The Home Service Expert Podcast - Using The Why Story Formula to Get Your Customers to Know, Like, and Trust You

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

Dennis Yu is the founder and CEO of BlitzMetrics, a social media analytics firm in Portland that provides clients such as MTV, Nickelodeon, and Dominos Pizza with analytics and strategy. A world-renowned expert and speaker on Facebook marketing, Dennis has been featured in various publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fox News, and CBS Evening News. He is also a contributor for Adweek, Social Media Examiner, and Social Media Club.  Mark Wagner is the Director of Engineering at BlitzMetrics. Mark has worked on analytics and infrastructure projects for companies such as Nike and Viacom. He is deeply involved in training for digital marketing agencies and local service businesses, and has been a speaker at numerous events and organizations, including the Traffic & Conversion Summit, New York Marketing Association, VendastaCon, and Trend Digital. In this episode, we talked about business systems, digital marketing, remarketing, branding...

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. Hey guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today's going to be Angle is scaling your home service business with effective systems. And I'm here with Dennis Yu and Mark Wagner. Excited to have you guys on today. This is going to be fun. I love what these guys are doing. We're going to talk about all their accomplishments after the podcast.

But right now we're going to just start out. I mean, you guys have accomplished a lot with BizMetrics. I know you are a contributor of Social Times. You're a technical marketer at Yahoo. You were the American Airlines project manager. I mean, there's a lot of good stuff here of what they've done. So it's impressive. Tell me a little bit about where you guys have come from about your business.

And really, I think effective systems is really what we're going gonna try to pull out of this towards home service businesses but I want to hear from you guys a little bit so I don't know who wants to start I'll start yeah so Mark and I are weird birds because we're engineers that know a little bit about marketing and when your systems oriented like I came from the airline industry 22 years ago think about what happens in the airlines when something goes wrong a flight attendant calls in sick. There's a weather pattern. There's a strike. Something's wrong with the equipment, like the landing gear doesn't work. There's always a backup system. And we found that when you can put systems, that's necessary for scaling. In

America, we had 2,100 flights a day with 730 aircraft. Think about all the things that need to coordinate so that people don't die in the aircraft. because of the systems we built like Sabre which was initially for American Airlines that was for fair planning capacity planning food and beverage cargo we sold that to all the other airlines and the amount of data that we had was incredible that stuff there we then built Yahoo's analytics that was 13 terabytes a day bigger than any commercial database on the planet. Only the CIA would have more data than we had. And when things like Facebook came about, Mark and I were there, both Marks, Zuckerberg and Mark Wagner. And we said, what an incredible data

opportunity. Can we not apply simple heuristic rules to be able to help small businesses that are trying to drive sales? Because if Facebook is an algorithm understands who your friends are mm-hmm and who you're with and where you and where your phone is and can predict who your next customer is going to be how do we leverage that so we've built dashboards that look at it from the standpoint of if your Facebook or if your Google how are you looking at it as a network to give the network the signals that he wants? We were talking about SEO earlier, right? And we have some common friends. How do we, I don't want to say trick, but how do we feed Google the particular elements that will help us show up in the local three pack that will help us

show up when someone types in fix my broken garage door. And these are things that are not secrets. These are basic mechanics that we know that small businesses just don't understand. And thus, you can be really good at fixing toilets, really good at roofing, really good at fixing cars, but awful when it comes to systematic marketing. You know, there's something that we're working on. We're with a company called Service Titan, they're really really smart company about three billion dollar company right now started in 2014 and what we're starting to pull in is analytics from all these different places to understand who our best customers are so it's

called regression testing and we're taking in average income of the home credit card score how much they paid off when they moved in. For example, how many garage doors they have. And we're able to really make sure we're marketing to the right people. And I think a lot of times in home service, we market to the wrong people. And not to say that the right people might be that $90,000 double income man and wife. And literally, they're not afraid to spend $15,000 double income to you know man and wife and literally they're they're not afraid to spend $15,000 on an air conditioning whereas the other company you know you go to Paradise Valley some of the richer areas you're just not getting that much paying for your buck I'm just spending so I think it's pretty

interesting to think that hey people say we should market to Paradise Valley's rich areas well most of those people have account managers kind of managing their stuff and looking. They've got one air conditioning guy that comes and does everything for all their homes. They've negotiated cheaper pricing. So I think you're talking, when you're talking about algorithms,

we're trying to predict how much money a customer's willing to spend with us because I might find a million dollar client that'll use us all the time versus the one household person. So interesting stuff stuff so let's talk a little bit about so you got a lot of businesses and systems and processes and standard operating procedures you know these guys that I'm working with are putting in 10 to 14 hours a day they're putting out fires all day long what's important you know tell me a little bit about it seems like for me we

the milestone we got to is standing up standard operating procedures manuals knowing how to win the game most people that i work with they say go hang out with this person for a week and that's your training and how do you really put systems together? Because building systems is a learning experience. So how do you do that? Well, when it's just you and it's a small team, you can spend time one-on-one and coach them. But when you have larger and larger teams and you have teams of teams,

you have to actually document. And anything that we know how to do, we are putting into a checklist. We're recording a five-minute video saying, this is how you do this particular thing. That way we have consistency. We put a quiz against it. We create a certification without that you're going to have failure. You're not going to have reliability You're not going to have consistency and thus we

Accidentally became a training company because in the thousands of young adults that we've trained as certified digital marketers I found and Marcus found that we can't train these people one-on-one. We have to provide the foundation and then as they are helping companies that do air conditioning and HVAC or a carpet repair that they actually know what to do. So the same systems that we used to train them to become pro at digital marketing are the same systems that they're using to implement so that we know we have quality control because we can look at the checklist and say which of these items did you do and if they didn't, which of these items did you do? And if they didn't do one of these items,

here's what we need to do to be able to fix it. So this is kind of important. I want to explain to the audience or have you guys explain exactly what it is you guys do with this training program and how it could apply to home services because I've got two guys in there, about 30 and 25, and all they do is figure out how to get guest blog links.

They figure out what citation sites we're not on. They figure out what marketing is over a percentage of our revenue, and they build in analytics. Right now, I've got to tell you, we're more of a technology company than a garage or a company. We're a marketing agency, and we're a revenue generator. We've got an LMS. We've got a whole you, we're more of a technology company than a garage or a company. We're a marketing agency and we're a revenue generator. We've got an LMS. We've got a whole learning management system designed. We've got a whole recruiting system built into Zoho.

All these things built together that I'm telling you, we probably have 10 different things we're using. I'm not using Infusionsoft anymore because it's switched to Zoho, but very familiar with all these different things. So explain to everybody what you do and how important this stuff is and why they might think about hiring one of the people you guys work with. Absolutely. We have training programs in 10 different universities where these young adults, and some not so young because modern college, you have people in their 30s, single moms, they're getting certified as digital marketers as they're getting their degree and being

able to help you guys audit your business. Think about it this way. Then Mark can explain how metrics analysis action works. So Tommy, when's the last time you've been to the doctor? Or maybe like a dentist. Oh, I got a dentist appointment tomorrow. Okay. When you go to the doctor,

let's say that you go to the emergency room because your son breaks his arm or something like that. What do they do? First thing is they have an intake process where they collect the metrics. So they're collecting the vitals, the blood pressure, the x-rays, right? And then they move into the diagnostics, meaning, well, based on this and the chart, it looks like you've got a broken bone. It looks like this is wrong. It looks like your liver isn't working. It looks like you have a gunshot wound, whatever it is, right? And then we move to the action. This is what you need to do.

Shouldn't it be like that for your marketing? How often do you have systematic marketing? And I think about other home services businesses, you've heard everything from everybody and you should do this and you should do that and everyone should take two pills and call me in the morning. But what if we use data and systems and checklists so the recommendations we made were based on your data and then if we implemented those recommendations we can look back and see are, and then if we implemented those recommendations, we can loop back and see, are we ranking better on Google? Are we getting more leads?

Is our conversion rate increasing? Is whatever the business metric is we're looking for working? That's what we teach. So we are systems people, but we're using it on marketing data. And Mark specializes as an AI engineer, so he's 10 times more intelligent than I am when it comes to looking at the data. I build automation systems, so in a few years the data. I have a lot of nation systems. So in a few years,

maybe we'll have this all being done automatically. But for right now, we go through a standard checklist to do it. So I make scorecards and kind of analyze where things are going right and wrong from like a 40,000 foot view and then zero went on certain things, right down to the actual ads themselves.

Oh, this ad performed better. Let's boost this. Let's do better here. And a lot of it's already done by the algorithms of Facebook it's not black box right often we think of algorithms as you know these movies where the robot gets smart and takes over the world and there's some evil guy and now the robots are all revolted that's not how we view algorithms we view them as being better sorting through the data to figure out, let's say,

all the reviews that you've ever gotten, or all the people who've ever said something positive about one of your employees or great service on Twitter. Do you know how to figure out which of those is the most powerful and which of those things you should push out there as ads on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or whatnot? What if there's a system that could do that? What if there's a system that could figure out, you know what, your name, address, and phone aren't quite right as it's bubbling all the way up through Yext and therefore on Twitter. People can't check in because the name, address, and phone isn't correct. Or you changed your phone, or you have a different contact email. What if we just had a system that was a housekeeping robot that could do that,

and we trained young adults in being able to go through this training to be able to use this scorecard to implement it. Then it's not on this crazy expertise. This is not Mad Men where you're trying to come up with a great campaign. If you're a home service business, it's very clear what you do. There's 100 other people that do the same thing. How do you stand out? You fix these basic items.

You tell your story. You let your customers do the work for you. And these are things like these young adults they're all amazing at social media right like we have young adults in our program i don't even know how to use snapchat and they're showing me how to do that and tick tock right are you tick tock i'm not but all my people are and i'm like i don't have all night to sit around and watch these videos but you know what it's becoming that's that's the millennials and we don't get a lot of money yet from millennials we're starting to but understanding how it all works and we're starting to so but they're buying homes mr mark here's 27 he owns multiple homes yeah you know what they are buying homes and they're finally moving out of their parents house and i'm a millennial so i'm

allowed to say that i'm right on the tail end of it but uh so one of the things i talk about a lot is understanding your numbers and it's all really, it's a system which is taking the numbers. My booking rate. So I start like this, I start off with what's your average ticket and then your average ticket is broken because I believe marketing is really relative. I don't tell people fix your marketing. Marketing is the last thing I fix and here's why.

You're not booking the calls you're getting. So your call center sucks. Your face toface conversion rate is horrible then i look at what's your average ticket and why is it so low and when you take these numbers and multiply them by each other you start getting this number yeah and then you got to look at the cost per acquisition what you guys are talking about yeah and the place to start for most of the home service business owners is where are your systems to analyze what's your booking rate? Where are you going to find out what CSR?

So I'm a big fan of a round robin that's waited for your best people. Right. Whether that's your best technician out there selling, whether that's the fastest guy if you're on time basis, whether that's booking a phone call. Yeah. And then what's your best marketing and how can you lift it? Because people are like, how do I get more jobs? I'm like, you don't answer the phone at night. You don't answer the phone on weekends.

How do you use technology? So I've got a backup call center. After it rings three times, it goes to a nationwide inbound center. So there's all these things that I would just tell you guys, especially listening, that fix those before you fix your marketing. But most of you, and i've been to these i hope the people that are listening are smart enough obviously they're listening because they want help and they're actually working on their business but the people that aren't listening

that should be listening don't have a website they don't understand what the google my business pages they don't understand reviews yep i went to buy out this guy's company three million dollar company yeah working on a letter of intent right now he's got 11 google reviews he spends 3 500 a month on google that's crazy 3 500 a month it's like driving with e-brake on oh my gosh it is it is so you know what do you say to these guys i love this you know you got this report and the report is you just threw it together but it's it's good because it gives you data on where you need to spend your time. And I like it because I'm familiar with a lot of this stuff.

And then there's errors that need to be fixed. There's 301 redirects and all this stuff that you can fix. So most people don't even realize this. See, you know that if you buy furniture at Ikea, you could probably follow the directions and put it together. But you probably don't want to because you're busy doing all this other stuff. But at the same time, before you're going to hire anybody, the catch-22 is you want to know what those checklist items are.

The good news is that there's a fundamental list. Have they claimed their GMB? Do they have their knowledge panel? Do they have plenty of reviews on Google and Yelp? Does their website load quickly? Do you have things like maybe Google AMP? Do you have a remarketing tag on Google and Facebook that's run through a Google Tag Manager? Do you have a Facebook page and a Facebook business page?

Do you have a LinkedIn? And do you have certain elements, assets that you put on these? The odds are they don't. They don't even have these basics. Half of local businesses don't even have a website. Isn't that crazy? They don't. 2020? Now, what if each of those items, we give you that list and we've already audited which of them are there or not. And then if you don't have a particular item, we give you the training to be able to go get that implemented. Maybe you have a young daughter that wants to learn how to do marketing and you just employ her to do it. Maybe you work with interns at ASU here and you create jobs for them.

Or maybe you hire virtual assistants in the Philippines. So for us, we're a job creation company, but the work is done based on something that we know that we can audit. And that way everybody wins. So talk about this training. I want to know more about the training because the biggest problem i see with home service owners home service business owners um they just number one they don't know how to hire and number two is they don't know how to train training is a huge deal that i'm like trying to help people out like you get an a player you can turn them a C player really, really quickly if you're not training them properly.

So tell me about your training. I think you said it's free to some people. I don't know exactly. If you're a young adult and you're enrolled in an accredited university or if you just came out of the military, you can use your GI Bill benefits. It is completely free and there's no strings. It is subsidized by the other organizations

that believe in what we're doing, like GoDaddy and Keep and Facebook and Google have contributed. This is not like Google Grants, but it is something that we do because it's something we believe in. We believe mentorship is really important. So if you fit some of that criteria, and I think it's at blitzmetrics.com slash students, you can apply, and it's a work-study program. So you get the certification, and we believe that you can't learn something unless you do it at the same time so you could learn how to set up websites you could learn how to set up remarketing to catch people

that came to your site but didn't you know or how to tie in custom audiences to say you know Merry Christmas how's your family doing right automatically but unless you implement it you're not going to remember it so these kids go through this system and they get live clients and they earn more money than they would at Chili's or whatever, right? So they're probably averaging 15 to 20 bucks an hour, which is great for the business owner. And then that helps them become, at a certain point they can either become an agency owner and get more clients or they can use this to build their resume to be able to get a

dream job at some other company. Because maybe they don't want to be a digital marketer and that's okay, but it's certainly great experience to learn how to communicate to learn how to deal with clients to learn how to write a statement of work to learn how to deal with project management because you got to coordinate these different things that have to happen within a checklist how long is this course if people are on average going and putting in a few hours a day it's about six weeks that's not bad there's six phases that we call the social amplification engine which is necessary to implement the full cycle

for a local business. Plumbing, goals, content, targeting, amplification, optimization. And we have a course on each of those. And if you're a business owner you can go through the course too but you have to pay. So you've got how many courses after that? 48. 48 courses. So training is very, very important to us. We were just with our friend Bradley in Vegas. He runs Lightspeed, which is one of the LMSs. And he said, with people, you have either three things. You either fire them, you train them, or you tolerate them. And we don't tolerate. So it's either fire or train. It's almost always a training problem. Always a training problem. So tell me a little bit about how you incentivize and motivate your employees.

Because me, once I switched to performance pay for almost everybody, I mean, some people are tough like your finance. But the finance person has to come out with reports that are accurate in a timely fashion. But it's really hard to monitor that because how do you know it's accurate unless you have checks and balances for that? So tell me a little bit about motivating the employees because a lot of people say millennials, man, they're hard to motivate. They're hard to get them to do anything. They want to have their own schedule. They want gamification. They want nurturing where the baby boomers just say, put me into work. I need money. Yeah. Well, it's an employee versus a contractor model. I think of it this way. It's not that the millennials or Gen Z folks are not motivated. Because look at how motivated they are to win in Fortnite.

To be that last one after 100 people fly down and shoot each other, right? Look at how motivated they are when it's like a Farmville and they want to win. And yes, gamification, points, leveling, unlocking, randomization, immediate feedback, the five elements of gamification. What if you can gamify the job? So what happens if you pay someone X dollars per hour versus you pay them, let's say, 20 bucks an hour for a young adult, or we'll pay you $50 to do this audit that will probably take you an hour,

half an hour to put the stuff together and half an hour to talk a client through it. If you pay someone by the hour, they have a disincentive to get it done faster. Yeah, I agree. It's going to take longer versus if they're being paid on the job If you pay someone by the hour, they have a disincentive to get it done faster. Yeah, I agree. It's going to take longer versus if they're being paid on the job and then the customer is giving you one to five stars, now all of a sudden I'm no longer the boss. Now we're on the same team trying to get the customer to give us five stars.

Why do you think Uber or Airbnb or Fiverr or Fancy Hands or these other networks work. These two-sided networks work because they gamified it to where you're being paid per task and there's a rating. So you have to do a good job because you don't want to get whatever, anything less than five stars. Even Uber is like that. Yeah. Actually, I remember something from the home service. When I was in high school, I worked as a locksmith. And one contractor I had for commercials was called ESC Mobile. Do you remember that? Yeah, I had that.

I had ESC Mobile and it was called Desco yeah that was there was two parts of it yeah it's interesting i had like three phones you know what's funny is back in the day i've learned a lot about algorithms and i've done done some affiliate stuff i've done you know there was a time where my business partner locksmith had um a thousand,000 GMBs within New York City. Oh, wow. I mean, there's ways. So right now, I think the way to do it, and I tell people this,

is white hat is the way to go. Build your business on a solid foundation. But so many people are like, you know, the hardest part is that I hear every day is, where do I start? And I go, you don't know where to start because you can't tell where the holes are in your business.

So if I was in a sinking boat, where would I start? The biggest hole, the biggest hole. So I got to go into your business because everybody's different. A lot of times the people that are listening, they have the hardest time at talent acquisition and training. So there's a couple of things that need to happen. I need to recruit the right person.

And I don't like hiring, hire the right person. I like recruiting because that means they're leaving a job for a career. And then you got to orient them. And then you got to train them. And biggest one is retain them because it costs a lot more to get someone new. So tell me a little bit about how that, when you guys are so systematic in your standard operating procedures what would you guys recommend for the listeners to go out and find the problems in their business that maybe don't have the systems and maybe they are maybe they're one time they own the business they are everything they answer the phones they do the dispatch yeah so what do you recommend to someone like that so if you want I'm happy to give you guys what we

call our DMT s our digital marketing training system so this is how we bring people in they have to actually do the work before we hire them and it's not us trying to get free labor it's them getting a taste of what it's like to go through the training and apply that training immediately then we assign them on real projects and they start out as a level zero specialist and they move all the way up where they gain multiple skills and they unlock other tasks that they can work on. Now the the idea of the employee lifecycle which is something that is true for every single business is you have to first train them on the thing

that they want to do and make sure that's in alignment with their goals. A lot of the young adults they just need a job because their parents are all over them saying you need to you know pay for college you graduated, now you need to do some stuff. So once they go through the training, or as they're going through the training, we have them go through what we call our three by three goal sheet. You want to talk about that or I'll talk about it? We should talk about it. So imagine tic-tac-toe, right?

You have short, medium, long-term goals. And you have personal, physical, and professional. And they put three items in each of these boxes so that we can see you as a person. So who is Tommy Mello as a person? He's not just an entrepreneur. He's a family man. He works out a lot. He helps other business. There's all these things that you have to do. You heard the shoe brand Asics, right? And that's the label. And it stands for animosane for Anamosane meaning a sound mind and a sound body

so if you're not physically healthy then emotionally or if there's something wrong relationship wise then you're not going to be able to focus at work but if work's not going well

or you don't have a job then you're not going to be able to you see like they all work together and just for fun because a lot of young adults and even old adults they don't want to fill out forms

right so if they don't fill out fill out forms, right? So if they don't fill out the form a week later, then they get a video from Grant Cardone. And Grant says, hey, Dennis told me you didn't fill out your three by three goal sheet. Now let me tell you about why that's important. I set my goals every single day. And here's what, and then I check at night to see how I'm doing. I set my goals for the next day. You need to get your three by three goal sheet going. So we have these cameos that come from friends of ours that are built into the training. Because what happens when you think about training?

It's like, oh, it's training. I have to sit there and it's like the drunk driving thing. You just click next. It's not engaging. So how do we make training fun? Because if they're not engaging, they're not going to be paying attention. It's going to be like, okay, I've got to sit here for an hour. I'm going to be surfing the internet while I'm sort of halfway paying attention to this

video. This is the trouble with all the learning management systems. How do you have accountability to know that they're actually doing it? You could have a quiz or a test, but how do you make it actually enjoyable? You know, that's a good question. In my LMS, what you got to do for me is I'm not here as advanced as you guys, but you got to have five minute spurts. You got to tell more stories is I'm not here as advanced as you guys but you got to have five minutes spurts you got to tell more stories storytelling shoes you've heard of the story brand and yeah really

what people always ask is why did you guys come up with this stuff why don't you let us use the customer's bathroom so I tell a funny story about one of my guys breaking the customer's toilet and literally I had to buy her a two thousand dollar000 toilet. But, you know, I am curious. Learning to me is never, I like reading. I like, you know, I think I have 450 audibles. I enjoy it. But I don't know if I ever loved, they got that new thing called luminosity or lumosity. That's supposed to make it fun to learn and remember.

But how do you make learning fun? Well, I'm very practical. Because I think that if the learning doesn't tie to their ability to make money they don't have an incentive right and the other part is has to be entertaining but it has to clearly satisfy an economic interest people that are in their early growth stages where they're under 40 they're trying to marry their girlfriend they want to move out of the apartment and get a house they're trying to buy a new truck. When we appeal to them by saying, hey, you can move from making an average of $20 an hour to $40 an hour, that makes a lot of sense.

And then we make it fun because we bring in other people, just like you do this with the podcast, they know how to do it. For example, Ashley Furniture is the largest furniture manufacturer and retailer on the planet. They have 710 stores, they do a lot of money, and their employees were just salespeople, right, on the showroom floor out there selling furniture on commission. So if you don't sell furniture, you don't make any money. Right. And we know that reviews are very important. We know that personal branding is very important to bring customers

through the door. And our reviews were horrible, right? When you look at all the stores and think about thousands of retail sales staff and they don't really care about the reviews because it's like any other furniture salesperson is like another salesperson. So we put a program in place where we would every month at the sales team meeting provide snacks and provide gift cards

to those who got the most reviews or got the most accolades. We made it important. And by doing that, we were able to raise that so our average rating was something like 4.7, 4.8 across all the stores that we had. And that drove a huge increase in sales. And a year ago, so we thought, this is great. Everything's going fantastic. And then we just discontinued having those meetings. Discontinued because literally, you go into the break room and you'd see this worship wall of snacks and fruits and all this

and make sure you get your reviews and the printouts of all the reviews that we've gotten. So we're showing that it's important. But for some reason, we thought we got the game down. We got a nail. And then what do you think happened? We fell off like anything else. And then we had to restart the whole program again. That's systems.

The one thing I've learned here, this is really, really probably a gold nugget that I've never said before on the podcast, is I see, I had a lady call me three times in the last two weeks you stick to a core and you just teach the core, the core is all you need. Because if I want my guys to sell memberships, we'll talk about memberships for two weeks. And all of a sudden, memberships will go up or sales will go down. Every time, they can only handle a certain amount and focus on that. So when you start building your training program, I remember my GM used to ask me, why do you say the same thing every week but just in a different way? And I'm like, you gotta beat it and beat it and once they feel

like it falls off, they'll fall off. It's crazy how that happens. Saying it and saying it again and then saying it again. You know, you said something earlier and it reminded me of a book because in my opinion, there's no such thing as a balanced life you can't you're not going to have a six-pack work 24 hours a day um be praying to

god every hour right and be the healthiest person on this earth it's just so there's a good book by dan thurman and i actually seen him speak it's called off balance on purpose because if you're around family all day long and you just you think you could just be around your daughter and son and be their soccer coach and baseball coach and be to every event and you think you could work out all the time you're probably not working very much so i do agree find what somebody wants so people ask me like how do you get through to your employees and i'm not the best at it but find out what their goals are. Instead of saying, if you can make a hundred grand this year, say, let me ask you this.

What, if you could do something really, really fun this year, what would it be? Maybe a fishing trip. Maybe they're going to say, fly my in-laws in because they meant a lot to me my whole life. Whatever that looks like

and really have them set. I want to be able to pay for my kids' tuition for college. I want to be able to buy my son's first car. I want to be, whatever that looks like and start talking in those terms because they don't know what most people don't care about money and here's what i've seen every guy that i've had making 50 000 they go to 80 000 do you think they have money no they don't all of a sudden they go from 80 to 120

you think they have money no they don't no they never have money i don't care how much you give these guys i got a guy that made $152,000 last year. Mm-hmm. He has one car. He has a nice house. He doesn't have money. And so what I did is I got Dave Ramsey's penny saver thing and got him going through that. But then again, I paid $7,000 for training for over 200 employees and 12 of them have used it.

Oh, man. So, but what I could do at 600 bucks each, why don't I give gift cards for every time they complete something? But at the same time,

I got to give them gift cards so they could save money. I don't, like, don't you want to motivate yourself? Don't you? But they don't.

You don't give them money. You can lead a horse to water. Yeah. Well, I tell people this. People are like, you know, I'm going on this great,

they go, why do you invite people into your office? Why do you tell them everything you're doing? I go, do you want to know a little secret? I can tell you exactly how to get everything you want in your body, your body to be perfect. And five quick things. Eat right. Sleep right. Consume your liquids right, meaning don't drink a bunch of calories.

Take vitamins and do a bunch of cardio. And you will drink a lot of water you're going to be really really healthy the problem is there's no secret diet that's just going to make you invincible yeah it's like people want to have their cake and eat it too so i'm like look i'll tell you how to get there you need to have really good systems in place to know what's going on in your business because i could go out here and say i need to fix google but i'm losing $25,000 in TV. So many people, they don't know where to spend their time. What I do is the first thing I give my managers is a sheet of paper. And I say, I break it into 15 minute increments. And I say, I want to know what you did. More importantly, I want to know every time you got interrupted. Because it sounds like to me,

you have no idea what your time management is. You wait for your last big thing. The big thing of the day, you wait to the last minute and then then you kick it off to the next day, then the next day. But they have a hard time identifying what that big thing of the day is. They go, well, how do you know what your big thing is? Systems, and more importantly, software and technology these days, I don't think there's really a COO is going to disappear. It's a CTO. It's understanding technology to kind of give you where you need to be spending your time is where you need to focus.

And that's what my CRM does for me. It says with this guy, we need to work on conversion rate. This guy's average ticket stinks. This guy is spending an hour to do a 15-minute task.

He needs to get retrained in this. And I love technology because people are listening going, how could he have all that data and how does he analyze it and how does he do it but see nobody should have more than five direct reports and i feel like this is the reason you have walls in the business that goes up and down up and down because you start taking on too many direct reports yep and then all hell breaks loose and

you go now i was managing six we were doing great now imagine 20 i would say jesus christ only had 12 disciples you know so um so tell me a little bit more so how do you manage that you know i mean sounds like the airlines was a great way to learn all this stuff because the airlines have so many issues they have so many they have baggage they got you got to book the right flight you've got this last minute flight that you got to lower the prices and then you know there's all these safety there's tires there's air pressure there's yeah i think all things go wrong and yet not many people crash and die i don't even like to think about it because i'm on a plane all the time well let me ask you this tommy let's say that what's your favorite airline i fly southwest a lot so do we

we got companion pass i saw you pulled out your Southwest card earlier. You saw that? And I got the A-list and the Companion Pass. So I've just hit 5 million miles. Oh, really? Mark and I have been all over the world at all these different conferences. But let me ask you. So Southwest, sometimes we buy tickets at the last minute. It costs more, right? Even though you have free bags and Companion and all that. But let's say that we started – there was another upstart airlines, Giuseppe Airlines, and they offered $1 flights with no extra charges, whatever. Everything's exactly the same.

It's just $1, but there's a 1% chance they're going to crash and burn. But 99% of the time, it's fantastic. The service is great. Everything's first class. But 1% of the time, it crashes and burns. Would you get on that airline? Get on the flight? No.

There's not even, I've looked up helicopters due to the recent stuff going on, it crashes and bursts. Would you get on that airline? Get on the flight? No, there's not even... I've looked up helicopters due to the recent stuff going on, what the chances are. And I don't even want to get on a helicopter. But I probably would in the future. But no, I would never take that 1% chance. Although if I was in a surgery and they said there's a 10% chance, but literally, like, I needed a new hip or I was... I'd be like... If they said there's a 10% chance but literally like I needed a new hip or I was I'd be like if they said there's a 10% chance you won't walk but I was walking and I could barely walk I'd probably

do that but you're talking catastrophic you're talking death yes I mean you wouldn't do it right think you guys would not even if it was way cheaper even if there's a heart surgeon let's say you're you know you have a daughter that needs this crazy heart surgery and you went to the best surgeon, of course, but then there's another surgeon who's like, you know what, I'll do it for one-fifth the price, but you're twice as likely to die. Yeah. And so what you said, Tommy, is the distinguishing between catastrophic failure versus an acceptable failure. And that's, so the way we build processes around that is we create something we call graceful failure. So graceful failure is a failure that isn't catastrophic. So the flight's late by 15 minutes.

Okay. You grumble. All right. The bags, they didn't get through in time. So they come on the next flight or they didn't get your drink in time because by the time, you know, you had to land, they had to put everything away or someone's like all these things are minor irritants, but those are all pieces of graceful failure. And the way you have graceful failure is you have backup systems. So if the avionics don't work, you have backup avionics. If the flight attendant calls in sick, you have the ability to call in other people. So maybe it's late because they've got to pull another aircraft or pull people from somewhere else. So think about applying that kind of thing.

And in the airlines, they have a group called OR. And most of the big companies is a group called OR. You know what that is? Operations Research. These are the guys that build systems and processes. And they're super genius. So think of yourself as working on your business, not in your business. And your business is a machine.

And you're seeing what the different parts of the machines are and like how they interact. And what are the parts that seem to fail a lot. Let's build processes around that so that there is a backup system. We also call that hope for the best, prepare for the worst. So you want to allow your people to succeed, but if they don't, what's your backup? So you never want to have a single point of failure. If you have one person who's in charge of this particular system and they hold you hostage, do you have a backup? Not because you don't trust them, but you want to have that in place.

So when you start thinking about that, it's not because you're conservative, but it's because you're thinking about your business as a system that's independent of who you are. So when it comes to, for example, Goal Setting. So people, they come in and give us their three by three goals, and then every quarter we say, hey, tell me, how do you do against your goals? And if you didn't meet your goals, or if you missed one of them, you wanted to take the trip to Hawaii, you wanted to buy a new car, you wanted to pay off your credit card.

If you didn't hit that, we are jointly responsible. So therefore, if I'm your coach, Tommy, it's partly my fault because I'm supposed to be helping you achieve those goals. So I'm not your boss. A boss is there trying to catch you in the act of doing something wrong and punish you. But me as your coach, I want to help you.

It's my responsibility to pull whatever resources and connections and projects to make sure you're working on the things They're trying to catch you in the act of doing something wrong and punish you. But me as your coach, I want to help you. It's my responsibility to pull whatever resources and connections and projects to make sure you're working on the things that you want with the people that you want, with the lifestyle that you want. So I think one of the biggest things about a system is you've heard I'll always be closing. I say I'll always be recruiting. And so many people have a hard time. I think the hardest thing in a business is getting the right people and training them properly. It really is. The difference for me is several hundred thousand dollars per employee. That's really the difference.

If I got a guy that did 1.3 million last year, I got another guy that did 400,000. Now, imagine if I switched those 400,000 in sales. But look at it this way. People put so much emphasis on the people out there that are face to face but if my average jobs just say for sake of numbers a thousand and they're taking 30 calls a day once booking 29 that's $29,000 yeah once booking 20 that's $9,000 a day now let's just say they're working 200 days out of the year how much money is 9,000 times 218 that 1.8 million 1.8 million dollars your csr lost you so so many times we get these office staff

and we don't put enough emphasis on these people and i love when we because i'm thinking about systems and i'm thinking about people and i like what's called i like to be disconnected sometimes because i don't want the business to evolve around me There's a good book called built to last right they talk about Jack Welch about a good leader should leave his business Better off when he's not there than when he's there That's right And that's by creating a depth chart and that's by saying if this person doesn't come in and this person Doesn't come in. Well the system still run properly and it takes time because I Have to say you gotta have a full-blown

Really nice orange chart because there's not two people when it's three people in the business you'll never reach this so your goal should be to fill in the voids I love marketing and I love sales yeah I built a really good team around me because I hate financials and I hate pivot tables I like to see everything in a nice chart and I like the pictures were the thousand verse to me i'm like you're awesome you suck you guys need to work together on selling struts you're great at this you're not you need to work together on this he's good at this he's good at this you're bad at this you're bad at this you guys train each other on this so we do a lot of ride-alongs and and there's

a lot of role play that goes into it but i hate the word role play too and no one likes the word role play because some some reason guys have a hard time with role play and I get it because of the connotations that are applied to that. But you know, there's a lot more things I wanted to get into, but I love the word coach. I'm not your boss, I'm your coach. And I got three, I got two things we could do.

Three things I could do for you. This is what I tell my employees. I could either manage you up, I could manage you you out or I could find another position within the company because maybe we didn't find the best position for you if you got a will I'm gonna find a way you guys I had a question yesterday we're doing a little bit of consulting and the guy said what is your thoughts on social media for home service and I said that's a really really tough question first of all I need to think about the lifetime value of the customer right if it's a pool business or not then I need to think what I do with what

I do with people is I draw a pyramid so I draw the upside-down pyramid and here's how it looks it's an upside-down pyramid it's pretty simple these people on the bottom need your service today these people up top they never heard of your service but they might want it but it's a funnel so you need to be able to work with them to get that funnel down but is your service something that people might be interested in like is it a really nice garage or once they learn that it's 40 of your curb appeal so with social media i think of social media and billboards and sometimes tv radio as top of funnel yeah not Google or Bing that's bottom of funnel they're coming to me right so I want to hear your guys's take on that so certainly bottom of funnel is good for DR because

if someone is typing in the Google new garage door garage door replacement then they're very much in its great demand collection you're not going to see that kind of search on social media so you have to incept them through these three stages and what Facebook and Google LinkedIn and Twitter they use the exact same terminology they call it awareness consideration and conversion. Now a lot of people like to say it's just top and bottom funnel because it's easier to think that you're trying to build relationships you're trying to plant the name better call Saul that way oh I'm gonna call that lawyer right because I'm gonna give it

and so you're trying to get the name there and then hope that's going to help you win when it comes to Google because they've seen your name before but actually it's the the ROI of social and the way you manage social is the exact opposite so we think of social as integrated in your operations not some separate thing you hire an agency to do think of it this way if you've got a home services business that doesn't take good care of their customers that doesn't take good care of their customers that doesn't do good work what do you think is gonna happen

with the reviews what the customers are saying bad bad reviews bad customers right so but if the customers are happy and if the contractors you send out the different vans and perform jobs are collecting that feedback and we're able where I might you know go to mark and say let's let's say mark is one of you know I'm a lawn you know I do homes lawns and say, let's say Mark is one of, you know, I'm a lawn, you know, I do homes, lawns and gardens, and I say, hey, Mark, you know, do you like the lawn that I did for you?

And I trim the trees and the bushes. He's like, oh, yeah, it's fantastic. Well, you know, my boss wants me to collect these reviews and it would really help me a lot if you could, like, give me a 15-second review and tell me what you think about the yard and the job I did. Would you be willing to do that? Yeah, of course.

Right. So now we've got that on my iPhone and send it back. And there's software that you can choose whatever. There's lots of things. Yeah, we use BirdEye, yeah. Yeah, to do that. So think of social as an amplification of what you already have. So if your business is a minus five. Well, that's reviews. Times 10.

Right. But social and job, everything in social, everything in digital is a review. When someone clicks like, that's a review. When someone leaves a review, that's a review. Well, what about when you're doing a sponsored ad? What I'm asking for is paid Facebook. You guys do a lot of paid, right? The issue is not how do you set up ads on Facebook. Yeah, we spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads.

That's why people like to ask us questions about how do you set up Facebook ads. But the issue is not really that. It's upstream of that. It's the ingredients that you put into the machine if we're not putting in Good one minute videos and what your customers are saying and interviewing your staff and what they're doing It doesn't know about you can't make chicken salad chicken shiitake No, you can't overcome that so it's always with especially home services businesses. They don't want to get on video Pull out your phone into a 15-second Say, hey, it's really hot in Gilbert

and it's in July in Phoenix or something. Just something. So they can see who you are as a person. So they can see your staff. They can see your personality. You share your knowledge, right? That's funny. I got a website called Sales Pocket Video, I think.

I want to pull up an article real quick that's really, really important. That's why I got on my phone. Sorry if that was... I actually, when I'm taking notes most of the time is because I'm taking notes but let me pull up that it's basically all about follow-up because I think the biggest problem I see with most home service companies actually every company I can think of has a big big problem with follow-up and here it is so this is some stats about follow-up what so yeah I scream sometimes on the podcast people use that so 2% of sales are made on the

first contact 3% of sales are made on the second contact 5% of sales are made on the third 10% on the fourth 80% of sales are made on the third, ten percent on the fourth, eighty percent of sales are made on the fifth to twelve contact. Eighty percent on the fifth to twelfth. Tell me a little bit about that because social media works the same way, everything works the same way. So Tom, you probably heard and you guys out there that it takes six to ten touches or exposures before people buy, right? You guys have probably heard that. That's why you see the frequency with things like TV ads and direct mail. Guess what the frequency is on social now in 2019. So we did this for a major electronics company. It's a company that you've heard of. How many touches before people buy this piece of equipment? Oh man, I'm guessing it's something like 22.

It's 17. 17 touches. Now why is that? That's triple what you would have in traditional advertising. Well I'm scrolling through. I don't know. Is it because I'm just less... My brain is being overloaded with social. I'm seeing... I mean, you got Instagram, you got a million different things. You got Twitter, you got MySpace. I'm just kidding. But the funnel of awareness, consideration, and conversion is just longer. You have more chances to get that across. And people are doing research in the top of the funnel.

They're not ready to get their garage door replaced. They're not ready to fix their toilet. But when they are, the average amount of time between when you have a first touch all the way to when you close them has increased. So instead of being two weeks, it now might be six to 12 months. Yeah, that's interesting because we need to be top of mind. So top of mind awareness, right?

But also here's the biggest mistake I see with home service companies. They are in a sense top of mind with 95% of our brains are are living in this that you don't even know what you're thinking right it's the back end of your mind it's I don't know the the hypothalamus or something but when you when you go through when you're picking on Google you say you know what I recognize a one garage door service I'm gonna click that ad so your conversion rate your

click-through rate goes through the roof that's right and all of a sudden you're paying way less and you're just buying your own keywords. So what's crazy about that is I see people spending all this money on Billboard's radio,

TV, and Facebook, and social, and they suck on Google. Everybody goes to Google once they need something done. I need, I can't get out of my garage.

Where do I go to find somebody good? So I tell people this, you're spending way too much time, energy, and money on these other things that just amplify Google. I can't find you on Google. You're spending all this other money. So I think it's important, especially for when you need something done. Like I need this right away.

Now, if you're doing something like awnings and it's more of a luxury or epoxy flooring and it just looks nice, I think that's a different story. And it's more brand you're creating what you guys call awareness yeah it's just this stuff i just love this stuff um so talk to me you know i i still i know we can make money on social media it sounds like that's your expertise and review and finding out what's wrong with your business online yeah And I've had things that Facebook ads, my book. My book was, we killed it with Facebook ads. We do good with consulting, stuff like that. And then I got another software, I think,

it's called Ninja Blaster, that we can blast into groups. It's kind of like, what do we use for social? Not social. There's different software to post on all your Facebook and everything else, and it's timed. You put on,ph. There's different software to post on all your Facebook and everything else and it's timed. There's a science to it where you put a fact and then a video

and then a joke. So tell me a little bit about spending money though because I think a lot of people have tried Facebook and they go, I just don't get any results. Tell me what the secret is to get results with paid social. So we hear that all the time. It's like friends of mine that will say.

Billy Jean. Yeah. Well, you know we power his back end. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, all the systems there. I kid you not. There's a gym owner that came to one of our VIP workshops. And he said, I tried Facebook ads and it didn't work.

And I said, really? Well, what if I went into your gym and I worked out really hard for three hours with your top personal trainer? And at the end of that, I said, I don't have six-pack abs. Your thing's a scam. It didn't work. Your gym didn't work. What do you say to that?

Right? And Gary Vaynerchuk and I have been on stage before, and he'll say, what's the ROI of your mother? I'm like, Gary, you can't use that anymore. There is a measurable ROI. You can't just, like, eject that way. And here's what you do. Remember Mark talked about the three stages in the funnel of awareness to consideration and conversion most people because they don't know

any better they start at the top of the funnel and move down because facebook and google and these other guys move based on remarketing which is the next thing you do if you start off in the wrong direction you're going to end up over here because you might find that the most engaging stuff is like cat photos and babies it has nothing to do with driving leads necessarily taco bell killed yokero taco bell remember that thing with like the ch like cat photos and babies. It has nothing to do with driving leads necessarily. Taco Bell killed Yoquero Taco Bell. Remember that thing with like the chihuahua and all that? Do you know why they killed it? Because it made them think you're eating cats? I don't know. Because it was really high engagement, so they thought it was winning, but they found

it didn't increase preference for people eating at Taco Bell. It didn't drive sales, but it got people to say Yoquero Taco Bell, and it's funny, but it didn't sell more tacos. Same with the Harmon Brothers videos. Yeah. Have you seen those? Oh, yeah. I got that book that I poop. It's something.

Turning gold into poop. Yeah. Turning gold into poop. Yeah. Yeah. The poop. All I remember was poop. So instead of starting here, which can cause you to go down the wrong path, start down

here. What does that mean? It means feed the signal into the algorithm. Have your Google and Facebook and Twitter remarketing pixels. It's not hard to do because when those pixels that you understand... Conversion.

But not everyone understands what a remarketing pixel does. They think that only big companies can do remarketing. You only need to spend a dollar a day on this. You put those pixels on the website and then anytime someone's

been to your website, wherever they go on the internet, they watch videos on YouTube, they look at ESPN for the sports. It's like a cookie. Yeah. It's not just a cookie. There's other ways that they do videos on youtube they surf you know look at espn for the sport like a cookie yeah yeah it's like it's they're not just a cookie there's other ways that they do it but then you know when you when you look at a hotel or whatever and it follows you around you look to that one thing you want to be able to follow people around how much money are

you losing from people that come to your site or come to a property you have or come to your facebook or come to whatever and then they're off to something else or they chose someone else but they forgot about you because it was just at lunch time and they forgot what was the name of the A1 garage door or whatever. I don't remember the name of that company, right? So you start here and this gives you immediate ROI. It works super well as long as you have people coming to your website. Right.

As long as you have an email list because you can tie in your MailChimp or Constant Contact or Infusionsoft or whatever. You can tie those email addresses and match back to Google, Facebook, YouTube and these other guys, right? Yeah. So if you find that this is working and it will, if you have an ongoing business that's driving leads through digital, then you move one step up to drive engagement. And then this is what we call the why.

Or I'm sorry, it goes why, how, and what, which is the same thing as awareness, consideration, conversion. So the how is you're teaching, you know, you're sharing your expertise. Like this is why I would set up a garage door this way versus that way. This is what I would do in this situation. This is what, this is the kind of mistakes that novices would make when they're trying to do this particular kind of action. Right. And you're sharing that you're not selling, but you're driving more remarketing. So the more engagement you're able to drive by sharing knowledge, the larger the remarketing pool works, right? Because if you're, if your remarketing pool is working, then you want to make that remarketing pool bigger because you already know it's working. So then you move one step up

into the how and drive that into the what, which is your remarketing. Then you move one step up here into the why, and that's about who you are and about your family and about how you work out and about all these things of you as a person, about your book, about how you're a public speaker to then now people are interested in you and your values. Then they hear about your knowledge, which is your how, and then you're what they start buying from you and this is possible even for small home services contractors like the one-man you know HVAC company we just backs up the truck and you know installs air conditioners or what have you right that works for you it doesn't require

anything more than your cell phone and recording nine videos three plus three plus three videos. Just like this, someone holding it. You don't need a fancy setup. That's how social is going to work. It's better like that. But if you're only doing these silly cat photos or you're doing worse is you hire a social media consultant and they're just posting random stuff like on the news or whatever it is,

that has nothing to do with your business and it doesn't sequence logically, systematically all the way to to the phone ringing yeah you're right because you're driving engagement and you know what i found that works really good is beautiful girls and you can get a lot of people to like that stuff but they'll never buy and really tracking people to where that buy signal is and i think the best thing you could do in your business is don't get an expensive camera. Have somebody use their iPhone and do 10 FAQs about your business. That's it.

10 FAQs for me. I used to tell people how to maintain their garage door, how to program. I've got millions of views on how to program your car. But I come off as the pro. I'm the professional. I'm teaching people. I have people all the time at garage door shows that go, you're the YouTube guy for garage doors.

And I came out with these videos 2008, 2009 before anybody was doing it. That's why they got so many views. But, you know, YouTube's algorithm. Google's algorithm for their free stuff annoys me too. The one thing that I know, get paid dialed in because paid will never go away. That's right. You got to pay to play. And some people go, yeah, I've done this and I've done that.

First thing I did with my cousin's company, I went in, Colorado Springs Grocery Company. I interviewed his Google guy. I fired him on the spot. We took over his campaign. He got three times. And I said, let me see your ads. Why aren't you getting any good people? And it said, only eligible if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I said, who would apply for this ad? ad i said let me rewrite this ad for you so i rewrote it 20 minutes and i said amazing place for new opportunity if you're looking for a career not a job we'll train you and we'll pay you for it when you paid holidays we do a barbecue every week and then at the end of it after these two paragraphs i put by the way we do garage doors yeah i didn't say garage door only available nights and weekends. You must work. And what happened was,

he goes, dude, we got 200 applicants the first week. That's awesome. He goes, the most we've ever had is three applicants in a week. Wow. And I said, now you get your pick. So we just solved your people problem. The next thing is, how are you going to train?

So then later that day, and this is just a quick thing, I called a guy and he goes, this is my worst guy. I said, no problem. I said, have him call me on every thing, I called a guy and he goes, this is my worst guy. I said, no problem. I said, have him call me on every job. And he calls me and I said, let me diagnose the door with you. I want you to check this, this, this.

Your 25 point inspection. I'm going to teach you how to do an inspection. And I said, now let me talk to the customer. And I said, ma'am, you're in the right hands. You've got one of the best technicians that's ever worked for this company. He's going to take care of you. I sold the job for him. And he was so happy.

And then the next one, I sold the job for him. And he was so happy. And then the next one, I sold the job for him. I said, let me show you the parts. And I said, Mark, go show her the parts, blah, blah, blah. So I sold all the jobs for him. Then I said, Mark, do you realize you made $700 today? I said, how does that feel? Do you feel good?

And he goes, dude, I never. And Ryan goes, I've never called my employees. I've never congratulated them or said, great job today. And I said, this is one day of me working with you. But what happened was, is he literally went from $800,000 to doubling. He got out of commercial. I said, there's no money in commercial for this business, for you. Because people go into commercial saying big tickets. I said, big insurance, big AR, big, big, big, big.

And you're set up as a small company. You're not made to do this. You don't specialize. One thing that I could tell every company out there is don't be a jack of all trades. Specialize. Be the best at what you do. Don't own every category. Don't say, yeah, this morning we were in our morning mojo call in this room.

And somebody sent me a picture. And I said, can we do this? And they said, we can, but we're not going to. And I said can we do this and they said we can but we're not going to and I said good that's what I like to hear I don't want to take on a challenge because I know we'll make no money doing it let's do what we do really really well my dad used to run a transmission shop Amco he used to own a couple and people used to say shoot I can get it I can get it done from the dealer from that you know the dealer yeah and he'd say do you go to a your general doctor for heart surgery no you go to a specialist because we are specialists we fix transmissions

that's why they call it amco transmission that's right we're the best and we get the best warranty better than you'll ever get from your dealer so special specialized but uh all right so let's talk a little bit about branding because i think it's a little bit daunting to talk about branding to a small home service company. And I think branding is one of the most important things out there. I think it's so important to brand yourself. We talked a little bit about it, about making those videos and FAQs and different things like that. How can we automate the branding? I saw you guys take a quick video before we started.

Tell me a little bit about, so, hey, I'm about to install this five-ton unit. These people, this very nice elderly couple haven't had air conditioning. I don't know. What's the best way to build a brand affordably? So the first thing is don't think of branding as something that only big companies do. Like polar bears drinking Coca-Cola, like what small business would want to waste money doing things like that or Super Bowl ads. Think of branding as something that it's not what you say about yourself,

it's what other people say about you. So how do you get into those authentic moments? You hear people talk about being authentic. Well, that means behind the scenes. That means, hey, I'm about to go visit this customer. Or you have the customers that are talking about you. You're interviewing other people, right? You don't want to come off as a salesperson, but you want to come off as a journalist where you're interviewing other people.

So instead of collecting testimonials from your customers, you're interviewing them about their lives. You're actually paying attention to them, seeing what they're interested in. Then you collect that, and you have an amazing video editor or your team in the Philippines do all that editing and push it out like we said before across all these other channels. It just takes 15 second stories and one minute videos. Lightweight moments with your iPhone. If you make it look like a commercial with perfect lighting, people can spot commercials. People can see if it looks like an ad and you're going to get hammered across all the other digital channels. Just like I told you, Ashley Furniture, the first ads that they were running, they spent

a few million dollars a year on Facebook ads and they came to us saying, well, our rep said it looked like it was pretty good because we got this much reach and this many clicks and this, but we don't know if we drove any sales. And I said, you guys are just wasting millions of dollars. What we need to do is actually collect information and collect videos to show how do you hang a frame properly or how do you decorate the living room the right way, the actually helpful information. And then here's something we did.

Then this will apply to everybody, to YouTube. So we took the top salespeople in each of the stores and we said, you know what, just tell us about how you grew up. Tell us about your favorite restaurant in town. Nothing to do with furniture, right? But we put it out there and we boosted it for a dollar a day for each of these stores. And people started coming into the store saying, hey, I saw you on Facebook. They started, customers, instead of round robin, like you get the next salesperson,

they started saying, I want to talk to, what's the guy's name? And I forgot that there's one guy who's in one of the Ashley, Alabama stores, which is absolutely fantastic. He'd say, yeah, when I grew up, my grandma, we had this go-around couch. And we always sat on the go-around on Sunday. We'd watch football, you know, Roll Tide, things like that. And people identified with that. And that's really what people, personal branding is just capturing authentic moments.

And you're capturing other people's stories. Well, you know what's interesting is the last podcast I did, I interviewed Ken Goodrich. Personal branding is just capturing authentic moments. And you're capturing other people's stories. Well, you know what's interesting is the last podcast I did, I interviewed Ken Goodrich. And he owns Gettle. And if you ever heard his commercial, he goes, When I was a kid, I used to hold a flashlight for my dad. And the first one, and he's not Texas, but you got me going on Texas. The first one was a Gettle air conditioning unit.

They were made for this, that, and the other. And he goes, and there's such, you feel like you know him yeah and you're buying from him it's kind of like george brazil you see him on the back of the truck and you're walking back and you're like that's the kind of guy i want in my house and that's that's branding and it's hard to build branding if you don't know what you're doing but you know there's a science to it and i love this give me give me one more tip so you interview people you start telling a story, a personal story. I think personal hits home. It's not like we do drug tests.

We do background checks. We're open nights and weekends. You know what I mean? Who doesn't do that? So familiarity. Familiarity. That's a tough one. English was my second language.

I didn't learn English until I was seven. I spoke Chinese. I don't have an accent because my parents spoke to me in Chinese. Hold on. There's two. There's Cantonese and Mandarin. Yeah, I speak Mandarin. Okay.

I'm an ABC, American-born Chinese. Oh, okay. I was born in Dayton, Ohio. America. Nice. So familiarity creates trust. And all the studies in psychology show that when there's proximity. So Mark and I have been in a lot of the same places.

We're more likely to become friends. People that you went to school with, it could have been random that they were in that same class and they sat next to you, are more likely to become friends and you trust them more. Why would you trust your next door neighbor more than some other random person in the mall? They haven't proven anything, but people, when they see someone, they're more likely to trust them. So by getting that exposure, enough times that you're able to go through know, like, and trust, and all of us are in the trust-building business. Now the way we do that with poignant stories that reflect mission and meaning is something we call a why story.

Now a why story has three components. It starts with when I was, then it goes to I believe that, and the last point is I am. So when I was 18, I dropped out of high school. I wanted to be a pro athlete for Nike. I ran cross country, but I couldn't make world qualifying times. Shelly Bridges, the internship coordinator, she rejected me and sent me this letter. I remember her saying, we're sorry that we can't accept you. And my heart was crestfallen. But I had a mentor who taught me how to get into Nike and it was about connections.

And eventually we got a million dollar contract for Nike to do social ads and analytics. I believe that when you have a mentor, that they can open doors for you and that other people who can coach you can help you get more done than you could otherwise. And a mentor is not a boss or a coworker or a wife. It's someone else who has expertise, who's done something that you want. And because of that, I am Dennis Yu and I founded Blitzmetrics. And I love to be able to create mentorship at scale for other people. See, so those three components and learn how to tell different stories. When I was, which gets straight to the point, you don't say, oh, hi, I'm Tommy Mello. I have a $45 million business. No, no, no, no. You have to engage them with a moment in time. Point the camera at a particular scene. Tell that story.

Then what did you learn from that? Which reveals the larger story, the picture from your heart. And then you say, I'm Tommy Mello. I run A1 Garage Store Services, and this is what I do. And I think one of the core things about that is I think you've got to relate to your audience. Yeah. So I don't say, man, when I was making $20 million, I say, when I was mowing lawns,

and I was allergic to the grass, so I knew I wasn't going to be a landscaper forever. I believed that one day there would be something greater for me. And because of that, I'm smarter and a better man today. There you go. Those are the three components. Those are the same components that Pixar uses in their storytelling. So why is it that Pixar and Mar-Vell and Disney,

which are all owned by the same thing now, Disney, why is it they're able to create compelling stories? It's not because they have better CGI, more polygons per second rendering. It's because they follow the hero's journey. Because they're able to start with a why, where, like you said, people are able to relate meaning empathy meaning you identify

with Rocky like Aladdin or Rocky and at the end you want to see him beat up the big guy at the end you want to see

Harry Potter kill Voldemort at the end you want to see so if you get people to relate to you they want to see you go through this typical

it's called the hero's journey it's a three part Hollywood story arc and if it'll work for motivational speakers as you see people on stage, it'll work for people that watch movies and kids' films,

it'll work for you as a local service business. I think that's interesting because people sell this dream about, you can be just like me, an internet marketer. And I'm so sick, and you guys do this, so I'm sorry, but I'm so sick of internet marketers being like, you can be a millionaire just like me, the four-hour work week. You can live anywhere you want and run a business and don't worry. Sell this to everybody.

And everybody's selling these agencies. And I'm like, you know what I do? I freaking fix garage doors. Let me tell you this. The average plumber is 47 years old. It's a dying breed. Enter this journey with me because here's the deal. I make a lot of money and i do fun things

and i love to work with my hands and this isn't a bad career and there's not a lot of us out there yeah and you know what it's going to be a lot of hard work but it's going to be a huge payoff and blue collar is not bad it's great that's right and because you went to the military doesn't mean you're a dropout it means you're a patriot and i love that love it and you know there's certain things and i'm not saying internet marketing is bad because it's great for some people. But that doesn't mean these people on the sidelines can't have a great career doing air conditioning, doing plumbing, doing remodeling houses or flooring. I think it's important to know that we were founded in the trades, built in the trades, and am the trades. And I think there's a good thing to say about that.

And I love these podcasts because they help tell us that there is another side out there. Don't be afraid to get on the internet. Don't be afraid to make those videos. Use your cell phone. There's Fiverr. You know, I use Upwork a lot too. And Upwork's a great resource. You just got to not pick the bad contractors

because you might end up in a whirlwind of just not getting back to you. So that's what the reviews are for. So I got a few last questions for you guys. Obviously, I get a ton out of this. We're going to talk a ton more after this podcast just about cool things and about kind of how we can apply this to the whole home service space and make it better. I find the more that I'm out there sharing a story, people gravitate 10 times. If I give something great, I get 10.

It's like a boomerang and it comes back 10 times so yeah let me ask you this what what three books would you recommend and they don't need to be towards social they could be actually both of you will get three books if you don't mind I don't know both of you guys give us three books to think about we've had so many great books that people have recommended so you guys go ahead and tell us on anything could be life could be health could be anything you know I've read 4,500 books oh that's like all I did until I was 30 I was a complete introvert so it's hard to pick one but I'd say at the very top snow crash by Neal Stephenson because it's what

technology snow crash you see there are entrepreneurs that are looking at things that are commercially viable in the next five to ten years, and there's science fiction writers that are looking at things that are 20 years out. They're just really entrepreneurs that are thinking too far ahead. And that's where I get my best ideas. I don't read marketing or business books. I look at the right kind of science fiction. So Snow Crash talks about an environment where there is no currency,

and people are able to do whatever they want, but if they do good things, they earn more things like, you know, woofy or whatnot, and what happens when you communicate and computers are smart? Yeah, well, I think that's... And companies are more powerful than governments. Socialism is coming. Yeah.

Yeah, you will be... It is coming. In a good way. It's futile. In a good way. Two is The Laundryman by Jeffrey Robinson. Laundryman. I mean, I do have a finance degree, but I'm not interested in the details of how money's being laundered.

But it shows you what happens when you follow the money trail to see where the kinds of things that people will do at a global scale. And it may even cause you to be a conspiracy theorist because there are some of these things that are there. But it's just fun to see what happens there. But Laundryman by Jeff Robinson. And number three, which is my favorite book of the last three years, is Principles by Ray Daly. Oh, yeah. That's a big book. That will change your mind.

Now, if that's too big, you can listen to his podcast. He's got a short video. I think it's like 17 minutes. And he's released a new app that's got a condensed version. It shows you how to be a logical thinker and overcome bias, especially in building teams. And he ran the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, because he was able to make logical decisions not based on emotion. I love that. And the facts, I could talk for more.

Mark? I'm just going to throw a few quick ones out there. If you'd asked me in the beginning, I probably could summon up some more recollection. I've read a lot of books, too. Krakauer, just for a good read, because we all need a good read now and then. Crackauer. John Krakauer, Into Thin Air. Yeah, Wild Into Thin Air. You've got to throw some

good books in there, too. They can't all be... There's a book, I can't quite remember the name of it right now, but it's by Lyle Loundis. It's about personality traits and interacting with people. What's the guy's name? Lyle, L-E-I-L-L-O-W-N-D-E-S. I can't remember the name of the book, but I believe it's a

her. It's a really good book, kind of like understanding things from other people's perspective and things like that. And everyone could use a refresher on it, especially these days with, you know, cell phones. And another one, Becoming a Master Student. So, yeah, I think those principles can be applied everywhere for all these students yeah if you're not a student you might as well die

because i believe that you know oh harsh i'm always learning no no but if you're just if you know everything then why are you even on this earth anymore i just feel like if you're not learning you're usually there's something else going on um so tell us a little bit about how they get a hold of you and what you guys i'm going to finish it off with just a final last thought so just go ahead and tell them what you know how do they get a hold of you if they want to reach out to you both and tell us a little bit about what you guys yeah i don't know mark and i are easy to get a hold of the best way to contact me is to find me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's got 30,000 connections is the limit.

I'm at 23,000, plenty of room. Do not Facebook friend request me. I'm at the 5,000 limit. I've been there for 10 years. People still Facebook friend request me. Do not. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I always reply.

It might take me a day or two because I'm traveling and things like that, but I always reply because I want to see you grow your business. You could also email me, Dennis at Blitzmetrics.com. I personally, not a virtual assistant, I personally respond to emails there. Very good. And I'll go a step further. I have my LinkedIn URL if you can't find me because there are a lot of Mark Wagners. LinkedIn.com slash in slash mark.u.wagner. And you can also give me an email at mark at seniorscorecard.com.

Okay, and if someone will, so I'll let you guys kind of finish it up with whatever you want to talk about and one last thought. And like I said, whatever you want the audience to know. And you guys close us out. So in the same way that you go to a hospital

and a doctor's going to collect your vitals, diagnose you, and then make a recommendation, we want to do the same thing with your digital marketing. We put all of our training out there for you to be able to inspect and be able to look at exactly how this stuff is done so there's no black box kind of magic. I would encourage you to look at our checklist, look me up, ask me questions and my hope is that you're going to say, you know what, there's so much stuff here, I want to hire one of these certified young adults to be able to do it for me, from Oklahoma Christian University, from the University of South Wales, from BYU, where I've got a

lot of Mormons in our program, but we're not Mormon. We have a lot of these universities, and that way you're able to create jobs in the local community, and be able to grow your business at the same time. Our job is education, and I've always been an educator, and that's what's meant the most to me. And a lot of people say, oh, that's because you already made a lot of money because you were an early exec at Yahoo, so now you can say, only rich people say these kinds of things. But no, that really is what means a lot to me.

And we create jobs by helping local service businesses. Mark, you want to add anything? I think you said it best. All right, guys. Hey, thanks for listening, and I will see you soon. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, Wyatt's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now,

I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also when you subscribe, what I'm going to do is let you know the next guest coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here. I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow together. Also, I'm giving away my book for free now. All you got to do is go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. You got to cover the shipping and handling, but I'm giving the material out for free. It's 200 pages. It's a hardcover book,

homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. I appreciate each and every one of the listeners and thank you for making this Home Service Expert podcast a success. I hope you're having a great day and thanks again.