The Home Service Expert Podcast - The Real Reason Most People Never Start (It's Not Discipline)

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://homeservicefreedom.com/ Dr. Benjamin Hardy is one of the world's leading organizational psychologists — PhD, bestselling author of 10X Is Easier Than 2X, and Dan Sullivan's writing partner. In this episode, Tommy sits down with Dr. Hardy to break down why you don't need to be ready to start, how your future self is already waiting for you to decide, and the one mindset shift that separates the operators who scale from the ones who stay stuck. ⏱ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Start Before You're Ready 02:54 Welcome and Introductions  04:31 Tommy's Hockey Stick Growth 05:28 Ben's Background Today 07:01 Profitability Over Revenue 09:26 Ben's Origin Story 16:08 Meeting Dan Sullivan 21:48 How to Co-Write Books 24:30 Building Your Audience 30:13 The Power Law Explained 36:24 How to 10X 43:59 Writing Seven Books 47:34 The Gap and the Gain 48:59 Future Self Framework 57:14 Stop Waiting for Perfect 01:00:11 Future Self Deep Dive 01:07:48 The Science of Future Self 01:21:40 Closeout Questions  01:25:01 Start Over With $10M 01:28:20 Ben's Favorite Books 01:31:18 Find Ben Online 🔗 Build Your Freedom → https://homeservicefreedom.com/ 📱 Follow Tommy: TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/officialtommymello 🎙️ Home Service Expert Podcast → https://homeserviceexpert.com

I could have said, I'm a PhD student with three foster kids. I'll save the becoming a professional author until after I finish the PhD. But if you just wake up and do it for like even 30 minutes, as you said, most people, they haven't been trained to think very well about their future self because they don't think very successfully about their future self. Their future self just becomes a continuation of their past self. It is worth to climb. It will, it will rip you to shreds. The future self, it's worth stretching into.

It really humbles you. No, dude, dude, this is incredible. I'm excited to have a conversation with you. I'm excited to just be with you, man. I mean, I just love where you're at and what you're doing, man. It's huge. It's going to be fun digging into your story. I mean, I quote your books all the time.

I know Billy Klein's a big fan too. He's a good buddy of mine. Billy is a dog, dude. He's one of our scalers. He's in scaling.com. And he's doubled his business already since being a member in scaling.com. So we'll get him to 10X. Don't you worry.

He's a good guy. I like Billy a lot. Yeah, you got to get rid of the old methodology and make it simple and scalable, right? And I always say who not how. I mean, it's become like a metaphor slash verb at this company is like, I hate to say I like the top grade, but I do. Because I think it's okay to say I'm going to free this person up to go win and enjoy what they do. And different seasons of business. I mean, right now we're running about 25,000 clients.

a month and I recently interviewed Mark Winters who wrote Rocket Fuel with Gino Wickman and we were just talking about the difference between visionaries and integrators and you know I still got a I still feel like we're in the first inning my vision is just we have so much in charted territory to drive leads we got 70 technicians coming in next month and 90 coming in the following month to train from scratch

so we're just starting to hit that that hockey stick curve but I got to tell you, if you don't fall in love with the process and the journey, the destination is not what it's about. People think, man, once I get there, once I get the fame, once I get the money, it shouldn't change who you are. It should just pull out the best than you.

Or for some people the worst. For some people, what? For some people the worst. You know, money just, it tends to magnify your traits. But I'm going to do two introductions because I want this to go on both podcasts, the mellow millionaire and the home service experts. So I'm going to just basically read out the same thing.

Actually, I'm just going to do an intro of both and then I'll read out some of your accolades. Then we'll just jump into questions and we'll have a good conversation. Let's do it. All right, here we go. Welcome back to the mellow millionaire. Today, I've got a good friend of mine.

He is a genius. I'm sure most of you have probably heard of Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Known him now for several years. He is just a monster when it comes to scaling, hiring. Really just, he's a scientist. I mean, seven kids, just an amazing author, amazing businessman, and just an amazing human. I think you guys are going to really enjoy this episode.

All right. Welcome back to the home service expert. Today I got a really special guest. His name is Dr. Benjamin Hardy. He's an expert in organizational psychology with a PhD from K.S. from Clemson, co-founder of scaling.com. He's written a lot of books. Willpower doesn't work.

Personality isn't permanent. Be your future self now. Who not how, the gap and the gain. 10x is easier than 2x and most recently the science of scaling. He's based in Orlando, married to Lauren with seven children. He's a number one writer on Medium.com for three straight years, read by over 100 million people. He's just a best-selling author. Just an amazing guy.

I've known him for a long time. His core thesis is your future self is the greatest tool you have in transforming yourself into the present. Ben, it is amazing to have you on. Dude, Tommy. Come on. This is the honor is mine, man.

I'm excited to hang out with you and talk to you. You're like one of the ultimate practitioners of these ideas, man. You are like the ultimate scaler. Yeah, you know, what I've kind of learned over the last two decades is really racehorses wear blinders. And it's so easy for an entrepreneur to get distracted and want to pivot and want to take stuff on. And the fact is, you could go open up a restaurant to be successful if you put everything you had into it. But a lot of us think we could just kind of dabble. And as long as we're part of it, it'll work.

And we get distracted. And I'm telling you, and I'm speaking about my past self. And if you just get the focus right, you make it simple. I love your message. And like I said to you before we started, I quote your books all the time. And as I was reading the science of scaling, I'm like, yep, yep, exactly. And dream bigger. That was the purpose of my first or my second book, Elevate is your dream's got to be massive.

Your dream's got to be big enough for everybody else's dream to come true. And so why don't you just start out and tell everybody a little bit about yourself where you're at today and what you're looking forward to? It's awesome. And I can't wait to, yeah, talk. about impossible goals and focus because focus is the hardest part as you were saying with the with the racehorse innovation is saying no to a thousand things as uh as steve job said yeah so i mean you already gave overly generous introduction but live in orlando we have a company called scaling.com our whole obsession is 10xing companies in three years or less and that's our that's what

i've been studying for the last 10 15 years and about there's a lot of psychology in it obviously as you were mentioning future self, using a different future to shape, in this case, your company. So a 10x goal, you know, if a company is in your case hundreds of millions revenue, you know, let's just say you're at, I mean, let's just go with any company. Let's just say you're at 10 million revenue, you know, rather than one of the big things we've distinguished lately is growth and scale. That those are just completely different games. They're different models. And so growth would be, if we're at 10 million, let's get to 15. Scale would be, how do we get to 100 million or a few hundred million in the next two.

or three years. And those are just different games. And so that's what we help people to do is we help people scale. And we're just deep in it, man. As you said, we're deep in that process and that mastery and that learning curve of just of learning that on all sizes of companies and teaching people how to do it. Yeah, you know, I, we coach about 500 companies. And the common question is, how do I get the leads? Then I always say, what's your profitability? And most of them are under 10%. So what I find is the wrong conversations are happening

because without profit, nothing happens. You literally are three months away from bankruptcy. And so I've always said scalability should be bottom line first. And then the revenue has to grow if you're going to grow the total amount of bottom line. But I find people dabbling. And I always used to walk in rooms, Ben, and I'd brag, hold my chest up, and I'd say, what's your revenue? And I'd say, we grew 120% last year. We went from $50 million to $110 or whatever it was.

And little did I know that profit was the name of the game. And I think there's a fine line about revenue versus profit. And profits what you get paid on when you go to sell the company. And hopefully most people are building to sell a business. Or they're going to die or pass it on. Those are the only three options. What is your take on that? I agree.

I think, you know, so John Doar, who wrote, you know, he wrote the book, Measure What Matters. He's the one who trained Steve Jobs. You know, he trained Larry Page and those guys. He's big on a goal properly set is halfway reached. That's like a quote from his, a goal properly set is halfway reached. And the reason for that is when you set the right target, it allows you to skip all the dead ends, right?

And so I think when you're talking about a company, revenue is fine. You know, I mean, I think it's important to actually think in terms of 10x, either with revenue or valuation, valuation might actually be the better target. Yeah.

Because that's going to force you to reshape the company. So, yeah, I think starting from, you know, and it's classic Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. But starting with the knowledge,

we're going to sell this thing. Let's think in terms of maximum valuation. That's what led us to actually buying the domain scaling. dot com and to building a lot of the IP that we had. We weren't just building a training company. We were thinking from the beginning, okay, if we were going to sell this company in three to five years for, you know, high nine or ten figures, what would the positioning of this company need to be? What would it need to look like?

And so that ultimately led us to thinking in terms of, okay, we probably should own the category, what category, oh, like for what we're teaching, scaling. And so, yeah, when you think in terms of exiting and you think in terms of valuation, it leads to a completely different stream of decisions. And it forces you to make the right decisions now. So I couldn't agree with you more. I want to dive into, obviously, I know you weren't born with a silver spoon. Your childhood was, I would say, there was some instability there.

And you talked about how it shaped your obsession for transformation and identity. Can you take me back a little bit of your childhood and kind of some of the things that guided you to where you're at today? Yeah, brother. And I always want to hear your thoughts too because I think that you're like the ultimate practitioner. So anytime I answer a question, I might want to like reverse back and hear your thoughts even though I know your people hear your thoughts.

Your stuff is so good. Yeah, so I'm the oldest of three. We grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and pretty normal experience. You know, my parents got divorced when I was 11 years old. Obviously divorce can really rock a kid. It did rocked my younger brother so much, actually, that, like, he really messed him up. So, again, I'm the oldest of three.

My younger brother, who's two years younger than me, he was a lot more emotionally impacted by it. I mean, I was very emotionally impacted by it, but I think I just kind of withdrew myself and, like, went into video games and friends and snowboarding and stuff like that. He just was so impacted by it. Like, he just went deep into drugs and things like that, dropped out of high school and stuff like that. My dad ended up becoming a drug addict.

And so he, you know, the divorce just rocked him. He felt like a failure. He went into deep depression, got into pretty much every drug you could think of. And so for me, you know, I'm in high school, going through junior high and high school, my dad becomes this extreme drug addict. And, you know, I'm barely going, I'm barely getting through high school. And I barely did graduate high school. I didn't have good grades or anything like that. But I mean, you know, obviously blessed by the hand of God without question, you know, protected.

But one of the things that really helped me was that idea of future self. So if you've ever read Man Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, obviously that's right. Yeah, it's a very extreme story, man, of someone who has everything taken away from them. If you think about the Jewish people. And he was very clear in that book that the only way to have meaning in the president, is to be is to actually have a goal worth striving for you know he says it's a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future and he says that you know basically the only way that people in the concentration camps could could maintain sanity let alone hope was to actually

have a goal for their life beyond the beyond the concentration camps he didn't have the language we have today about future self and about you know how I think about our own future as an idea is what gives our life meaning, but that's pretty much what he said, and I was the same. For me, it was more along the lines of actually serving a mission for my church. So, like, you know, often people do that at like age 20 years old. And so for me, like, I have all this chaos going on in my world and pretty much nothing made sense. I mean, I could have easily just given up on my life. But I had that North Star or that future self, which was, you know, get on that mission. and if I,

I just felt like for some reason, if I got on that mission, I'd be able to figure it out after that. And so because I had that future self, it's really strange, but I was able to navigate the present. Like, and I think that this is true of companies.

Like if a company has this big vision, they can navigate a lot of chaos in the present. And they can, you know, they can turn it into fuel. They can reorganize it. And so for me, yeah,

I was just able to get on that mission. And then that was a transformative experience. You know, a lot of communities. service, just serving, teaching people, helping people get closer to God. And also, I read probably 100 books during that time and just filled stacks of journals. And it was during that time when I decided I wanted to go study psychology and become an author. So, yeah, I mean, there's, you know, there's a lot of other things too. I mean, I didn't mention, you know, the car crash

had almost killed my mom that I was the driver of. But yeah, I had a crazy, crazy life. I mean, I definitely, I definitely didn't have a silver spoon. We grew up very, you know, middle class, normal family, but just with a lot of trauma. And, you know, I'm glad that I'm not angry about it. You know, I've learned how to use the past as a tool rather than as a trap. So it's a lot of learning, a lot of humility. So you got back from your mission and you just decided psychology was what you wanted to study? Yeah, I wanted to go deep into psychology.

One of the reasons was that that two-year experience was so. transformative for me. Like, again, I barely graduate high school. My brain was so chaotic, and that's often what happens with trauma. This is that you just, you just get so shaky. It often creates ADHD, to be honest with you. But like, you just, you have a hard time focusing. You have a hard, you have low confidence. You have low ability to, like, learn hard things. And so that was basically where I was at before. I left on that mission. Like, I, I couldn't really focus in school. I mean, I could focus on video games, you know. I could play a guitar hero. for hours. I could, you know, I could snowboard. I was actually a really good snowboarder

and skateboarder, but I couldn't do difficult things that were mental or even emotional. And so I was just very inhibited. And that's, that's often what happens to someone who's in a, in a traumatic, you know, state. So what happened was when I went on that mission, what blew me away was how fast I was able to click in and just start learning stuff. I mean, I was studying in the beginning more just like gospel stuff right but then I just started consuming books just book after book I mean I became like a just a just a vacuum of learning and my brain could comprehend it like I could I could I could understand big challenging thick ideas and it would change how I viewed the world it would change my mental models um I learned how to memorize really big things you know and learned how

to become a leader. So I just went through such a transformation that I wanted to understand that more. And so that's why when I came home, I began to study psychology and just try to understand how to help other people with the same. That was ultimately what started that. I didn't know was going to end up leading to, you know, entrepreneurship, you know, writing, writing business strategy books and helping companies scale in 10x. I didn't know that that was what was going to lead to, but that's like, that's the deep undercurrent that was the fuel in the beginning. And so what phase of your life did you bump into Dan Sullivan and how did that relationship progress? Super fun stuff, man.

So what happened was, so I went home from that mission, went to undergrad, studied psychology, ended up getting married. And then originally I was going to go into, and so I got home from that mission in 2010, right? So 16 years ago. And so I finished the undergrad from start to finish in three years. Like again, I barely graduate high school, but flew through an undergrad just because, again, I've learned so much on that mission. And I tried to go into counseling and clinical psychology programs and ended up getting rejected, had to do way more research, and ultimately ended up getting into, you know,

shifted over to organizational psychology and ended up getting into a PhD program at Clemson University. And so it was during the first year of my PhD, which is around 2014, 2015, and I was already studying, all my research was on entrepreneurship and transformational leadership. But my aunt Jane, who runs a health supplement company called Barlow Erbil, she joined Genius Network, right? Joe Polish's group, this was like 2014. And I was just a grad student. I had zero money. I was making no money. I was interested in entrepreneurship.

I was interested in writing, but I had no money. And I was just a full-time PhD student. My Aunt Jane joins this group. And she's around a bunch of really phenomenal people, you know, the Dan Sullivan's of the world. And I'd never heard of Dan, by the way. But even a lot of my favorite authors at the time were, you know, associated with Joe. And you and I both know Joe. And I know that you're in the community.

And that's, I think, maybe even how you and I met. but so my aunt was just telling me all about that and I kind of made a personal pledge to myself like a personal goal is is that I would get into Genius Network before I finished my PhD program. I had no idea how to do it. I knew at the time it cost 25 grand to be a part of. To me, that was an incomprehensible amount of money to pay for a group. But I'm a big believer in investing in yourself and 10xing that investment or 100xing it. And so anyways, what happened was is that the first year of my PhD program,

I decided to commit to my goal of becoming a professional author. So I was doing my PhD. My wife and I got three foster kids. And then I committed to becoming a professional author. And I'm actually writing a book right now called The Power Law Strategy, but it's all about choosing the one path that can get you to your goal. So I want to get a six-figure book contract fast because I wanted to provide for my kids. I didn't know that that was a top 1% of book deals.

But, you know, most – one of the things that Dan and I actually wrote about in 10x is easier than 2x is that when you go for a 10-X goal, most pathways can't get you there. You know, you can do 50 things and get to 2x, but if you want to go for 10x, you got to do like one or two very well. And so I ended up becoming one of the top bloggers in the world on Medium.com, grew my email list organically over about a year and a half to over 100,000 people. And I got the book deal for what became willpower doesn't work. And so as soon as I got that book deal, it only took me a year and a half to do it. So by early 2017, I was in like the maybe third year of my PhD program, I get the money for my book deal and I invest that

straight into Genius Network. I joined Genius Network and blown away by it and I then invest into the 100K group. And Joe let me in, even though I was brand new, didn't have a great, big business, but he let me join 100K. And so I just went straight into that. And I was not making that much money, to be honest with you. But I was just like all in on the learning. And, And, you know, so I was a top blogger, tons of views. My email list was grown by like 20,000 people a month, pure organic, no paid media, just pure just through my blog posts. And I was teaching people in Genius Network about my strategies.

But one of the things that happened was is for the few years before that, when my Aunt Jane was in Genius, she was giving me some Dan Sullivan stuff. And so I started to really study Dan's material and fell in love with it. I just thought, in my opinion, it was probably some of the best stuff I'd ever studied. And I had, at that point, I'd read tons of stuff. I had read all the self-development stuff. I was reading tons of stuff on entrepreneurship and, and Dan's stuff just stuck out to me. It stuck out to me a lot.

And so when I got into the 100K group, Dan was in that group, his wife was in that group. This was in 2017, 2018. And I was, and willpower doesn't work. It came out in 2018. And Dan loved it, shared it with all the people in Strategic Coach. and then it was right around that time in like early 2018, maybe mid-2018, during my first full year in that program, Dan was just in the group, you know, in the room, in the 100K room,

and he just taught about who not how. And he just was riffing, you know, Joe always gives Dan time to teach. And I was just in that room. And I again, studied Dan quite extensively at that point. I thought he was pretty much the best thinker that I had been around. And yeah, when he presented that idea, who not how. He knew, he knew my work pretty well. I just, after he gave that little speech, I just went up to him and I just said, Dan, if you ever want that to be a, like, a mainstream

concept, if you ever want that to be a mainstream book, I'll co-author it with you. And so he just said, boom, let's do it. And so it took a year and a half. It took over a year to get the publisher. I was still finishing my PhD, by the way. So I had to finish my PhD. My publisher didn't want it because Dan, even though Dan's kind of a legend in our world in New York, he wasn't known at all. My publisher thought it was a big step back because I was already a published author. I had a pretty big name and Dan was not known. He was very niche. And so I was at the top business publisher in the world and they said, you're an idiot if you go write this book with this guy. And so they said, no, we're not going to do who, not how. So I had to switch publishers and I went

over to Hayhouse and then who not how came out. And then it just was so successful. We decided to do two more books together. How do you co-write a book? I mean, I know a lot of different authors. I was just telling you about Mark Winters and Gino Wickman, and I know there's different strategies. Do you guys sit in a room and writing together? Do you just work through the internet and kind of write your parts? And I mean, I'm sure you go to the main topic, kind of just said how you're going to parse it out. But how did you guys arrange that? You know, Dan is actually really good at who not how, like the idea of the book. And he figured I was the who. So he would just let me handle almost all of it. He just made himself available to me.

And so basically I would just, you know, he actually, he writes little books. And so he writes little books that he mostly uses for internal purposes with his clients. And so I just studied the heck out of all of his little books. But I used his little book of Who Not How as kind of the base. And then he just said, utilize me as much as you want. So I probably interviewed him 10 or 20 times for Who Not How. I did it again for the other two books as well. And he really honestly did not provide much critique.

I mean, yeah, I mean, he pretty much just let me write the book I wanted to write. The hardest part, to be honest with you, was in the beginning, I was trying to write the book that I thought he would like. But eventually, I just had to realize, and I got some help from Tucker Max, who edited the book and helped me through that was, you're not writing the book for Dan. You're writing the book for people who should be in Strategic Coach. Right. So just write the book that, write the book that will serve the office. audience. Don't worry about Dan at all. And so I just, I ultimately just wrote. Yeah. So it was probably pretty different, honestly, because Dan just let me do it. You know, that's who, not how. He just let me do it.

He just trusted the who. I was already the professional author. I had the taste. I knew the audience. He didn't know all that stuff. He didn't know how to write this level of book. And so, you know, he gave some thought and some wisdom, you know, and I could ask him questions. And ultimately, he looked at the manuscript and made sure it was in alignment with what he said. But he almost, with 10x is easier than 2x, he provided like literally almost zero critique. I love it. I love it. How, in your opinion, there's different ways to grow your influence.

I have a buddy of mine. He just sold for $100 million. It's doing really, really well. And I coached him along the way at the end. And I said, dude, I want you to start. a podcast. Here's some of the things I missed and I messed up. I want you to really start posting all the things you do. People are going to fall in love with you. He's a helicopter pilot. I said, and most of all I want you to write a book. And, you know, I wrote the Home Service Millionaire

and he wrote the Home Service Empire. It's kind of funny. But he's like, dude, everything's working. He's like, it's growing. I got this huge following now. He started a club called the 1% club. When you think about how you built your, and by the way, it's changed. It's changed a lot. Like, it's not as easy to break out. Like, I started a podcast in 2017. I've been doing this almost 10 years. So, you know, Joe started his into, what, 2010?

I love marketing. So if you were to start today and really try to get a following and really pour your heart out to people, where do you think the best mediums are to do that? it's really strange but it it really depends on your objective if it's solely just to teach an influence that's going to be a different pathway that might you know a podcast might be really good to me it really the goal shapes the means right the goal shapes the path um just like when me when i wanted to become a professional author like i really wanted to become a professional author at the highest level and so and i wanted to do it fast back during my phd

I started again back during my first year of my PhD program. This was back in 2015, right? And so I couldn't get 100,000 email subscribers, which is what I really needed to get the six-figure book do I want. I couldn't get there organically through Twitter or Facebook or even Instagram or YouTube back then. Like, again, if – and so my goal led me to Medium.com. That platform doesn't really exist anymore, but that was the only platform I could find where I could write blogs that could go viral

and that I could put call to actions at the bottom and lead them to a landing page where I can get emails. Like I couldn't find any other pathway to do that. And so I think that the goal really does determine the path. You know, for us, like I ended up getting rid of my YouTube channel, not because I don't love it, but because our goal, we need to, for us at scaling.com, we need to reach a pretty highly sophisticated audience.

And so for us, the medium, is books. It still is. And so we're just writing really outlier books to grow our, our business, right? And we want to write books that are like good to great level, right? That's what we're at least trying for and getting them into their hands of the right people. And those books end up converting people and blowing their minds and leading people to scaling.com. And so it really depends on your goal. You know, like for me, yeah. And so, but if, again, if it's solely just to go, like, about and teach and stuff like that. Podcasts are about as good as they can, as good as you can get,

to be honest with you. Like, I think that people love a host. They love a message. They love a theme. And so I think that podcasts are still very, very, very phenomenal. We may even eventually do one for scaling. But yeah, for me, for me, the goal always shapes the medium or the goal always shapes the path. And so that's how I'd answer that question. I don't know, I don't know what your thoughts are on that or if you push back and go for you know and further clarify i don't know what's your opinion on that Tommy well i love the books i think it's great if you could get the right book out and you understand you know there's there's this new thing that it's not necessarily publisher it's kind of self-published slash publisher that gets you into the airports that gets you in

the thing i don't like about getting published is i don't i use my i use books as a calling card i like to give them out. I like to really. Totally. I've been studying a lot about Alex Ramose and his launch. And he made a lot of money, but that's not the goal of my books is to get the message out there. You know, social media is great, but I had a great talk with a guy I work a lot with. His name's Jim Leslie. And he goes, you know, you've grown to this. You're like the 1% of the 1% in home service, home improvement. And my goal right now is to be the voice of blue collar work. and he said, you already are.

He goes, but what you want to do is become that for everything else, like Fox News, CNN, like when they want to learn about home service, home improvement, the blue-collar space,

and who do you think about? Bob Vila, maybe Tim the Toolman, Taylor, maybe you could get there with Mike Rowe, but there's that spot that I just kind of want to take. And I,

you know, I want to deliver things that change people's lives. And for me, it's not about money anymore because A1 is still very healthy and growing. So it kind of,

I go back and forth. A lot of people ask me, what do you think is bigger? The Tommy Mello audience or the A1 audience? And I go, you know, we build each other up. A1 built me. I'm building A1. It goes back and forth.

They're both compounding assets. I mean, they're both synergistic and compounding assets. One of the things I like about what you're saying, Tommy, is that do you know the concept of the power law? Well, focusing on one thing. I guess. Pretty much. But you can explain it.

Yeah. So power law is, you know, the 80-20 principle is just a elementary version of the power law. So the 80-20 principle says that almost, you know, all results come from a really small amount of what you do. Right. And so the power, like in a VC like portfolio or like a, sorry, private equity, like portfolio. No, sorry, VC. There may be like 100 companies, but like one or two of them drives all the results, right? Yeah.

That one, by the way, that one's the power law. And so the idea of the power law, one of the core components of a power law is that it, it becomes the thing that defines the category, right? And one of the things that's really smart strategically, so like if you think about, if you think about physics, who do you think about? Einstein. Boom. He's the power law of physics.

Like, and so like he changed physics and he now defines that category. And so any other physicist either has to go through Einstein or. or argue against him, right? And so this is why I like what you were just saying with like Tim the Toolman Taylor or whatever. So the thing that you want to think about is what category could you create that would actually pull you away from competition? Because the main aspect of strategy is not to beat competition, it's to escape competition. And often you do that by creating and owning a new category.

In our case, it sounds weird, but scaling, as much as it's like one of the ultimate buzzwords, the way we teach and the way we do it, like we're going to become the power law of scaling over time. Like, because no one's actually going deep enough to truly solve it, and we actually are. And we're redefining it. And so, like,

the thing that I would have you think about is what's the thing that you'd become the power law over? What's the big enough game? And a blue collar work might be it, man. Like, where it's like people begin to associate, because your business fits in that category. It's only one piece now. There's a bigger mountain to climb.

what's the bigger mountain to climb well i'm just a i'm garage doors today and garage doors yeah yeah but garage doors fit in blue collar work right they fit if it fits in that bigger category yeah so i mean look there's there's a lot of other industries that have a way higher tam that i'm very very familiar with and uh i love the garage door industry and this is like like i said keep keep the blinders on we're at two percent you're the power law of that, you're the power love that one. Of garage doors. Totally.

And there's still so much room to grow. But I'm really like, I got a lot of pride in the blue collar space. And, you know, you used to be shone upon, or you'd walk in a wine mixer. And there would be a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a PE guy, you name it. And guys use it with their heads down. Yeah, I'm a plumber. And you look at Jensen with NVIDIA. Now there's like a lot of pride.

Like look, we've done very, very well. It's a great industry. I think a lot of people are broken in our industry, though. Like a lot of my coworkers, you know, they didn't come from necessarily great families. They weren't taught about compound interest. No one really taught them about money, health, habits. And so it's a much bigger calling than just being the blue collar guy. You know what I mean?

How would you define it, though? Because I'm wanting, like kind of like choosing a category. I actually, I wonder how you could define it. And then you become the one who owns that. And you know, not, not, not, not in an egotistical way. But you become the one that defines and uses that opportunity to serve in that bigger game. Yeah, I mean, look, blue collar is working with your hands on a house or, or industrial. I mean, it's literally going out there.

The men who built America, a lot of it was, you know how to fix stuff. You know how to build stuff. it's not sitting behind a computer. It's not necessarily it has a lot to do. Some marketing has to do with everything. But, you know, right now, we're at a two and a half to one,

meaning two and a half of the people in our company are out there fixing stuff, repairing and installing. And that ratio with AI and some of the stuff we're building will be four to one and eight to one next year. And that's probably the most important ratio to look at. So I think some of the operational things and the call center and the dispatch

Right now we're at a 40 to one ratio. We used to be at a 12 to 1. So, meaning one dispatcher could dispatch 12 technicians. Now it's one in 40. That'll be 1 in 60 by the end of the year. So it's just a huge category. And the world needs more blue-collar people. We're going to build the world.

I mean, yes, robots are coming, but they're going to be used at like fixing people's hearts and fixing people's teeth before they'll be going out fixing toilets and hot water heaters and garage doors. You know what I mean? I love what you're saying, man. And I love the idea of the bigger game and rebuilding, not only making it more compelling,

like where you bring more people in and actually say like, this is a good game. Like this is a game where you can have a future, but helping them lift their heads and be successful in that game. I think, dude, that's, it's always fun.

That's part of why I like thinking from scale. That's why growth and scale are two different games, right? So growth could be, you know, which is still good. it, right? How do I, how do I improve what I'm already doing? Whereas scale is this much bigger game that forces you to think about a different game and a bigger game. Well, you got to work outside of the boundaries. Like if I think we're at 400 million, if I'm going to get to $4 billion in revenue,

very, very healthy. I think we're one of the most healthy bottom lines in the industry. People are like, wait a minute, how do you pay by far the most, spend the most in marketing, have the best net promoter score, have the most reviews, and still make double what anybody makes to the bottom line. And that comes to a lot of efficiencies and economies of scale and just constant focus. But, you know, to think about $4 billion, it forces you, we're living a box of more leads, more booked calls, more conversions, higher average tickets. But in order to 10x, you got to work outside of the boundaries. You got to look way beyond what you could see. and reimagine the way you think about everything.

And I love that concept. What would you do? Well, what would you do? Just messing with you for a minute and just because you're so, you're obviously extremely visionary and strategic, but you're obviously with everything you just said about profitability. You guys are extremely efficient in your operations. And just,

and so you're, you're phenomenal. So just asking you, if you were to get your company or your business to $4 billion in three years, what would be the ways to do it? How could, you know, and I ask that not to stress you out, more to just say like, I know, I already, what, what possible ways could get you to $4 billion in three years? So number one, vertically integrate. Number, like, for example, every time you move into a house, what do you do? You work with a mortgage company.

I happen to be meeting with three of the biggest mortgage companies, the biggest in the world, especially in North America. So before you close on that 30-year fixed or whatever you might be doing, let's go ahead and get everything fixed on the garage. I want to own the garage. So a lot of it's vertically integrate new construction. I got to open up the buy box. Number two, there's some, you know, we don't do any box stores.

We don't do Home Depot. We don't do lows. We don't do home warranties. We don't do Ace Hardware. We don't do any of these things. We don't do any insurance work. So if I was, whatever adjuster does is they go on exactimate when you've got a storm damage or a fire. and they fill out this stuff.

If I was the default and worked to deal out with the insurance companies, that I could actually make them more money over time. So it's really relationships is I'm going to walk us into the, we're the one company that I know of in-home service that I can make all the decisions. We're not a franchise. There's no other decision makers, obviously my team and I, but we pay on time. We could, we could, what they're looking for is we don't hire felons.

we're saving people's homes. We always honor our word. We run the warranty calls. We could scale up as quick as you could handle as far as our machine to make technicians and installers and leaders. So I just need more channels. Exactimate.

Distribution channels? Yeah. So like Home Depot, Lowe's, Costco, all the home onesies. Is there one channel? Is there one or two channels that could get you over a billion through one channel? Well, it really depends. These things usually,

You fail forward a few times. A relationship with Chamberlain's very promising. They're connected to 16 million units. I'm flying out there in June. But there's a lot of targets. It's who wants to play ball and understand. Because once you get one, you can get all of them. You just need the case study.

And, you know, I don't want to own the industry. I want to, like, I want to make it, this is going to sound really egotistical, but within two years, you're either going to have to sell to us. or go out of business. I mean, and people are like, well, they'll always, we're never going to become a monopoly. But if you vertically integrate, how do you compete? And if you're run 10 times more efficient, how do you compete?

If you're filled with AI, we're running 26 softwares now. I just counted yesterday. And you would think, why not just run one? But each one is the best in class for every single thing we're doing. And half of those we've built in-house and only for our company. So, yeah, I mean, look, you need the leads. You need to be able to get in homes. And Google's not the only way.

Now they got the LLMs, you know, whether it's Grock or Claude or, you know, there's a million of them now. So we're working on a lot of things. But I think it's the distribution channels. And I think it's the network and the relationships. And for some reason, man, you know, Joe Polish has taught me a lot. I've learned a lot from a lot of good people. Is relationships come easy now because I'm not afraid to reach out. I got a little bit of clout now, a little bit, a little bit enough to take a phone call.

And that's all I need. You got on a plane. You got some clout. And, you know, the main thing for me is that we treat clients right and we make them customers for life. And if you could do that properly, you know, the business will grow itself. That's beautiful stuff. That's beautiful stuff. Yeah.

One of the things that, you know, to the idea of the power law, usually if you've got 50 distribution channels, right, a few of them. two, three are going to be the ones they're going to generate 80% or more of their leads. And so it's really about how do you, that's why I, sometimes we, one of the things we help people do is we help people set a floor, right?

So it's like maybe the floor is for the strategic partnerships you're looking for, they have to produce, sometimes to go and find the best opportunities, maybe for you, it's like 500 million, you know, in potential.

Now, I like this idea of really. If that becomes your floor, if that becomes your floor, then like, look for the opportunities above that. And I know that that may sound limiting because there's so many great opportunities right below it, but it forces you to become the guy above that floor and at that level. And so, as you said, you get the first one, you get them all. You know, I guess the real question I should

be asking is, for example, I had the CEO of Angie at the house a couple weeks ago, really, really cool guy. is the first question is, if we did everything perfect, and you were very satisfied, what is the total addressable market of the lead flow that you could, if we just knocked it out of the park, because you really don't know the opportunity until you get some of the data. The data actually will explain what's going to happen. So we talk about, for example, the storm chasing, I need to get that data and work. I got to go to Utah, your hometown of Salt Lake and meet with the company. and really understand that opportunity.

So some of this is a little bit investigative. You know, I don't know anybody who says if I got this one without understanding the volume. So what I think what I'm kind of reading between the lines here is I really should probably go and understand Home Depot. I'm flying out to Atlanta next week to meet with Home Depot. So as at a next level, we're going to reimagine everything Home Depot does. I got a meeting with Lowe's over on the East Coast. I lined that up. I got another relationship with Ace Hardware.

But not all of them are going to work. And I already told my whole team I'm ready to walk away. I'm not going to get us distracted. But if we go in, we're going to fall. We're going to fail. And we just got to, like, nothing really happens over. I never got involved with anything and didn't hit, like, little stumps along the way. And it's tough to work with another company that you depend on.

Like, I like to make my own luck. And now you're dependent on another source, but that gets a ton of volume. And if we could run with it and keep them happy, that's a win-win. I think we can really grow the valuations of some of these companies. It's hard to believe grow the valuation of Home Depot or lows, but it's possible. That'd be awesome. That would make you extremely valuable to them. Oh, yeah.

Well, SRS is doing somewhere along the lines of $1.2 billion of EBITA, and they're a roof supplier with Home Depot, Home Depot bought them. So 1.2 million of EBITA. So a company's worth, you know, tens of billions of dollars. You wrote seven books. Obviously, your last book is probably the, you created a company around it. But what were some of the biggest?

What did you enjoy writing the most and why? Woo. I think that my last two books have been, my favorites. 10x is easier than 2x and then the science of scaling. I think that the science of scaling is a way more ambitious book. 10x is easier than 2x was awesome though because for my view before that book it was not a concrete concept. Like the idea of 10x, you know, we've heard people say it. Grant Cardone and others. Yeah. And even Dan has said it for like 20 years, but like and people like Aster Teller and stuff like that at Google like 10x thinking. But I, I

I honestly think that I was very unsatisfied with that when I, when I set out to write 10x is easier than 2x. Like I thought Dan had a great kernel, which is like that in order to, he really only had a kernel, by the way. Like, Dan is really good at framing concepts, but he's not,

he doesn't take them very deep, right? He's just very good at framing. And so even like who not how, right? He's so great at the, at the, just like the simple idea. But for me,

10x is easier than 2x. I really wanted to create a framework for it or a model or a way to actually like truly do it and to validate that the concept was accurate. And so that was just such a difficult book to write. And so like when I say fun, like writing books is not really that fun. It's insanely hard. But that book I just felt like it was a breakthrough. Like I felt like that book represented a breakthrough in thinking.

and it was very challenging. And I think it's, I mean, it's one of the biggest books in China right now. I just spoke at the EO Global Conference, Entrepreneurs Organization Global Conference in Dublin, and one of the people who was in the China chapter was like, you know, 10x is easier than 2X is one of the biggest books in all of China right now.

I was like, I did not know that. I don't pay attention to that stuff. So like that was, like that book I was so proud of. And I, you know, one of the concepts of that book is mastery. and so I started that book with Michelangelo and like how he became Michelangelo you know and just the levels of mastery and so for me I wanted that book to feel

like a masterpiece. I don't know if I got there but like people when people first read it like they just were like this feels different. Science of scaling I think that science of scaling is in my opinion a much better books than 10x is easier than 2X.

It's a grander book. Like it's not a simple you know, it's not a simple concept. It's a framework that I actually think can, that remodels how you think about scaling and makes it simpler. But it's just, it was a way more ambitious book. And I do think it did provide, it does provide a framework that can allow someone to 10x a company in three years, even if they're doing 400 million revenue or if they're doing 4 billion or 4 million, you know, and we have companies that are doing 10 billion plus applying the idea to try to 10x. And so, You know, one of the fun parts about it, and it's hard, you know, it's hard is just, number one, there is fun and just playing with ideas and exploring ideas, but the hard part is, like, really validating those ideas and, like, making it useful.

So those are the two books that I think I had the most fun writing. You know, I think a lot about the gap and the gain at times because I've always... That book hits people hard. Well, it's because we all know people. We've got a lot of family members and friends. And one of my famous, I didn't come up with this. I copied it along the way at some point in my life. But I tell during orientation every month, hang out with people you got a common future with instead of a common past.

And I really believe it's the closest people to you that lets you live in the gap or the gain. And it's the conversations we have of like, man, I wake up every day. I don't have any pain in my body. there's, I don't know, a person alive that would want to change places. I mean, life is, I don't mean that to be egotistical or cocky. I just am so, God's done so much in my life and he's working through me and so many, I don't even know exactly what's coming next. I just want to have an open mind and continue to pray.

And I feel like he keeps anointing me with all these opportunities and the right people come at the right time every time. And, yeah, I mean, it's amazing to think about, to really, really, really live in the gain. And so many people live of what they're going to do and where they're going to go. And it's great to dream. It's great to have goals. But sometimes you just got to say, man, life is good. And like I said before, is enjoy the journey. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big believer that, you know, just from a psychology standpoint, I'm a big believer that we use our future to shape our present. But I think what's really important with the gap in the game is that we use our

present to shape the meaning of our past. And I think with the gap, I think a lot of people, what they do is because they're not at that future that they want to be at, and by the way, we'll never be there. You know, I think that the analogy that Dan gave, which is phenomenal, is just the idea of the horizon that like the horizon, you never reach the horizon. You know what I mean? Because it's always in front of you. That's what the future is.

It's a tool for navigating, shaping, shaping, directing, and directing an order. organizing the present. Like, and so the gap is just that idea that you're, you're mad at yourself for not being at the horizon or you're mad at yourself for not being where you thought you should be. And I, I beat myself up all the time, man, um, 24-7. So like, I'm, I'm in the gap. And I'm the one who, you know, wrote that book. Although Dan obviously wrote the original, but I wrote like the big version. Um, but, uh, what I love about the gain and I think it's super important is is that, I think that people, especially ambitious people and entrepreneurs, they don't take the time to truly evaluate their past very much. And so like one of the things that even I did it at that EO conference

last week was I had people look at where they were five years ago. We call it quantifying the past. So like Tommy, just just on you for a minute, if you went back to April of 2021, what's the biggest difference for you in your company right now? If you went back to 2021, literally. Yeah, well, I can tell you. I mean, that's right around the COVID. I was living at the apartment. I bought an apartment complex for the technicians, but I lived there for four years.

You know, it was just, it was tough, man. I mean, we were probably $7 million of EBITDA. Now, this year we'll do well north of 100. So you have over 10x in the last five years. Yeah. Profitability. How would you say? How would you say, yeah, the EBIT is beautiful.

What would you say is the, if you could give like two or three things on how you're different from your past self, who you were back in 2021. If you went back to that apartment guy, what's the major differences in you currently versus that guy? Nothing against that guy, by the way. Love that guy. But what are the major differences? Well, number one, I've really entered into this role that I am a true visionary and I don't

need to get involved. I started to trust more and accept failure. I believe this company now is run towards failure and everyone needs to make mistakes and they all learn differently, that I'm not the choking point of decision making. Number two, you know, my cousin Rachel called me and she said, you know, we love you. You've written a couple books. She said, why don't you love yourself? And I said, she's got a doctorate in physiology, anatomy. And she said, go into the bathroom real quick. She's one of my best friends.

She's like, take off your shirt, look at yourself. She's like, I know you're drinking probably more than you should be. I can just see it in your pictures. And she goes, what do you feel now when you're looking at yourself? And tears came down my eyes. I could have got really defensive. And this was right about that time, 2021. And she said, you do so good at so many things and you got the world on, you got the,

you take the world on your back and pull it with you. She goes, what about you? And that changed everything. And so I started walking and reflecting more and being at one with myself. And I took getting in shape, not six-pack shape, but just mental clarity shape, sleeping became a priority, getting the right nutrients in. So those are a couple things. I think I'm a lot more patient than I probably was.

And I let go of things. I wouldn't say I'm a master of saying no yet, but I get better every day at it. So those are a few things. So one of the things I love about what you just did, one of the key aspects of quote unquote being in the gain, but it's really just deep psychology is it's actually very, very useful. First off, you and the present get to define what your past means, right? And that's what you just did. You just defined the last five years in a little bit of ways. You went back to your former self. You thought about where you were at. You thought about what changed. We know you over 10x year, EBDA. And we could, I'm sure your company is fundamentally different in a lot of ways than it was five years ago. But also, it's really important to actually disconnect your present self from your past self and say, here are the reasons why I'm different. Because a lot of people, they continue to define define themselves by their past. Oh, this is just who I am. This is what I've been like. Whereas what you just. What you just,

did was the opposite. You just explained how you're different from your past self. And so rather than saying my past is determining me, you're saying, here's how I determine my past. And so, yeah, I think that the gap in the gain is so critical and staying in that gain mentality. I also like the piece that you mentioned, which is just living in the gain, right? What I mean by that is everything's a gain, right? Like, everything's a blessing. You know, I love what you said about running towards failure. Like, you're going to learn through that, right? That's part of being anti-fragile. Rather than saying, oh, this is going to blow us up. it's like, no, what are we going to gain from this? Like, this is going to happen for us, not to us, right?

So if you can turn everything into a gain, every mishap, failure, mistake, or even every success. If you could turn a success into more success rather than turn success into failure, then anything you do and everything you do just becomes a blessing and turns into more blessings. It becomes that compounding asset.

So, yeah, I don't know, is there any other aspects of the gap in the game that stuck out to you or doesn't have to be about the concept, but just why it helped you? Or is there? You know, all your books are absolutely phenomenal. But I'll tell you, instead of me looking at myself, the biggest concept is hang out with the right people that are living in the game. So it's really about understanding because, man, they bleed off of you.

Literally, when they're living in the gain, you're just happier. You're better. You're around the right people. You're getting the right message. And if you believe in mastery, like, I don't go into anything. I won't play Candyland with my niece and nephews and not try to master the game. I'm not there to have fun. I'm there to win.

Although pursuing the challenge of winning is fun. So for me, I don't really go into anything and be like, well, we're just having fun. I'm just going to try. I'm like, I want to go find who's the best. That's why I had a ping pong coach. I mean, literally I got beat at, you know, when you play bags, cornhole. So I got a coach for a cornhole because literally I don't like to lose. And I believe in mastery of everything.

Why play a game to just contend and just be one of the players? Like whatever it is, and I'm not the best at a lot of things, but that doesn't mean I don't want to become the best. And to be the best, you got to get around the best. If you were to go golfing every day with three golfers that shoot under par, I promise you, you would figure out how to become a much better golfer very quick, faster than going to a coach, faster than practicing every day, faster than hitting a thousand golf balls. And that's who you really got to get around the ball. the right people, get around the right people, get the right people on the bus.

And no longer am I searching for all the answers because there's people that are so good at what they do is how do you find them and how do you persuade them to jump on and help their dream become part of your dream and vice versa. I couldn't agree more. I think that it's just such a, I call it a wormhole. But like, do you ever, did you ever see the movie Interstellar? Like where they like. Oh, one of my favorite movies.

I love that movie. you know the concept of the wormhole, which is just like it's a concept where it drops you from one place to the other. And that's what that's what being around the right people does for you. It's the ultimate leap. It just jumps you straight to where they're at if you just go deep on it. And yeah, I couldn't agree with you more on that. You know, a lot of people I could imagine when they get involved with scaling. So many people are waiting for things to be perfect. They're like, we got to make the system perfect. And they never get started. I find so many people, that are so afraid to take a chance. And unlike baseball, when you hit a home run, it could be $400 million.

And for example, we're entering the Spanish market. And a lot of people in my team are like, well, we've got to have Spanish CSR, Spanish dispatcher, Spanish technicians. I'm like, what if we try it? We get two clients in the first six months. I'm like, let's just try it. Bring the guys. We'll have a translator. We have the people that speak Spanish.

But I'm like, it's so hard to get started. And once you get started in the right things, they kind of, you could go, well, that you test, one of the things that's way different about me now is I test things out rather than make it company wide, we'll test in a small market, and then we'll scale it from there. And it's just like, perfect is the enemy of just getting started. And I think it's crazy how many people are like, we know we need to do that. Or they say, I know I need to start this workout regimen. I just want to wait until this wedding's over. and they say, well, now we got the graduation party, and they just delayed, delay, delay,

and then I meet them three years later. And I was like, so how'd that go? They're like, well, you know, life happens. I'm drinking through a fire hose. And they never get started. They've got all these great ambitions, but they never find a way to start. And I think getting started is half the battle.

Just jumping it. You don't even need to work out harder to the gym. Show up for five minutes. Maybe next time you'll be there for 10. Maybe over the course of two years from now, you'll be there for an hour a day because you fell in love with it, but you just come up with a reason to not go.

And that's, just get your keys, make it to the gym, that's a success, you know? Yeah, I think it's big. I think that,

honestly, like back to those genuine, simple fundamentals. Like, yeah, even, you know, one of my favorite quotes

from back in the day, that's classic, you know, just these, these ideas that you're talking about is, um, when you lose an hour in the morning,

you spend the rest of your day trying to find it. So like, for me, usually those key critical most important things if you don't do it in the first like two or three hours of your day just forget it's not going to happen that day right because so like yeah I mean that that's how I became a professional author while a PhD student while having three foster kids was just I would wake up and before I went to class I would just write blog

posts right so it's like I could have said I'm a PhD student with three foster kids I'll save the becoming a professional author till after I finish the PhD but if you just wake up and do it for like even 30 minutes as you said could be working out it could be writing in your journal it could be working on that project it could be i mean you don't have to do it in the morning by the way i'm just saying sometimes it's easier to just do it first thing in the morning before all the busyness wipes you out um to me that's been that's been a very classic concept um and one that never stops paying me back i want to pivot a little bit to the future self-frame work. You know, I was in a meeting with one of my mentors and he said, we're in a big

conference table, a lot of my teams there. And he said, you know, Tommy, do you realize you called me the last three weekends at 8 p.m. on a Saturday? And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, dude. And he's like, no, no, no. Do you realize that you talked about 10 books you've read in the last two months? And I go, yeah, I've been reading a lot. He goes, how many courses are you taking right now? How many mentors are you working with? Then I kind of talked about it. And he goes,

now you still go to work, don't you? And I'm like, yeah, I'm usually there at least 40, 50 hours a week. He goes, so you're taking 20, 30 hours a week and growing yourself. And I was like, well, I try to. And he goes, my best advice for you, Tommy, is that if this guy right here, this guy right here, this gal right here on your team, they're not doing that, that you fire them immediately.

Like if you don't find out that they're raising their lid, as fast as you're growing, as fast as you're committed, as fast as you want to learn, they're not going to be valuable to you. So that means they got to put in their 40, 50 hours and spend a lot of time growing themselves. Because the law of the lid, if you keep growing, they're going to be speed bumps for you.

They're going to eventually cause you to pull into a wall. And I'm not kidding, Ben, after that, they're sending me podcasts. They're wanting to go on trips with me. They want consultants. I'm placing books and they're actually getting back to me. I mean, I watch some people grow so fast that actually I'm like, wow. And that was a day that was pivotal in the shape because I thought if I keep growing,

you know, I'm the founder. It's so important. But now when you bring everybody with you, not everybody's going to get with you. Not everybody's going to have that ability to learn. but it's so important to build that framework of just helping grow everybody around you. And not only the company grows, but they're all healthy. I had a guy walk in last week. They're like, does everybody in your company have a six-pack?

It was funny. I was like, we're just healthy now. We all prep our meals. You know what I mean? And it's not just, it's like people are going to church again. People's, their relationships are better. They've got bigger dreams. And it's just, it's fun to be around.

is they're working on the methodology of future self. And I want to just talk a little bit about that and what that actually means in practice to you. Yeah. And I'm actually super interested in how you got your team to do that. Do you mind actually just sharing how you, and we'll go deep on future self and how critical it is? But what was it that you did to inspire your team to start studying more

and just creating this culture of, you know, healthiness? I mean, what did you do? You know, obviously you transferred it to, oh, it's all got to be me, just 10xing myself. and somehow, you know, what did you tangibly do to, like, get the team in the culture that way that you just described? Well, a couple things. This is kind of embarrassing, but I'll tell you, I walked in my CEO's office and I took off my shirt. And I said, I'm working just as much as you.

What's your excuse? He's a competitive SOB. And he looks at me, and he goes, are you kidding me? I go, no, dude, look at my calendar compared to yours. There's no excuse. and man, within three months, he dropped 15% body fat. That was like a wake-up call. He's like kind of F-U type thing.

And I also, one of the things I started doing was I used to go to these events by myself. And I'd walk back inspired and I'd come back with ideas and more visions of the company. And now when we go to these events, we go 30 deep. So the whole team fills the energy and the passion and the growth mindset. I was living in a little bit of a cave, bringing myself maybe one person, and now we all, we all have ideas, and we all kind of reconvene and talk about what we're going to do. And we've got a really strong work chart of who's responsible for what. And we've got very data-centric on the decisions we make.

And I think it's easy to tell people what to do. It's different to show people, lead by example. I think Jesus is a great example of you could preach. or, you know, I want people to walk around and say, I wonder what he believes in. I wonder what his thoughts are. I wonder, like, I want to lead by example. And I think that's the biggest thing is leading.

And then one day I told everybody, listen, I'm not keeping track of your hours. If you're a VP, C-suite, whatever, director, I don't care, work from home. You know what you're responsible for. You don't need it behind a desk. I know you're scrolling Instagram anyway. Just get the results.

You go work from home. You can work from work. You can go work from another market. I don't care. And I'm telling you, I must have a dozen people come up to me and say, when you change that policy, they made us want to work 10 times more. Because you gave us freedom. We get to spend more time with our kids. And we're still hitting every objective you ever lay out. Talk about transformational leader, man. I love what you're doing. I love that story, by the way.

I don't think it's embarrassing at all. I love that sort of walking and ripping off your shirt and just being like, dude, my schedule's packed, bro. You know, it makes me think about myself, especially when you start running a company and a business and stuff like that and you're just, you are eating, drinking out of the fire hose. It can be easy to give yourself the excuse that you don't have time. And the fact is, is you can figure that out. You can make the time to get ripped, get in shape, strip out, you know, raise your floor and strip out the nonsense.

Well, there's 168 hours. You can get stuff done. You can get it done. What? 168 hours in a week. Let's just say you work 60. say for you, Ben, you work 70. Let's say you sleep 50. You still got 50 hours left. So you sleep 50, you work 70. That's 120. You still got 40 hours left. Let's say you want to go on a day

night with your wife every week. You want to spend at least an hour a week separately with your kids and have dinner with all of them. So that's about, we'll just call that 15 hours. So you still have 35 hours left. And I know there's drive time, there's other things, but you can make that actually very, very powerful. You know, that's why I got a driver because now that time of driving became useful time for me to knock out a lot of other things. So you spend an hour with your kids, you have breakfast and dinner, you got a day night with your wife, you can watch your favorite show. Let's say that's an hour. You still got 10 hours left.

let's say you want some personal time. So I think when you really look at it as a math equation and you really understand how much time goes to nonproductive, the 80-20 rule and the 80-20 will could be broken down deeper into the 80-20 of the 80-20. Now you're getting closer to the power law, by the way. Yeah. Well, I've studied some of that stuff. I just didn't realize it was called the power law.

I mean, I must have read about 80-20 for the last 10 years. And it's probably in every five books I read. And it's still a good reminder of, I mean, there there's it's it's such a great rule and it's always almost always accurate to me it's the rule it is the rule um so so so so back to the idea of um of future stuff just real quick um so what's wild about future self man by the way i hope my camera doesn't die it's like flashing and yelling at me it's been on all day it said battery low do you got a plug for it we could deposit real quick?

I mean, it's plugged in. It's just been on all day, literally all day. So I can always shift to just my, my, I can shift to my, my computer. Let me just do that real quick. Let me just shift to my Mac, but camera. Perfect. I know it's a little different, and I'm just going to do that. Hey, you look good.

Anyways. Yeah, brother. So anyways, Future Self is such a, an insane idea. So the idea is, you know, here's what's tough, is that most people, they haven't been trained to think very well about their future self. And this is one of the most critical ideas that's come out of positive psychology. Most people, because they don't think very successfully about their future self, their future self just becomes a continuation of their past self. Some of the original research that looked at it, a guy named Daniel Gilbert from Harvard, what he wanted people to do was he first started by doing similar to what I did with you, Tommy, where I said, like, let's see who you were five years ago. He would actually go 10 years. He'd say, are you the same person who were 10 years ago? And a lot of people, just because they don't think in the gap in the gain and stuff like that, they're just like, yeah, I'm probably similar, you know, but then when they actually think about

it, like who I was 10 years ago. Do you have the exact same taste in music? Do you have the same, you know, your personality is quite different. Your views of the world are different. Certainly your situation's different. Your skills are different. Your network's different. Like, you're not the same person. And so even after people really, clarified that they're quite different from who they were in the past, what Daniel Gilbert would say is, well, what about your future self? Like, you in 10 years from now, you know, who are they? And what people would consistently do is, is they would consistently think that their future self is for the most part, the same person they are today. Maybe just a little different, right?

Like maybe like same personality, same tastes, same interests. And maybe just maybe just a better net worth, right? Maybe that's six-pack abs, right? But like those are like cosmetic. They didn't, they, in other words, they, they didn't really, they, because most people don't think that much about their future self. They think about where they want to be. They think like, I want to be retired by this age or I want that amount of money, but they don't really get deep on like who's the person. Who are you and how are you, how is that person different than who you are today and what are they like? And, and so what's really interesting is is that the research dug deep into it. And what all the research says, and this even goes back to Victor Frankel and stuff we're talking about like,

30, 40, like an hour ago was the connection you have with your future self determines the quality of actions you take today. So it's not about the grit and the willpower. Like, it's about like, do you have a future self that gives you the reason why? And what we do as people, you know, that was, by the way, the reason I was able to get on that mission is because I had a future self that was a missionary, right? That's why Victor Frankel, you know, said that when you have a why that can, you know, the why that allows you to bear anyhow. What's really interesting is that your future, one of my

favorite quotes, this is from a guy named Dr. Roy Baumeister. He said that the self, talking about who we are, who you are, whoever's listening, the self is not a thing. It is a process. And it uses the future to organize the present. So basically what we do is we use our view of our future to organize ourselves in the present. You know, you use your future self to organize who you are, Tommy. You know, if it's $4 billion, you're going to use that future to organize who Tommy is, the skills he needs, the networking needs, the distribution he needs. We use our future to organize our present. Not only who we are and our skills and our abilities, but our networks, you know,

our resources. We use the future as the tool for shaping who we are and what we do in the present. And the beautiful part is we can change that future. You know, if you're out of shape, you can think about your future self, healthy and fit. And then you can use that future to reorganize your present. and to strip out the stuff that no longer fits with that future. It's just the most powerful tool. I mean,

the future is the most powerful tool that human beings have. Other species don't have it, man. Like, you know, plants and animals. Yeah, they don't have a future to ultimately shape and direct and guide the president. It's the most simple form is, if you want to build a house, man, you got to have a blueprint, you know? and the fact that we can think of a house, create a blueprint for a house or a plan,

and then ultimately build it, like that's just high-end intelligence. And you can apply that to just about anything. You can apply it to 10x in your company to 4-X, you know, getting to $4 billion or whatever. If you have a future, you can use it to organize the present. You know, you want to get to the moon, use that to organize a rocket ship.

I mean, it's just incredible what human beings can do. Yeah, and, you know, I'd even go to say, a big fan of atomic habits. I just read it with an accountability group that I formed this year. And the future self, so I got a whole file with me at 45 and 43. And I got a lot of things in there. And I kind of split it up between six things. Friends and family, finance, faith, fitness, fund, and future self.

Future self is learning. That's cool. Changing. And I said, what would I like to have? You threw future self in there, bro. What's that? I like that you threw future self in there. Yeah, well, that's one of the most important things.

But none of these things exist without fitness, without a clear mind, without the ability to learn and get the sleep you need and actually not have pain. I think fitness, you can't praise God if you can't get out of your wheelchair. I mean, I guess you could, but I'm not going to pretend you can't praise God anywhere. But if you can't think clearly and you're taking all these meds, you're not clear-minded. I think Steve Jobs said you're going to be taking your food as medicine. or are you going to be taking medicine as food. And so I'm a really big fan of being is like, get yourself right. Doesn't mean you got a six-pack.

But I love this idea of using your future self to guide your decisions today and making sure it's in alignment. I think the hard part is, like, I'm not a very, I know we've got to probably end soon, but I'm not a very, you're good. I'm not a very creative thinker. I'm more like, show me everything. I'll tell you the changes.

Like, I can take something. make it great, but I can't like draw or do art. I don't really, not my left brain is probably not as strong as my right brain, the reasoning side. And so what I like to do is get around like the dream 100. Those are the 100 people, but I'd make it a dream five. And when it comes to parenting, I don't want to read a bunch of books on parenting. I mean, there's a couple people I know that have the kids that are the most fun to be around. They're super obedient. They laugh all the time. They don't get on an iPad. I'm going to go to them and I'm going to ask them for help. So for me, it's like getting around the right people.

Like I said, people you have a common future instead of a common past. And success leaves clues. So if you can get around those people and they kind of fit where you want to be and their outlook and their optimism and they're smiling. And, you know, I was really thinking about this a few weeks ago of like there's about four or five people I'm around,

good buddies and some family, that the next day my abs, I can barely walk because I'm laughing so hard. I laugh so hard with this group of buddies and my cousins. And I'm just like the serotonin and dopamine and everything's going crazy. And it's not like drugs or alcohol. It's literally like just having so much fun. And just, have you ever had your abs hurt because you laughed so hard?

Like I have that every time. And so my future is like, how do I be around them more? How do we do more golf trips? How am I, you know, but then I also like teach Amanda Fish versus give Amanda Fish. I want all of them to be able to do this stuff and not feel like it's handouts. So a lot of the stuff evolves around like this is like when I'm the happiest. And obviously kids are in the future. But it takes a lot of like get into your own zone and just start to get in that flow of what it looks like and really understand where do you want to go.

So if you want to go to Italy, how did you fly there? What did you go see? What was the most important thing? What were the colors? What were some of the plants you were around? like actually visualize like visualize yeah you got to get vivid they call it vividness make your future self a vivid vision yeah i mean honestly they it's funny that they use that term but like in the in the in the in the psychology research they actually call it make your future

self vivid and it just means like you know truly make it completely uh visualized i mean you need to like actually see it in radical detail as you're saying one of the things you also said that i I thought was powerful, as you said, you know, the dream 100, but then you went to the power law and you said the dream five, you know, obviously having 100 is powerful, but having a higher tier five is more powerful than having a lower tier 100. And, you know, if you already understand the power law, you know that the top five are going to create almost all the results anyway. So you might, you know, that's just the idea of simplicity, right? We make things so complex. And yeah, the more and more I understand the power law.

It's just like those top five, if you just pour into those top five, you're going to get 10x the value. Then if you're, you know, you're too split thin. I think a lot of us, I kind of talked about this earlier, but, you know, what's interesting, as you said, writing books. I deleted my YouTube channel. You know how many people are like, well, yeah, I want to do TikTok. Yeah, LinkedIn's important. Yeah, X, got to own that. Yeah, Instagram, Facebook.

very, very, and it's like, why? I always ask people why. That's no strategy. That's a lack of strategy. Well, you know, a lot of people walk up to me better and they're like, I want to do $100 million like you did. I always look up to you for that. And I go, why? And they're like, because you proved it's possible.

I'm like, but why? What's going to happen? Like, where are you going to use the money for? Like, are you going to go into 5013C, be giving back? You want to become a teacher? Do you want to do stuff for family? Do you want to do stuff for mom and dad? Do you want to do like you're setting up a retirement account for your kids?

Like, why? Why do you want to do what I did? By the way, it's not a love of, it's not a story of love. It's a story of a lot of drama the first 10 years. And the sacrifices were unsurmountable that I wouldn't want to make again. In fact, if I had to do it all over from today being 43, I don't think I'd make the same choice. I did it when I was 22. So, but a lot of people are like, dude, I don't know.

I'm like, because if you could, you should, right? And I'm like, yeah, just remember, can't take it with you. And, you know, I was obsessed. We didn't have any money when I was a kid. My mom worked three jobs. I mowed lawn shovels. No, I got a job when I was 12 washing dishes. I decided at four years old, money's not going to limit me and my family.

There's not going to be arguments if we could go on a vacation. There's not going to be arguments if we could get a stake tonight because I lived through that. And that's a decision I made 39 years ago that I kept because I decided when I was four. And then I don't think it's fair, but I know a lot of people have a much harder youth than I had. I mean, I had love, I had passion, I had competitiveness. I didn't get a participation trophy for anything. But we were winners in this family. That's what I was told.

So, but I got to ask everybody listening is why? Because if you want, Jim Carrey said, if you want all, the, I wish everybody, Ben, had all the fame. Most popular. Everyone knows you. Largest influencer. People recognize you everywhere you go. And they had all the money. And they realized that's not the answer. And by the way, the money is a great tool. But I'll tell you, it's weird. It's weird how people look at you differently. It's weird how people kind of, that you don't talk to in the last 20 years start showing up again. And I always compare it to, you know, if you're a pretty, if you're a beautiful woman, people are going to hit on you.

You can't be mad because you're, and if you're successful, people might want to share in your success, but there's other leeches out there and vultures that you've got to look out for. Yeah. No, it's, yeah, I mean, I think you're dead on that you need to have a why. And it shouldn't be someone else's why. You know, it's what's, what's the reason for this? And that's part of having a strategy is choosing, choosing the right goal.

And not needing it to be about competitive. It's not about beating someone else or doing it because someone else did it. It's about in the end, honestly, we're all playing our own game. And so, you know, that's back to the, honestly, that's back to the idea of choosing your own category and just deciding what you want to do and having fun with it. So, no, I completely agree with everything you said. And it is powerful still to succeed. You know, there's something, there's something big about the stretch to succeed.

And it is worth the climb. it will it will rip you to shreds you know as you even mentioned but it's to me it's worth it's worth it's worth it it's worth stretching into it's it really humbles you and um you know for myself going for the the scale that we're going for and what we're trying to accomplish you'll see yourself do stuff you would have never done and you'll see yourself outgrow your past self really quickly when you're really going for for big goals and i think it's it's just uh it's it's a beautiful thing to do yeah Yeah, dream bigger. I agree. I'm going to ask you a few close-out questions. I really enjoyed this, though. I think about just more journaling time, more reflection time, more really purposeful decisions.

It's just a wake-up, a wake-up calling a lot of factors. If I could just do a few things more, and there's no time, there's no time bullshit. shit. You don't have the time. If you're at all opening your phone on social media, if you're at all watching Netflix or Amazon Prime, if you're at all watching the sports games, you have the time. Totally. What's one piece of game changing advice you wish you knew in your 20s? I think that, I mean, as simple as it is, a lot of what we've already been talking about, but I think that I would have shot for the top fast.

I think even my goals were a little linear. I think that I could have certainly gotten to where I'm at now 10 years ago. Like if I would have just, and again, I'm not in the gap about it in any way. I just understand that what you're going for, like human beings, we use the future to organize our present.

And so I was using what I felt to be at the time, massive dreams. But what I realize now is I could have, I could have gone straight to certain relationships, to opportunities back then that, you know, that I understand now. I could have gone straight to him. Do you think... And figured it out.

Do you think that your network might be part of the reason that you are where you are today? I mean, you said Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan. I mean, you can't just start out with a network. You don't automatically get access. You kind of have to pay your dues a little bit. Is the network effect, you know, network is your net worth type thing? Does that mean anything to you? Or you just feel like, man, I was...

I could have done this when I'm 18. Network matters a lot, but like when I went into those rooms, one of the things that I think that people get wrong. Like I knew that those rooms were really important, but also I knew that what I brought to those rooms and the capability I already had, like, was what was what created leverage in those rooms, right? So like, you know, I,

I was able to take my, like just being in the rooms alone can get you pretty dang far. But if you already have, but if you have really good capability and if you know how to serve other people, you can turn those rooms into something massive, right? And so I had a lot of things that those rooms couldn't give me when I walked in. And then when I walked in, I brought those things to that room. And it just opened up, it opened up fast. It opened up fast doors. but yeah, you do need to be into that proximity.

You do need other people. You know, I think that other people can take you 10x further than you can take yourself, especially if you're very capable and ambitious, and if you're happy to let other people get a lot of the success too. If you had to start over with $10 million, nothing else, no businesses, you got $10 million in your account, what are you doing with the money? You're going to go probably start scaling,

it's just started the same business. A lot of people said, you know, I'm living what I want. So probably get into that business that you're doing now. It's a really interesting question, Tommy. Yeah, so if this thing went away and if I just, like, I'm just starting with blank and 10 million. Yep. Such a great question.

Yeah, I would, from a financial standpoint, I mean, I have seven kids. And so, like, I'm big on at least having, I'd probably as weird as it sounds. I'd take half of it, set it to my family and just invest it slow. Maybe even maybe only 20% of it, just two million. Just because I love the peace of mind with my seven kids. And I'd probably take the other, it's just so that the two is just there, liquid and just slow compound.

And I'd take the other 80 and I'd, I'd create this. And I'd just gun for what we're going for right now. What do you think adding money would do? to the scaling of your business. Would you put it into ads? Would you put it into? Yeah, if I had, yeah. If I had 20 million right now that was just given to me to, you know,

as an invest, like I brought in some investor, it would get us, it would get us to our goal two or three times as fast. Yeah, it would, because the science of scaling in my mind, I think it'll,

I think it'll take about 15 to 20 million for us to, to 10x. and then our company would be worth billions. So yeah, I think I would take it. Most of it would be advertising. Some of it would be, most of it would be spreading. Some of, there'd probably be, I'd probably say 80% would go into be spreading it the right way. What's your biggest professional dream at the moment?

I think I know what it is because we're just talking about it. It's about getting to your goal with scaling. Yeah. I mean, I would say, I would say that it's helping. It's helping people transform. You know, and it's helping people realize that they're not limited by their past or even their present, but that they can change their future and then use their future to change their present, you know?

And so, you know, I would love, I would love to see, to be honest with you, I'd love to partner at levels, even with like the president of the United States and help 10x economies. You know, I think our country needs it. I think that there's so many, you know, business people that don't understand the difference between growing a business and scaling it. And I would love to, I'd love the science of scaling to sell millions of copies and transform lives. But yeah, ultimately, I'd love to just help help people see what they can be and see what they can do and see that there's a different, there's a different way to do it. Give me a few of your favorite books.

You've got seven amazing books, but if you had to just pick three, just real quick. You're talking about different books, like books that really I love and impact me. Yeah. I really love zero to one by Peter Thiel. Just read it again. Yeah, zero.

That's what you're talking about creating your own category. Yeah, it's a big one. Yeah, he talks about Monopoly. You know, we're writing a book right now called The Power Law Strategy. And we, you know, we may end up co-authoring it with Tony Robbins. He actually wanted to be a co-author on the science of scaling. But we weren't quite ready for that. We didn't feel right about it.

But yeah, I think that, I think that zero to one is really good. I really like, there's so many. I actually just read a book that really blew me away called Life Beyond Capitalism. It's not what you think. It's actually a book about. the power of capitalism, but in a different way than you think about. It's just, it's such a deep book, such a deep book. Um, you know, just said to some of my favorite classics, there's a little book called peaks and valleys by a guy named, um, um, oh, what's his name? He's the guy who wrote,

who moved my cheese. Oh yeah. Um, Spencer Johnson. So he passed away, but he wrote a book called peaks and valleys that's similar to who moved my cheese. It's like a little parable. It's like, a, and two-hour read. To me, it's one of the best books I've ever read. Um, I go, back to the alchemist every once in a while and I go back to like the the war of art but yeah I really like you know 80 20 or yeah the 8020 individual by Richard Kosh but yeah I would say the top few zero to ones up there uh anti-fragile's up there um peaks and valleys is in there man search for meaning is in there I mean those are some of the ones that I just think are just like deep classics you know, like these are ones that, you know, they're worth 100 books.

I'm always looking for the power law. I'm always looking for like, what's the one book that's worth a thousand? And so I think that those ones are, those ones are biggies. My advice, and I don't know if you agree with this, but read the same 20 books 10 times instead of reading 200 books one time. Yeah, especially if you find the good ones that are really deep, I couldn't agree with you more, man. I get so much more out of going back. You read them in a different stage of your life and they hit completely different.

Yeah. No, I agree. I prefer mastery. And so I keep going back through the same books over and over and over and over and over again. And it makes it more interesting when you go read some other book that you've never read before because then you read it deeper. You know, like depth is so much better than breadth in my, I mean, breadth is still important, but depth takes you a lot further in my mind. Ben, what do, someone wants to reach out to you. What's the best ways to do that?

Yeah, I mean, obviously you can go to scaling.com. Highly suggest reading the science of scaling. You know, my email is Ben at scaling.com. So if anyone wants to just reach out to me directly, Ben at scaling.com. And yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. We give away the book, The Science of Scaling for free. So you can definitely go and just listen to it for free if you want. You know, scaling.com, did you spend a fortune on that web, that domain?

Depends on how you define a fortune, but yeah, we, it was, it was a good domain. I have futureself.com as well, but we have a lot of big don't. We've got a lot of great domains, but yeah, scaling.com is by far the best. I bought every garage door site like 10 years ago, garage door university, garage door academy. Yeah. I think I have every single training garage door say. Last thing, I want you to close us out, whatever's on your mind. We talked about a lot, but probably missed a lot.

I had about 100 other questions, but we'll do a second round because I've got so many more questions. But we blew away an hour and a half. It feels like 10 minutes. Dude, nothing else is on my mind except for a lot of what you said, Tommy. There was like two or three just deep signals. Like one is obviously that, you know, time will go fast. if you don't, like, really own it and get the important things done. Your story with ripping off your shirt is a really big signal.

I think that that's a huge one. I think that shooting for the top as fast as you can, your goal shapes your path, you know, it shapes your learning curve. So like, just go for the 10 or 100 X goal because it's going to reorganize your present. The future is a tool to reorganize your present. Obviously, the people you surround yourself with,

I love the story of you laughing with those friends, belly laughing. I think that, you know, so critical, you know. And then just to the idea of the massive idea of the power law that like, you know, there's really only a few things that are going to make all the difference. And so you might as well strip out all the noise and just like really go deep on those few things. You know, those are just some massive biggies that I think are really fun ideas that we went, that we took some depth on.

And I'll just say to you, man, just who you are. You know, I really like spending time with you. And I know you've got a great audience and people who like spending time with you as well. And I really like where you've evolved. And I like what you're up to. and I'm excited for maybe the creation of either a new category for you, that you've really helped those blue collar people, and or you think from $4 billion and maybe get into some big distribution channels

and figure out the way to do that. I mean, those things excite me a lot. Yeah, no, I'm excited too. Our big obsession is 10x and three years. And so I get jonesed out thinking how do we get this thing to $4 billion in three years and what are the distribution channels that do it? And who are the super who's, right? Who are the few people that can help you do it?

To me, that's just like we could geek out on that forever. So I'm going to be thinking about distribution channels. Yeah, no, I love it, dude. We'll connect. Let's connect over the weekend. Hey, thanks to everybody for listening.