The Home Service Expert Podcast - ‌Using‌ ‌Automation‌ ‌and‌ ‌Scalable‌ ‌Systems‌ ‌to‌ ‌Build‌ ‌a‌ ‌Crisis-Proof‌ ‌Business

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Ravi Abuvala is a successful serial entrepreneur, and the chief scaling officer of Scaling With Systems, a firm that has helped businesses improve their systems to increase their appointment rate with high-ticket clients. In less than a decade, he has scaled and founded multiple companies, has worked with over 500 firms worldwide, and has placed nearly 600 fully-trained virtual assistants for his clients. In this episode, we talked about paid advertising, lead generation, digital marketing, delegation...

One of the best things that we did was we created what we call the ramping Bible inside of our company. It's about 35 different pages long. It's a Google document. And we give it to every single new employee we get. And it teaches them everything about my background story, all the podcasts I've been on. And then it teaches them about what does our company do, who our client avatar is. And then it teaches them about some of the stuff I'm talking about on here. Client avatars, customer acquisition, split testing, lead generation, client fulfillment.

And so I create this army of little rubbies, which if you're listening to this, you're probably going to think it's terrifying and you just met me. But I create this little army of people that are thinking and acting and talking just like me. And the only way you can really truly do that without, once again, increasing your overhead, increasing the amount of time it takes to ramp a customer is having your hiring process really systemized. And we've done that really well. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. Got a very special guest, Ravi Abuvala. He's an expert at Facebook advertising lead generation, B2B digital marketing, virtual assistants. He's based out of Miami, Florida at this point. He just got moved back there from California. And his company is Scaling with Systems. He's a chief scaling officer for the last couple of years. And he's also the founder of Prospect Social from 2016 to now. Ravi is a successful serial entrepreneur and motivational content creator.

His firm Scaling with Systems has helped multiple businesses increase their appointment rate with high-ticket clients by improving their systems and processes. He has scaled and founded multiple companies in a very short period of time, has worked with over 500 firms worldwide, and has placed nearly 600 fully-tra trained virtual assistants with his clients. He has shared his inspiring story of success on multiple podcasts and even featured in Fox and Forbes. Ravi, it's very, very cool to talk to a guy like you that's already kind of worked through the systems and picked up a lot of people. So excited to have you on. I appreciate you having me on here, Tommy. Seriously, everybody else that's listening back home, thank you guys so much for tuning in. a lot of people so excited to have you on i appreciate you having me on here tommy seriously

and everybody else that's listening back home thank you guys so much for tuning in i've done literally hundreds of these and i still am so uncomfortable when people are reading my bio like i don't know what to do with my hands or the whole process there but thank you for going through the whole thing without a hitch for sure yeah no it's great i I'm really excited to hear your story from your point of view. Your story of success is really interesting because it seems like at the start you were going down a different journey and kind of shifted. I was wondering if you could tell me about where you were, where you're at today and what your plan is, where you're going to be going. Yeah, what an awesome question. And I'll keep it short but like I was gonna be a lawyer that was like the number one goal in my life was to go to law school and I had worked for the governor for a few years and

You know, I had watched every episode of law and order online that there was and so I thought that I knew what it was like to be a lawyer, but I graduated college. My dad was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. It kind of threw me for a loop I had to pretty much put everything on pause and go move in with him in Atlanta, take him to chemo and radiation five days a week for a year. And during that process, I'm also studying for law school. At the end of the whole thing, my dad goes into remission and I just take a second and I go, is this really what I want to do? I'm sitting in this chemo and radiation with 30-year-olds, 32-year-olds, 35-year-olds who thought that they had their entire life ahead of them. And now they're facing stage three, stage four cancer. And I just was like, I don't think

that this is the right way. I think there's another way. And so I got into the schools of my dream. One of the top law schools in the nation, but I actually ended up dropping out. And I Googled how to make money online. And it was a really rocky start. I have to use my mic over there, but that's the legitimate truth. I got retargeted by an ad. It was a really rocky start. The first six months made about $6,000 in total revenue. But now two and a half years later, we just hired our 35th employee. We, like I said, have over 800 clients, have clients and employees all around the world. And I kind of travel globally as well, visiting them, visiting our trainings in the Philippines, et cetera, et cetera. So quite the interesting journey. I would say that not anywhere close to where I want to be. My biggest fear is

that the small success I've seen right now makes me comfortable where I'm at. And so I'm continuously pushing myself and trying to strive for greatness. But to answer the last part of your question, where do I see us going? Not 100% sure yet. I'll be really honest for everyone watching this video right now. I'm not a great goal setter. I'm really not a good goal setter. I kind of just like wake up every day and just like do the things that I know works. And there's like pushing me further and further along my journey. But I would like to have impacted 10,000 people by the time I turned 30. And we're at 800 right now. And I'm 26 years old. So that's the farthest out I have right now is 30 years old. I want to have 10,000 clients, helping them kind of systemize and scale their business, all service-based businesses by removing themselves from it.

Well, let's talk about that since we're on the subject. Explain to me how you, obviously it's software related, I'm guessing, user interface, things of that nature. There's checklists. We could talk a lot about scaling with systems, but where do you come in? What's your typical avatar of a client and how do you come in and help them? Yeah. Awesome question, Tommy. So essentially our typical client is usually in the higher ticket space. So they can be, you know, brick and mortar place or it can be online sales and really doesn't matter. But we like clients who, if we help them get a client, they make a few thousand dollars, not $10 or $15.

So we work for higher ticket clients and they're usually seeing some success already. So about $100,000 in annual recurring revenue or more. However, it's usually one to three employees, usually a lot of times just the business owner, maybe one or two other people. And they're kind of stuck working in the business, the business owner is. And they show up every single day and they're barely getting by. They're not seeing the month over month growth that they're kind of hoping for. It's like a struggle every single month to get clients. And they're kind of on that hamster wheel.

And so a lot of the things that we do is we identify bottlenecks, which in service-based businesses are almost always a lead generation aspect. Especially local service-based businesses. They rely heavily on referrals. And so what we start doing is we start building assets like sales funnels and websites and online ads where they can start getting booked appointments or jobs or orders on autopilot. And that's not just a buzzword. It means they literally wake up in the morning with these things already on their calendar. And that's usually the first place that we start is making it so that they have a consistent stream of new leads coming in on the front end. And then once we have secured that and we have that down, then we start looking at,

is the business model that you're currently doing right now, is that hyper scalable? Meaning, could you sign 20 people up today and be able to service them without your whole system breaking down. And if that's not the case, then we start figuring out, do you have too many offers? Are things too complicated? How simplified is your fulfillment service? And then we'll work on the backend with them as well. Once we know we have consistent cashflow and leads coming in, we'll work on the backend process of it, systemizing that fulfillment aspect so they can truly fully remove themselves from the business. And then they can do essentially whatever they want, exit the company, scale it up even more,

et cetera, et cetera. So service-based company, can you give me a few examples? Yeah. So advertising agencies, SEO agencies, coaches, consultants, we have a lot of real estate investors, a lot of real estate agents. We have HVAC companies, carpet cleaning companies. I'm trying to think of what else comes to mind. We had a dog, the second largest dog food company in the UK just joined us a few weeks ago, which that's not really service-based, but they came from a referral. But yeah, pretty much anybody that's helping somebody else. And like I said, in the higher ticket realm, we're not doing it where it's like a plumber comes in and they get 50 bucks or a hundred bucks from something. It's usually going to be a higher

ticket because it's just so much faster and easier to scale a company when you have higher margins. And it sounds like a no brainer, but a lot of people think that it's so much harder to sell somebody on a $2,000 thing than it is to sell somebody on a hundred dollar thing. And in my experience, that's just not the case at all. I like that. But HVAC, there's small tickets. There's $200, $300, and then there's your $10,000, $15,000. So how do you separate that?

Yeah, so a lot of the times in our qualification process, whenever we're helping people. So I just did the stats because I did a YouTube video yesterday. We cancel 68% of the applications that come into our company because we ask questions exactly like you said, which is what's your average ticket price? How many new customers are you getting a month, et cetera, et cetera. And as I had said earlier on, if they do do the lower ticket stuff, that's when we're saying, is this a hyper-scalable model right now? I mean, every one of these $100, $ 100 200 jobs you have to have somebody going out there somebody fulfilling it and that's time taken up and that you could similarly be doing it for one thousand two thousand three thousand five thousand dollar jobs as well and so for us if they are in the lower ticket range one of the things that we will do is help them transition into the higher ticket range or even a lot the times, we've even seen some of the

service-based people that are brick and mortar transition to online sales and higher ticket consulting or subscription-based models where they are allowed to do a home improvement or HVAC or essentially on-call services for $1,200, $1,500, $2,000 a year in annual recurring revenue. And then we're starting to build up the subscription-based model, which has huge, huge, huge benefits, especially if you're looking to exit the company. You get a much higher multiple when you go to sell, right? Exactly. That's the main thing. Like literally an insane higher amount of multiple when you're going to sell. I mean, and statistically speaking, I was reading a book the other day,

Subscribe, incredible book. And he was talking about statistically speaking, I was reading a book the other day, subscribe, incredible book. And he was talking about statistically speaking, subscription based companies have a, like, I think it was a 13 times faster growth rate than S and P 500 companies, which are obviously the 500 best companies in the United States. So I'm sure you're going over there to get the book literally right now. So I've got it. You know, there's another book, the automatic customer. Have you got a customer? Yeah. That's by the gentleman that wrote Built to Sell as well, right? Yep. Great book. Great, great book.

Built to Sell. I don't know where this stuff is sometimes, but I have it right here. Here's what's selling your business for a premium. You know, I just like to read these books and understand, but right now, oh, here's The Automatic Customer. Yeah, by John Warlow. That's what it is. Yeah. It's just nice to be able to, even if you don't plan on selling the business, it just makes sense to build it to sell. It just makes a lot of sense to do that. Even if people say, I like to be with my clients, I like to be in the face of it,

then be able to have that decision. Most people, it's not a decision they're making. That's a rationalization because they can't exit their business. But the people that I know, a lot of our clients, they're still really interactive with their clients and their customers, but that's because they choose to, not because they have to. Well, I don't care who you are. You should build a company to sell it, number one. Even if you're not going to sell tomorrow or in five years, it should be marketable a lot of people and i've had the conversation kind of between some senior management of just understanding exactly when it makes sense because it's really not you know we don't need to sell we might take

a bite out of it is what they say you take take a bite out of the apple, this huge investment fund comes in, or private equity fund, and they're going to help you scale faster. That's why they say franchise, license, go with private equity. There's a lot of ways to skin the cat, but right now home service is hot. I'm telling you, it's really hot because of COVID. It's hot because the movie theaters and the bars and the hotels and the huge buildings right now are not as attractive as they were. What if there's another COVID 20? I mean, COVID, the strand as it starts changing, we're deemed essential.

You can't make this stuff up. I didn't make this up, but right now it's, it's very good. And right now Amazon is growing like crazy because they're able to deliver. And I think the world is in for a shock. I think this thing, can't say it was planned, but you could definitely say some strange things going on. You go to a restaurant, as long as you wear a mask when you're standing, you won't get it. But when you sit down two feet away. Don't even, I could go in.

I just left California for that exact reason. I lived there for a year and a half and I'm thinking in my head, we're talking about business here. If California was a business, I would ask for my money back. For 10% of my money that I'm taking home, I'm paying for the ability to have to be told I have to wear a mask whenever I'm working out, whatever. And we don't have to go into this politics side of it, but between the homeless, the trash, that as that as well i'm just like what am i doing here this is not a fair exchange of value for me so that's why i came back to florida in the first place well the american dream for me was i didn't come from a very poor but it was very not wealthy by any means it wasn't like we were struggling to put you know food on the table necessarily there were times that it was tougher than others like any family but i think i'm kind of living

the dream of saying i can succeed i can work really really hard choose to kind of put money away and see it multiply with compound interest and the government's not going to take it from me and i'm not trying to be too much into politics here, but if you want to get me disincentivized, then take all my money and tax me more. I just think it's kind of, you know, there's a lot of people that take advantage of the system in both ways. Rich people do.

Extremely wealthy people. Not somebody that makes $400,000. I'm talking about the people that are making millions and billions a year those are the people that are taking advantage and then there's always the other side that people live on welfare for their whole lives when they don't need to be it's supposed to meant to be a bottom but what people don't realize is they're not only taking but they're not putting back in at least for the wealthy corporations if if there's 7,000 people working for them, all those people are paying into taxes. And here's the thing. They're not paying near the rates that we're paying because we've got better CPAs and lawyers and things helping us do this stuff.

But, you know, you've grown a really successful business in a couple of years. It's a short time. Tell me what's the secret sauce here because I see a a lot of people try to scale and they scale too fast and they're not profitable. And they didn't fire when they should have. They didn't top grade when they should have. And it seems to be top heavy at times. Yeah, I'm super proud. And I'm not afraid to say that out loud.

I'm super proud to say that for my seven figure companies, we retain a 60% profit margin on them. And the reason we're able to do that is because we didn't accept capital when we started. I've had multiple offers for outside capital, and I've never taken it because there is a place, there's a time and a place. I'm not going to say it's not ever useful, but I do think that capital can kind of make you fat and lazy. And it makes it okay to be acquiring customers at a loss, right? If you're acquiring them, and then you're eventually quote unquote lifetime value, in eight months, you're going to get that be in the green. Well, then you're just continuously burning cash at this rapid rate. And so for us, I was like,

just forced out of necessity to essentially figure out I mean, the main part of it is, is building this machine, which I talked about and what we help our clients do, whether it's paid ads, whether it's hiring virtual assistants to do messaging, whether it's cold calling, where you're putting in $1, $2, $3, and you're getting out $6, $7, $8, $9 back in the shortest timeframe that your fulfillment allows. So for real estate agents, it could be a few months. For online sales, it could be a few days. And so just structuring my companies around, okay, what's an example of some really high profit,

high impact fulfillment that I could do? Well, service-based coaching, consulting, and digital products is a great example of that. And what are some really great traffic sources that I can scale up for my target market is Facebook ads, YouTube ads, cold email, cold calling, and then building a machine around it where we're taking total strangers who have never heard of myself or my

company. And then and one of our different traffic sources, whether it's these kind of videos, podcasts, my YouTube channel, my Facebook group, the paid ads, having them get some kind of training, understand who our company is, go to our website, whatever it is, and then just having the right systems and people and procedures in place to what seems like what we call the invisible funnel, take them along this journey to the point that our average person from when they opt into our page to when they pay us money is about 12 and a half days. From the time they book an appointment and pay us money, it's about six and a half days. And from the time

they show up to the call and they pay us money, it's about two and a half days. And so shortening that window and then being able to scale that up is a really big reason of the way we've been able to hit these numbers while retaining these profit margins. So you're probably always AB testing. 100%. AB testing ads, AB testing traffic sources. We get really granular with our data and we're able to see what YouTube video did someone watch when they came into us, right? Was it YouTube organic? Was it YouTube paid? What did they come from our Facebook group? What assets did they consume? And so a lot of people, they have no idea where their leads are coming from. And then even if they're running paid traffic, like I know people running six figures a month of paid traffic, but it's just meddled together. One of my clients, Jeff, he runs a credit consulting company. And he recently just learned what's to be said in the tracking for his company

that he spends about $120,000 a month in YouTube ads. And what he learned was he is barely breaking even on YouTube ads. And he runs a really successful company, barely breaking even on YouTube ads. But because the YouTube ads is blending in with all of his other traffic sources, it looked like he was really profitable on it. And so he was able to turn that off. And now his profit margins jumped by 40%, literally by doing that one thing. So yeah, tracking and doing these kind of split tests is a huge, huge tool that we use to keep our company super profitable. You know, it's funny because we talk about marketing all the time on the podcast. And one of the things I like to think and talk a lot more about now is

marketing for employees because getting the right people in the right training, everybody thinks, how do I get more leads? How do I get more leads? How do I get more leads? You could use a lot less leads. You got the right people getting great reviews, asking for referrals, networking, doing things on their own social media profiles, going out next door and saying, I'm the best garage jerk guy or HVAC guy in your neighborhood and I can give you a discount.

You get your current employees right. Watch how awesome and fast you can grow. And I feel like most people miss that they say i need more leads but they're chasing after the next lead where their conversion rate average ticket average review average booking rate all this stuff is not where it needs to be and you know i think everybody gets the biggest companies i know and the problem is when we get too big sometimes we forget where we came from and it's the little details of top grading and making sure the right employees you said something really interesting are we acquiring customers at a loss and i'm embarrassed to say but i'm sure there's

certain markets that today we're paying too much for a customer not because they're the wrong customer but maybe we don't have the perfect avatar to find. Maybe we didn't get the right person on that call because you're right. I can sell everything from six, seven, $10,000, but I can go all the way down to like, we've got something starting at $45.

And the question is, is the better your employees are trained, the better you're going to do. Because that's what- Yeah. I'm sure you've also read Jim Collins' Good to Great. I can tell by all the books on it. Yeah. So obviously, you know you're a successful business owner. And the other people I know that are listening to this,

service-based businesses, where you have to have people in the office with you on jobs, which is even more important than having remote. I feel like remote, I honestly feel in a lot of ways remote is so much easier to do. People say it's opposite, but I think remote is so much easier to do than having the in-person team because you're also dealing with a local talent pool, which is really difficult. My brother runs a bunch of restaurants in the state of Florida and he deals with a local talent pool there. And that's a big issue he has.

I have employees globally. I can go anywhere around the world and get an employee to help us out. And so you're 100% correct. One of the best things that we did was we created what we call the ramping Bible inside of our company. It's about 35 different pages long. It's a Google document. And we give it to every single new employee we get. And it teaches them everything about my background story, all the podcasts I've been on. And then it teaches them about what does our company do, who our client avatar is. And then it teaches them about some of these stuff I'm talking about on here. Client avatars, customer acquisition, split testing, lead generation, client fulfillment. And so I kind of create this army of little rubbies, which if you're listening to this,

you're probably going to think it's terrifying and you just met me. But I create this little army of people that are thinking and acting and talking just like me. And the only way you can really truly do that without, once again, increasing your overhead, increasing the amount of time it takes to ramp a customer is having your hiring process really systemized. And we've done that really well to the point that I have a gentleman, he's 17 years old in Canada. He's collecting 30, $40,000 in cash for us every single month. He wasn't doing any sales before this, and now he's absolutely crushing it. So I could not agree more. I don't want to say the culture thing because I feel like it's a buzzword and I don't want to go there, but yeah, having the right people and making sure, even if they're the quote unquote, right people,

having made sure that they really, truly understand. I think ownership of the company is really big, especially if you're in these kinds of service-based businesses. If you can get your employees to feel like they own a piece of that, then they're going to want to ask for referrals. They're going to want to ask for them to leave reviews and they're going to want to upsell them in these certain offers because they feel like they're helping their company. And that was one of the biggest things that we've done for our company is explain to everybody how everybody is their own CEO. Everybody's their own employee of their own business owner of their certain sections of

the company. And that's been really, really impactful for getting, like you had just said a second ago, the right people on the bus, essentially. So, you know, I've read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And that's when I got obsessed with virtual assistants. There was a time I had 25 virtual assistants doing a bunch of different things, everything from social media. I mean, I had a group of six people everything from social media i mean i had one i had

a group of six people doing send out cards for me i mean it was like hitting land mail and see i was doing it all and i just i've done a lot of work for the people in the philippines you know now they build software to make sure people are doing stuff and getting it done. I find that right now, if you opened up to just North America, there's a lot of people out there that they're working on raising their kids and they've got an extra three to five hours a day. And they're very good. Some of them are lawyers, some of them are doctors, some of them are nurses, but they don't want to go back to that career until their family, they raise their kids to a certain age. And the level of output, the quality versus quantity is very, very important. I'm curious to hear your point of view

and how you set up the systems, because I believe that if it's so easy, anybody could do it, like anybody. I mean, that's how McDonald's is, and that's why it's very successful. But the systems let them make anybody could do it, But there's still got to be some level like outbound calling. You need to speak good English. Right. That's a must. You need to be able to write well if you're going to be a content creator. Some of these are skilled to a certain extent. So at what point do you decide to bring in somebody from Russia, Ukraine, you know, the VAs, the Philippines? I haven't had much of China, but all over the place. What are the tasks and how do you monitor that? Yeah, it's an awesome question. So I'm going to

start with the last part of that. How do you monitor it? I will say it goes back to having the right people on the bus. So we have monitoring software, but in two and a half years of having virtual assistants, I have never had to check it once because I really care about output. I just care about what are the results that these people are producing. And I could care less. If they can get what I want done in four hours as opposed to eight hours, then so be it. That's totally fine with me. And I think that with any employees, if you're having to monitor every single thing that

they're doing, their click activity, whatever it is, there's not really a whole lot of trust there. And I think that too often people treat virtual assistants like they almost start the relationship expecting them to betray them or to do bad or that they're not competent enough or whatever it is. Where I actually, just through my own naiveness from having my first employee be a virtual assistant was just like, oh my God, I'm so excited. I gave them so much discretion. I gave them my credit card to be able to buy like leads, whatever we needed to buy. And, you know, obviously there's horror stories out there, but for me, I think one of the real big reasons we've had this success we've had is I've just been

like, I've treated them like anybody else and I've given them so much discretion and allowed them to have problem solving capabilities. And because I've allowed them to do that, even if they weren't necessarily or didn't have those skills to begin with, they grew into them as almost an expectation to be able to work with this company. But I do understand what you're saying. And there's definitely some things that do require some skills beforehand. That's why for our clients, every virtual assistant we hire has to go through a 60-day bootcamp. They go through multiple tests. They go through speaking tests. They go through internet tests, et cetera, et cetera, to be able to figure out how do we turn this person into what I like to call literally a lethal ninja

to the point that you can place them in. We have them running Facebook ads, them doing cold calling, qualifications, setting appointments, setting jobs. Actually, we're even doing sales for some lower ticket clients of ours. And you couldn't tell the difference between them and someone that you're hiring in the United States. And so for us, I 100% agree with what you're saying, but it's just like going to a restaurant. Some restaurants are not that great. And then other restaurants are incredible. And you're just because you go to a not great restaurant doesn't mean that the incredible restaurants don't exist. So I know plenty of clients that have had really terrible experience with virtual assistants. But I also know plenty of people who've had terrible experiences with US-based employees

or Canadian-based employees or UK-based employees. And I actually see it more as a function of that client and the employer a lot of times than the employees themselves. And so we've been really blessed to have some really quality virtual assistants. I also, just so everyone here knows as well, we have 35 employees. I actually only have three virtual assistants in my company that we trained. We trained over 800 for my clients, but I only have three in my company and everybody else is based in the United States, Canada and South America and UK. But the virtual assistants that I have do, they run multi six figures and tests

and assets for our company. Let me tell you a quick story and why I asked the question. I had a guy come on now who's my COO and he's amazing. He came from the airline industry. And I told him from day one, you got to inspect what you expect or otherwise you're going to get taken. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, Tommy. Give them their freedom. They'll go do the right thing. Give human beings a bigger and longer leash

and whatever he said. And now if he came in here, he'd go, you got to inspect what you expect, buddy. Because we just passed 300 employees. And the fact is, I'm going to pass 1,000 next year. But the way we get there is, you got to give them a playbook, which is a manual. And it sounds like you give them a boot camp and give them your ramping up Bible. I think that that's really great. I think the manual, but they also need to know if they're winning or losing the game. And it can't be like,

I think you won. I guess you could say, I think you won because you made us money. So you must be winning. But I've always thought the KPIs in my CRM were, they tell us what's happening. They told us what's winning. And you're right. I've never said, if you could do this job in a couple hours, go ahead. I walked out of my building a year and a half ago. And the nice man that took care of the painting on the inside said, do you like this color? I said, perfect. I love it. Do it. Well, he didn't paint it in a gloss. He painted it in a flat, which means every time someone touched it left an oily mark on the paint. So we had to repaint the whole thing. So by not delegating properly, by not giving the right instructions, by not creating checklists, I found that we assume that people know the right thing to do.

I've literally gotten so pissed and said, isn't that just common sense? But I'm sure you've been in a situation that's similar. It's because for some people, it's not common sense. And I think it is. Most stuff that people tell me is not common sense. I remember I used to work on cars with my dad and he'd be like, Tommy, isn't that common sense. And I think it is. Most stuff that people tell me is not common sense. I remember I used to work on cars with my dad, and he'd be like, Tommy, isn't that common sense? I'm like, no, I don't work on cars. So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I agree with you 100%. And you have 300 employees. You're going to hit 1,000 next year. That's incredible. And you're correct as well. Everything I'm saying about giving them the freedom, whatever it is, I should have specified. We give them the things we want them to do with specific KPIs from these certain dates. And then I say, if you can find a better way to do it, then you're more than welcome to. That's how I should have phrased this. So I still say, follow these exact instructions,

do this, do this, do this, do this, do this. However, if during this process, you feel like this part is redundant, or you can do this a little more effectively, then by all means do that. But the bottom line is we want this kind of KPI and we want this result, but I could not agree more. But my point was, it's also not just the virtual assistants. I have employees. I've just let a person go that's United States as a salesperson because of, you know, some of the things that he was saying on the calls. And like you just said, I'm like, does it make sense to tell that to somebody? Like we don't even offer that and to promise

them that like, does that make, well, I don't know. I'm like, okay, well like that. So common sense is not common. I couldn't agree more with what you said. That's awesome. I think a hundred employees is incredible. So that's really, really incredible. You know what I found though, is my next big trip I'm going to do is going to be to go visit a huge company that's well over my goal next year because I want to not make the same mistakes that they're making or they might have made in the past. It's pretty interesting. I can tell you that. Going and visiting a company that you want to become or maybe that you want to grow past or whatever it might be, I think is a huge benefit. And it's one that people always talk about doing, but they don't come in even ready. They'll come tour the place. The problem is you got to ask

the right questions. You got to make sure you're with different members of the team. You have to have a plan going in and this should take time. You should spend weeks on just the questions you're going to ask. A lot of people say, I'm just going to put myself in that area, and maybe I'll just be a sponge, and that's fine. But you're going to get a lot of stuff that you don't need and don't want right now. Maybe some stuff that you might even be better at that you shouldn't even have taken the advice. So go in where your weaknesses are and be able to recognize that. I think a lot of businesses don't take time to do that. You know, how much has networking meant to you and your success here in the last couple of years?

Yeah, a considerable amount. So I met, you know, the first six months in business, we did $6,000 total revenue. I was, it was terrible for me. And that was because nobody around me was doing what I wanted her to do. And I also like couldn't talk to anybody. I didn't even know if everything

that people were saying online was real or not. I didn't know if people were just lying on social media, whatever it was. And it wasn't until I went to my first mastermind event in Atlanta, Georgia, that I finally could touch and feel the first person that was doing six figures a month on these online companies. And I could speak to them. And like you said, had my questions ready. What would you do in this situation? I'm here. And have them answer it to me. And then I actually ended up meeting my future roommates and some of my business partners and my other companies in that same mastermind. We had a beautiful house in San Diego.

Now we're getting a gorgeous house in Miami. And we can all easily afford to live on our own, our own house, whatever it is. But we choose to stay together just because of that kind of power of that mastermind networking effect as well. And then the other really great part of it is from their connections, I'm able to now tap into their networks as well. So all the hard work that they're doing to network with other people, I now easily just get the fringe benefits of that. And they can see me on their social media, see me in their videos,

whatever else it is. So I would argue that probably one of the biggest reasons I've been able to do some of the things that I've been able to do some of the things that I've been able to do in the past two and a half years has just been whether it's networking and having the right employees, networking and having the right friends or coaches, consultants that you can rely on. I would say the networking is an absolutely critical part of it. So much so to the point that I have turned down multiple offers to work with or get equity in other companies because I did not like the structure of the teams there. I did not like the people in those companies. I couldn't see myself learning a whole lot or being able to give

back in the value to them. Yeah, that's interesting. You know what the biggest thing you're going to have to do as you start being more successful is the power to say no is what most people fail at. And when you spread yourself out, you know, you're feeding a whale. I mean, the opposite of that. You're doing the opposite. But when you can focus all the time and energy, and it's tough, you got to get great people that are able to handle the load of a lot of things. But your job as a CEO is to just make sure every department is not necessarily killing it, but they're growing along with each other. Right. You're able to find bottlenecks. And I think that's kind of the job as the company grows.

You are the culture. You are the leadership and you are the bottleneck finder. Those are three big things that I think. One of my questions here is, some people have grown their business without a lot of systems, especially the home service business. And this is what people don't know. You give me a real estate company in an office, that's easy. You give me a restaurant, that's easy. You give me a lawyer's office, a dentist. All I got to do is confine what's in these walls. As a home service company, we got to find somebody that doesn't hopefully smoke a bunch of cigarettes and smell up the whole room when he's with somebody or she's with somebody. Not an alcoholic, not a drug addict, clean driving record, decent on the eyes, not like

tattoo, you know, tears coming out. And then you got to find somebody that's decent at scales, good mechanically. They're going to drive great always. It's easy to see if someone's an asshole at a restaurant because the guy stands up and goes, this guy's a jerk. When it happens at the house, it's hard to figure it out. We had 8,000 customers last month. 8,000. So how do you get the systems in place? And this is what you should think no matter what, if it's an e-commerce

business is how do you systematize your business? Because I do think it's a requirement. Talk to me a little bit about how systems define a company's success. What an awesome question. And I also want to say, I literally, it's so funny. You said the saying, no, I just published a YouTube video maybe 14 days ago called the art of saying now and how I attribute a lot of what I've done today to it's literally a thumbnail of me. I'm like with Bob Ross's wig and I have an easel and I look like I'm painting. It's called the art of saying no, but it's, it's legitimately, I had a whole video on how important that has been. And I literally say, once you get to a certain level, all you're doing is saying no to people, friends, family, employees, opportunities, you're just saying no and saying on course. So nailed it right on the head. And I'm happy that

you confirmed it because obviously I'm learning from you too. But I think it's so cool being the business owner because I get to also, like when I see another business and I see the struggles they go through and they still deliver a quality product, I'm like, kudos. I'm like, hats off. I will leave a Google review or a Yelp review for that person because I actually see more often than not, someone has a terrible business. Someone is doing a bad job at business. And so our moving company that we recently had come in and they did an incredible job. I left them a review. I tipped the moving guys. Home services companies, 100%. My brother has a restaurant, which I know is not as severe as some of the things you're saying, but he's also dealing with this local talent pool. And like, I hats off, salute everybody in here that's watching this, that has it,

you have a really tough job and sometimes you're really encroached inside of it. And so it's like, you have to do this and the systems aspect of it, there's some things you can systemize or some things that you can't systemize, or it's a little more difficulty. It requires more creativity. So it's a little more, that's like kind of what Tommy and I were saying earlier with some virtual assistants, you can give a certain job to because it's really systemizable and other, you need to have a little more problem solving skills to be able to come up with a solution because it's kind of hard to put on paper, you know, what the solution is. You might not even really know what the system is yet because it requires as high level of thinking. But as far as implementing systems inside of your company,

100% it can lead to your success. I think that I've talked about lead acquisition, customer acquisition leads a lot inside of here as well. The first place, in my opinion, that people should start is if not the hiring process, like I really do believe in that, having some kind of ramping Bible, having some kind of way you can consistently be acquiring employees, some kind of application process, a vetting process, make it as automated as humanly possible, and then have someone there to pick up the slack whenever it has to systemizing the home services, because I personally don't have experience in it, but as far as lead generation, which I have helped home service companies doing, you do need to start systemizing that. So where are you acquiring these leads from? What kind of journey are they going through? When are you getting the information of what the job requires?

And also lead follow-up after the sale has been completed, after the job's been doing, requesting a review, asking everything went well, trying to get to that lead before they had a bad review, getting to that lead before they go online and leave a bad review as well. So some of these things are a little more complicated. Some of them like the lead generation or having an automated email going after or an automated text message going after someone completes a job, it's super simple to do. So I think you should have some systems in your business. And like you said a second ago, it does baffle me a little bit that some people have the success that they have without systems in their business. And then I just always tell them the same thing. Imagine if you put some systems in there. If you're doing this well, balancing 100 things on your head right now,

imagine if you put some systems in there, where your company would be. I'm a big fan of APIs and Zapier and making sure... Oh, nice. It's so important. Someone walked through my office. Oh, it's been six weeks, maybe two months ago. And he goes, dude, you guys are running like 22 different software so far since I've been here because we're looking at our vehicles are running. We're looking at this thing called Linux with a camera system.

We've got a recruiting software. We've got one for automatic interviews. We've got another one for onboarding. We've got another one for payroll, but they all kind of speak to one another. We've got different lead gen things. As far as how we accept leads, we've got a thing that every single person in the world could be an affiliate as long as we build a custom page for them to land. And if someone books through that page, they get a check. They get a check all the time. I was talking about this earlier, but I think we're going to be headed for some pretty good inflation. You just can't dump billions and billions of dollars into the

economy. And you're going to notice the companies that get hurt the worst are the ones that change their prices the last. The mom pop uh macaroni and cheese shop on the corner they're not paying attention they don't pay attention to the mcdonald's costs 18 bucks for a happy meal so it's crazy but it happens to us this morning i told my guys it's kind of like a frog the frog jumps in hot water he's out boom jumps right out but if he slowly boils the water it's lukewarm slowly they don't feel the difference and that's what's happening right now is we're in this boiling pot and the people are not changing their pricing they're not adjusting how much they pay their people because right now i mean from five years ago well look at minimum wages 12 bucks now i mean

12 bucks used to be decent to pay somebody. You know, when I got into business in 2007, that was a good amount of money per hour. But what do you find about as far as pay goes? How do you keep people happy as far as employees? Yeah. So one of the reasons why we've been able to keep our profits so high is because a lot of the work that we do, we tie in some kind of commission base. So I really truly believe that obviously the culture and buying into the vision, all of that's really nice, but you can't buy groceries with the vision. So I do understand that people need to get paid. And so we always try to tie in our compensation with what we want our employees to be doing. And whether it's

our customer success managers, or the people that are actually doing the jobs, the salespeople, the people that are generating the leads, we usually give them an option. So we say, hey, we can either do flat out salary, and this is what you can make. Or we can do some kind of salary with commission, and this is what you'll make. Or we can do straight up commission, and this is what you'll make. And just because of the culture we have inside of our company, like in our application, in our interview, we have a hiring video sales letter where we literally say like, if you did not play competitive sports, this is probably not the right business for you. This is not the right model for you because we're not, we don't attack each other.

But one of my mentors said, you know, he did $90 million in the past three years. He said, we don't run a family. This isn't a family. This is a high performance team. And so I think it's the exact same thing with our company as well. And so our comm structures are really rewarding people that are doing the extra work and actually producing for this company. And it can actually be super hurtful for people that are not doing any of that and just want to skate by. And for us personally, I just had employee reviews, 90-day performance reviews. We let six people go because it was a mutual thing. I was like, look, you're not making money because you're not putting in the work. And so this is probably just not the right position for

you. So yeah, for us personally, I want my employees to be happy. We give profit share, we give compensation. And then a lot of times we'll give them the option between flat base pay hourly or whatever it is or some kind of combination between compensation and that base pay so that they can make a lot more money if they get kind of the results they do the things that the kpis that that i think will help the company you know it's interesting because a lot of people at the company make performance pay as well. I hate the word commission. There's something about it that just seems like a used car salesman. Kind of sleazy. I call it performance pay because we want to make sure we're doing the right things for the customer as well.

And so many people do a base plus a bonus structure. And I like it to be, you're going to make minimum wage. And Angela, one of the gals that manages our call center, she's the one that came up with this. She said, you can't give this plus what you should do is give this or this.

And they make it off of booking calls. She's got five KPIs. She looks at, and it's so cool because there are people that make like 32 bucks an hour some days. It goes after it's a biweekly thing. But what's super cool about it is there's other people that make minimum wage. Well, the minimum wage people fall off automatically. Yep. Kind of like survival of the fittest. I've always said 1A equals 3B. 1A player will actually run circles. So let's say you wanted to pay somebody $30 an hour. You're paying everybody else $12.

1A, that $30 an hour got you more results than $36 because three times 12 is 36 for the people out there rambling off numbers. So once you pay more, but just don't do it to do it. So many people are going to hire somebody. Don't hire somebody at $30 an hour. Let them earn it. And I would talk about

performance pay someone asked earlier about training is what do you see a need for an instructor to perform remote i let you know depending on the size of your company i think it's always good to have a laser focused person in charge of training. And then someone asked else about a manual or a tranual. And I think any LMS is good. It's better than nothing. And there's other ones out there. I really like this new one out called absorb. It's super cool.

It actually allows you to push things on. I could have Robbie go, go through a whole course right now because maybe he wasn't selling enough bottom rubber. The problem is he doesn't need to sell the bottom rubber. The problem is he needs to bring it up and educate the customer. We don't teach anybody how to sell. We just give the customer options. It might not be best. Maybe this person's moving out and they don't care. We want to do what's best for our clientele. But what are your thoughts as far as getting someone specifically for training? Yeah. So we went from six employees to 25 employees in 30 days. And that was because I had finally nailed down this training manual. And I also started running traffic

on these different hiring websites. And they would send people to this hiring video sales letter. The same way we get our clients, I was getting employees. And then actually I'll tell everybody, let's just listen to something super interesting. We actually have our sales reps specifically. We actually have our sales reps pay us $1,500 to $2,500 to come learn from us and sell for us. So that also gets literally the high performers, the ones that have some money to spend. We teach them how they can make 10. I have some guys making $20,000, $25,000 a month selling for us right now. And so I'm saying, you give me the money and it's an investment in you. And we're going to teach you everything we know in this manual here. And you're going to be making $10,000, $20,000 in the next three to six months. And I try to do it all on the manual and have everything

on the manual. But I learned through the hard that like i had to have somebody else there that was able to answer all these questions show up every single day make sure they're going through it whatever it is and it's crazy too because you have to almost find somebody it's really hard to find that right laser focused person for training because if you have someone that's like too incredible and too amazing which everyone gets all the time then someone's going to get on there and get in the training and be like i'll never be like that person or i'm not i don't associate myself with that person so this is the right company for me when they don't understand that that person's been here for a year and then on the flip side of it it's like well if you just get obviously the person that's just standing around doing nothing and they're the person

that's training where then they're going to be passing along all these bad habits as to why they were standing around doing nothing in the first place onto your brand new hire. So one of the biggest things for us was finding the right person. And I don't even know if I know the right answer to it, to be honest with you. But one of the biggest things that we had to go through was, okay, well, who is the person that I want to pretty much be mimicking or cloning moving forward for all these new hires that we're bringing on? Yeah. So that's it. Find the perfect guy. I've always taken my standard operating procedures.

I've literally followed guys around that are living them. And I built, I would say work on it, not in it. Right. Michael Gerber, you missed. The problem is sometimes you got to work on it or in it to work on it.

I had a guy come out the other day. Amazing. Helping out us, us out in the dispatch. And he sat there from six in the morning to 8 at night for three days in a row. And he said, I love your manual, but it's not being used properly. And he had a lot of good things to say. And I said, I need you to come back out here and help me because I always ask for help because that's what smart people do.

You can't be everywhere. There's a good book here. One of my favorites. That's why I've got three of them. And I've probably given 10 dozen of these out. I'm not even kidding. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. Let's run through this real quick,

because what he does, you're right. I only hire people that are competitive. They don't like to lose. There's two types of people, Ravi, in this world. Those who need to be number one and those who hate to be last. This is it. Aspire to be number one there, the one. I like that.

It's aspire to be number one. So Chad Holmes and my buddy interviewed for him before he passed away. Let's just do a fake interview real quick. So I'm interviewing you. So Ravi, real quick, you applied to A1 Garage Doors. Tell me why you think you possess the skills necessary to not only fulfill sales, but also handle it mechanically, drive the car and be respectful to your employees. But I just really want to focus real quick on sales.

Yeah. So for me personally, I have sold over $3 million in the past two and a half years of being in business. I know how to generate my own sales from scratch. So I don't even need to rely on the sales that you have to give us as a company. I know how to go out there and generate them and bring in business at no additional cost to you. And I have been in a competitive environment for as long as I can remember. I was president of my school. I ran my soccer team, my football team, and my tennis team throughout middle school, high school. And then I played club sports whenever I was in college. So I'm used to being number one. I have to be number one. And to be really honest with you, Tommy, if I'm not top

of the leaderboard, it actually pisses me the fuck off. So this is what Chad Holmes would say. And this, you did really well there, but I would say, you know, that sounds great, Robbie. And it sounds like you're an amazing guy. I'm just, I'm just not sure. This is kind of high pressure. We really pride ourselves on great people that are great at sales. They make our customers laugh. They get five stars.

They're able to get high conversion rates. And it just sounds like to me, there's probably going to be too much stress on you. I just kind of think in this job it's probably not for you and then i get defensive and then explain to you why or you quit see or yeah you're right a lot of times people go well maybe not then i didn't but the way is he's pushing to see if you're truly competitive if you're truly who you say you are you're gonna go wait a minute wait Mr. Mello. Let me just tell you this. Give me a shot. Let me put my money where my mouth is. Put me on the chopping block. You give me 90 days and I'm a record setter. And that's the difference is we got to challenge the people who say

the competitive. If you were to tell me right now, you're going to kick my ass today at bowling or whatever. I'd be like, bring it on. If you on if you beat me i guarantee this next time it's going to be a lot harder the time after that it's going to be even harder and by the time i'm done with you it's going to be very difficult to even compete with me and those are the type of people we're looking for and those are the way you build an amazing team now also you got to make sure that they're going to do well with each other and that's why we have the profiling just to make sure they could work well with others but you know a lot of these guys are in their own van they're pretty much they're not 1099s they're not subcontractors but they're almost like their own bosses in a way because they're out there pushing

themselves all day i always say guys find somebody who's better than you, whatever it might be, whether it's conversion rate, whether it's selling bottom rubber, whether it's selling new doors, selling custom doors, and call them and do a ride along. I pay them to do ride along. I love it because I can breathe till I'm white in the face, right? Like, hey, this is how you do it. This is how you do it. But when they see their coworkers, their peers, it's a game changer. It literally changes the game the game by the way i just love talking about this stuff and when i used to do the podcast you know two and a half three years ago it used to be about sales marketing sales marketing and now i'm like marketing is is everything marketing is how you get great employees it's how you keep them so you're up to number 30. What are your goals next year?

We're going into a year here. What are your next goals here? What do you want to see your growth like? So yeah, 26, like I said, by the time I turned 30, I want to have 10,000 customers. For me right now, the biggest thing that I'm trying to do is build up my organic awareness. So kind of videos like this, where we spend literally millions of dollars a year in paid ads. I know you spent a lot of money to acquire clients as well. What I'm trying to start doing is that's a lot of disruption marketing, which really works. It does like emails, whatever it is, it works well. I want to be able to have such a massive platform to be able to stand on. And it doesn't even have to be this business. It can be any business that I have. I'm able to say one thing

That's why you see like Kylie Jenner is able to have billions of dollars just because she had a massive platform and then she was Like alright, I'm doing cosmetics and I'm not gonna say that I'm gonna start, you know Showing my my boobs and ass on Instagram But I'm saying that I want to be able to have a massive by this time next year I want to have a hundred thousand subscribers to my youtube channel There's one of the main goals that I want. And we're only at 4,000 right now, but I've only been doing it for about 90 days. But I want to have such a massive audience of people that are listening and understanding

what I'm saying, that are seeing kind of the changes. I don't even give a shit if they're clients of mine or not, but I want them to be buying into some of the stuff that I'm saying so that I can have that attention and that platform to go to make decisions or grow a business any way I decided. So we had an idea the other day. I'm trying to do something kind of similar. You know, I just think I could help a lot of people. I want to create a thousand millionaires. And YouTube is a great channel. And I was thinking me and Gianni were talking. So Gianni's in Italy. He helped set up the podcast.

And Hannah is in the Philippines, and she's an all-star. So I'm not against, by the way. I'm all for it. This is the real deal. It works. What I was just going to tell you is I thought about having a camera. Gianni actually brought it up. You know, someone brought it up to me. I don't remember who it was, but just record you at meetings, just certain meetings that i don't remember who it was but just record you at

meetings just certain meetings that you don't want to get out there look when you're having a bad day have somebody record you and see it's the real deal the real under the facade and not this we're not perfect anybody that watches that's why reality tv does so well i can't tell you if you saw my cell phone of how many people have asked me about garage drawers or asked me for a repair in the last week alone, I send them to different people and they're like, dude, you must get like three to five a day. I'm like, you're just one person. I'm sending them to three people, but it really helps everything. And I didn't even know when I started the podcast, it wasn't really to help my business. It was literally to learn. And then I got it with a guy that teaches on how to podcast and he goes, well, who's your biggest client?

I said, he spends a million dollars a year. He said, so what if you could get guys like him on the podcast and figure out his avatar and have him share it with a hundred more of him? That'd be a hundred million dollars. And I said, holy crap, there's some rhythm here to our madness. So i do think you're you're on the right path to have a youtube channel i want to hear your goals as far as

youtube what kind of videos are getting the most action what are you doing on youtube to get noticed yeah so there's really two different types two different ways to grow on youtube so i've worked with some really incredible people people that have channels in the millions and are clients of mine. And so we've done the exchange of services. So the coolest thing in the world is, you know, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world owned by Google, the number one search engine in the world. So it's also the only platform out there that the half-life of your content increases over time, meaning you post a video on YouTube and the number of viewers that watches it

increases by the months that pass versus Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and 24 hours, no one even knows what the hell you just posted. And so, you know, I just casually started a few months ago. We have 4,000 subs and we collect quite a bit of cash from it.

We close an incredible, it's actually our number one lead gen source right now, YouTube Organic, which I'm not paying any money to get these people on there. And that's with 4,000 subscribers. So I'm like, if I had 10, 20, 30, 40 times that amount right now, what would my business look like? And our customer acquisition is going to be incredibly low. And like I said, they're already bought into you. They already know who you are. The close rate is super high. They're closing on one call and they buy into what you're saying. They already know half the stuff, so they get results a lot faster. And so what I've learned is there's really two different types of videos on YouTube.

One of them is searchable. And that's really what I'm primarily focusing on right now. And you hear people talking about keyword research, keyword pools, and that's some of the stuff that we help our clients do as well. It's like, okay, the video I just posted, we're doing really well is how to qualify your leads. So we've been talking about that on the on this right here as well. So lead qualification was like had about 30,000 people searching for it, but how to qualify your leads had about 5000 people searching for it, but it had a

lot lower of a search pool. And so if I'm able to take a video and use the expertise I have and actually give value, like really just give away the farm essentially, and give these people what they're looking for in these search results, YouTube algorithm is going to reward me and move me to the closer and closer to the top whenever someone types that in. And let me just tell you from personal experience, so much easier to get. I'll get on the top of a YouTube search result in three days. It can take six months to a year to get on the top of a Google search result. And so that's the number one way. That's what I'm kind of following right now. And

that's like really longer term keyword searches. Like how do you fix a garage door? How do you qualify your leads? Whatever it is. And then the second way is a viral content. And that is what you see some of these other people do like Kylie Jenner, or, you know, I don't know what videos you can watch, but you know, the titles have three words, four words. It's not searchable, but it is just like something that's mass relatable to people, right? So it could be something about the stimulus checks could be something about the economy where everybody isn't experiencing it. And the way the YouTube algorithm works is it will show it immediately to the people that have already shown interest in your video. And then if that engages really well, if the people are watching it, the number one thing

people care about, they don't give a shit about, by they, I mean YouTube, they don't give a shit about subscribers. They don't care about likes. They don't care about comments. It's really simple. Just like Google is really simple from just backlinks. They care about time watched. How much attention are people watching on your videos. And so if people are clicking on your videos and then watching it for a good bit of time, you're just going to be like, okay, this is a good indication that it's good content. So then it's going to show this video to similar people to the people that originally watched it, that liked it. And then you hit what's known as a viral effect when they go one layer deeper and they go to people that don't even know

you that aren't even really similar to you. And when that gets to the thumbs up, then all of a sudden you're on the recommended page. As soon as people hop on YouTube, that you're on this, you're on the sidebar page and people are clicking on your video. And that's essentially the viral way to go. That's not necessarily the way I'm going to grow it because I don't know. I like to keep my channel really hyper-focused, but those are the two main ways that I know from a lot of people that have grown YouTube channels to the tens of millions of subscribers and i think it's about giving amazing content and being real about it which is number one which is literally number one like that that other stuff was second to being a having utility content that has utility to it you know i look at like these influencers and some of them are pretty girls that are drinking these bangs and stuff.

That might work and it probably has because it's a huge brand now, but the question I would say is I'm looking to hire a bunch of technicians that are 22 years old. They're all following this hot chick wearing a string bikini.

But is she the best person to be the people into my maybe maybe she says listen my boyfriend is making more money than he's ever made i mean i i don't know i don't know that's just ingenuous but maybe there's a way to go about it but yeah i think that um man there's a lot of good stuff here It's really interesting because You're right YouTube's Algorithm trips on time on page and that's why There are people that

Will actually pay people To watch their videos They'll say they're these people at home Like the moms that Could literally make three bucks For watching a video for ten minutes Just let it play I want to say about while we're on

here too. I told my team the same thing that we're talking about right here earlier on today. And one of my, the same guy, 17 years old, I was talking about earlier. Here it is. He put a photo up in our Slack channel of him having all three of his computers and his phone playing my most recent video for just the watch time. So yeah, I mean, and I know the people that pay the people to watch it and yes, that's one way to do it. But like, why don't you just put that same amount of energy and just producing a really quality piece of content and then the algorithm will just reward you anyway.

You know, and there is an art to this stuff. I've worked with some of the best guys in the world at creating videos that matter. And we're almost there. We're starting to hit it. But you know what people say about me in the podcast is it's consistent it's consistent it's every single week on the week it might not be the best one you've ever listened to but it's always there and i've done it years and so many

people that they start something and you know there's a great book that i've been telling everybody to read it's called go for now. If you get a chance, check it out. I'm typing in right now. Yeah. So go for now. And basically it says start to get to used to be rejected. Cause it's like a muscle.

And I was going to talk about muscles, consistency, working out all the time. I'll give you muscles. You're not going to see a difference in a week, a month, or maybe even a couple of months, but you will in a year and consistency will change your life. But the reason I love this book is it

said, you build muscles too on rejection. My buddy used to get rejected all the time. I watched him. He used to be with a pretty girl every single week, have a new girlfriend. And I, one day I watched him and I watched him get rejected, rejected, rejected. Then finally, he's almost a yes. And I said, it wasn't really the fact that he was this great looking guy that had spoke this amazing game. It was the fact that eventually he just didn't give up. You know, that was on the Harmon brothers from Poop to Gold. They wrote that book and we're talking about viral videos. I'm kind of going back to this.

They said it's really difficult now to get a viral video because they don't want you to. They want you to pay for that. They're making it almost impossible to do it now. If you get a ton of shares, they won't show it on your time feed. They don't want people to gain the system without making money. But think about that. It's exciting for me that I could pay a hundred dollars to get a certain amount of views and see something. It's so easy, but people don't like to pay. I'm going to get more leads off of Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, probably in the next two years than I do off of Google. I mean, it's hard to believe, but the best person looking for a lead is not necessarily somebody that needs to use me today.

People say it was a broken spring. Maybe I see it's that person looking to spend twenty eight thousand dollars on wood overlay doors that are doing their research, that are looking for new ideas. It might be on house Instagram. They might be on Pinterest looking for ideas. So I want to start asking you some closing questions because I've already taken you too long. No worries. No, no worries. taken you too long. No worries. No, no worries. So you mentioned a good book here.

You mentioned a lot of good books, but one of them was Subscribe. Who's that by? It's by, yeah, Tian Zou. T-I-E-N-T-Z-O-U or T-Z-U-O, excuse me. He runs a, it's the largest subscription financial company in the United States where other people host their subscription billing on his platform. So he has all the data. If you like data, the whole book is about the data behind subscription businesses. Well, you know, I just think that for me, even to get somebody on an annual service agreement is a huge subscription and we've got

some pretty cool ways to do that and then what are two other books that really i know from good to great or built to last do you have a couple other books that you really recommend that it could be yeah yeah my favorite book of all time which we actually give to every team of our clients is called the slide edge by jeff ol. Really, really incredible book. Just pretty much talks about the compound effects that I think his name is Dan Hardy or Darrell Hardy. Yeah. Darren Hardy. But he was a mentor of Jeff Olson and he's actually, I think he wrote the foreword in his book, but the slide edge was like the original one of that, which is pretty much what you had just said a second ago. And just like doing consistency over time, whether it's good or bad, in the right direction, the small decisions that

you make every single day, the hamburger, not to call that lead, not to do cold calls that day. It doesn't kill you today. It doesn't kill you tomorrow. It doesn't destroy your business in six months. But one year from now, two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, you wake up and you go, how the hell did I get here? And I can just say from someone who's just done, which is not a whole lot, but done a considerable amount more than other people that I know my age, I should say. And it has to do with me, like that slight edge. And it just me like not stopping this momentum and just doing the right things every single day. And then the other one that I really love, I read a lot of autobiographies. I just finished Warren Buffett's autobiography, which is great. But Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography,

Total Recall, I give it as gifts to a lot of my friends and family. But it's a really good book to make you realize how lazy you really are. Because at one point, he's winning Mr. Olympia. He runs a successful concrete business out in California. He's taking accent removal classes. And he's working out four hours a day and doing movies as well at the same time. And so anytime I feel like I can't work out, I always remember that. You know, there's a quote I wanted to read real quick if I could find it. It's interesting because it hits the nail on the head if you ask me. It's a lot of people, it's the routines that we get in that really change us. people don't decide their future they decide their habits and their habits decide their future yeah yeah 100 it's just crazy that

some people think that they're gonna work out two days in a row they'll be like dude wait for it doesn't work in this yeah it never happens and it's really about telling everybody what you're going to do writing it down keeping a checklist i gotta say it's so easy to fall out of that rhythm but it's so easy for me to stay in the rhythm for business but another thing is putting yourself in the right situations all the time like you you're in a house right now with roommates. Why? Because you want to be in a great situation to grow. And you want to be around people that are going to push you forward. My trainer's going to be here in a little bit. And he said, who's the guy that you drink the most with? You know, I gave him a couple dozen names. I'm just kidding. You know, he said,

look, I don't care if you go out a couple nights a week. So he said, who's the people you know that work out the most and play a lot of sports? I told him, and he said, so maybe sacrifice a night with them for them. And maybe one longer walks with your girlfriend at night. Just a couple small things. And then maybe a bicycle ride every now and then. And why don't you plan it? Why don't you get it on your calendar so it gets done? So we've got three good books.

I'm going to get them all because I haven't read any of those ones. A slight edge. Awesome. Do you know if you flip a coin thousands and thousands of times that there's actually a 1% chance greater than the side you started on? Really? And it's crazy, but that's the 1% we need to find. That 1% can separate us from everybody. That's awesome.

And Tommy, if you want to or not, if you send me your address or your business address, actually on almost every podcast, I get a book for the podcast. So I'll get you Slight Edge and we'll send it over to you. Because we do it for our clients all the time too, as a gift. Then you can put it on the bookshelf behind it and then forget that you have it yeah no it's all they're all here look at this this is uh the four disciplines of execution the toyota way leadership seller be sold the best team wins all these books they're everywhere look at this the walt disney i got all these books career magic i'm stuck right now Disney right now. That's my big one. I'm kind of going for it.

Smart guy. But listen, I always end the podcast, two things. Number one, someone wants to learn more about systems forcom just as it sounds there's going to be a bunch of free training on there and then the other best option is just type in my name into google or facebook or instagram or youtube raviabubala r-a-v-i-a-b-u-v-a-l-a and you can even shoot me a message let me know you came over from tommy and i'll answer any questions that you guys have but i would like any resources you have that could help out the audience, anything you're able to share, we're going to work on from our end. We've got a great team. I'll have Joanna reach out to you, and we'll get everything on this page.

So go to homeserviceexpert.com, and you'll be able to find all the resources there. The final thing we do here is I'm going to give you the floor. Why don't you spend as much time as you want? Some people take five minutes. And just what I like to kind of do here is just if we forgot to talk about something, or maybe there's something on your mind, or maybe there's just a take action step, but whatever it is, you got the floor. Well, that's awesome. I've never been, that's never happened at the end of a podcast. So first of all, Tommy, super grateful for you having me on here. I know I'm probably not the typical client avatar of the people you have on here, but I've both learned a lot inside of here. I've been inspired myself. So I really do appreciate you having me and the opportunity to be able to speak to you and your audience and everyone that's listening. I really do hope you guys got some value out of this. I try my best just to lead with as much value as possible. I will say this.

I've been saying a lot recently. So I've been going through an incredible amount of stress, both personal and business. I've been moving, a bunch of other stuff going on right now. And if you are thinking election, no election, economy, no economy, inflation, no inflation. If you're thinking that there's something keeping you from getting to what you want to achieve, and I'm going to sound kind of cheesy here in a second, but if you think that it's the president of the United States, or it's the economy, or it's the fact of the printing money, if you think any of that stuff is directly going to attribute to you not achieving your goals, then you're really just copping out. And you're really just, you're blaming somebody else because

you're afraid to take the action that's necessary, whether that is building the business, whether it's scaling the business, whether it's restructuring the business, whether it's focusing on lead generation, whether it's focusing on client fulfillment, building systems, doing the hard shit. I just see way too often people trying. And look, I know, trust me, I'm in one of the top tax brackets. I understand how that does play a role. But a lot of people use that stuff as kind of a cop-out. And I just challenge everybody that's listening to this right now to just really look at it and be like, is the excuses I'm making as to why I can't do

this, get in shape, build a business, scale a business, systemize a business, hire these people, are they actual reasons? Are they actual excuses? Are they actual legitimate concerns or are they excuses? And are they keeping you from getting somewhere because of some kind of preconceived notion that you have or your parents had or your spouse has or your kids have as to why you can or can't do something. So just a challenge for anybody listening to this. I'm just a big believer in that you can really do anything through the kind of the 1%, the hard work, the persistence, and just even if someone tells you no to keep on hammering your way at it, and you'll usually find your way through.

I love it. Consistency. No excuses, guys. You heard it from here. No excuses. Listen, I go out to Florida at least once a year. One of my buddies lives in Naples. Love to come.

Would absolutely love it. It would be my pleasure to have you down here, Tommy. Yeah, well, well hey you're the perfect age for a guy like me i'm 37 you're 26 we'll go out and hit the uh you know my cool city you got to know people there what some of my buddies that's actually one of my really good buddies his best friends they're like the guys that let all the chicks in and they do that stuff. Oh, yeah. We'll definitely connect up with them.

I got to see what their tricks are. But, yeah, man, I got a lot of great information. I took pages and pages of notes here, so I appreciate it. I'll be texting you and reaching out later, and we'll touch base and get some plans. Sounds good. I appreciate it, Tommy. Thank you, everybody, that tuned in. You guys have a great day.

Thanks. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And i just wanted to mention real quick we started a membership it's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club you get a ton of inside look at

what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company and uh we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically and people say why do you give your secrets away all the time and i'm like you know the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment.

I'm not making any money on it, to be completely frank with you guys. But I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.