentor Al Levi, author of The 7-Power Contractor, and Jim Leslie, president of Home Service Freedom, to break down why: the hiring excuse every contractor uses ("nobody wants to work") and the answer Jim gives back, what a lost tech really costs, the five things of staffing, why you should triple your pricing, why the owner who is the best CSR, dispatcher and tech is the ceiling on his own company, the zero-or-two cranes rule for your org chart, and the listening tour every owner should take this week. Al is retiring at the end of the year. His last small-room session is at Freedom 2026: Monday, October 26, 6 PM, Mandalay Bay. Use code ALFREEDOM at freedomevent.com to unlock a seat in the room with Al and Jim. Home Service Freedom: https://homeservicefreedom.com | The 7-Power Contractor: https://7powercontractor.com -- 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 🕐 -- 00:00 - Introduction 00:50 - Al, Jim and Freedom 2026 02:03 - Revenue for vanity, profit for sanity 03:49 - Put your pricing online 05:50 - Three kinds of testimonials 06:38 - Lead times and the boom-bust cycle 11:19 - The five things of staffing 11:32 - What a lost tech really costs 12:35 - Al's last room at Freedom 15:00 - The empty truck in your yard 15:44 - Stand on the bridge 16:39 - Triple your pricing 17:51 - Fighting commoditization 22:15 - Would you send me to your mom's house 25:29 - They just don't want to work for you 27:22 - The best CSR, dispatcher and tech 28:15 - Zero cranes or two 30:09 - The five-year org chart trap 32:26 - Burning tokens on technology 35:33 - There is no silver bullet 40:40 - What your accountant should say 42:24 - $2.6 million to the bottom line 46:54 - The listening tour 50:04 - Al's three-month notice 55:57 - One thing to do this week 59:45 - The room at Freedom 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Check Out My Social Media: Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

I speak in front of hundreds of contractors a year and almost invariably, you know, in a Q&A or something, right? Somebody says, oh, I can't, I can't find good people. Nobody wants to work. And I usually clap back with, no, they just don't want to work for you. You don't pay right. You got a rusty truck. You don't have, you just don't have an opportunity that the right people want to take advantage of. That's a you problem.

I had a guy I just interviewed a technician that's winning. And he goes, you know, your manager hated me when he met me. He said, I don't have to what it takes. So I went to another company. They didn't buy my tools. They didn't have training. They had used trucks. He goes, I don't want to be part of that company.

So I studied up on the company, came back. You knew I was going to have to raise my level. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I am joined by two of my closest friends, L. Levy and Jim Leslie. Two guests today who are both incredibly important to me. L. Levy is the seven power contractor. He's been my mentor for about nine years now, and his system has helped. Contractors across the U.S., Canada, and Australia, build businesses that run without them.

Jim Leslie is the president of Home Service Freedom, our mentorship community. He's a former CMO who helped build A1 into what it is today, and he's helping hundreds of contractors do the exact same thing we did here on A1. Both of them are speaking at Freedom, 26, this October at Mandalay Bay, alongside of Robert Hurchovic. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Martha McSelly, Terry Cruz, and a bunch of other badass panels that we're going to be having. So let's just jump right into it. Al Jim, you've both been on the show before. I think what I'm seeing out there is there's a lot of revenue happening.

There's a lot of things in the community that we talk about. I still do a ton of shop tours. I'm out talking to a lot of contractors, big and small. And the revenue doesn't seem to be a problem, but very little profit. It's going back to the old revenue for vanity, profit for sanity. So number one, let's talk about that. And let's talk a little bit about freedom this year. Jim, why don't you go first?

Yeah, I mean, I've probably been in 50 shops or better this year. And I think everybody's kind of in the same place. You know, major disruptions in search and marketing in customer acquisitions. commissions cost to kind of go, you know, cost to go through the roof. And everybody's struggling right now. So I'd say marketing costs are like the number one thing. I've been kind of working with people on how to bring that down, you know, how to find out where the customers have went, right?

You know what's interesting about that, Jim, is a lot of people are talking about being more transparent with pricing, putting the pricing on the website. The LLMs have been driving that, right? Yeah. They recommend when they can find information on pricing, they're more likely to recommend you, right? And back in the day, Google's algorithm kind of pushed you a little more if you had some basic pricing data. But the LLMs now are just crazy in the depth of information they want in order to rank you. And, you know, I see companies with, you know, a ton of pricing data out there that you wouldn't have seen two,

three years ago. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree that you should always have a starter pricing. You should have like options instead of ultimatums and be able to say this is what a spring might start at. This is what a normal mini split might start at. But I wouldn't go too deep because then you let people know too much and then they're surprised by the price. Yeah, a lot of people are doing through case studies, right? So they, you know, almost like a blog post, but they publish this customer, the zip code. This is the work that we did. This was their all in pricing. That's the kind of stuff that the LLMs are picking up. Yeah, what do you think? You know, you've been through this rodeo now for decades,

and you've heard that people chase revenue more than profit. Well, one of the advantages of talking to an old person is, I have seen this, and this is not new to me. It may be new to you. It's the rhythm of what goes on in this things. And it's classic when there's a boom, when I was out selling just like you did years ago, Tommy. When I knew there was a boom, I couldn't even get through my sales pitch. And they would go, sounds great. When can we start? And that is a really sweet time, my friends. And then there's the other ones about, well, I'm getting through out the bids. I haven't really done my process yet and all the other kinds of things. But what my father, my greatest mentor, said to me, the really best

will always stay busy. And it's always about constantly marketing. You know, the phone's going crazy. Everything's great. So the tendency is to back off, and you and I talked about this in marketing, one of the things that people miss, they may get the marketing budget, they may get the allocation spread,

but the one that Ellen and I always talked about is a marketing calendar. The way that a marketing calendar first came up is I used to pick up my phone sometimes and go, maybe it's not working. Maybe the phone is broken. I'm not kidding. And I bet you've done it too.

So marketing calendar of my guru, Leo, told me all these years ago. He says, you can't just wake up one day and decide you're going to do direct mail postcard campaign or get billboards or do anything else and really do something. Well, you have to work backwards through the year in your marketing calendar to get the things. And the other biggest thing that I always come back to now that the easy money is gone and easy profit. is that customer testimonials just cannot say it often enough. And there are three flavors of customer testimonials. One is bragging on a service or product that you did that changed their lives, saved 30% on their energy bills, the door is quieter than it ever was,

whatever that is. The other one is about how quick you got here on a Sunday, 6 o'clock. I thought I would get an answering machine and there was actually a live person. You know, somebody at my house to take care of. I got my air conditioning back in the middle of a... Phoenix Summer of 115. Those are the kinds of things. And then the home run testimonial is the third one.

They brag about what great product and service you are, and they brag about how great your people are and how you took them out of a bind. And the answer to your next question is, well, how many do I need? You need them all. All, all, all. Never, ever, ever stopping it.

It affects your sales and marketing. There's something you said in there, the lead time on the marketing. Right? Everything has a lead time, right? So recruiting has a lead time. Implementing a new operational process has a lead time. And I talk about this all the time.

It's the intersection of those three things that you have to get right and why these guys are always in a boom and bus cycle because, hey, we do a bunch of marketing. Oh, we got too many leads. We need to hire people. They back off on the marketing, but now the hiring lead time, you know, then the leads go away. That's the problem.

capacity planning. Well, we had this discussion just yesterday in the live webinar, which was about when I talk about the seven powers that Tommy knows, planning, operations, staffing, sales, coaching, marketing, finance. I really got it down to two, which is make more calls and more techs. Not one or the other, more calls and more text. And there's more depth to that, but you're so spot on with that. It is about all of these require planning.

And that's Ellen's great line that she told me, I mean, decades. which is plan or be planned for. Yeah, you know, if you reverse engineer it, the one thing I will say, a budget's amazing. But I don't let the budget completely be the North Star because I got markets that are overperforming that if we make budget by the 22nd, let's move that money over.

They're killing it. Their conversion rate, the booking rate, the average check is where it needs to be. But the biggest thing that stands out to me is cancellation rate that people aren't paying enough, especially if it's break fix. Oh, yeah. If it's break fix, I mean, it's different if you're looking,

at a landscaping company or a pool company, it might be a little bit different. But if it's busted and you need to get out there and fix it, I've got markets right now that are nine days out. That's how long I have to push them out. Even the project-based companies have a cancellation rate on the setting of the appointment that most of them are measuring, right? They set up an appointment for a sales rep to come out two weeks later, but they're not measuring how many of those drop off.

And we're flipping out the term cancellation rate, which a lot of people may know, but they may not really know what you're speaking to because the one I always talk about marketing, remember filling the bathtub right amount of calls, right customer, right time, and the big cold to the drain is, of course, your quality of CSRs to convert. That's conversion of those calls. But you're speaking about we can't get out soon enough, so the customer is obligated. You can't say I'll be there two weeks from now for your air conditioner that's broken

at 115 degrees. And that's probably where the biggest pickup is. I'm having a real problem now, I'll tell you guys, is it starts out with calls. that's how I built the business. Like I knew every person that came here, I knew their wife. Like we'd go out a lot more. I lived at the apartments.

And then it turned all into KPIs, where we knew every metric. We studied these metrics, and we got metrics for metrics. Really the main one is what's the cost per lead? Is it a quality lead? What's the booking rate? What's the cancellation, right?

What's the conversion rate? What's the average ticket? Did we get a review? But now I'm going back and understanding because I'm losing a lot of technicians, because my classes are getting to sizes of 80 a month. And it's hard to play. pour that much love into 80 people every month and then still keep capacity right. So I'm going back

to like the beginning days where you got to pour love into people. Oh yeah. I mean that like now that it's a metric based business, you can't KPI your way out into the culture. And so I'm having a fun time with it and we're just, well, you know, we got these decks we put together that are 150 pages that we review each month, but we never had the HR data to say what's our turnover rate? And is it forced or enforced by what market, what leader? And so now I'm getting, It's a different size problem than most have, so it's hard to relate. But I just want people to understand no matter how big you go, you never solved it. It's always something.

I so agree to all of that. And matter of fact, when we were a pretty good-sized company years ago, but we decided to build our training room capacity that only 15 people could sit in there. We could have built it much bigger. I've been in these cathedrals that they build, you know. And I try to explain to them is if they're sitting in the chairs and they don't get to talk They don't get to touch the stuff. The effectiveness of your training and development

and the culture is really compromised. So we would run multiple sessions. And after I left, I mean, all of you guys have blown away what I could do. You would pick, particular, but even Jim Cornetian Zoom train, they just, but we created it from bottom up, which were apprentices, it became junior taxes, became senior techs, and really high-quality field supervisors

who could run their own groups of training, but we'd all run it the same way. And that really helps with this development, this culture, and still keeping the quality metrics where you want. And really what we talk about in staffing, really, is the five things of staffing. Always recruiting, always hiring, always orienting, always training, always retaining. And if you do a good job with the first four, you have a good shot. But the retaining, the time he's talking about, it's expensive. 22 grand.

But it's more than the money, it's demoralizing. Yeah, no. Because people go out the door and you go, well, maybe I should go too. I don't know why. Well, not only that. Well, it really screws with marketing. Yeah. Because you're trying to say, this is how many guys we've got coming in here, so many leads.

And when turnover becomes a real problem. So we're looking at it. And what I've identified over the last six months is it's completely leadership. You can only take a company so far unless you're training the next one down to care. And it's hard to train somebody out of care. So you've got to be better at identifying people that actually give a shame. I would say training up. I know that sounds weird.

Yeah, training up to the next person. training up the ladder because that's where the real depth. You know, like what I was talking about, you wouldn't build the house by designing the, you know, the master bedroom bathroom suite up at the top. You get the foundation right. And the foundation will allow you to scale in a way that's still safe. Hey, guys, I want to tell you something that we just added to Freedom 20206 that is not going to be on the main stage. It's Monday night, October 26 at 6 p.m. Jim Leslie and Al Levy are going to be doing a private session.

It's a small room. There's no slides or anything like that. Just time for you to lob questions at them of anything that you're dealing with right now in your business. If you don't know, Al, he ran his family's plumbing and A-track business in Long Island for 25 years. He got it so systematized that he retired at the age of 48, and he wrote one of my favorite books to Seven Power Contractor. The guy walked into A1 back in 2017 when I was running a ton of jobs and barely keeping any of the money. He's the one that got me the real operating manuals and scorecards in every department. my technicians, my CSRs, my dispatch, all of it. A lot of what led us scale past where I was stuck is the stuff that Al built directly with us. It's a pure open forum. Bring your problem. They're going to help you walk through it right there in that room. Here's how you get in.

Buy any Freedom 2026 ticket package and use the code AL Freedom at Checkout. That's A.L. Freedom at Checkout. That unlocks your seat in the room with Jim and Al on top of whatever package you already bought, which already includes free tickets. Freedom 20206 has October 26 through the 28th at Manila Bay. Go to freedomevent.com, grab your package, and don't forget that code.

It's Al Freedom. Or call us or text us at 602-581 7563. Now let's get back to this episode. I think a lot of companies have never even just, I mean, I've seen some pretty sizable ones that have never built a hiring plan, right? And you know, the companies that we work with in HSF, one of the first things that we do is have them work out, okay, here's your goal, reverse engineer, how do you want to get The whole process that you always talk about.

But the bottom line on that is, like, well, how many people are you going to need to do that, right, based on their average ticket and your current training and all that? And you can't hire a fraction of a person. It looks nice on a spreadsheet, right? When you figure out your turnover rate and whatever, most companies, like, you have to be hiring somebody all the time. Yeah.

And the owners do it just reactively. Reactive versus product. Yeah. And I'm first hand up. And that's how I used to, you know, we just waited until there was a truck. out in the yard going, what should we do now? But that's why I thought what you said before, about planning time and lag time, whatever

you want to call it, we just didn't do that. But after we finally woke up, we were always recruiting, we're always hiring. We knew we could create the calls, good times, bad times. We could do all of it. And our trust in that was big. There's a concept of lost potential revenue, too, where, you know, that truck sitting out there has a cost, right? Yeah.

And like, well, we could get leads if we had somebody to put in it. Like, what is that worth? $40, $50, $60,000 a month? I know. My father years ago, I came to him. This is a long time ago. I said, we really need another big-ticket salesperson. And he said, yeah, but, you know, we just don't have the revenue for it.

So he looks at me and he starts to laugh. And I remember, he started from nothing. So he said to me, he goes, so you're telling me we can't get more big-ticket sales until we get salespeople, but we don't have enough money for the salesperson, so we can't get the big ticket. He just did this for like two minutes. Yeah.

And then just like after a while, he goes, sometimes you have to stand on the bridge and know that you can make the jump and survive the fall. Most people don't want to do that. And you know what time? It just hit me like a brick in the head. And he didn't do it in any tone or any, you know, it wasn't like you're so stupid.

But it was really just to wake me up to the fact that, you know, there's risk in all of these things, but bet on yourself. bet on the long term of your company and do these things that you need to do, that you know you need to do. And if you don't know, you need to do them, go see this guy. Yeah, well, you know, I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time about a week ago at Gettle in Vegas. And the interesting thing is, like, the company's kind of gone up and down through the years. But I talked to Kenner and I said, you're the guy that's known for buying these broken businesses.

That's kind of his MO is we buy broken businesses. And I go, what's the one thing they get wrong? He goes, it's always the pricing. And Alan Roar screams to the top of your lungs, triple your pricing. And if you read Alex Ramose's book, it says, Dan Kennedy, quote, charge as much as you could possibly charge without smiling when you give the price. Keeping a straight face.

Without keeping a straight face. And, you know, there's a lot of people out there. We hear the same things. You can't charge that because everyone else is cheaper. Everyone's comparing to every, that's like a steakhouse going, we need to be the same price as McDonald's because people could buy cheaper food from there or anything. Look at all these companies that have started up that just sell really organic food, and they charge seven times the price. Tommy, you know, for me, I was selling a million dollars a

year as a part-time job in the 90s, and that was in a million dollars. It was real money. But I would go back to Long Island, which is where our family business was centered in, and I'd be sitting in my favorite restaurant, and people would come up to me and go, Al, you're back. And go, no, I still live in Arizona. And they go, oh, I just want to tell you, my kid is off to college. You didn't remember how you fixed the room up that it's really good? It wasn't like, you remember how much you charged me? Yeah.

And we were 30 to 50% higher. But they really, you know, it lasts a lot longer as that famous expression is, you know. What you made for you. Yeah. I think the issue now is like commoditizing the business, right? Everybody's using the same software, the same, you know, automation, the same, all this stuff. What's the differentiation between one company and another? And, you know, if you look at your process and what you do in A1 at the home, you know, radically different.

But most of these companies are racing to the bottom and to do everything the way everybody else is doing it with the same price. Commoditization. And what's interesting is I was on both tryouts of Amazon home services. And these smart software guys way smarter than me said we're going to commoditize home services. The problem with commoditizing home services, there's different skill levels. There's different truck setups. There's different guys that have different hours of operation. I remember I hired somebody off of Amazon Home Services to put together like 20 chairs. The guy came back 10 times.

And it was a team of people. They got three chairs together. They came back. They didn't have enough screws. They didn't have the right tools. And this is what happens when you start thinking. Home service is tough. Anybody that says you've got a million people trying to get in the home service space.

Especially now. Right now it's hot. It's the hottest time it's ever been. And they all think, well, if you do this and you do this and you can charge this and it's so much more complicated than people really think, especially if you're just getting into it. You think, you know, you were a dentist, you might have worked in a white-collar industry,

and you know how to use power BI, but then you don't realize how to deal with blue-collar workers. But sometimes they never pass 10th grade. Yeah. And I think that that's a skill that very few people have is how to manage people. I think it's so interesting. I had a phone call that they wanted me to set up with a family attorney back, back east. He wanted me to speak to his son.

I said, isn't he going to go into the family business with you? He goes, no. He doesn't want to be a lawyer. But he's identified the business that he should be in. And go, what business is that? He goes, home service businesses. I said, well, if he's not going to be with my brothers, I said, I'm OK with it.

And he was talking to me about that, you know, they're all aware that it's a job that won't be replaced by AI anytime soon. And so, but then I started to go through what it means. Are you ready for a 24-7? 365, because if you can't talk about differentiation, we didn't just put that out in every kind of thing. We lived that. We had shifts for that, not on call, shifts for that.

And so we always impressed upon people, there's somebody live answering that phone. There's somebody in a truck waiting to come to you. Think of who else, and I know myself, I get out of my own bed at 2 a.m. to go run a call at a nursing home because it's not a nice idea to have heat and nursing home in winter. It's life standard. I think a lot of times what they miss is the customer perspective, right? Like on the other end of the phone is somebody having a really bad day, right? They're late for work.

The garage doors jammed. They just made a popping noise. They spilled their coffee. And they want help and they want somebody out there in the next two hours. And, you know, they want confidence that when they pick up the phone or, you know, go to the website, that person's actually going to show up. and so many businesses in a race to, you know, the bottom, it's like you can't tell one from another

and you have no confidence they're actually going to be there. You know, interestingly enough, get a rolled out of split shift, 6 a.m., 8 a.m. and new, something similar to what we're doing. And it seems to be more difficult, and I don't want to blame millennials. I don't want to blame Gen X or Gen Z or any of that crap. But it seems to be...

This baby boomer doesn't blame them. Yeah. The baby boomer doesn't blame them. I built, no, no, I have built great millennials everywhere around this country. It's just a myth. That is a myth. They are, what they need, Tommy is the weirdest thing that coming from me, but I had to learn what made them tick. And one of the things I found out is my generation, we were told what to do, and we didn't

really ask a question of our boss. We just did it. And so the next generation, this millennial generation, they're not doing anything until they really know the why until they really buy into the why. And once they do, they can run circles around anybody. Now, next generations have come since I no longer go around to visit all of your shops. But, you know, I don't think that's gone. I don't think that's gone. I think if they know the why well enough. So one of the whys that I always do, and you know this, I mean, is I always make it personal. I go, would you okay if I came to your mom's house and your water heater's two years old,

that she just bought, and I only find the pilot tube disconnected, and I sell her a new water heater, would you be okay with me? No. Is that okay to do it? Does that make it okay for you? How about if I say the only thing I found was a pilot disconnected, by the way, are you happy with the amount of hot water? Because I see you have a giant jacuzzi tub that you got. She goes, no, no, it takes forever to fill out and runs cold.

Can you fix that? Yeah. You got a sure can. Do you be okay with me? I think the hardest part I find is, you know, personally, I know that if I'm working, a really early morning or a weekend or a night shift. Both decision makers are going to be there. It's definitely going to be more emergency calls.

I'm going to make a lot more money. It's just hard to do that to somebody with a family. So those are shifts that are harder to set. So you've got to have some type of pay structure difference to pay those night shifts. And they're going to make more money, but it's still hard to want to work. Morris Jenkins does a great job out of Charlotte. And they work until midnight, seven days a week. I think, you know, for us, again, I wouldn't be looking for people who came from other companies who didn't have to pull the shifts.

And when we finally created our own pipeline, rather than taking industry retreads, by the way, we did that for a very long time. When we finally got them, we drilled into them early that we are an emergency-based business for residential, commercial, and industrial. And it isn't on our schedule, it's your schedule. So if you want to move up in a career, because we don't want you to be. a tech for life. But if you do want to be a tech for life, you can. But be aware there's much bigger careers here. But you're going to be demonstrating all along. So if I'm going to go run a call at 11 o'clock at night, I'm expecting you'll run a call 11 o'clock. When we set up shifts like that, they all knew it. But they didn't come as a tech and go,

what do you mean we have to do that? They started as apprentices, understanding that this is how it's going to come into that way. And the people that were already there, I remember one One of the times, you enjoy this, a guy, we're a union shop now, remember this. One of the guys that I had trained, his name was Bobby. And he's just got a raw apprentice working with him. And the apprentice says, can't we knock off? We're pretty much done. He goes, yeah, we can, but we're not going to put in for any extra money.

Because when it's slow, Al will send us home and he won't take any money back. He goes, this is a two-way street here. And if you're not going to go with the two-way street, do me. favor, Leaf. Yeah. So they censored themselves because they don't want, you know, what you know really well is A players, and I say A and B players. A and B players finally came to me and said, why?

Why do you tolerate C and D players here that drag us down? I have to clean up their messes, get them gone. It's true. It's true. B players, I mean, B minus C players, they could. ruin a company. Usually, usually they get fired. That's a good thing. We built the structure that they opt out. I speak in front of hundreds of contractors a year and almost invariably, you know, in a Q&A or something, right, somebody says, oh, I can't, I can't find good people. Nobody wants

to work. And I usually clap back with no, they just don't want to work for you. You don't pay right, or you got a rusty truck. You don't have, you know, the brand. You just don't have an opportunity that the right people want to take advantage of, you know. So the steering pulls to the right and the brakes pull to the left. You're going straight when you're stopping. I had a guy I just interviewed a technician that's winning. And he goes, you know, your manager hated me when he met me. He said, I don't have what it takes.

I went to another company. They didn't buy my tools. They didn't have training. They had used trucks. He goes, I don't want to be part of that company. So I studied up on the company. He came back. I knew I was going to have to raise my level.

Jimmy, you talk a lot about this. So we've talked about this for years. But my marketing isn't working. it's almost always a booking rate problem. Yeah, I mean, nine times out of ten when I hear that, and especially, you know, like certain marketing channels, people say, oh, PPC costs are out of control. Well, yeah, they're expensive, but if you have the right system, you can make money on it. Yeah.

You know, but if you can't book the call, if your cancellation rate's out of control, it's going to make any marketing look expensive, you know. So is it really a marketing issue or, you know, the first, the last step in the marketing chain is the call center, right? And that's what competes into the cost of marketing. A lot of people miss that. Al, you know, a lot of these companies don't have an org chart, and they don't have what you call a depth chart,

and they don't really know the owner is typically doing everything. I think I was really in that spot where I knew everything, and I knew I could get it done by sheer grit. You told me. He told me very early on. He told me I'm the best CSR. I'm also the best dispatcher. I'm also the best tech.

And he was. And I go, Tommy, can you clone yourself? Because if you can't clone yourself, we've got a problem. Might be a scaling problem. Might be a scaling problem. But to his credit, he was already $15 million. It wasn't like, you know, he was a small company. But the thing about Orchard was my company was formed in 1936 and my grandpa's gas station.

And we didn't have an or chart until like the early 90s. So you can overcome with enormous effort and a waste of time by doing this because it really showed up in the three brothers, myself, my two older brothers. We were duplicating tasks or tasks would go undone. So the classic one I always talk about, you know, with commercial air conditioning, you need a crane to get the unit up on the roof. So since it's nobody's job, would you like to guess how many cranes would be on any job at a given day? The answer is zero or two? Yeah. Both are bad.

Yeah. So what you need to do is a very flat, not your ego one with the CIO, CFO, CTO. I'm not saying those are important positions they are. But for most of us, especially smaller companies, but scalable forever, because the org chart that's available in the program is working in companies from his, 1 million to 100 million today without a problem. Where you talked about, which is when you get bigger, you get the luxury of having more depths at each position. So you, owner, owner, owner, owner only.

I don't care that your name is in every box. I didn't do it to you. The day that you had an entrepreneurial seizure and thought, well, everybody loves me, I'm going to go into business and I'm going to make a ton of money because I'm going to sell it for five bucks less than my boss did because I'm not ripping people off. But, you know, the day that happens,

you have automatically put yourself in all these boxes. And with the org chart, you can finally know what boxes it takes to run your company. And you can also know what activity and which box am I occupying when I am doing these things. And then someone like the Great Jim can come along and he can move me down the depth chart because he can handle that box and boxes. just because there's a box with a lot of boxes on the org chart, doesn't mean there's necessarily a person for each one, especially at a smaller company.

That's normal that your name will appear in multiple boxes. And it's your incentive to get systems in place and learn how to train. That theoretical org chart, you touched on that in the middle. That's a problem that I see bogging people down constantly. And I've kind of traced it back to like the, financial analysis piece where like a CPA or a CFO or somebody says, well, you've got to plan for all the people that you're going to need. We're going to build a five-year plan. So figure out, you know, the org chart that you need five years in the road. And so, and then you'll grow into it. So they're

trying to build that today. The problem is you have no idea of the people that you're going to need five years on the road. If you actually, if you had to predict all the people that you need today, Tommy, five years ago. Not a chance. Could you have even done it correctly? No way. You know what I keep hearing out there is this obsession with technology, which is great. I'm a big fan. I always say we're a tech company that happens to do garage stores. We're a marketing company. We're a people company.

But people are wrapped around the axel on technology while not paying attention to this. There's not a whole lot of KPIs you need to dominate on to really make a super profitable company. And I find that people just get washed into all these different numbers and they don't know what they mean. But here's the other thing is like when I interviewed Jake at Ken Goodrich's, he goes, I got into this company for the first six months, trusting the numbers as the new CEO. Ken was the chairman of the board. And I found out that all the KPIs and all the data that I was managing were wrong. So what's one thing to have the core KPIs, it's a whole other thing to have them correct. And then there's this new software that comes out and everybody's like, what else are you using? What I'm using today will not fit a $5 million company.

It just doesn't make sense. So you talk about this. Yeah, there's like five things to unpack there, right? One is like, hey, I see a bigger company doing something, so it must work, so I must try. How much stuff do you test that doesn't work that you scrap, right? I mean, we're testing probably five things to find one. Right. And so people, and maybe it's not just a tool, but it could be just a technique or promotion or whatever.

So they automatically copy what the big company down the road is doing, thinking that that's going to work. And it tanks them, their numbers go off the cliff. And it's like, well, they didn't even know if that was working, right? But the technology, you know, getting wrapped around the axles, I mean, AI has created a whole legion of owners who are sitting there burning tokens thinking that they're doing something. And the numbers only move when a human does something in the field, right? And building tons of dashboards. Like, it's great. But if that's not effectuating change in the field, nothing moves.

You don't make any more money, right? That's a huge problem. When I hear this, it actually, my mind jumped to something totally different. We acquired businesses since the 1950s. My dad and my uncle, their generation, our area. had gotten wiped out by urban renewal in New York City, right along the beachfront. We had eight miles of empty beachfront where all our customers were gone. And if it wasn't for my dad and uncle learning to acquire companies, they were doing it for survival.

They went and chased where the customer were, bought companies out. And happily, they found out, hey, you know, what if you acquire? You can do a good job, make some more money and a lot of things. Otherwise, it would never have been a company for me. So I got really good at knowing how to acquire a company, look under the hood, do all the rest of the stuff. kept on doing acquisition. And when I wanted to go into a new trade, which was plumbing, gas, heating, air conditioning, electrical, the easiest way was to buy a company with a person that I know, people that

I had done business with, acquire them. So I acquired this company. And, you know, when I went to interview him, where was this person who was losing money every day he was in business? He was out in the warehouse, looking at all the inventory he owned. because he knew it was bad. But look at all the stuff I have. That's all mine.

And look at the trucks in the yard. They're all mine. And it's just looking in the wrong place. And so I saw this through the years come where we used to have a screen that gave us the information. And all of a sudden it turned into NASA or SpaceX with screens all over the place. And I always go back to Ellen's mentor. or Frank Blow. Yeah.

And he told me in a bar where you learn everything you learned. He told me, he goes, Al, if you can't run your business with a piece of paper and have the same key things, the computer's only going to hide it. Yeah. Well, now you bring AI into it. And it's going to bury it in places. You'll never find it because you're thinking it's going to fix it. My company was born into technology as well.

And now it was different, of course. My dad was the first one to go get two-way radios. Yeah. when everybody was looking for pay phones. And when everybody was using boroughs, I was in college, and we got computers. And we just kept on always investing in technology. But it was always first, what are we trying to solve?

And how is this going to solve it? And we mapped it out in paper or whatever it was, and then we tested like we were doing. Instead of just, oh, you know, there's some guy I read in a magazine, he's using this. So like what you were saying, which is it's got to be. good. We used to call it the silver bullet. There's got to be a silver bullet. So anybody out there who's watching or listening or both to this, let me help you out. There is no silver bullet. There

never has been. Yeah. It's not always technology that they think is the silver bullet, right? There must be some unicorn who's going to come in and save me, right? There's a magic CEO, GM, or whatever you want to call the title is they're going to come in and get this all to work. Yeah, no, I hear that question all the time. People are like, what would you do if you were me right now? I'm like, man, it's tough to really have an answer that's just universal, except it all starts in systems. It all starts on perfection of the system. And it shouldn't be a ton of systems.

That's why, you know, Al, you talk about the triangle of communication, CSR dispatch your technician. And just making sure that that communication is, I see a lot of people that still have a CSR that's doing the dispatching. And they still are like, why should I separate it? And I talked to a, yeah, yesterday, office manager answers the phone, does the payroll, does this, that, and the other, and they're not measuring a booking rate. It's like your business can double when you figure that. I always say the number of things cost you. Tommy, Tommy was, I had a lot of great customers over the years, gone on to great things, sold for a ton of money, or stayed in the business and passed it on through multiple generations, which is great. But Tommy was one of the first people when I told him how much it was going to be to bring me in.

And he didn't have the money in the business. he had to go take it out of his own personal savings. He goes, Al, if this can get my CSRs to book X amount of calls more and do it right, I'll pay for all of what you're going to do for me in one month. And he was the first one to really understand it wasn't a cost. It was an investment. Yeah. And that's what it is. I mean, look, it's still the fundamentals of the seven powers. I remember you brought in Allen and we talked a lot. We were obsessed.

We didn't know what vendor management inventory was. we thought buying everything at a discount, putting it on shelves was the best thing to do. I'm super light on inventory today. I still am because it's, it's, people do get proud of their 40,000 square foot warehouse for the grass. I know how much out loves the warehousing business. I love the warehouse. Actually, I was good at it, but I, you know, what I just came to understand is I don't

want to be in the warehouse business. I want to be in the company. Let Amazon handle that. Yeah. Let somebody else do it. It's still your job. And you still got to look at the numbers about what's being. quote unquote, borrowed from your place.

And, you know, Tommy has heard me say this because I'd said it to his face. His old, old place, which none of you can ever see, was gone. But I told him, I could clean out your whole warehouse with your own fork truck and you'd never know. Yeah, no, come a long way from those days. I mean, look, it's something where I never really mastered, but we've got better people.

That's the thing I've done pretty well, is just go try to find somebody that's an individual that's an expert than finding a jack of all trades. And then knowing the roles where they're the most critical, but there will always be a point in the business where something's not as good as something else. And it goes in like you slam up this growth and then you plateau,

then you've got to almost reinvent the business plateau again. And so it's very hard for me to talk to smaller businesses right now because even on the podcast, people are like, man, if I listen to the first 100 episodes, it helped me get to this level. Then I listen to the next 100 helps me get to this. Because they listen to me going through it. Yeah.

And that, I think you were on the second podcast. Yeah, I was. No, he's not joking. That's how we first met. Yeah, I remember that. So. I wanted to get back to the profit before anybody's tuned out. No, let's do it.

Everything that we've been talking about is all interesting. And I, of course, valuable to get these three powerhouse people speaking to you. But, you know, the reality is everything that we've talked about today, it may sound like warehouse. It's profit. We may talk about marketing and the leads and conversion. It's profit. Everything we've spoken about right now either makes your profit more or makes it disappear.

You have to make a decision. Am I going to fix it? Well, you know what I'm sick about L? I'm really sick of hearing companies. And I've probably tuted this horn for the last two years. They've always talked about revenue. And they say in their minds, I'm investing in growth. I'm investing in the future.

I'm investing in hiring. I'm investing in trucks this year. I've invested in consulting, which all of those might make sense. But realistically, with the right CFO, you can actually say I truly invested in growth. But if you're less than 15% to the bottom line, then you got issues. And you're going to blame it on growth the last five years because you keep doing it. And you know what I'd rather have is a smaller business that's extraordinarily profitable. And because, you know, I'm on performance pay.

The company doesn't make money. guess what? Well, now I get fired. But when I was just a single owner, if we didn't make money, I couldn't pay myself. You could take out lines of credit and everything else. Oh, I totally know. We were not as formal as that. But in the dark days, when we were really dumb, we didn't do any budgeting. We'd have our accountants come in

one month before the end of the year. And they would say to us, you had a really great year, had a lot of money, the banks are going to be happy. Go buy yourself some trucks. And by the way, were bumping you up with a nice commission. And that was a wonderful year. Yeah. The next year they'd walk in and go, the sales weren't really good this year. We got to balance the books for everything else. I hope you boys have money in your own personal account because you're not getting paid for the next three months.

So don't be dumb like that. Budgeting, an alert budgeting, and budgeting in the moment the way that Ellen teaches it, which is driving the financial car by looking out the windshield, rather than waiting for reports to come in from your accounts who are just doing tax. Real time data. They're just doing tax accounting. If you think accounting is helping you, then you're wrong. It's real accounting you need to know. That was something that changed my life is when we heard it.

Obviously, when you got involved now when Jim came on, but I'd say, look, we're good at marketing. We're good at sales. We're good at culture. The finance side is not something I'm really passionate about. It's not like I could sit accrual versus cash. I understand high level, balance sheet income steaming, P&L cash flow. but ultimately the right person in that seat for most of the people listening that actually could see behind corners and understand how to renegotiate terms, how to get more money back. Even your merchant fee that you pay when a client pays for a credit card, if you can get that

down and then you start getting great with selling financing, which we call promotions, and you're able to negotiate those down. Like right now this year alone, using Mantle, it's a different software that I don't recommend anybody getting on necessarily. If it's right for you, it's right for you. but we save $2.6 million that hits the bottom line. And so a lot of these things were born out of the right person in the finance department looking at these things.

And now we got FP&A, which is Leanne, we got six people on her team. A lot of its commission structures, but I go back to this is, I know something's wrong when we're losing people at the level we are, but we've never had classes of 80 or to 100. And so it's broken again.

It's time to fix it. Yeah. You know, now we're like really, really, really focused on this problem. And it's always come back to the people. It's, you know, the marketing, for the first time in the company's history, we're beating marketing budget by a lot. And we're like, how do we get great people? You can still some of them, you can buy companies, but you need to be able to create them

from scratch. That's what you've always. Yeah, pipeline. I've lived the other life, and it's awful. Plus, I couldn't scale the way I could. I knew I could get, I had more calls than I could humanly do in a day, always, including these kinds of times. Yeah.

We always had, you know, referral networks, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, and good marketing because I finally had a person who could, you know, handle me. But he really literally took me from zero knowledge of marketing to, you know, to where I could actually have a conversation with people. Because I know you, Tommy, talk about being the dumbest person in the room. And that's okay. But I don't like to be the dumbest person in the room because I can't add anything. I need to know what I'm getting.

I can filter some of that information. So there's some level of education. I don't need to be the smartest person, but I need to know what's coming my way. And then so I can kind of figure out how it fits, how it doesn't fit. Is it something new, something we can do? Not right now or whatever. Or this is, stop what you're doing because this is now a top five.

Yeah, we've really been good at doing the top five. And also, you told me, never lose sight of marketing and financials. As the CEO, owner, founder. those are the things that I think people don't pay close enough attention. And the one time I thought I had the right guy in marketing, I lost track and I had to fire five people in marketing. And I took back and I'll never let it go as far as I did. And so, you know, and I can't tell you enough I think that getting the day that I started.

Well, there's several times. This has happened several times, but it's never going to happen again. I'll tell you another thing is that Al was the one that told me to go to Dan Antenai. with kick charge when we were doing 30 million. We got the 30 million and getting the brand right and using one color shirt and having a uniform. Now we got stilt-toed boots, we got gloves, we got eye protection, simple little things like that

that don't really, like people just, they don't think about these things until you look at your workers' comp and you start realizing it's just, and then the brand that people want to come work for. Well, you just look at the trucks, you're talking about the outside, but I look at the trucks on the inside as well. I mean, you and I laid out the model truck all those years ago. And it's the same thing I did in my place was because I used to hate as a tech going into anybody else's truck.

And when I talked to the techs, they absolutely hated it as well. Because they were losing efficiency because most techs do not want to be sitting around and not being efficient. Not even talking about the money because it is affecting their money in your case, absolutely. But even in our case, they just wanted to go out, serve customers, do really well. And this truck, in itself, where stocking couldn't be in, you know, if you still have vans where you crawl your way through, forget it. Yeah. Make yourself happy. But it's a waste of, not only that, you are losing one of the biggest things is a billboard, a moving billboard in the neighborhoods that you serve.

And if you don't think that counts, do me a favor. Go to Las Vegas. Just stay on the main boulevard and watch how many empty trucks with billboards are going up and down that street all day long. Talk about the inside of the truck. I can tell you how much money you're making just by looking at it, right? There's a direct correlation between how clean it is, how it's set up, what's going on inside of the truck. How close the inventory is monitored, how well you have an inventory turn on it. If nothing else, their ability to maintain standards inside the truck is a reflection of the standards.

What you will tolerate that. They're tolerated throughout the rest of the business. I totally agree. You know what a great CEO does, if a great CEO steps in a business, And they're coming into the business, and they're taking over a group of great people. You know what they do for the first 90 days? They go on a listening tour, and they get feedback. And they try to find out from the cumulative amount of people.

This is what happens in a business. And I'm ready to go on a listening tour here soon and just literally, some of it's about leadership. Some of it's about there's a lot of high standards that are set. Are you going to do undercover boss? Yeah. I don't know if they would have done work in a wig. out on the market. Please stop.

Please stop. Please stop. Because the Zoom drain, Ellen kept wanting us to go on undercover boss. I said, if I put on a toupee and I went out there and they wouldn't recognize me, I'd be pretty disappointed. I mean, you know, listen to the voice. But the reality is, I don't know how that was. It was so propped up. But, you know, just the point of it is you doing what you're talking about, the listening tour and the rest of it, here's what I guarantee.

There's going to be less loss. of people that should stay. Some people need to go to make your company better. Having said that, when they get the connection again, now it's harder in Tommy's case because, again, I was kidding about clones. He could use a couple of clones at this point because it's just, otherwise he's just a big head

on a huge screen. It's very difficult for what he has to do. But he still can be there. He can still make everybody fly into Milwaukee or he can make everybody fly into where these three or four sites so that they do get that touch. They need to touch it, but you're right. There's other people that need to step up.

I've identified a lot of things. Anybody that thinks it's easy with great, what do they say, great power comes, great responsibility. Well, they see the house and they see the cars and they don't understand. Oh, you know what? There's never been a reason for me to hide that stuff. It's like I never really felt compelled in this day. I think great leaders need to be relevant online. And it's not all about, I like to mix past times, but with coaching and different things.

Jim and Al and I are doing something on one night at Freedom that's never been done. And it's never been on any agenda before. Jim, you want to talk about that? Yeah, so Freedom is October 26th through 28th. And I was chatting with Al the other day. And I'm like, you know, at Freedom a lot of time, I mean, we got great speakers. There's great people coming in. but people really want to get up and close, ask questions that they have, meet you, get specific answers in their business.

So we had this idea to do a small session with just me and Al, right? So Monday night, 6 p.m. at Mandalay Bay. It's a small room, no stage, no slides. It's literally me and Al. Come, bring your problems, bring your questions. you know, the floor is for the folks that are in that room. And anybody that buys a ticket and use the code Al Freedom gets access to that session, right? What's interesting is, you know, I was going to say, hey, we've never done it before,

never may never do it again. I'm not sure. But Al mentioned earlier, he turned in his three-month notice. as we were talking before the session. He just laid it all out there. Actually, he said, you know, I gave my brothers three years, but I'm giving you guys three months. And I just want to say it's been a pleasure

working with Al over the last, I don't know, three years. So it was three years ago. You know, Al said he wanted to, you know, kind of come up with a retirement plan, but didn't want to see his work, you know, just go to the wind. and would you guys be interested in taking over and, you know, kind of integrating that into what we do?

And I think the initial thought was like, well, we'll hire somebody to run this business and kind of take over as Al. And that was a fool's error. And there's nobody that can replace Al. And I don't know if you remember the day when I said, Al, I've been going through all of these people. There's nobody that's going to live up to your standards. The closest guy that I could think of, and I'm not even sure that you would approve of him. But I think it might be me. And what do you say?

I just jump in. I go through all of your program, your manuals, your book, I work with you. Maybe we go out to a few shops. And at minimum, if I pick up as much as I can of what you've done, you know, I'll have somebody that I know is going to be around for a while. And we'll go from there. And I think you actually agreed. I did agree. I did agree.

I just reminded him that you really don't want a 70-year-old coaching these programs. He said, it's not much of an insurance policy. And so I said, yeah, Jim, if you want to be able to take it because I really want to get the coaches that we already have to be able to do. The other good thing about it, the way is the seven powers are now in the can, so to speak, and they're set up. And another great reason to become a home service freedom member at whatever. level that is. That's not a discussion with me. That's with Jim and the others there. But they are finally available in a way that you can work your way through the program. There's a load of video, but it's short videos. It's a lot of stuff. I'm literally taking you up the

mountain that I took Tommy up all those years ago, me and Ellen, because it's not all just me. Ellen's doing the same thing with her programs. So the whole seven power platform, is now available through home service freedom. For those that want to qualify and get themselves there, you can finally have this system that we talked about for profitability. Yeah, and I think one of the things that we talked about in the early days is, you know, you kind of said, hey, I'm in a mode where I want to do less and less, right? And so I offer this program, but people could use a lot more support, right?

and I had that vision three years ago of like, all right, well, we have to build a lot of infrastructure around, not just transferring the knowledge of what you built, but having people to stand there side by side, you know, with them as they implement manuals and systems and processes. And I'm pretty confident today to say, hey, we build that out. We've got a whole team of trainers in operations, sales, frontline, but all build on your principles. and we're kind of going down a nostalgia rabbit hole. No, I bet some of the graduates from the class, and they talk about how they're starting already to see the success.

And now that I really feel confident that we have the whole platform built. So whether you're a million, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million, 100 million, whatever that is, all of this applies to you. So to bring that back, this session at Freedom Monday, October 26, 6 p.m., It's probably the last time you're going to be able to engage with Al in a setting like that. Small room, again, no stage, no slides, Q&A, beat and greet, ask your questions. If you buy a ticket, just use the code Al, freedom at the checkout. Go to freedom event.com for that and look forward to seeing you there.

Well, I won't use my ex-New Yorker, but you'd be an end. idiot not to sign up. You know, it's funny. Every time you really think back, I gave it out a few podcasts to go to somebody that really needed help. And I just think sometimes it's just good to go back to the basics. Sometimes you're growing and it just takes one little session to say, you pay an attention to this.

You have this planned out. You got this. And if you look at that seven powers and you continue to run with those, it's very simple. It's not overcomplicated. I know the world's a busy place. I know things are changing. It's just going back to the fundamentals that work. And you need some basic things.

You need some org charts and depth charts. You need some manuals, standard operating procedures and checklist. But ultimately, you need to get clients. You need to convert them. And you need to get leads, book the leads. And then you also need to do the orientation and get people. If you do that, and this is what I'll start with is get great clients, get great people to come work for you. If you do those things and you do it well,

people feel appreciated. And I think Al will be great to visit that day. So once again, go to freedomevent.com and then you put in the code Al, A-L, Freedom, F-R-E-E-D-O-M, and you'll be invited to this session with him. Before we close, I'm just going to ask you guys each one question that you guys can both answer. What's one thing an owner should do, this week and why should they come to freedom? I guess that's two questions. So, Alie, you can start us out. I'll have Jim. You have to be in the right room. I learned that lesson so many years ago. I was not born enlightened. I have all the bruises, bumps, everything that went along the line in every way that I did. But what I find mysterious to me is that people

don't want to be coached or don't feel they need a coach and events like this is that or what you talked about to him, you know, the coaches and the rest of it. The best golfers in the world are coached constantly and what are they coached on?

The same fundamentals. Stance, grip. Everybody of us is so fixated on the next AI thing that we, and AI is powerful. I totally get it. But if you don't have the platform, if you don't have the basics,

it can't do the magic that it can do. And so that's really what I would say is, number one, if you're not signed up, sign up. And if you are signed up, sign up for our event while there's still openings for it. Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, because at the end of the year, I'm out of the room, so we can go from there.

Yeah, I guess one thing to do this week, go to a freedom event and get a ticket right. But why come? I mean, it is about being in the right room, right? People say, oh, you know, you have all these big name, big name speakers, you know, I don't know how that applies to me. Well, you know, we use that to dry in all the big companies, right? And the people that are in the room, you know, I've had companies that are $5, $10 million,

so they're like, hey, the guy sitting next to me in the next seat's doing $300 million, $500 million. And I asked him these questions, and he gave me an answer right. And that's really the power of the network of the people that we assemble there. You're literally sitting with the people that, you know, have the key, the piece of the puzzle that you need to unlock what you're doing at your level. So buy a ticket, come, get in the... Yeah, I think it's a great event. I mean, I've been to every event known to man.

And I will say this is an exceptionally well-done event. it's organized unlike any other event I've ever been to. The speakers are prepped unlike any other event I've ever been to. And there's a lot of different walk. It's not just, I go to some events, it's always the same people. Every single year, the same events, same people. What I like about this event is you're going to see some pest control. You're going to see some commercial roofing.

You're going to see, we have mechanical people come with shops. But like, you know, we really don't try to say it's only for HVAC or garage stores or roofing. It's for everybody. And you get to learn a lot. You can learn a lot from landscaping companies and pool companies and people that are putting up fences and you name it. And there's just such a variety of people that. And what's working in one industry, I can tell you there's a lot of solar guys that show up that are spending a million bucks a month on YouTube. And I pick their brains.

And I learn a ton. And I'm like, man, if YouTube works that well, that's the channel I need to start focusing on. And they'll say, well, here's the five things you need to know if you're going to do YouTube. And these are just channels that nobody else is using. And that's how I use the event. There's always certain people I like to meet there, too. And I walk away with no more than five names. I don't need to meet everybody.

I don't need to hand them a business card and try to fill up my podcast. I hate those people, by the way. They're out just trying to meet every single person, tell them what they do. All I want to do is listen and find some people that could help me where I'm at today and good people that are reliable that show up that aren't scumbags. I would tell you, because you hit a really key point is the next stratosphere of growth, Looking back is always easier. But in the 90s,

when my friends and the industry friends, like Ellen, said, you know, you've got to get out of the small swimming pool you're in. We only wanted to see companies that were like us or in our trade that we were doing at the time. And they said, you're just never going to grow. And I had to get out

of the, I was a big fish in a little pond. And I had to get out of my comfort level, out of my depth. And it got around other people in different businesses. And you heard me, yesterday in the live thing, which is everybody likes to tell me how different their businesses. And I was in plumbing, heating, killing at the time. So my first customer naturally is an electrical, which I wasn't in at the time.

But I was able to fix his company. He had to talk me in to come working because he had read everything I did, and he knew it applied to him. It applies to you these things. Don't think your business is oh, so different. So the event is freedomevent.com. It's October 26 through the, 28th, Amanda Lay Bay. What we've learned, and I've learned from personal experience is when I used to go sometimes back in the really old days, me and Adam would show up to an event. We come back with all these

ideas. None of the team was motivated or excited. So bring your team, bring the decision makers, bring your CSR manager, bring your technician trainer, bring some of your area managers, whoever you have on your team that's CFOs are great. Bring your team with you. You don't need to bring 80 people, but it's wise to bring. Well, we've actually added a bunch of discount packages for people to want to bring their teams this year, right? So there's options, different tickets, different compositions. Depending on who you want to bring, you can go right to the website and get a great deal for bringing the whole team with you. I am so happy as we did the wrap-up here, and you guys are doing this, because that was the problem.

Richard, we'd go to these shows, come back with all excited with great ideas and everybody. It was like, you know, they would do the eye roll. Yeah. And they just couldn't stand it. And we, as we got in line, we started to bring these people with us. And you could see how they would get so attached to the culture because they look around the room. And, hey, there's nobody else like us here in this room. They're wearing, you know, we're all wearing the same cloth.

We're on the same team. We would meet up and dinner and rest of the time. It really helped us bond. And also more excited when we went back, it was much more just trying to sell this new way we've got to go. So it's another great thing. So I correct myself when I said, right now go to the site and sign up. Sign up your team, too. I can tell you over the years I've seen companies that bring 8, 10, I mean, one year we had a company bring 25 people and, you know, obviously just tracking them over the years.

Those are the people that are making the gains because the whole team is bought in. They see what's possible and immediately they go back and double, triple their goals because they realize, you know, it's like the four minute mile, right? Yeah, 100%. Prior to Roger Bannister running it, everybody thought it couldn't be done. the year after that, what, like six people or something, break the record? And that's what happens when you bring your team to freedom of that. Well, I hope to see a lot of people there. It's a lot of good news happening.

The industry's never been stronger. It's great that I'm still obviously always looking for help and mentors and people to just call friends. Because I talk to Aaron Gaynor all the time. He beat year over year last month by 50%. And you talk to the people that are winning, and it really changes your, I say for me it's always about mindset now. For me, it's just getting around people that are going to lift me up, no matter how big or small I am, somebody that's going to say, yes, you can.

Those are the people I want in the room, and that's where I think we've done a good job. One other thing we've done is kind of excluded all the scumbags that come there that try to, you know, pick up clients and just, we've really vetted every single vendor there. We're not having just come for the highest bid. I mean, we've said no more than we've said yes to vendors. In fact, I mean, I don't know how many I'm getting right now, five a week reaching out to me that I send to you and you're like, yeah, sorry, we're sold out. It's like... Yeah, we have a strict qualification process for, you know, who can be in the room.

We really have to believe in them. And even the attendee list, we don't just let random, you know, companies buy tickets to, you know, come in and, you know, pedal things. So it's a really strong environment where you can get around the right, right people. Well, listen, that's a wrap. Hopefully we'll see you at the Freedom Event in October. Thank you guys for coming in today. Thank you.