The Home Service Expert Podcast - Vertical Track: The Event That'll Create 1,000 Recession-Proof Businesses

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

Jim Leslie is the Chief Technology Officer of A1 Garage Door Service. He is known as Tommy’s right-hand man and go-to guy for building software needed by A1, and is also a great contributor to the success of organizing Vertical Track events. In this special episode of The Home Service Expert Podcast, Tommy and Jim talked about Vertical Track, and what participants can expect from the 3-day live event in October.

That really happened at the last minute, last time, right? I mean, we had so many people asking about it. I mean, we talk a little bit about garage stores, but it's not like we're looking at gear ratios and motors and stuff. I mean, the whole event, scaling your business literally applies to anybody in the home service space, the training, the marketing, the recruiting, the culture, all the stuff that you talk about and teach. It's sort of universal principles, right? So why hold back from all these other industries? 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. Today, I got a good buddy of mine that I get the pleasure of working with. His name is Jim Leslie. He resides in Pittsburgh, Illinois. I'm kidding. Pennsylvania. Steel City, man. Come on. There you go. He's basically my right hand when it comes to a lot of the stuff here. He's really stepped in.

His title is the Chief Technology Officer, but he's filling in as the Chief Marketing Officer. Pretty good at software. He's building a lot of software for us and helping out a lot with vertical track really every facet of the business he's kind of stepped in he doesn't drink he works weekends he answers the phone at midnight or 5 a.m so we're perfect together jim you want to give everybody a little bit of your background yeah it's it's kind of an interesting story. I majored in math, found out you couldn't actually get a job in that, started a home service business. So I was in kitchen remodeling for about a decade, got an offer to be a CEO for a manufacturing company, did that for about

seven years. And that's the point where Tommy kidnappedy kidnapped me yeah you know i met jim and and he was looking around because he was bored and he got involved with actually home service expert kind of helping coach people and then got to know him more and i just realized he was being underutilized and i was right but i took care of that. Yeah, we're at maybe 70% utilization now. We'll see. Yeah. I still got some more, but we're getting there. Well, you were able to bring out a couple of people, and I think that's going to help.

You're still kind of getting them adjusted, but we just hired a director of marketing. I'm trying to think of the title. that the title we chose i think it's vice president vp whatever chase he's gonna be a great guy um so there's a lot of stuff that goes into what we're working on jim's actually he went to nashville with me he helped me kind of get going on my second book which is all about everyone's needs to win culture, onboarding, a lot of that Levy type stuff. It's going to be amazing. Jody writes a little section in it and we want to really do something special with this book. We want it to be, you know, what I've been hearing lately is the Michael Michalowicz. Have you read Profit First?

Are you doing Profit First? And my goal is that this book comes out and it's literally like, are you guys doing that Tommy Malone recognition? And so it's coming with some software, really appreciating people and really thinking about what I really think about is we hire these people and we say, how are they going to help me? What are they going to do for me? This is their life. They've got kids. They've got a family. They're thinking about their future. They want stuff out of their life, but we're just like, this is my business. What are they going to do for me? If we change that attitude to how could I help them? Yesterday, Jim, in my

meeting, you got the link sent to you for Thursday morning meeting. Yeah, I was on it. I said, if I just sent you guys a video of me golfing, you better be good at golfing. You better be able to drive the ball 300 yards. The fact is Tiger Woods hits a thousand balls a day. I need these guys hitting balls. They need to go to the driving range. The driving range is that amazing training center.

And we need to work with them. They need to log in and out. We've got simulators for financing. We talk about eye contact. We talk about objection handling. My wife's not here. I got to talk to her. What time could I come back tonight to talk to her?

I'm going to be in the neighborhood anyway. I just love what we do. And I think the biggest thing that we're really working on is marketing because marketing is recruiting. Marketing is clients. Marketing is buying and partnering with companies and then the other part is just the technology aspect of like why don't you talk a little bit about the checklist app that you're you're building right now because i i got everybody excited on the home service expert page do you have anything you can show us or anything just talk about it a little bit. What does it do? How does it work?

Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, we're on ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan has a basic, you know, form-based kind of checklist. But Tommy had a lot of other ideas how we could bring some interactivity with it, some better tracking, you know, a lot more dynamic stuff to show the customer. So every item, instead of just a static item, we can attach pictures, a video for the technician to review. As they go through the steps of the checklist, they can record pass, fail, statuses, keep notes, all of that. But when they complete it,

customer can sign off and it pushes it back to their job in ServiceTitan. So all that data is kept with the customer. But in the meantime, we've connected it to our marketing sequences. So we can know, you know, as soon as the technician starts in the work in the home, we can send a text message to the customer. You know, we can follow up with email sequences based off of the status of different items on the checklist. So if the technician put that the condition of the motor was bad, then we know that's a potential follow-up. If they don't replace it at that point,

we can put them into a marketing sequence based around the issues that we found. There's a lot more, but that's kind of the basics. Well, plus what it does, it text matches the customer the summary of 151.tuneup, and then that gets the customer to say, listen, can you guys take care of this once a year? Service agreements are sold. The other thing is we can include animations and pictures

of failed parts and show the client their part and say, this is what's going to end up happening. This is the sequence. And this will happen within the next six months. And then you can get the signatures. You can get the age of equipment. It's like a checklist on steroids with marketing capabilities, plus the ability to text message the clients. So they're going, so if I send Jim a text message of 151.2 and up when it finishes and I go, Hey, listen, the major things I noticed are the top 10. Those were tagged. And then the other 141, there's a video kind of explaining everything I did. Do you want to take care of that or do you want me to take care of that each year yeah that's the latest feature we just started adding so the technician

can record a video you know and kind of walk the homeowner through what's going on and then the homeowner gets texted a summary you know the the checklist including the technician's video after the uh checklist is complete so so listen we wanted to talk a little bit about vertical track obviously i never knew we were going to have our own event and when i saw what happened after the first one it was like this is no fluff this is real shit that you could apply to your business this is not something that is like oh we want to sell tickets. We want to go on stage. It's like, I had a guy tell me he's tripled his business. It's the last vertical track.

I've had people say, I understand a fundamental difference. You know, I, I want you to describe vertical track, but if I had to tell you, we're giving our Rolodex, first of all, tried and true people, which it's taken me a decade to build on top of that, we're giving actionable items to get started today rather than theoretical bullshit that you could kind of get started in a year from now based on crap. And then the third thing is the core principles is our training center, our manuals, our checklist, the things that Alibi helped us create. And the biggest takeaway usually is get started today,

but tell the listeners about Vertical Track and what's it all about and what your thoughts are on it. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of simply stated. I think it's the only event where you can come and meet real people that have scaled home service businesses. There's lots of conferences and, you know,

like you said, different people are in the speaking business and what have you. But the night at the dinner i'm looking around and just adding up you know sort of the total sales of all the companies that were there and i'm like there's like four billion dollars in this room of home service entrepreneurs and i just don't know where else you can get that with people that really started in the trenches with one truck and built hundreds of trucks, right? Yeah. You know, I'd say one of the things that I love the most about our event is when we open our doors, we show our training center, we help train their CSRs. We got a dispatch training coming up, which is incredible. Nothing's held back, right? Nothing's held back, right's held back right i know i show the crm we you know we go in and like people are just like i don't need this like hold back like good go like that's improving industry

the crazy thing about the last one is we had all these plumbers and roofers and gutter companies and they all said how do i join garage tour freedom Talk a little bit about the vendors that we have that we're working with, including ServiceTitan. Yeah, I mean, ServiceTitan, obviously a huge, huge sponsor and integral part of the A1 business, obviously. But we had a ton of vendors, every vendor kind of walking away saying this event was amazing. The best companies were here. Everybody's asking questions. And how can we get more involved and help these folks out more so yeah i think you look at just a company like power selling pros bring them i mean his message was amazing the people are amazing i believe in

his product we're still using them today one se SEO is another huge. Yeah, Lance and Bill Ross. Dan Antonelli spoke. Joe Crisara was there. You know, it's just the best of the best. The next one, I'm pulling out all the stops. Now, Ken Goodrich told me yesterday he's coming. Now, I believe it when I see it, but he said, hey, man, I really want to come to your event. I'll be there for you.

He said, give me all the stuff. So Brice sent him the information. And he was the most requested speaker. I mean, he's got an amazing story. But not only that, but I'm trying to get some, we're going to have some just all-star people. And I just want people to walk away and say this paid for itself times 100 these events, I had no idea Victor Raincore's event, he asked me to speak

his is 1.2 million dollars just hard costs you know where they make all their money on these things is the food it's like two grand per meal I had no idea so I asked you the other day because we were at another event the one in st

louis my boy zach right they passed out these boxes of food and i said how much would that cost if we just did the boxes 50 bucks a box so really they make the money from the rent the rental of the space and then they make a lot of the obviously the hotel space this one's at wild horse pass coolest spot this year i wanted to be more of a networking bring your family there's a lot of cool water stuff to do and it's it's a perfect time of year it's october in phoenix you know we added the networking ticket option right because that was a feedback at the last event like a lot of people wanted to bring you know a significant other or something where they didn't necessarily want to go to the

conferences they wanted to kind of hang out at something where they didn't necessarily want to go to the conferences. They wanted to kind of hang out at the resort or golf or whatever, but then to be able to have dinner and stuff in the evening. So that's a new option this year, right? Yeah. And you and Bree, I'll tell you what, you guys have done a fantastic job. And the whole team, really. I mean, Megan's amazing amazing there's been a lot of people involved crystal so this is weird talking to myself in the third person but why did tommy decide to organize this event and where did the idea come from i kind of felt like i should be asking you that question all right you know the deal is is the event the thing was is i had joe chrysara and al levy and all these people and i'm like shit i had

darius livers that taught me how to do financing i got hopefully alan roar comes the next one who taught me a lot of stuff i was a contributor to my book i mean you learn how to sell your business all these people that i spent years podcasting and just building connections we had um michael mckellar what's at the last one i mean it's just such a blast to get the people that were my role models that taught me everything. I'll tell you what. If there's a mistake, I've made it. And if I didn't have mentors and people to go visit their shops and books to read and podcasts to be on, I would have never met Al Levy. You know, I would have never met Alan Rohr.

I would have never met Darius Livers. If I didn't have Service Titan Pantheon to go to, which I was voted the best speaker there, who would have never met Alan Rohr. I would have never met Darius Livers. I would, if I didn't have service Titan Pantheon to go to, which I was voted the best speaker there, who would have thought anyways, how did the event go from only garage door service to the whole thing? That really happened at the last minute last time. Right. I mean, we had so many people asking about it. I mean, we talk a little bit about garage doors, but it's not like we're looking at gear ratios and motors and stuff i mean the whole event scaling your business literally applies to anybody in the home service

space the the training the marketing the recruiting the culture all the stuff that you talk about and teach it's sort of universal principles right so why hold back from all these other industries? How does the team, and you're part of the team, and Bree, how do you decide who the best key speakers for the event are going to be? I mean, a lot of that goes to Bree, right? I mean, she does so much work in organizing. But I think it's just figuring out who are the best people we can bring to the audience. I know there's just a ton of time involved in talking with everybody and finding the right fit and bringing something new. We're really working hard this time to get some new faces, right?

Yeah, we're going to put some new faces on some different curriculum. Howard Partridge spoke of the last one. He was amazing. We learned a lot about the employee retention credits. These events need to be able to apply to people's businesses. You know, I was talking to a guy earlier and he's an amazing guy and he came to the last event. He's part of GarageBert Freedom and he can't find employees. And I gave him Jody's number and I said, why don't you do a hiring event? I said, I promise you this. I will put 10 good candidates in front of you. But one of the things he told me, and I disagree, he gave the $3,000 bonus, 1,506 months, another 1,512 months. I was on a podcast yesterday with Ryan.

His name's Ryan England. And he goes, why not just give them the bonus up front? You hired them. it's your job to retain them well like stay an extra six months for 1500 like if i was like jim i'm gonna pay you a 10 grand in two years 24 months it's not even real at that point right like something that might happen right and by that time let's show me how you're tracking this crap and you know oh you use your pto it's like they try to weasel out of that so tell me this you know there's all these events starting to pop up you know one thing i'll tell you this with our acquisitions can you agree

that we'll do over 200 million this year easily who else is putting on an event and i'm not here to tell blow smoke i can give two sh, but I'm in the fight every day. How many hours do you think we spend on the phone a day? I'll ask my wife, but she'll probably say like five, right? At least two. Am I not calling you all day working on the business? Am I not in the middle of this fight? Oh, yeah.

I mean, am I coming in tomorrow and Sunday? You're flying in on Sunday. But are we not working all week? Do we work on weekends? Do we work sometimes? Was I on the phone with you last night at 1230 your time? Yes, absolutely. So my point is, the difference is, I don't give two shits if anybody joins our freedom group.

Like at the end of the day, this is not something, I think we're stronger together. Of course, it's amazing. I think it's cool. It does a lot of things. You know, I learned just as much. You know, when I get a Howard Partridge in a room and I take 10 pages of notes,

when I got Al Levy giving me new ideas, when I got Lance from OneSEO, when I'm learning new things from Service Titan, when they see me adding people and they prioritize my account, this makes me win. I win so many ancillary ways by doing this, but here's the deal. I'm still in the fight. And guess what? I love business more than anybody. I'm not giving up on my day-to-day. I don't care about being on a freaking stage. My podcast lets me learn more than I could ever learn anywhere else, more than reading a book, because now I'm asking self-directed questions towards my business.

So I just look, and I got to tell you this, there's a lot of great events out there. I like Victor's event. I think there's Joker Star puts out an amazing event. Like, look, there's the huge event that, you know, Brandon Vaughn, you got Danny Kerr. I'm not dissing anybody's stuff, but I'm giving you guys, come into my home. You'll see what a $200 million company looks like, or even a $100 million company, whatever. And take some notes if you want, because this is all I've done is go to businesses that are bigger than me and told them everything I do. So what are your thoughts on our event?

Yeah. I mean, you know know we were collecting some testimonials uh at the end of the last event and just kind of asking people hey what do you think about vertical track and it's usually hard to get random people to open up on camera right but i mean i think we collected like 50 people and i'm sitting there trying to pick you know five or six to put on the website right and but everybody had the same thing i've never seen a place where you could come and literally you know talk to the guys going 20 30 60 100 million dollars where they're literally giving you the exact playbook just walking you through the good things of the bad the mistakes that were made the way they fixed them what worked what didn't work i mean where else can you get that right did you see what people were saying about angela's training or elisa's so we

sent technicians there and we sent csrs there and of course everybody's like is this really are they going to really teach us anything all i know angela sends me an email twice a week about someone just saying oh my god our booking rate is through the roof and what's hard each time is making it better and i love the first vertical track i thought it was killer i hear a lot you know one of the things cody johnson talks a lot about the first one but this last one was like it was just so much fun and i can't wait for wild horse pass but what do you think what were some of the things that the key insights about the last event that stood out to you? I mean, like I said, lots of positive feedback.

I think it opened a lot of people's eyes, right? Their goals. Like guys that came in that were doing like 5 million and thought, oh, I could do 7 or 8, you know, walked out saying, I should be. Cody. Well, yeah, these guys, they walked out, they said, listen, I think I can do 6 million next year. Then they said, forget that. I'll do 12. You know, every number they had in their head, they were like double. Yeah. I mean, 30 million is possible. You know, it was something that I heard, you know, all over the place.

We have a clear path to double in the next 18 months. I mean, that was a pretty common realization. Lance called me up and said, we raised our price for the first time in 12 years. And there was one attorney that said, my cousin Ryan doubled his prices. He said in record high profitability. Every call I got was, you were right. I raised my prices. I'm doing more for my employees. I'm recruiting easier. I've got happier people. We're able to do the things like get on the service tight and then buy new computers. We actually were able to get vehicles because Holman was there. What are some of the partnerships that we've established? Just go

through a couple, maybe go through a dozen of them doesn't yeah i mean one seo has been great service titan of course you know power selling pros i'm trying to think of all of them we got a way to get shirts we got a way to get tools we've got ways for there's literally the cameras in your vehicles one of the things that we're going to be working with is like some of the different marketing features. We got Amar if you're in garage doors to give 3% back. Consumer Fusion's a

brand new partner, right? That's going to be amazing. Literally, these partners are coming out of the woodwork and the deal is Goodleap is giving a special price. We got something going on with service finance for financing. We got the branding got dialed in with Dan. You know, there's like, you add it all up. And I think we had 150 vendors we were trying to dial in. And the deal is, is what I love about

all these vendors is I can call them all on their cell phones right here. And if they don't come through, if one of our people get left short, you better believe that I make it right. I mean, that's the one thing is if I put my name behind somebody, I will go to war before they get taken advantage of. Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. I don't like to stick my neck out unless I know somebody's going to perform, right?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this conversation. I just want to take a five-second break to let you know that the tickets for my next Vertical Track event are now on sale. Just go to verticaltrack.com to learn more and get a guaranteed seat before the prices go up. Now back to our interview. So what's the future of Vertical Track? What is it looking like? Yeah, you know, I think it's another Tommy goal, right? I mean, every time bigger, better, more people, more training, more knowledge, more insights, more vendors, just more giving back. So what do you see, right? That's probably a better question.

Well, what I want to start doing is I want to start really getting into maybe 10 core competencies. We got to reach out to Joe Polish to write that down. I wanted to see if we could get him, but 10 core competencies. And I wanted to start, yes, this is an event for everybody, but I also want to work as, let's just say we got carpet cleaning. I want to get the top five carpet cleaning manufacturers involved. And I want people to get more focused to their niche. know i'm investing in a fifteen thousand dollar recruiting course i just paid five grand that you're going to be involved in in a fractional cfo course what i love is i'll probably spend you know i pay a hundred thousand dollars for the 100 million that mastermind is if i'm willing to put out two two hundred fifty thousand dollars a

year to learn and pull this and not to mention another probably $20,000 in books and audibles and then the pot. But I'm trying to pull this in in a useful way that people can digest it and actually make an actionable item and get started today. The one thing is people say $15,000 for a course Ryan said yesterday.

I'm signing up for that shit. $15,000. People are like, how does he write checks for $15,000? I'm like, how do you not fifteen thousand dollars is a fart in the wind compared to one a player could bring you one and if you learn how to get fired from this you just made a couple extra three four hundred grand so i like the people that are always learning they're always progressing you know you told me one time the guy you used to work for was in his mid eighties and you said it was slowing down, you know, maybe the last decade, but you said, Hey, I'd imagine he was a lot like you are today. That was when I first got to know you.

He's an engineering guy. I'm curious what your thoughts are now. Yeah, I think that's totally different now right i mean you you had a lot of ideas but you never really wanted to push the envelope in the way that we're pushing the envelope here right so it's an envelope man if you go to your monday you know one of the things we did when jim came on is we knew we needed to get our projects in one area there were people using google sheetsets, Microsoft Sheets, all kinds of drives. There was people using Slack, people using Teams, people.

And it shit was Basecamp here and Trello boards here. And we said, all right, let's put this all into Monday. And Jim did some research and said, Monday's way more robust than you guys would ever know. And Jim did some research and said, Monday's way more robust than you guys would ever know. And you built some fantastic things out, but what are some of the most important topics that home service owners can expect to learn from vertical track? Yeah. I mean, recruiting, training, sales, marketing. I mean, we kind of cover the gamut. We got improved classes this year, technicians, CSR you know, there's an option for them to come a full day

and attend the rest of the event too, right? It's just kind of new. We only did the partial before. You know, you get your booking rate up, you get better at marketing, you get a really nice brand, you start to do things that last a long time, like SEO and make your GMB rank. And then you get a higher conversion rate with higher average tickets. And you get really good at bringing and keeping people and retaining people. All of a sudden, you get freedom. And what I call it is to do what you want to do when you want to do it with whoever the hell you want to do it with. And I love the thought of that because so many people have been a slave.

They literally they own a job. And, you know, the people that follow the podcast, you've heard this before from me, but there is another way. And. You know what I love the most, Jim, is the other day. I don't know if you saw this, but the guy on Facebook, still a good buddy of mine, he said something like, yeah, well, if your dad didn't give you the business and you were born with a golden spoon. And I'm like, I love my dad, man. He's the coolest dude in the world. But we went grocery shopping for my dad last night.

I was able to help him get into a house yes he did take me to cedar point when i was a kid and he paid for that and he did put me in a christian school till i was in third grade and was able to afford that for me and he helped me with my first car which was a 1979 dots and 280zx it was a $1,500 car. If you call that a golden spoon, I guess so. We were never in the garage door industry. Never. We started out from pure scratch. A1 happened to fall first in the

phone book. I don't know where these people make this stuff up from, but there's nothing that's been handed to us. There's nothing that's come easy. It's a culmination of mistakes, but waking up and not doing the same thing over and over again. How should those interested in attending prepare for the next event? Well, get a ticket first, right? If you go to verticaltrack.com, right, tickets are on sale now.

There's an early discount. But I think coming with an open mind, right, you know, just kind of realizing that there's an early discount but i think coming with an open mind right you know just kind of realizing that there's more out there i think a lot of people you know start you know with one truck they're grinding you know sort of like you were in the early days but they get stuck in a rut where they think that's as far as they can take it and just realizing there's something else out there and the answers are all here you know if you get in the right mindset you listen to tommy you raise your prices you have more money to invest it's kind of like a cycle right so you know what's crazy is the money starts to come easy but you

know what doesn't come easy you know what i love so much is Andrew texted me yesterday. Andrew's just a really good guy. He works with me. Great technician. And he said, hey, boss, I just want to let you know how much I love and respect everything we do, everything you built. And I'm going to make us an army. And we're going to hit your goals. And I'm going to help you get all these acquisitions trained and we're going to make all this money and change the industry forever

and i said love you buddy i appreciate that earlier i was getting a bunch of text messages from some of my other guys and you know the difference is is i would do anything for these people wouldn't have right well you know at the end of the day I would do anything for these people. Would and have, right? Well, you know, at the end of the day, they do a lot for me. I remember when me and Bree moved in that house, the PV, I must've had a dozen managers come up to me and say, nobody could ever see you own this house. Nobody in the employees. And I'm like, you know,

Bree doesn't want anybody going through her underwear drawer. I get that. You don't want a bunch of randoms in there. But at the same time, I'm like, these guys and gals bought this house for me. The house lasted a month. We moved back into the apartment. But ultimately, I want to do nice things and get nice things to share them. I remember when I was a kid, I used to get this tingly feeling once a kid would grab my toys. It's a weird feeling. And now I just can't wait to share them. I remember when I was a kid, I used to get this tingly feeling once a kid would grab my toys. It was a weird feeling. And now I just can't wait to share everything. There's something about giving. Why do people win? Yeah, I think too, when you have employees that are winners

with the co-workers that have the right mindset, it's not a zero-sum game, right? Just because Tommy has a nice house doesn't mean you can't have one, right? Well, that's the whole thing. Just because I win doesn't mean you need to lose, right? Right, exactly. Why is it called vertical track? I think you need to explain that one. Well, what's horizontal?

Horizontal is pretty much a plane. You're not growing growing when you're growing which way should you be headed up vertically and it just so happens we're a garage door company and there's such a thing called the vertical track so it happened to make sense what was really cool about it is you got the website verticaltrack.com and i think it's a cool name for an event. Like six months after the first event, I grabbed it. I'm like, we don't own that? Oh, man.

Yeah. Lucky no one beat us. I'll tell you what, service titans had our back. There's so many people that have just been there for us. Julian Skadden has done so much for me. I look back and I just, for some reason, some of these people

they give without wanting to receive. And they don't expect anything. Darius flew out here on a whim the minute I asked him. Jody came out here and these people they show up when you need them. And those are what real friends are all about.

And I think they put on a hell of a show. You know, we did the VIP last, well, on the wrestling match. But we did the VIP session and Julian is just such a great, gracious, amazing man, isn't he? Yeah, amazing, amazing speaker, great. Just the world-class people that we have here

that are willing to give their time, energy. You know, for the most part, we're not spending a lot of money for the speakers. They're doing this because they're my friends. You know, sometimes, you know, you got some keynotes that you're throwing some money at because they're a busy schedule. That's how they make their living.

But I love getting people that are deep in the trenches that have built something that have really good they've been at the highs and they've been at the lows and i love people that have been where everyone else has been and been able to accomplish and work through it like aaron gainer yeah you know they worked his way through he held his little kid up and he said listen he said this is not going to be our life they were living on his mom's couch two years old little boy and he said this isn't going to be our life your dad's going to make it we're going to make it through this and they persevered and they kicked ass and we got to hear that story right travis the story at the last one. That was great too. Travis Rangy?

We had Aura, the CEO of ServiceTide show up at the last one. Tom Howard, you can't make this shit up. The one thing I've never seen is, I don't think I've ever seen Aura speak at anything other than his event. Yeah, I mean, what are they, like a $9 billion company? And he's just like, hey, I'm going to fly out to support. at anything other than his event yeah i mean what are they like a nine billion dollar company

and he just like hey i'm gonna i'm gonna fly out to support tommy's event i mean amazing right he was so cool man it was like people were walking up to him i don't know who got a meeting with him the next day but it was like a guy with like four technicians and i already took the time to have a meeting an hour out of his day with a guy that has four technicians. You find people that actually give a shit. They're not there to make money. They're there because they're real people. And those are the type of people that I want to do business with. I will do anything for my vendors and they'll do anything for me. And it's just something really special. You know, I think it's super cool what we're doing.

What else do you want to talk about as far as vertical track? I mean, so if you pull into the airport or out of the airport, it's about a 10 to 15 minute drive. You've got golf. The cool thing is Wild Horse Pass. What is Wild Horse Pass? It's like a casino and a resort. It is a casino. So there's gambling if you want to gamble. They've got some live music.

There's so many cool things to do around there. And it's so cool. Like the Biltmore was really cool. The Biltmore was really high class. This one is just fun. It's a great place that you could go. Maybe you don't want to go to a certain speaker. I think you're crazy if you don't.

But you can just go have fun. Go swim with the kids and your wife or husband. I'm telling you what, this one's going to blow the socks off. I don't know how we're going to keep doing it better, but we're going to have some breakout sessions. I want to really make sure people understand their financials. I really want to be sure that people know how to recruit right now. Cody just hit me up earlier and said he needs more trucks

because he's getting so many people. I'm telling you what these guys are coming out there his new guys are his best guys i mean he loves his old guys but the new guys are crushing it with a new mindset they're not having to unlearn bad habits mindset's what it comes down to at every level right i think cody said they're on track through seven seven, 7.5 million this year, hopefully 15% plus. That's awesome. Throw a million bucks in the bank. Yeah, I mean, Cody made a lot of changes in a short amount of time, right? I mean, the rebranding, service site, and all the systems.

I mean, it was a lot to bite off. Where were we when he met us? Were we in Vegas? We went to an event event and I called his dad and I said, you got to get Cody out of the field and boom, he's out of the field. So he's able to double down on the systems now. He can focus on dispatching, focus on training.

I'm sure he still itches to get out in the field, but now he can actually be on Facebook all day without any interruptions. I'm really excited, guys. You know, I think this is an event. If you don't like it, I'll give you your money back. I promise you that. If you know me, if you say it was a waste of your time, I promise you, Scout's honor,

you tell me you didn't get much from it. It just wasn't for you. I will gladly write you a check or refund your money on the card you paid. I will do that. Like if it's just not your cup of tea, if you didn't get much out of it, I don't care about ticket sales. I want to get as many people here as possible. And I want as many friends as possible. And I want to start changing industries. And I know there's so many relationships and so many things going to change lives that'll come out of this. Jim, what else?

Yeah, I mean, that was the thing, like the mood or the spirit in the air, like everybody was family there, right? I mean, I just sat down and talked to random people from all over the country and everybody was just positive and sharing information and how can we grow and how do you do this? This is how we do that. The speakers are great. The training sessions, all that, but the networking and the exchange of information amongst people, that was amazing. So, you know, we had a team from Canada come out.

There was about eight of them. He said he's bringing his whole team, like 20 of them, the next one. So love to have you. If you're interested, let let me know if you're struggling if you feel like you could do better if you want better systems if you want to meet some people that have been where you've been this is it jim um is there any other things you want to discuss here while we got a little bit of a crowd well just, just plug for the website, verticaltrack.com.

Ticket sales are open now. There's an early discount until August 15th. So don't miss that. If you're interested in coming, now's the time to get on board. So let me ask you a question here as we close down.

I give you so many freaking things. I can't even keep track. I know you got the Monday board, but how the hell do you keep track of all my ideas? It's a challenge and it's a process of constant reinvention, right? Like I had one system when I started and then gradually like, okay, Tommy overwhelmed that system, need a new system. So every day it's like, how can I process information faster? You know, store it, catalog it, take action on it, prioritize, right? Because you're helping me do the book.

We're doing a course for the book. You're building software for it. This is our first book after the last book. We've got another book after that. We've got a vertical track. We've got acquisitions, partnerships, four different softwares i mean one of the projects to keep a full-time person busy and you're working on over 100 so pretty remarkable i've said this to you before but i appreciate everything you do there's not a lot of people i know that could even

usually people walk in my office they think i'm talking lat at least you could interpret what i'm doing and make it actionable things. And, you know, I appreciate your work ethic and more importantly, your brain, you know, your daughter just won valedictorian killing it. And that good, very smart gene must have ran. Well, I think for mom and dad, she put in a lot of hard work. I won't take that away for, you know, dad was up at 2 AM working on, and she was sitting at the kitchen table working, too. She put in the hours. She earned it. But she screwed up in middle school, you said.

Well, she was on a streak of never had missed a day of school. I forget what grade it was. She was totally sick, couldn't go. She missed one day. I was like, should have kept that record going, not missing a day and valedictorian. So that can't be perfect. I'll forgive her. So Jim was over, I don't know, a few weeks ago and he gets a phone call or a message about she lost her phone. That was funny. And then they lost her electricity that night crazy stuff you know jim will end up living in phoenix one of these days i don't know if you guys ever been to pittsburgh there's some cool things about it but arizona sometimes but i think you'll end up

getting a place won't you yeah jim is there any books that stood out to you in the last couple of years that you're a big reader is there any books that really are just moved you in a big way oh geez that's a good question yeah i read read a lot but i'm usually studying a lot of technical stuff and i don't know so the home service millionaire you know what book i bought everybody for this trip coming up to Flagstaff? It's called The New One Minute Manager. It's pretty cool. Quick read. It's about 19 copies for the managers. And we're going to go through this. And what I'm going to do is sit down in a circle, a kumbaya. We're going to be roasting marshmallows. And I'm going to take turns reading.

And every time we finish reading a certain page, I'm going to say, Hey Mike, what'd you get out of that? Hey Jim, what'd you take from that? Hey Brandon, what'd you take from that? And we're going to make sure to comprehend this whole book and it's going to change our manager's lives. We're doubling down on training. I think it's just important to really, I love what we're doing because we're building our own. It's like Star Trek, places where no one has ever gone. I say that a lot every day. People ask me, you know, how are we expected to do this or whatever?

And I'm like, you know, we're kind of charting, you know, new territory, doing things that nobody in this industry for sure has ever done. A lot of things that nobody in any industry has done so you obviously make mistakes along the way you learn you know as you go but it's kind of that spirit of adventure that i like right it's never a boring day for sure so what's my answer if someone says i don't think i can get that done what do you need to get it done what do you need

just give me the list do you need more money do you need to hire more What do you need to get it done? What do you need? Just give me the list. Do you need more money? Do you need to hire more people? Do you need more resources? Do you need more software? Like, look, who could we 1099 to get in here to help? Who can we hire as a consultant? Why I do not accept no as an answer. Now I know I push and I know I don't get annoyed at times, but the deal is perseverance is putting pressure, deadlines, passion, excitement, having the carrots. Oh, by the way, we're testing a new thing called carrots. I wouldn't suggest anybody getting on it just yet until we master it and give the mellow approval. But I think it's going to be a game changer. We're going to have that for ground zero freedom.

Hey, Vince, I appreciate the compliment and Cody, as always, we appreciate you and Jody. Appreciate you watching this. Jim, why don't you close this out?

One last tidbit, maybe one piece of action, obviously go get your deliberate specials, but I'll let you close this out. Oh man, you put me on the spot. Yeah. I don't know. I got to say, I appreciate being here. A lot of fun. I mean, everybody I've met, all the garage door companies, home service companies. I mean, it's been great. And I think

we're going places. You know, I'd say this, more than anything, I want you to get your life back. What makes me more excited is when I see a mom or dad that get to be a soccer coach, to go on field trips again. They get to be there for dinner with their kids. They get to take their wife or husband on a 10-year anniversary that they never thought possible. They get to leave and have the stress-free time of knowing that systems are running the business. That's what I look forward to. I look forward to home ownership, great credit scores, time with family, new human

beings coming into this world. And if we could have an opportunity to help people do that, then I'm all for it. And I'm here to say, we're going to help you do it. If you want, there's a lot of people that are going to do whatever they want and can to help you succeed. Just because someone wins doesn't mean there can't be other winners. Winners share, winners give back, winners pay it forward. Jim Leslie, it's been a pleasure. Got you on the flip side. Talk to you in about the next 10 minutes. I'll just get my phone out now.

Sounds good, buddy. Thank you guys for watching. Hopefully we see you at Vertical Track. Thank you. Hey, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. Before you go, I wanted to invite you to my next Vertical Track event. We've opened it up to all home service companies, just like our last event. And people across all industries have been messaging me all the time saying this last event brought them as much as a 10 times return on their investment you need to go there check it out sign up today now the great news is is that we're doing it again in October

and we want it to be the best event of the year in the home service space if you're ready to build systems to scale and get out of the truck once and for all get your tickets right now at vertical track.com we're about to go through some tough times in the economy and I want to give you some tools and some tips to get through it and start making more money than you ever realized so go to verticaltrack.com and get your tickets now