The Home Service Expert Podcast - The Smartest Home Service Owners in the Country Are All Doing This One Thing

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://homeservicefreedom.com/ Jim Leslie is the CEO of Home Service Freedom and former CMO/CTO at A1 Garage Door — where he helped build the company to over $400 million. Today he breaks down exactly what's killing revenue inside most home service companies (hint: it's not your marketing), walks through real HSF member success stories with real numbers, and explains how the right systems, community, and coaching can take any home service company further, faster. In this episode: ▸ The #1 reason home service marketing doesn't work (it's your booking rate) ▸ How a $22M multi-trade company was losing money without knowing why — and turned it around ▸ The speed-of-implementation principle that separates companies that grow from those that stay stuck ▸ How AI is flipping the labor equation — and what it means for your team right now ▸ Why going deeper beats going wider — every time ▸ What smart investors actually look for in a home service company ▸ Inside HSF: membership, coaching, training, and the 90-day money-back guarantee ▸ Freedom Event: October 26–28, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas -- 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 🕐 -- 00:00 — Jim Leslie / HSF 08:11 — HSF Membership Overview 16:00 — Member Turnaround Story 23:52 — Speed of Implementation 29:05 — AI Productivity Shift 36:28 — Smart Investor Criteria 44:15 — Freedom Event Details 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://homeservicefreedom.com/ Check Out My Social Media: Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

A company that's a million dollars a year, they think they haven't all figured out. They're giving advice right across the room as a guy who's just kind of quiet, humble, listening, who I know is doing 50, 80 million dollars a year and they're trying to convince him he's wrong. There's a direct correlation between your results and the speed of implementation. Most of you who think your quick implementers will say, oh, that's great, I'm going to put that on the calendar to talk about at the next meeting, you know, next Monday or next week or something. Tommy would already be texting saying, get this done before I get home. Somebody comes to me with a problem that they've been struggling with for three months, six months, nine months a year. If you look at it right at it, and it's like, well, hey, just do this, this and this.

Like, wait, it's that, it's that easy. All right, welcome back to the home service expert. Today I got my man, Jim Leslie in the house. He is the CETO at Home Service Freedom. He's an expert in scaling home service, brands, marketing, and operations. Technology integration, membership, and community building, strategic partnerships, and investor advisory. He worked with me at A1 as a CTO slash CMO. We built A1 garage Jordan a 400 plus million dollar company.

Home Service Freedom exists to give every single home service owner across the land, the same system strategies and community that made that growth possible. In this spotlight episode, HSF CEO Jim Leslie, my former CMO and CTO at A1, walks through what HSF actually is, how it works, and who it's for, and shares real member success or is with real numbers. Whether you're doing 500K or 50 million, this is a look inside the membership that's helping home service companies

across every trade grow faster, operate smarter and build businesses, worth owning. Jim, glad to have you. I'm good, man. It's good to have you in town. It's like the good old days. Right?

We got the band back together. I love hanging out. We're working on so many cool things and stuff you just showed me. Blue my mind, actually, when it comes to some of the stuff your building just to make sure HSF members are successful. You know, to walk us through a little bit about this whole thing coming together,

where we're at today and where you see it kind of going. Yeah, I mean, it's grown massively even over the last 12 months and really become a growth engine for our members, right? So it's kind of started as a best practice community, but now has evolved into so much more We have services. We're training people's teams, sales coaching, frontline coaching, leadership coaching, helping them work on their operations.

So it's not just an owner comes in and learns what to do. We're kind of standing side by side, helping them implement stuff in their business. What do you think you've been traveling not only to give on different events, but you've been traveling to do a lot of shops? What are some of the low-hanging fruit you see right off the bat that you're like, man, we can really help this company. You know, it's the basics.

I mean, stuff you talk about all the time, right, but booking rate is like the number one. Nine times out of ten when somebody says this marketing channel isn't working for me or, you know, hey, my PPC costs are up or whatever, you dig into it, you look through the whole funnel, and they're dropping calls like crazy. I do a lot of work with direct mail, direct mail campaigns. I'm thinking of a company in mind where they're like, oh, it's just the mail's too expensive.

It doesn't work for us. Start auditing their calls, and the people on the front line are literally turning customers away because they don't understand the promotion. They don't understand the offer. In one case, somebody on the front line literally said, hey, we're not the cheapest option. Let me give you some other names. And that's a training issue. And so much of why we got into the front line coaching aspects of things.

is because that's the last step in your marketing, right? You spend all this money, you run these campaigns, you do testing, tracking attribution, and now somebody answers the phone, and if they don't have it together, you know. I mean, look, I've talked to Luke several times. I think we're a world-class, and this has been a while since you've been back here,

but at the time we were at 89%, so we're missing 11. Our cancellation rate was 14%, so now we're at 25. And our conversion rate was at 74%, so that's 20%. So that's 26. That's 51% of all the marketing dollars going out to competitors. Yeah. And that's... The cancellations, the other one people don't look at.

Like so many times people on the front line are saying, well, I'll book an appointment here as a placeholder. And if you don't need it, you can call back and cancel. Well, that's not a good tactic, right? Because it looks like your booking rates, you know, 90%. That's actually 75. I mean, Boris and Litt for Lace, I'd call them, or he was at my house. He comes out once a month.

We met at HSF. at the VIP section. And I said, I want cancellation rate by CSR. And I had some people at 94% but their cancellation rates, 18%. Now, the problem is, what are you supposed to do? In a market, I was booked out in some of my greenfield markets 10 days.

And the only thing you could do is you're here. There's 70 guys out there training right now. I don't know if we're ready for 90. You need the data to understand what the core of the issue is. Is it bad training and people just book appointments in the wrong way or is it capacity issues right but without the data you're lost vast any plan is a big deal the other thing I think more importantly than ever is brand I think like what's crazy is a talk to our

old buddy forest from back of the day and he said you guys kind of have become the roto-ruder he looked at our PBC account he goes you guys your branded keywords are just expensive as some of the non-brand he goes I've never seen that except for playing with like a roto-ruder what else goes wrong. I mean, look, we all talk about manuals, the L. Levy days, that for me was almost a decade ago. And I feel like people don't have their stuff very tight when it comes to that. There's this widening gap that I see between execution, right? Operators that are able to implement and build the teams that get stuff done and the people that just keep kind of going in circles.

And that's where we've tried to put most of our effort is helping people get these things done and implemented in their business versus just talking about them. Yeah, there's a lot of people that have talked about doing a lot of things. How often do you go look at a truck and they're very old beat-up trucks and the brand's not there? Like when you're out and about. Yeah, I had a company call and say, hey, we're losing money, a lot of money. I don't want to, you know, obscure the numbers to protect the innocent. But I'm like, you know what, I'll just, I'll jump on a plane.

Let me fly out there. Let me see what's going on. And from the second I walked in the door, you know, it was apparent. But when I get to the trucks, I actually, I tore the facility and I said, then can I see a truck? Before they show me a truck, I said, I'm going to predict to you what it looks like. It's dirty. It hasn't been washed. I opened the door.

There's a rolled-up McDonald's bag in the side of it. The floor is dirty. There's toll sitting on the front seat. When we open the back, there's debris left from a job. It was like I was a miracle worker. They tried to find a truck that they thought was cleaning, and it looked exactly like that I predicted. Yeah, and you're right. You know, I think when business starts to grow, it's very hard.

I was just reading this book, actually in between the last hour. And it was an old Michael Gerber quote from the E-Mith, and it said, learn to run your business on systems and have the people that work for you run the systems because sometimes people will come and go, but the system will live on. And I think far too often we depend on people versus the system. And Al Levy was pretty good at helping us understand that. But I do think that you should be a systems architect and teach people to play that playbook. Here's the playbook.

I mean, what do you think a coach does in sports? They sit there and they go, here's the exact play we're going to run. Then he has the people run the play. Yeah, for sure. And now it's crazy because the systems are becoming AI, like agents running the playbook. Yeah. The people are orchestrators. But at the end of the day, somebody has to understand, is this the right play at the right time?

And are we focusing on the right things? You know, the systems, you know, the AI will just carry out whatever you tell it to do, whether it's the right thing or not. For someone's listening who's never heard of home service freedom, walk us through what it is and what a member gets and what does the experience actually look like. Yeah, it's a pretty robust platform, and we have different sort of levels of membership, right? But everybody comes in at the core level where they get tons of resources. They get access to our experts. So we have seven experts in sales, marketing, operations, finance. I host the marketing call, right?

So they can get on, ask any questions of me about their marketing, have us look at specific things in their business. There's a ton of resources that they get at that base level, you know, templates, job roles, you know, access to a lot of our operational resources, help building out manuals, so there's a ton of resources there, but the biggest thing is access to the platform, right? From that point, you know, frontline training, sales coaching, operational coaching, whatever they might need in their business, we sort of sit shoulder to shoulder with them and understand where they're at and what their path forward is. What are their goals, right? Are you trying to you know, just scale up in one market? Are you trying to expand to multiple markets? What are the gaps in your business? What do you specifically need? And then we build a custom plan to help them figure out how to get there and how we can help them do that. I could answer that question in like, you know, two hours, right? It's like trying to cram it in. No, no, I get it. And everybody's at a different point. They need different things. But I think marketing and recruiting are probably the two biggest things. The biggest thing to get across is most owners in the,

this space, didn't go to school for business, maybe this is their first business. A lot of them started in a truck, right? And, you know, they're working for somebody and, you know, not happy with the situation. So they start out on their own. And very quickly, they scale to a point where they're kind of beyond, you know, their level of management. And they're looking for resources. And there's no shortage of it on the internet, right? Everybody's a coach. Everybody's a guru. very few of them have built even one business successfully, let alone, you know, A1 or, you know, others. And I think that's what we've tried to give back based on what we did at A1, try to build out a program to actually help other operators based on the principles that actually work, not something that sounds good in a, you know, in a coaching playbook or, you know, just kind of all this flyby night stuff on the internet. I wanted to ask you about, you went out to a company.

We didn't go into a lot of detail. We were chatting earlier, but you said they didn't have their pricing right. And pricebook design is a whole art within itself of knowing what to charge to make your gross profit, what it needs to be, and understand discounting and everything else. So what did you figure out when you went out to help that particular company? What was interesting in this case, they didn't identify it as a pricing problem. In fact, I think when we were initially talking, you know, they said, hey, we're priced right. all these things are right, but we're losing money.

We can't figure out what's going on. And the biggest thing that I showed them, you know, I just walked in and asked some simple questions. I'm like, give me a spreadsheet with all the jobs that you completed in the last 90 days, right? And then just looked at the average gross profit per job, and it was way under what their target was, right? And they were kind of struggling to understand how that happens. And everyone has a story, right? well, there was a customer issue here. There was a discount there.

They all had legitimate reasons why they were under the gross margin target. But at the end of the day, the net result is they were priced below what their operating model would support. And, you know, it's a case of like, hey, what looks good on paper isn't what happens in the real world, right? I think it was Tyson that says everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? I'm like, that's where you guys are at right now, right? Like, your gross margin needs to be 45% if you want a net 40 that your model is calling for. And so that was the case there. And like, these are great operators.

They know their business. It's just, you know, sometimes it's a force for the trees problem where you can't see what's in front of you because you're in the thick of it, you know. Yeah, well, then once you start charging the right prices, do you have the team that can actually get the right conversion rate they need? Right. And that's the problem, too, is like, we had a garage door event recently, and JD's been a manager. He's been working with me for over a decade. Now he runs Tucson and Albuquerque. And I went to the scorecards, and it's really easy for me to see it now because I look at these all day.

I go, this is your worst performing tech running the most amount of calls. And, of course, they all say the same thing. Well, he doesn't get the same quality of leads. I go, dude, he's at 126 leads. for the area I chose, for the time I chose the range. I got the next best guy is at 89. I know you're telling me out of that many leads, he didn't get a broken spring job or crash door.

I'm like, you got to make, you got to figure something out here. That Monday he calls me, he's like, he's gone. He goes, he'd been with us for seven years. And I'm like, I'm a loyal dude, but loyalty goes two ways. And if you've got a guy, what's crazy, Jim, when I look at this, it's so easy to burn guys out. They're running the most amount of leads with a, with the lowest conversion rate, lowest average ticket, lowest reviews.

But they'll always say yes to any job the dispatcher wants to give them. Because they need to burn, they need to turn and burn. That's just, we almost bred them to do that. One of the things we learned in working with members and just so many different trades is, and it sounds crazy, but like the mindset of the guys is a big part of the equation. I was talking to Tyson, our sales trainer, and, you know, he was out of the shop and he's like, these guys have, you know, they have their process down, they know their product, like everything's checking the box, but their mindset is wrong, right? They're walking in, projecting their wallet

on the customer, right? Thinking that the customer is buying with their resources. When in the reality, you know, the customer wants to spend a lot more and is open to it if they're just presented, right? But they're, they're hymming and hawing. They're not presenting things. They're just kind of hedging because they're afraid to just put it out there. And, you know, once, once, once they're that particular shop, like flip that, you know, dramatic increase. Yeah, it's hard if you live in an apartment and drive an old vehicle to find out what somebody with a million to a million and a half dollar house would buy. But the crazy thing is that I try to tell these guys, I have this story I share there

every orientation because the story happened in the last year, you know, the freezer with the ice cubes. Anyway, I've got three of them in the house and you know, you know where this one's at, but I got a fix three different times. And I'm like, it's about three, four hundred bucks a time. And I think a new one was like three grand. And I'm like, like, every time this thing breaks, it leaks, but what floor is warped, we had to get the floor fixed.

Like, let's just fix it right. Just replace it. I tell a story about wanting to upgrade the HVAC units when I bought a new house and calling the company and literally just begging them to sell me two brand new systems on the phone and them saying, well, no, we've serviced that house before in our records. They're fine. You'll get a few more years out of them. And it's like, you know, there are literally companies and salespeople that will not let you spend the money that you want to.

And it's crazy. Yeah, I know. It's frustrating. I don't use them anymore, right? I went to somebody that would let me buy what I want to buy. That's the same thing that R always says. He's like, I know what I wanted. I called the company out.

They didn't offer it to me. Let's talk about some wins. Walk us through a member story where they were when they joined HSF and what you're. you guys worked on together and where they are now. Yeah, I'm thinking in particular a, it was a multi-trade plumbing, HVAC drain. At the time, they were probably a $20, $22 million company, negative. They were running like negative 5% EBITA for the previous year and kind of came in saying, like, hey, we think, we think everything's going, you know, we can't see the problem.

right? And, you know, again, it's another situation where I flew out. And, you know, you walk into a shop and a lot of times people are looking for the magic bullet or the magic beans, right? Like, hey, there has to be one thing that we're doing wrong and we fix it and everything turns around. And in this case, I looked around and it was like death by a thousand cuts, right? Line sets priced wrong in their price book. You know, just a ton of different things. And it's like, hey, guys, here's a list of like 25 things to fix sales problems, sales mindset problems, culture problems. But they just started like chewing through it, right? And that was, you know, probably about 12 months ago. They turned that around within the first quarter, got to a positive, even a margin. I think they were, you know, 10% or so. I mean, not world class, but to go from losing money to like banking cash, huge difference. within the next year, you know, they were talking about an acquisition and just, you know,

a lot of positive things that were moving forward in the business. And that's a pretty typical story, you know, again, a situation where owners come to us and, you know, they're at the biggest level they've ever been and they're not sure what their next two, three moves are. And they just want somebody who's been there before who's walked the path to say, hey, this is what I see and what I would do if I were in your shoes. You know, I think I went the vast majority through the early years of business before I met you without having a clue how much money we were really making or losing. We didn't get by.

But when you really get it down to the detailed level by market and the future for A1 is to get it down by truck. But when I started, I don't know if you even knew this, but my first day in marketing in A1, I went to finance. at the time, different team than now, right? But I just said, can you tell me what we're spending on marketing? And the answer was no. I'm like, can you give me a transaction level dump of everything that got coded to marketing? And the answer was, we can give it to you, but it's only current through like 60 days ago or 90 days ago. And I'm like, okay, let's start from there and I'll extrapolate, you know?

Well, here's the crazy thing is that was my fourth CFO. Oh, and then when Dan Miller came on, we got Adrian, and there was a lot of work to do. But we ran the finance department with two or three guys. And now there's about 50. When you think about AP, AR, but what's like going, it's like, we weren't going to the right doctor. We didn't know our known financial position. We still, we had good enough data to know we learned from Allen Roar that like we knew how to read a P&L. We knew, but it wasn't, the attribution wasn't as what it is now.

and that it took a while because that's, I think, a missing piece to most companies is they don't know where they're out financially, they don't understand where the dollars are going. But that's common. Like, so. I think it's almost, I think I can find that in even big, big companies, like very big companies. Yeah, there's a level of precision too, right? It's like it's one thing to have a full company P&L, but if you're in five markets or 10 markets and have it, you know, broke it down, at least at the contribution margin level to each, you know, market.

It's a whole different level of sophistication. And, you know, I used to think growing faster in the new markets was the answer. And I'll tell you, now what I hear all the private equity companies talking about is how much market share do you have in that market? What's the market share? What's the max market share? Anybody's got in this market? And, you know, if I could go back until 10 years younger, Tommy, you know, 33, I would have said, take complete market share of every market. market you go into before you don't get me wrong I mean if the right acquisition comes

around but we didn't know how to do that back then so that you know that would have been great advice from back then yeah and I I repeat that like you know I mean I fly around the country doing dozens of events and and you know all these shops and they all want to like spread out wider and I'm like Tommy would tell you you know deeper than than wider don't spread yourself thin yeah well I'll tell you why I think part of it is you get good at one lead source Like you'll get good at GMB optimization or you're really good at LSA or whatever it is. Maybe, you know, some of these guys got great social media skills and they figured it out. And they do okay going by lead source.

It's almost like, you know, you could take that into a lot of markets, but then the algorithm changes or something. And you can only keep four guys busy. So who's keeping inventory? Who's making sure the trucks are rolling? Who's doing all the coding back to the taxes? Four or five years ago, you know, in A, one. like a Google update happened every every six months and we make an adjustment

right now the entire customer pipelines disrupt it like every three days there's a new Google change a new change in AI and new like you know over and over and they don't have marketing systems in place that can adapt to it so they think they're going to spread out and then they get they get whacked when there's some change in an

algorithm and that's hard you know I've always thought where can I go and pay and have a predictive output not just nothing organic because that could change. You've got every programmer on the planet working against you, whether that's social media, whether that's, you know, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok,

wherever you learn to get leads, they want you to end up paying more. So if you can figure out I could pay for these leads and I got a good sales system, then it's scalable. But it's still you need the volume to take market share. Your company's not worth a lot of money. Is there, who's a member that doesn't make sense? because we've had some people that definitely don't want to learn.

And they might think they all got it figured out. And they come more to talk at the events maybe than be part of them. I don't know. But yeah, it's, it's kind of crazy, actually, because you'll have, and to answer the question, it's mindset, right? Do you have a growth mindset? Do you want to get around the right people in the right room? Do you want to learn? Do you want to grow?

we'll have, you know, a company that's a million dollars a year, which is, you know, they think they have it all figured out. They're telling everybody what to do. They're giving advice in areas where they're maybe losing money or not successful, right? And then right across the room is a guy who's just kind of quiet, humble, listening, who I know is doing $50, $80 million a year and they're trying to convince him he's wrong, right? And that's, you know, that's what always makes me laugh is like, if you, if you come into a room with a mindset of like, I just want to learn, I want to grow, I want to be around the right

people. You can make exponential gains, but so many people come into it with the wrong approach. It's probably leading well into the next question is you've been around inside of hundreds of home service companies, their financials, their operations through HSF. What separates companies that grow extremely fast and stay profitable for ones that stay stuck? They're showing up. I know that. the Q&As, they're asking questions, they're implementing daily, and they stepped out of their business. They stepped out of the inner walls, so now they can work on it. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of things, but the first one that I point to, something I learned from you, I say this almost every time I speak is there's a, there's a direct correlation between your

results and the speed of implementation, right? And I'll say, hey, in a room like this, if Tommy was here, and I give you a good idea, right? You know, most of you who think your quick implementers will say, oh, that's great. I'm going to put that on the calendar to talk about it, the next meeting, you know, next Monday or next week or something. Tommy would already be texting saying, get this done before I get home, right? And, you know, that doesn't mean every idea, you know, is a great idea and has to be done without question. But, you know, when you see the right answer, when you see something in front of you, that gap between when you say, okay, let's do it and when it actually gets done, you know, that's 100% the difference.

What does that, what does that red ones say? Ruthlessly prioritize. Ruthlessly prioritized. That's the problem with a guy like me is, you know, most entrepreneurs, I would say, are the same way. We have a touch of ADHD. We get a lot of ideas. We read a lot of books. We listen to a lot of podcasts.

We go to events. And is this going to move us to the North Star? Do we have a team capable? You've heard that Jeff Bezos story early on when. one of his advisors that ended up working there said, you'll bankrupt us if you go to a whiteboard. Like we're not ready. These are early days.

We're just getting started. And so he said, look, I want you to take all your ideas, prioritize them. Give it to them when we're, give it to us when we're ready. But your goal is to build a company that can handle all their ideas in real time. I do think the issue is so many people are searching for ideas in all the wrong places, right? Oh, yeah. Well, it's a busy world out there. Yeah.

I mean, they're on YouTube, YouTube University, right? They're listening to other voices that have never actually done the thing that they're trying to do. And they're trying to, you know, throw all this stuff together in a pot and then dump it on their team and say, do it. Right. And what's different about what we do is like, hey, we have the roadmap. We look at where you're at, right? And we say, hey, these are your next three moves. And they're not just like ideas we picked out of thin air.

It's like we know the process. We've done it. you know, I can give you the frameworks to take a $40 million company to $200 and beyond, right? If you're $2 billion, I don't know, that's out of our wheelhouse, but anything up to that, you know, we've been there. We've done it. Yeah. I mean, it's getting tougher out there, too, is my prediction is all these guys that are doing mundane work than a big 401k's, the white color space. they've got enough money put away.

They've got enough money into their home that they could come out, they could start a business. And they're not stupid. They're smart people. They can figure stuff out. I think it's going to start getting very competitive in the next five years.

Oh, absolutely. I think it's going to be a fight, a big, big fight for leads and for great people. Because everyone's going to want to, how do they get paid a lot of money? How does your performance pay more than anybody's? And you still have to be able to pay more per lead. And that means you've got to have these.

numbers dialed in. And I don't know. I know there's a lot of best practices groups out there because I spoke at every single one of them. And most of the people in the leadership team have never even been part of something that they grew something. They've never been in a business. That's what I always want to do is say, I'm still in it. That's kind of the power of this thing is. And they're teaching last decade's playbook. Like this is what worked five years or 10 years. Yeah. It's like, do you even know what LLMs are? I mean, you talk to these people. They're like, Oh, yeah, I've used chat chabit, and it's like so much more than that now. Yeah, I mean, most of these folks, their idea of AI is like, hey, I talked to a chat bot and it tells me some things, right?

Like, we've worked at deeply integrating it into our processes, into our data, into internal software development into, I mean, it's just endless. What it's really done is flipped the labor equation on the white collar side, right? like one person can now equal the output of, you know, 10, 20, maybe 30 people. And you know what? It's funny because I remember in 2017, it was before I'd met you, but I'd been working with L. And he goes, I really need you to look at this KPI of how many workers do you have in the field compared to how many support staff. And now I think that that metric is more important than ever. Yeah.

But it needs to grow. It needs to go from one to three. to one to seven to like, you know, I'll be realistic. Right now we're at about a two and a half to one. And I see us getting to a four to one. And I also not the first guy to say, let's cut 40% of that staff because I think some people, it's easier to do in software and other things

when it's data entry. Yeah, that's one of the things that's really flipped in the last four to six months where I think, you know, unfortunately, most home service owners are kind of like playing catch up on technology and AI and all that, but the models prior to February of last year, we're good. But, you know, Opus 4-6, now 4-7, Claude 55, like, the capability jumped so much.

And there was a point in March. I think I called you and said, hey, and, you know, I was a software developer in a former life. So I was working on a project on a weekend. And I'm like, I just did 18 months worth of a team's worth of development myself on a Saturday afternoon. Right. And if you think about that replicated across your whole organization, you know, not everybody's developing software, but building agents to automate the work that they're doing, you know, the output of your team should be two, three-xing over the next, you know, four or five months. And most owners are so far behind, you know, they don't even know how to spin up a project in Claude. And that's kind of scary. Yeah, you got to have it downloaded under your, but, you know, you also need some protections.

I mean, I think now we've got five people in our, what is it called, fraud software, like, saying that's so much protection. Because a lot of people are just uploading their financials into something saying, make the model better, and they're sharing everything with the model. And, you know, there's all these things to do when it comes to privacy, security, yeah. Yeah, cybersecurity. We've got some pretty cool people coming to this event. I know we've already let the cat out of the bag about Robert. He's a shark. Robert Archivac.

Yep. You know, I'm not super involved. I know some of the other people come in that I was a little bit involved, but you guys kind of go out there and find the best of the best. What do you like the most about Robert? Well, you know, it's interesting. A lot of people would say, oh, he's a software guy. How does that apply to home services or an IT guy, right?

but, you know, he built a billion-dollar firm from scratch, obviously exposed to a lot of other companies through, you know, Shark Tank and some of the different things that he's done. But I think he's in a position where a lot of folks in our industry would want to be, right? Like, how do I take one company and grow it, you know, to whatever scale that I want to do? And, you know, just getting perspective from operators outside of our industry, I think is extremely valuable. I do too

And I think You know Jim Collins never built a home service company But there are some fundamentals Dale Carnegie I could go through just some simple things of like You know the network is your net worth type thing And I think that's what makes building a personal brand so powerful The thing I like about a personal brand is

You know for example A1 A lot of the people here are like We just heard about you And A1 because we see the trucks everywhere, and you seem like you're a pretty cool guy to work for. And I'm like, dude, you're my coworker. I don't look at it like that.

So what else? What else? When you come to this event, it's in October, it's in Vegas, Mandele Bay. What should somebody expect? Who's the right person to come to this? Yeah, I mean, anybody in home services, we've expanded the event,

greatly, right? So there's a sales training event where you can bring your technicians for sales training during the event. There's a frontline training so you can bring your CSR dispatch, your frontline manager, right? So there's opportunities for training. You're going to hear from a lot of great speakers, Robert and another one, another several that are going to get announced, right? But I think the best thing is being in the right room, right? This event attracts operators from, you know, a million to 200 million and beyond. And so many times people have said, hey, they're just waiting in the line for the restroom

or they're kind of leaning over and asking something of the guy next to them and then realize they're talking to a $100 million operator, a $200 million operator. And the connections that they form there and the stuff that they sort of gotten an insight on just from networking from people has been worth the price of admission.

Yeah, I mean, we've had guys like Paul Kelly I think he'll do like $280 million in Phoenix alone. That's annual revenue. You've got, we've had Leland Smith, we've had Ken Goodrich, that Ken Haines show up there. I mean, these guys are animals. HSF has a pretty incredible network of strategic partners. And it's crazy.

I mean, how many great vendors we have. And everybody always asked me, who would I use for this? Who would I use for that? Who would I use for this? And I'm like, I just wish there was a magic bullet, but it just depends on your industry, how you use them. Yeah, a lot of people want to know, hey, who do you use for this? Well, the solution for a $300, $400 million company is not the solution for a $3 million one, right?

So it's about matching the right vendor based on what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah. I mean, we've worked really, really hard to get the right vendors. And we've grown with a lot of the vendors. I mean, you look at even, I mean, Enterprise is a big vendor in Holman, and there's all kinds of choices you have for your, we've got several. But it's finding the right one, but most people don't even understand what the tax implications are of buying your own vehicles lease their own. And that's part of the training you got to go through is, you know,

we usually talk about EBITA and how much are we going to owe in taxes this year. And back in the day, I used to wake up and be like, I remember before I had met you or Al Levy or anybody, my CPA would call me and be like, it looks like you're going to hold $400 grand this year. I don't even have that in the bank account. How is that possible? Yeah, that you bring up a good point on the fleet leasing, right, is like we had a, we had a member that was, you know, they had a somewhat aging fleet. They needed to replace some vehicles. A lot of them were owned, right? They also had just started a rebrand, and they were kind of looking at like, you know, hey,

if I got to rewrap all of these trucks, you know, it's going to cost a half a million dollars, right? And we were actually able to show them how to get all the trucks rewrapped, you know, convert a lot of those vehicles into a lease, save on taxes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They ended up getting it, I think of it somewhere on the order like $200,000 check back and the vehicles wrapped and converted a lot of them into a lease, so they got a newer fleet, right? So it's all those little tricks that you learn from just years of doing the business where somebody's coming in thinking they're saving a problem. And it was literally one phone call.

You know, we, we, we, you know, and it was a process they had to work through, right. But, you know, one phone call gave them the idea that was able to generate money back in their pockets, get them a new fleet and get it all wrapped. I'll tell you, Renee told me this crazy stat. I had her on the podcast. She's like an expert. She's worked at her. She's worked at every single place out there.

She said, out of the Fortune 500, 498. than lease. Isn't that crazy? I don't know what the other two do or why, but it's an interesting question. You also advise investors who want to understand the home service space. What are smart investors looking for in a home service company right now? Yeah, I think a lot of them come in with a finance background and, you know, just thinking, hey, everything in home service is gold, right? And it's like, well, you got to pick the right vertical. You got to understand the market it's in. You got to understand the team, right?

And I think that's the biggest, you know, the biggest thing is picking the right team that's going to be able to execute post, you know, acquisition. I've seen so many stories where, you know, it doesn't go the way they want it because they didn't, you know, they didn't have the right team. So, and understanding that, you know, sometimes hard for, you know, investors. I agree. It's very, very hard.

There's a lot of people out there that think, get the right CEO, put the right CFO, get the right CFO, get the right CMO, they put the right CTO, and they'll, this business will just run. But then what about the blue color guys that didn't pass 10th grade, they weren't raised with a mom? You still need to be a great recruiting operation. L, back in the day, said,

you've got to create your own people. You can't just go get somebody else's hand-me-downs, as far as technicians and installers. And there's there's a communication gap there where a lot of people look at is just like, oh, it's just field labor, they're replaceable, not understanding the value of a great technician and, you know, what goes into making them through the training and the experience and all of that. And by the way, the great guys, they're pre-Madanas. And you've got to have some type of, if they don't lie, cheater still, and they don't roll their eyes

and meetings and they come to training, you got to figure out a way to keep those guys. because you lose a few of those guys, all of a sudden you'll have what Ishmael did. He went to build a company that he sold for over $100 million because he got four or five of the top guys from service champions, which, by the way, Leland was fine with it. Ishmael went and did it. That's fine. But I'm like, you know, I wouldn't have lost a guy because he had facial hair. That's what a lot of these corporate buyers do.

They don't understand the culture. they don't understand, you know, the fact that, you know, a great sales guy is a little bit hard to control, right? I mean, it's just what it is. And they come in and they just want to, hey, let's get people that are easy to deal with, level the playing field. And I'm like, where did all the revenue go? It happens quickly. One guy leaves. He's getting treated well.

And then all of a sudden, they call the other four or five guys. Yeah, I mean, there's been a massive kind of flip in the labor equation. You know, one, just with increasing capacity, what a guy's able to do with technology now, and what somebody's willing to pay to get a great guy, right? You get a producer that can do, I mean, depending on trade, a million, two million, three million more. What is that worth? Will somebody pay, you know, more than the other guy for sure? Well, the Tom Howard's story about Brent Buckley alone.

Brent Buckley, get this guy. They could do $12 million, $15 million. He works with another guy that could get almost the same Phil. Now Phil's doing more. You get two great people on a team. And the crazy thing is they could run all customers. They could run tuneups and flip up. They didn't need any demand.

But I think that's like finding magic in a bottle. It's very rare to do that. You can't just build the whole thing. But if I'm a buyer for that company, I'm like, wait a minute. But during the Q of E, the quality of earnings, I think sometimes these companies miss that. It's hanging on just two or three really strong guys. There's a story that's told through the financials.

That's kind of like the first story that a lot of these guys look at. And there's a human story that's like not interpreted through that, right? I mean the KPIs, but just understanding the people, the dynamics, the, you know, the leadership, the culture. A lot of that gets missed. And it has a big influence on the bottom line. If a home service company owner listening right now is on the fence about joining a program like HSF, what would you say to them? Do it. Yeah, I mean, look, I've said this every time I speak, every event.

I'm so confident in what we can do, how it's a benefit to your business. You have to do the work. There's no escaping that, right? There's no magic bullets where you just buy a program and just sit back and, you know, but, But if you come in, give it 90 days, participate, do the work, do what's asked of you. And we made it easy, right? I spent the last year just saying, hey, we've got to take everything that we do and make it bite-size so the average owner can just come in, absorb, do week after week after week. If you do it for 90 days and you don't see a positive result in your business, we'll give you your money back.

I don't want your money if you're not getting the result, right? And it's so stupid cheap. It's a no-brainer. So, you know, there's no reason why anybody listening to this should not have the results that they want in their business because we've made it easy for you. What's one piece of advice you'd give a home service owner right now, whether they join H.S.F. or not. Oh, man. That's a tough one. It just depends on where they're at, I guess.

Yeah. Man, I'm darn a blank. There's a protocol. I mean, it just depends on where they're at, but, you know, getting priced right's a big one. But what's next for HSF? I mean, we've been growing massively, expanding massively. I've started to talk about us as a growth engine for businesses, right? We've made it so simple where they can plug in at any level, get their teams trained, their front line, their sales team, get their operations right?

We're moving into finance and helping them getting those things, you know, squared away. They're reporting their service tight and set up. So, you know, I just see, you know, a future where an independent company that wants to thrive can plug into a program like ours and get the resources that they would if they were with a, you know, a massive PE group and be able to, you know, compete in the next decade. I love it. How does someone get started? What is where do they do? So they can go to home service freedom.com. There's a there's a book, a meeting link on there. You can talk with Joe or Greg or any one of our advisors.

They'll get on a call. It's no pressure. We don't have a high pressure sales team. Like we have an honest conversation about where is your business today? What are you doing? What does your company look like? What are your goals? Where do you want to be in five years, 10 years?

And can we actually help you get there? And, you know, if the answer is, we can't. We tell you that. If we think it's a good fit, we tell you that. And it's a low pressure situation. It's a modest investment. It's really a no-brainer for the results we're able to get in your business. And that's where it starts. Just go to the website, homeservicefreedom.com, book a call and see where it leads you. Tell me the last thing about why they should go to the event, where to find the event, what to come to expect, who to bring, what things.

the dates. Yeah, so it's, it's freedom event.com. It's, oh, crap. October 20. Do you have a written down there? I don't have it written. We're going to need some editing on this. Xavier's here. When's the event? 286. It's not on the brief. What are the dates? You want to start that one over again? Yeah, so Jim, final thought here, and then we'll close out. I know the events in October, Mandalay Bay. Who should come? Who should they invite with them?

Tell me all the details. Yeah, so first off, you can go to freedomevent.com. Everything's laid out there for you. It's October 26th through 28th, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. It's one of the best hotels on the strip. I mean, it is the best. It's clean. It's not smoky.

It's a great place to bring your family. There's a pool, a beach there, stuff for the fam to do if you want to bring them. As far as who on your team, this event's designed for everybody now. Like I said, you can bring your front line, your CSRs, dispatchers, frontline manager. We have a whole training day and a ticket option for them on the website. If you want to bring your technicians, we have a great sales training day where you can bring those folks. Senior leadership managers, you know, we have a number of teams that bring five, ten, one team last, last year brought 25 people.

I said to the owner like, hey, you know, a lot of people would say, you know, you got your team out of the field for a day or two days and the cost to bring them, aren't you losing money? One, they kept closing deals while they were there. He showed me they made just about the same amount of revenue from their salespeople. Two, when they went back, the team was fired up. They had a new vision for the company, how they were going to grow, what was possible just because of what they learned in that room. So I would say bring as many people as you reasonably can.

Everybody's welcome. This is an event just for home service owners, right? We don't let a bunch of PE guys and vendors and stuff in the room that aren't pre-approved that are just, you know, beating you up all day. Everybody you're going to run into is another owner like you, either behind you or ahead of you in the journey that you can network with. So freedom event.com, get all the details. I hope to see you there. Yeah, you know, we don't let vendors that burn people. and you've done a really good job of screening.

I probably get 20 to 30 people at the end right before the ticket's going. Why can't I come? And they're like, you're not coming to pitch people. I think the important thing is, like, we do have some sponsors at the event. There's an area outside. This isn't a trade show or an exhibition hall event. It's not like where there's like 5,000 vendors and you walk around.

We have a small curated space with vendors who, I mean, we know all of them personally. We've used them. We've worked with them. I know who's there. They're great, you know, in what they do. If there's a problem, we know who to call. That's the only folks that are allowed. We don't let random people come in and just start, you know, hassling people. Jim, what if somebody wants to reach out to you? I know that a lot of people want to reach out to. But if someone's got a quick question, what's the best way to do that? It's Jim at homeservicefreedom.com. My EA team is probably going to kill me for that. But, um, I think about it like this. I mean, I was where a lot of people listening to this podcast were at one point in time, swinging a hammer, doing the work. I've been successful because people helped me. And so if you're out there listening to this and you're like, hey, I want to learn more about the event. I want to know more about Home Service Freedom.

I want to understand. Or just like, hey, man, I need some help. I don't know where to go. Reach out to me, Jimat Home Service Freedom.com. Give me a few days to get back to you because I'm sure after this airs, I'll get it. at 300 emails, but... You know, it's pretty crazy when you've done what we've done together

and you look at it, you're like, do you have any manuals or success guides? Is your brand right? Do you know, do you have attribution? Do you have UTM parameters? Do you know where your leads are coming from? Do you have call tracking numbers? We've got 7, D200 now and 8.

But like, the fundamentals, and it's like, you can look at it in five minutes and be like, oh, well, that's the first thing to fix. And then that's the next thing to fix. And then once you see that, you can't unsee it. That's the funnest thing about what I do is I've been in hundreds and hundreds of companies now. I've spoken to thousands and thousands and thousands of contractors, you know, working with you and A1, a number of other businesses that we built. And somebody comes to me with a problem that they've been struggling with for three months, six months, nine months a year.

Who knows how long? It's just you look at it right at it. And it's like, well, hey, just do this, this and this. and you basically take this giant mountain and move on them. And they're like, wait, it's that easy, right? You know, there's owners out there still not doing, and I understand why, but they're not doing orientations. And I guess they say when you're small, it's hard,

or when you get really big, it's hard. I think those are the most important times to do it. So it doesn't feel like a huge corporation. And also when it's small, like, I want to get to know the founder a little bit or the CEO or like who's at the top that's actually making these, telling us what to do. And what's in it for me, we started doing 360 reviews anonymously.

And the number one thing that came back was we don't feel like we have enough control over where our own position is going. So now we listen and we get feedback. But it's a lot of work, man. HR is a lot of work. Finance Department has a lot of work. The marketing department, the hiring department, which is under HR, but they need to hire enough to generate the leads. And then we've got turnover. Even though we don't love turnover, Ken Goodrich came to me and he's like, no,

matter what, Tommy, I promise you you're going to have 35% turnover. He's like, you're not going to be on to solve it. Nobody solves it, not when you're training guys from scratch. And he was right. At the end of the day, this is a business, and it's not easy, right? A lot of people look at the end result. How many years did you spend to get to where you are now? 20 years, but the first time we're practice.

Right. But, you know, it takes work, you know. There's no magic bullet. It's a lot of work. And I would say this, that certain people, you know, they get so burnt out and it's the struggles that happen with your relationships with your family, your significant other, sometimes your external family like mom and dad. Like it's just, it's so hard. It's so hard. And I think people that think business is easy, the chances are against all of us that start a business that we will fail.

And the chance is to get over a million dollars of profit is slim to none. and have you gotten that far? There's ways to continue to get further. And somebody's been where you've want to go. And everybody and their brother now tends to want to train. I mean, you just go online for one day. You just go on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok and see the ads popping up. And, you know, I won't see all of its crap, but the vast majority of it, nine out of ten,

same thing for real estate training. Like, the old gurus that knew what they were doing, It doesn't work today because it's not the same market. It's exactly what you said. Jim, close us out. Any final thoughts before we end? I just think, you know, what we've created is really unique, really special in the industry, people that have actually done it, helping people to level up.

And so excited to see you guys at Freedom, Freedom Event.com. Anybody that's looking for help, homeservicefreedom.com or Jim at HomeServiceFreadom.com, we're here for you.