The Home Service Expert Podcast - Wealth Hacks and Motivation for Entrepreneurs with Tom Howard

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

In this episode, Tommy and Tom Howard discuss the responsibility of leadership, the need for immediacy in follow up calls, and how to be a good CEO. They also discuss how to succeed by doing difficult things.   Timestamps: 00:00:00 Cold Open 00:00:10 Title Sequence 00:00:29 Show Notes VO 00:01:15 Intro Into Interview 00:51:20 Outro

All of the people in your company are relying on you to be the best leader you can possibly be because they're working for you. They picked you just as much as you pick them, and you owe it to them. 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. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today.

To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I ask the team to take notes for you. Just text, note, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-5-26-1299, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevate and win.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.

All right, guys, welcome back to the home service expert. Today is always a special day when I get to talk to Tom Howard. One of the best home service people in the industry. I think what makes Tom really special is, that he's just a really, really good, he's always curious and such a good communicator. He's got, he's friends with everybody. He's an expert in sales, business, customer service. He's the VP of customer experience at service Titan.

He's also the owner of Lee's Air. They had a lot of exits, just a machine when it comes to business. He brings significant owner-operator and M&A experience to the home service industry, having previously bought, built, and sold several HVAC and plumbing home service companies. also close with Horizon Home Services, a leading East Coast provider of plumbing, heating, and air conditioning services. On the integrations of its adorn acquisitions, the development and implementation of its continuous improvements programs, including the digitalization and automation of critical business processes. I could go on and on about Tom. I just want

to jump into it. First and foremost, how's it going, brother? Great. Good to see you again, Tommy. Always. I'm just going to jump in. What's the hardest thing? would you say in 2025, 2026 about the home service industry? Oh, gosh. I think there's a lot of uncertainty for people about what's ahead. They don't know how technology is changing and how it's going to affect them. So I think people are concerned about whether or not they're how long-uner-right AI product, what AI is going to look like in the next five years,

how they should be moving now to stay on top of it. Are their competitors going to outrun them? And, yeah, just a lot going on. So it's the thing about. How do you compete with private equity? You know, one of the things I realized at Pantheon, which is Service Titans largest event. And I've always, the last week and a half, I've been saying,

there was more blue coats, Rolexes, and loafers there than I've ever seen at a home service event. Like, there's money pouring in. And I just know there's certain private equity companies willing to go to 0% profit. They're literally willing to undercut. And it's something we hear a lot about and they're willing to go, I can tell you this Chamberlain made an investment. And I was just speaking to the CEO of Chamberlain and they said,

we're not going to see a return on this until the end of 2028. How do you compete with that kind of investments? Well, a few things. One is that most private equity companies are going to go in and they're going to do more to raise prices than they are going to cut them. Right. So in a lot of cases, the price pressure isn't the issue. I mean, there's somewhere they're going to take a play.

where they're going to try to, you know, push into a market and price cut things to get in. And those are all, you know, business ideas that are thinking through. But in most cases, what people realize is, I mean, I've sold the private equity before. I own things that are private now. The private equity brings the table has a lot to do with sophistication on the larger scale, budgeting, forecasting, those kind of things. I'm sure that Cortex talked to you a lot about high-level things. The downside is, though, is that once private equity,

comes in and they're going national it's hard for them to compete on the city by city basis and so that's where the private guys um the privately held things really get i guess everything's probably held but like individuals mom-pop shops have that advantage when you have that ability to go into a city and people know who you are and you're posting on social media all the time getting to know people and going out there and meeting with people at the home shows at the soccer games and the you know church get-togethers and those kind of things and those kind of things and getting your name out there and really becoming strong pro skill did it really great with their pro skill cares program where they went around to all the little individual um the little

individual organizations that wanted to raise money and said look we're going to help you raise money and what we're going to do is we're going to give you a phone number and this is our pro skill cares number and anytime any if you refer anyone to our business have them call this number and anything that comes in through that number we're going to give you 5% of the proceeds and It was basically a 5% cost of marketing. And they went around to every single place out there. They had dozens and dozens of these phone numbers getting tracked through service titan.

And they would cut these checks. And that's really hard to do that kind of grassroots marketing as a private equity company. I'm having that problem now where I've got companies in Sacramento, well, just with Lees, we have locations in Sacramento, Fresno, Los Angeles, Vegas, and Phoenix. You have five locations and trying to do it in three different states. it's hard to get to where you can do grassroots stuff where you're really getting to know people and you know bringing in these organizations

to help market for you. That's how I'd be competing. I'd be finding all the spots where private equity can't fight as well and I'd fight there because they're going to be able to fight better than you on some of the mass scale things. So do better on the smaller things. There's room for everybody. You know, this is a personal question.

I'm noticing now that everybody involved in home service expects to just become mega wealthy. It's crazy. Like you're seeing numbers now if you were like at a Fortune 500 company to come in and run. Like it's it's like, you know, the technicians have the ability. Some of them make a million dollars, but they're selling 10, 20 million. And I just feel like, you know, I kind of am able to do that with equity.

But at what point does the market kind of crash? little bit and say, you know, I'm reading article after article after article of like P's coming in. They're taking advantage and that they could afford to pay these prices. But, you know, now you get like a director level that wants to come in at like some mega crazy number and ask for a bunch of equity. And some of these companies are paying it. But the problem is they're turning them over so quick.

There's no like they don't even get vested. But what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I have a few ideas. So, one is get efficient at what you are right now. So if you're a $5 million shop, get efficient and strong at that and make your profits. And then with those profits, you can afford to get some more people that are going to help you get to $10 million. But don't pretend like you're going to grow to $10 million and then figure out how to start like making your profit. As you get bigger, it's going to be hard.

It's hard to move. It's hard to do all those things. So then fight with what you have now. you don't need that director that's coming in that wants to make all that money. You should be able to get through that yourself and invest in yourself a lot. I think a lot of people come to me, they say, well, you know, it's cool that you got a background in, you know, an education and finance before you came to the industry. So, first of all, no, I came to the industry before that.

And then I used the industry to help pay for college. Number two, it helps understanding finance. But guys like talking to you, Tommy, I don't know. People listen to this podcast, Tommy doesn't brag about a lot. Tommy reads freaking 10, 20, sometimes 50 books a year. It's crazy. The amount of reading he's done. And Tommy sold his business for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars already. And he's still reading. And he's still learning. Sorry, I'm talking to the third person here, Tommy, but like, I want the listeners to hear this. All of you guys should be investing in yourselves and growing so that you're not

constantly relying on someone else. And then you do enough that you can kind of get past that five, 10 million mark. And then you can afford to get that director to come in or whatever. maybe you're a 20 million of revenue, 30, 40, 50 million of revenue and you keep paying up to keep getting more and more staff. Now, you should be getting there and you should be taking that responsibility on yourself to become the best operator you can because all of the people in your company are relying on you to be the best leader you can possibly be because they're working for you. They picked you just as much as you pick them and you owe it to them. So you should be trying. And so when I look at my college education, I'm like, guys, I've read way more since

college than I ever did in college. Like, I've learned so much more, all those things, because I kept going and going. This year, I looked at my goals. I've read nine books year-to-date that are calling thousands of thousands of pages. And I'm like, I'm going to keep going. And that's going to happen. I don't, I've sold businesses before. It doesn't matter. So do that. Then when you get there, don't be stingy with your equity and with your freaking wages. I looked at my my lowest paid field installer last year. Helper. Install helper last year made $120,000 in Fresno. You can buy a house for 500 grand. This dude literally came. He was picking grapes in the fields or whatever. And they taught him how to do air conditioning install as a helper. It made 120 grand. You should be. Now,

it took a while to get to a pay plan that was paid on performance so we can pay that to and still be profitable. But that's what I want to get to so that the people want to come work for me. And if I need a director, whatever. I want the best and baddest. Tommy does that a lot. He goes and tries to find the best people he can because you're not going to be perfect at everything. You need to be as best you can so that you can question them so you can push back. You can get yourself to the $10 million mark without a ton of really expensive staff. But the reality is like as you get bigger, you should be able to pay top dollar for people and get the best talent. And that's how you're going to win. Yep. I also think that I've hired people that wanted a lot of

lot of money but didn't have the skills. So you've got to be very careful just because they came from a big salary or big position before. I think it's really hard from somebody to come. Can you imagine a Luke or a Brian Davenport going to a $10 million company today? I don't even know, like, even me going to a $10 million company because we built these tools over the years. We've built these relationships with our technicians. It would be so hard to go back. So if I was going to go, like I'd have to go to a $100 million company to be effective. You know what I mean? mean, it'd be very hard to be as effective going back. I mean, when Adam started in 2014, we were doing $7 million. So it'd be very hard to go back to those days. And that was such an

organization, lack of systems. But what I would have to do is take a team with me now. You know what I mean? Because we've got so good working with a team. You know, you've said to me, I think the worst year in HVAC in 40 years in California, just you didn't get the weather. I know you had some really, really big stretch goals. And I don't know how much you feel like talking about them, but it doesn't always go as planned. And sometimes it doesn't. And even the great Tom Howard and the great Tommy and Ishmael or whoever you want to say, you know, we get up to bat, we strike out a lot.

But when we hit a home run, we hit a home run. But how do you regroup? What do you tell your team? I mean, you've got to be facing a lot right now because you've got a lot of partners. What's that like? Yeah, it's an uphill battle. So I'll tell you, we had the coldest summer on record in 25 or 26 years, something like that. It's all over the news.

And it's just in the western states. And my companies are in, at least Lees, is mostly in California, Arizona, Nevada. And so it didn't show up. And we killed it in August because all of a time we got a little heat in August, finally. We outperformed our goals. But we underperformed in May, June, July. And that's tough because to me, I'm like, well, let's not sell the company. Let's just wait until the end of, you know, next summer.

And the partners don't want to do that. They're ready to go. So I think in the end of the day, my feeling is that I could try to push and lead and get them excited to go through next summer. And the other side of me says, well, you'll get some friction on that. And I don't know. I feel like pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. We had a good run. We have a decent amount of EBITDA.

Less than I wanted, like half of what I wanted, which is going to cost me about nine figures. But I think we'll be clearing about 15 million of EBITDA at that company. And we definitely clear that. We're, you know, it's a layup for that. But anyway, and we're most of the way through the year now. We've got three months left. We got the last quarter. So, anyway, I think when you have partners, you've got to realize that not everyone has the same timeline, not everyone has the same mentality, not everyone has the same goals.

And if you don't take your partner's goals into account and you don't take their mentality into account and their timelines, then you're just pushing for yourself all the time and it gets really selfish. And people don't want to work with selfish people. So you might push it and get what you want on this one and then people don't want to work with you on the next one. So I'm going to make plenty of money. I don't care that much anymore. And I'll do the next one and I'll be happy and continue to be, you know, investing in the future. If you could go back and talk to these partners from the beginning, would you say, would you give like a double? Like, either we're going to go to three years or whatever we're at or if we hit this number.

Would you have thought about things a little bit differently? Yeah, I mean, I did. But we exceeded that number. So the problem is, I told them we'd go to market if we hit this number. But then we got close to realize, oh, my gosh, we were like double that number. And so now they look at it and say, well, Tom, we hit the number. You said we're going to hit. And on the timeline, you said we're going to do it.

You can't renege now. And so now I have to shrug my shoulders and say, well, okay, you're right. and that's why I'm just kind of going along with it. Think about the last 15 years and think about where you started who you were hiring. What do you think, I know Tyson was a really big hire, but you ended up allowing him to move to service tighten. I mean, I won't say allowing, just agreeing with the point that he could do that. But, you know, who do you think the most key hire was and why?

Gosh, there's always a different key hire for different things. We should talk about the Tyson thing for a second. It's Tyson Freeman was my right-hand guy, and I learned a lot of lessons there. I knew that he was going to be GM one day. I didn't tell him that in the beginning. And I just said, hey, I put his desk in my office. He could hear everything I was saying. He was such a humble guy, hardworking.

And I think this is a key point that, like, people, miss. They always want to drive for themselves at their companies and look at this short-term vision. When Service Titan called me, they called me to say, hey, would you mind if we talked to Tyson? I think we need to hire him. And I asked them, my first question was, what are you going to offer them? And they told me what they're going to offer them. And I realized at that point that Tyson had a better opportunity at Service Titan than what I could offer them in my company. With the equity they were packaged, they were offering him, and the salary they were offering him and everything else. And I realized, I mean, he's just more effective there. He can help thousands of

contractors at one time while we're at service time. I don't have that kind of impact, so I couldn't do that. And because of that, I knew that him moving to service time was going to be the best thing for his family. And when you think about it, like, could I, I knew service, I knew Tyson outside of work. We became friends outside of work. And I could never look at his wife and his kids and him. and think I stood in the way of them getting this awesome opportunity and hurt their family like that. So I had no choice but to say yes. Go ahead. And so what are you going to do? And I said, you know, the reality is I don't know, but I will figure it out. And we will succeed. And we did. And Tyson was an awesome employee for six years. And, you know, I would have loved to have him as a GM. But

The reality is like we've kept growing since then. When Tyson left, we were about $15 million in revenue. Now this year, we're going to do like $125. And you always figure it out. You've got to trust in your own business acumen and you can't operate out of fear. Oh my gosh, if we lose that one guy, we're never going to succeed and we're going to fall. You know, you're going to get through it. I know, Tommy, you've had some key employees, like, including, you know, Adam, Kronerberg.

He was an awesome guy, but you guys, you know, I'm sure it hurt when he left, but you get through it and you keep growing and you got to put your trust in your own business and trust in yourself to grow through it. But I think at every different size of company, there's a new key hire. I think one of the most important ones, though, for Lee's was Phil Fulaski. It was just an awesome, awesome, awesome hire. I saw what he did while he was at Fetch, Tech before he sold that. And then he went on to other places. I said, Phil, why are you going these other places? Like, why just come work with me?

And I had to give him a nice equity package and things to come over. And it was well worth it. And he did amazing things. And it's really made the company, you know, blow up. So he's the most recent one that was very, very critical. So you've done some things where you're kind of known to go into companies. I think it was Dustin Pest Control. I've seen you do this a lot.

If I had to sit here from a spectator point of view, I think, I don't know if your marketing is like the best in the world. I don't necessarily know if you run the best call center or dispatch, but you have abilities to recruit people that are not only anomalies, but just crazy good. But, you know, you can't really do that in pest control. So I think you're very good at just looking at a balance sheet and income statement. and like determining, whoa, this is a big hole. But if you had to tell me like how you turn around the pest control company, they were losing, I mean, they were running at a net loss and you turned it around. What are some of the things you go in and what are the first steps?

Just is it KPIs? Is it the financials? I think there's one thing that kind of you can string through almost any business, especially service businesses. If they follow this business model where you have leads, come in, that lead is turned into some kind of sales call or a service call or whatever. And then someone goes out to, you know, service either a service technician or salesperson or whatever, you're going to have a close rate. And then after that close rate, you have an average

ticket. And then average ticket turns into, you know, a job and, you know, whatever. And then you have profitability after that. And that's really when the P&L starts to really matters, like below after that sale happens. Because once that sale happens, then it hits the top line of the P&L. And then the P&L works this way down there. And what I see that is, and for all of you listening, Tommy and I talk about this funnel all the time. And these businesses work this way. Even if you're investing in real estate, you'll say, oh, it's not the same model because I'm going out and finding houses. It is the same model.

It's how many houses am I going to look at? Out of those many houses, how many can I actually get appointments to run through and whatever? How many, what percentage of those is going to turn into things that I actually want to buy? You know, why do I want to buy them? You know, what things can I change so I can get more of them? Whatever. There's just, how can I increase the top size of my funnel? There's all kinds of things like that.

By the way, Tom, people always. I learned that, I learned that formula in 2016 from a real estate trainer, a realtor trainer. So anyway, keep going. Yeah, yeah. And in home service, I just look at the funnel. I don't even care. I don't know. I don't care if it's roofing.

I don't care if it's electrical, plumbing, age vac, pest control, or, you know, birthday cake sales. I don't care. It's how many potential leads can I get? You know, and I'm looking at that top leads. And everyone in our industry wants to just get more leads. If I just have more leads, if I just have more leads, they don't realize it's like a funnel. And below that, those leads coming in, how many of those do we convert into actual book drafts? And that's our cold booking rate.

and I'm just going to look at it and I don't I don't care if you're press control I don't care if you're electrical whatever what's that booking rate now I don't care if they're coming in through the phone I don't care if they're coming in through online advertising or web form or whatever how many of those do we actually book and then out of those how many actually turn into jobs and what's my cancellation rate I look at all the places where it could fall out and I find the spots where they fall and then I fix that and then below that once I get to the bottom the average ticket and everything else then I start looking at the P&O because then once the sale happens and the revenues generated created it goes the top of the P&L then I can see from there

okay do I do I start losing on the gross margin do I start losing you know on the overhead do I where do I start losing where is it falling out in the P&L I basically trying to figure out how do I optimize not losing money all the way down the line and it gets simple you just you got to put the emotion aside though and I see these people go into into businesses or going into company meetings and saying, well, I can tell you, Johnny, that sales guy really sucks. We should just fire her, you know? Or, oh, I got to tell you, you know, Sally's wasting time in the CSR office or Johnny, my dispatcher, gosh, he sucks.

I, we need to fix that. And they just randomly point at things. And I tell them, like, look, guys, if, if I, I don't care, if you're saying Sally, the CSR is terrible, but my call booking rate is 85 to 90%. I'm not even I'm not going to bother Sally's doing her job you may not like her you may have emotions that you don't like blah blah

I don't care I just I see it as a spreadsheet and then I'm going to move on to the other things that are failing if my conversion rate in the field is 40% or 30% on service calls or everything else I'm going to go okay this is a problem now maybe for that industry it's okay I don't know each industry is going to be different but I can tell if you got a service call

and you're converting it 40 to 50% half of your job are just going down the toilet So get your conversion rate up. And so let's focus on that. And I don't care how much you like the technicians. If the conversion rate's low, it's something you've got to work on. And so, you know, I look at that funnel all the way down and make sure that I'm not losing money all the way down more. You know what's crazy is there's a bath remodeling company.

I'm not going to say who, but I just had met with somebody from that company. And I learned a lot of statistics. They're at a 12% close rate. So they're a 60% booking rate, which is. crazy to me because they come out for free. And then their closing rate is about 35, 40% when they're in the home. So if you do the math,

and then there's a couple other outliers, and they pay $5,000 to acquire one of those customers. And that's home improvement. But what's crazy to me is they're doing over $500 million and they still make it work. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't think, like those numbers, numbers just to me, like, I can make them work so much better.

But the home improvement, they're going to call you 25 times to follow up. They're going to get the appointment. That's the difference is if we had the tenacity that home improvement has in home service and you combine the two, what would happen? Yeah. You start picking up all those things that you're losing. And really, when you're talking about the tenacity on the follow-up, it's really, it comes back to, okay, what's the close rate?

Because the follow-up is just going to change that close rate. So it's like, it's still on the line that we should be looking on. It's like, oh my gosh, look at that. I saw it with the company we got down in Texas. They looked at us and they started laughing because they were so good on social media. And I thought, how are you guys so awesome at social media? They just did direct marketing on social media for new system replacements, not even service repair or anything else. And they had an $18,000 average ticket because usually when social media and you're just doing

direct sale, you're not really going there for a service call or anything else. You don't get that high of an average ticket because you're usually competing on price or something like that and trying to convince people it's a good idea just because it's the price or low. Their average ticket was super high and their booking rate was low

but it's still way higher than ours on social media coming in. Well, we consider low because we're considering like, oh, we want 80, 90% booking rate. Well, the reality is someone's feeling out of a farm online. 30% tops. Yeah, yeah, third percent tops, big time.

And I said, how do you get your booking rates much higher than that? And they said, well, it's all speed to lead. And so I said, okay, what goes on? They said, Tom, we've realized if someone pulls out their phone and is scrolling on social media and fills out a form saying, yeah, talk to me about a new air conditioner. I want the phone to ring to call them to book it before they put that phone back in their pocket. I do not want them to put their phone away before they get the phone call.

So they're constantly tracking how many minutes or seconds. It's down to seconds on how fast they call back that customer from the time a web form comes in. Meanwhile, over at Lees, we're looking at like we call them the next day. We call them five hours later. Whatever, when a web form comes in, our call center just didn't care about them that much. And these guys are like, dude, you're just burning the money. I'm like, you know what, you're right.

There's a study published in Northwestern University shows that if you call someone back from in five minutes instead of five hours. You have a 3,000 times more likely, you're 3,000 times more likely to book it. And because people can't remember what they're doing five hours ago. So basically, if you go web leads coming in and your call center is just focusing on the phone calls coming in, you're just burning all these web leads for nothing. It's just disappearing. You need to be under 30 seconds to a minute and a half getting back to that customer from the time

they put that web lead in. And so it's still fresh in their minds and they still remember the ad and everything else, what's going on and why they should be booking with you. so do you think leading up with an SMS a text message and saying hey we're going to call you right now just so you know this is the number yeah so it's like you know automated if you can and that way you can the bottom line is that it's the same principle you're trying to get back to them super super super super fast so that it it you know hits them and they know that you're you're on it where do you think you know i've been thinking a lot about this in the last two weeks

weeks. And I started thinking about who's going to be the real big winners. I mean, I really believe there's going to be massive amounts of big, big roll-ups. And I started thinking about just one thing, the manufacturer, because Amazon's not going to start manufacturing HVAC units or garage stores. And I started to think about kind of what Leland said years ago was like, I was able to buy better. And this idea of how can you get with your manufacturers and like I always think what's in it for them? How do I have them win? But what are some of the better ways that you've seen to really get to be able to buy better?

I mean, whether it's vehicles, iPads, whether negotiating with vendors or specifically the, you know, the cogs, the goods that you buy and install? Yeah. It's I, dude. Well, there's short term like what you're talking about about like how do we get to that what we buy install honestly I think the long term is what the manufacturers is is that

they're honestly going to be the long term winner in this I think if I had to guess he'll say how and I'm like guys it's going to go BDC it's going to go directly from them to the consumer soon yeah as soon as soon as soon it's the point where they can own the robots

to put this stuff in or if one of the manufacturers figures out how to change out an air conditioner make it so easy to change out you literally just like plug it in and that's it they change the technology so it's like ultra simple. No one hires someone to come

install your freaking microwave anymore. You just set on the counter and you plug it in. And if the technology gets to the point with air conditioning where they can do that,

if Tesla figures out or something like that and they can manufacture it, then they win, period. And if not, the robots are going to do it and that's going to take 20 or 30 years,

but I think long term, that's really, really what's going to happen. So I'd be thinking along those lines and I'd be thinking about hey if that's going to happen what am I going to do and where do I fit in that model and what's

my business going to look like? We've got a long time until robots are installing these things but I would be thinking about that right now because at that point the manufacturers can just own the robots and dispatch everything and be done. You know I was with a genius guy

last night. I was with my buddy Joe Paul was talking to this guy and he was talking about the last rocket that that SpaceX shot up. some of the shit that they're building is like if they just took a half a percent and went into home service and said we're going to go there next, that's scary. I mean, we were talking about that with the LSD group is like, hey, what happens if Elon, and there was talks about Elon getting in the home service industry, he wouldn't even have to put a lot of people. He'd put one engineer on it, and it could really disrupt everything. I mean, think about it, the driving, driveless cars.

I mean, I don't know. My brain doesn't think, my brain thinks, yes, driverless cars. cars, less garage or use. Yeah, I'm thinking like long term, but what could be a disruptor? Like you said, plug and play, hot water heater that just has a couple of valves that just lock tight, all different methodology. I don't know, but where a handyman can install it. But what are some of the other, obviously AI is a massive disruptor, but what would

happen if Elon got in the home service game? What do you think he would be looking at first? Honestly, I like which industry would you be looking at first? um i know he's already gotten into solar um and he his solar tiles look pretty cool um i think what'll happen is is stuff like that it'll be they'll probably have robots doing that the things that are very risky to do like roofing and solar um right now you've got a huge opportunity there because the cost of labor in there is so high you'll say oh roovers don't make that much money it's like No, they don't, but the workers' comp company does.

So with any roof for right now, if you got workers' comp on your roof and you're paying the roof for $30 an hour, you also pay the workers' comp company $30 an hour, at least in the state of California. It's $35 or $40. So just because they're so worried about someone falling and dying, in those cases,

not only do you have a financial incentive, but there's probably going to be a lot of investment around just because they're probably going to need a lot of credit for saving human life. and not having fall off roofs. And when I see that, I'm like, okay, that's probably going to happen. It's a repetitive task.

So they've got machines now that actually go across roofs, nailing shingles down. They're not, you still need crews to turn them and push them, and they just keep going. But they're getting better and better. I think also lawn care is going to change draft. They have talked to guys that are just buying up robots like you wouldn't believe.

And I got one of them in SoCal that he's literally buying up all the robots he can and then he wants to lease them to other landscaping companies. He's a big landscaping company over 20 million revenue, but he can literally just go drop off robots in a neighborhood and leave them all day and come back and pick them up at the end of the end of the day and all the landscaping stuff or at least the lawnmowing. And so a lot of this stuff, there's some things that technology is going to take a little while to figure out. I asked him the other day, I said, what happens if one of these

runs over a baby that's in the front yard and kills it? It's got a kill switch on it. Yeah. And he's like, oh gosh, I didn't think about that. I thought I would be thinking about that right now. It was actually at Pantheon, what I was talking to about it. But they're going to figure those things out. And so all these people right now complaining and kicking against the pricks saying, well, AI can't handle this.

AI could, one guy told me, AI can never, you know, demonstrate empathy to an individual. I said, are you kidding me? We can, we can program them to demonstrate empathy in a heartbeat. Like, it's, it's already happening right now. And he said, oh, wow, good point. AI is going to replace all these things. and we're going to be using it. It's just a matter of time.

I just, I don't want to fear it, though, because we've always been afraid. What? Guys like us will get involved in those opportunities. I mean, the fact is that there is some worry about it, but at the same time, who are you going to go to? Like if you had a robot, if you had AI, like they come to me and the guys like you and they go to service time. Like, they're like, because we become influencers or whatever, but they're like, you could help get the message. They still don't have distribution. So they got to go to somebody, right?

Yeah. 100%. Man, I got million other questions. We got to, so, you know, let me ask you this. This is a, because I was 30 million before I decided to rebrand with kick charge. And I know that you did a deal with Dan Antonelli on Fetchatech, tech, where you actually made him an equity. partner. Why, why did you do that? Why did you decide to make, like, that's a pretty bold move to decide to make a branding company, a partner. Obviously, we know the Gettle story. Dale Steele went out

and tripled his average ticket once they got rebranded. But what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, a couple things. One is that branding is huge. I'm talking to another company right now and their brand, their truck is basically a white truck with black letters on it. it looks like it's from the 1980s um it's just i'm like dude no one wants that come to their house um and you've got to change your brand and that kind of thing and i highly recommend if you have it go to kick charge talk to them look at what they're doing on going what they've got going on go to their website they've got all kinds of brands on their website that they've built and it's pretty awesome but the reason i made them equity partner in that case is because

one i saw the value of the brandy but number two is that i was trying to prove and i did fetch a tech that we could do all this without spending a single dollar. And so we didn't. We bought the whole thing and flipped it and everything else. We started out with zero dollars, zero out of pocket and grew it and sold it for tens and tens of millions dollars 16 months later. I can't say the number, but it was $6 million in profit. And you could assume that we got between, I don't know, nine and 12 or 13 times EBITDA,

if you look it up online about what the, you know, things are going for. So it was, it was well over $50 million. It's put that way. If you can look online and see what the stuff was. Anyway, and to do that was $0 in and sell for that as awesome. Now, in the end, it was, it was cool to do it and do well say that we did it with $0 and prove that we could. But it would have been smarter just to pay him, you know. He made a ton of money way over TEDx.

What he would have gone if I just paid him the money up front. But I didn't keep mind. He took the risk on that. It could have been worth nothing. And I think bringing him in was awesome. I think definitely having your brand locked up tight is awesome. You've got to have something to build off of. And you've got to be something that it's got to be something that homeowners when they look at

they can identify with and be happy with. It shouldn't be something that your buddy thought was cool and you think it's cool to put on your truck. It's got to be something that homeowners identify with, that Mrs. Jones, who's 60 years old, with, you know, a, I don't know, steady income on retirement is happy to have over to her house to invite you in and feels comfortable with. I've seen Dan debate probably 100 people online when they put the big muscular guy lifting up a log, you know, and he's like that's... For the dog, it looks like it's got rabies on the side of your truck that would have been

out of a horror movie, you know, but it's just so cool. And then they make it all this masculine when it's the women buying. And I think that Dan takes this pretty seriously. Like he scolded me about a dozen times. Like, who did that billboard? Why didn't you give it to me? That's crap. Or like the yard signs or like change your signature or this isn't the color pattern.

Have you looked at your last truck? It's a shade off of red. And because he cares, you know, it's something that's interesting to me because he's not just a guy that does branding. I mean, he's like, he considers it artwork. And he's like, if you don't get the right rap company and they try to play with the vector file and they move it a little bit. He will have a shit fit.

Like, that's how much he cares. You know what I mean? He will. I remember we asked him, one of the guys asked on the Fetchotech brand for him to change the dog to a Rottweiler. And Dan about lost his mind. I mean, Dan just,

file says, no. It's just, it's not happening. If you want to do that, go call some other branding company. It was pretty funny. Yeah, he gets a lot of rip off. So at Service Titan,

you leave customer experience and product adoption. and I would say service tight is an enterprise tool like Salesforce. And what's cool about service tight is you could set up things. There's so many different levers for your business. I remember when we barely got, you know, the ability to reconcile the statements. I was there for that. I was there for, what was another cool feature that we got that I was thinking about? Oh, configurable payroll.

Configurable payroll is a freaking phenomenal. I mean, the fact is that everybody pays a little bit differently, so you guys figured that out. But everybody kind of sets their stuff up differently and gets their data differently. So what do you think the biggest roadblocks when you get on to Service Titan? Because it's not like a quick, you just type in a few things and it's set up. What are the biggest mistakes people make? It's hard because a lot of us, when we're small companies, we've been on smaller softwares.

They're not really enterprise-grade software. and we're used to a few clicks to get it going. And honestly, if Aura had his way and could, if he had a magic wand to make it happen, that would be the number one thing he would do tomorrow is make it so simple to set up that it can do go in ARP. It's very hard though when it's a software

that's that big to make it that simple. If you look at really big software as like Salesforce and others, they don't even have in-house marketing, in-house onboarding teams. You have to go to a third-party onboarder and you're probably going to pay them a couple million to implement, and they're going to be focused on it for two or three years until it's fully implemented. With service type, we know that we're dealing with contractors in most

cases. They're not willing or able to do that. So I think a lot of people don't realize like, hey, with a really big software, you're talking about full implementation teams that are focusing on doing this. At service site, and you're getting an enterprise level software, but you're not going to have to put that big of an implementation team. But you're going to, in the The issue that people have that the big mistake they make is that they don't realize like, I'm going to have to put significant effort into getting this live. And it's going to take someone that can think through the whole process and see all of the different options and what's going on and think how they're going to do it.

And I tell them, look, in the very beginning, have someone focused on it in your office. It can be a, if you're a small company, it could be your dispatcher, that their job and they are responsible for making sure that service site goes live on time. somebody that really wants to run with it. It could be a CSR. It could be the service manager. It could be somebody. They don't have to quit their job to do it,

but they should be the one that's responsible for it and making sure that they take ownership in it. Number one and number two, they need to focus on in the beginning. Don't get all the flashy stuff going. In the beginning, when you go live, make sure you can take a phone call, book a job, run the call, collect the money,

and put it into your accounting software. If you do those five things, then you can start adding on all the pieces of service time later. If you do those five things, take the call, book the job, you know, run the job and finish it, collect the money and put it in accounting. If you can do those five things, and at least your business is still running, and you can build on top of that. And if people try to do like what you're doing now at your company, Tommy, and they're a $2 million garage door company, it's not going to happen. It took you guys

years and years and years of developing and getting stronger and stronger and stronger. they can sign up for like garage door freedom or home service freedom, whatever, and get some advice on things they should be doing and move faster. But they're not going to go from zero to 200 miles an hour in a heartbeat. Well, they couldn't. Like we've got virtual product specialists. Even if I gave them the whole playbook and how to do it, they'd have to fill in all these roles that are specialties.

You know what I mean? And you just can't do that at that level. I'm going to ask you a personal dilemma I'm in. You know, we're probably one of the most competitive companies. We've got scorecards. And a technician came up to me yesterday and said, hey, I ran a service agreement for a member. And I sold an operator bracket because that's all they needed. We did a lot of work last year.

And he goes, anything over $100 counts as an opportunity. So what I saw, and he's a newer guy, he said, I saw my scorecard come down dramatically from that. And so here's what I found out. guys are going to jobs and rather that either they say it's a warranty if they're going to write a low ticket they'd rather just fix it

and figure out a way I'm a very competitive guy but how would you solve the problem because I'm like yeah but that's your scorecard not the money you're making you sell things you make more money but they don't look at it like that the score card is their pride it's like the back of an

MBL card like runs battered in and I'm never going to take the score cards away, but they're afraid to take a job that's going to hurt their scorecard. And I'm like, this is kind of a dilemma. And I can't really come up with any solutions except for just using FieldSpark to listen to those calls and really finding out what was there and looking at the inspection list and service type. But what would you say to that?

Because I'm not getting rid of the scorecards of the competition. What I'm hearing from you is that you have an issue with the guy trying to play to the scorecard, not play to the line. But I think that's not really the problem. And I think that's what a great guy was, he was giving a speech in business before, and he said, what do you do with CEO? He says, I ask questions.

And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, Tom, it's, the difference for a good CEO and a bad CEO is the good CEO knows how to figure out what the right questions to ask are. He doesn't know the answers. But in this case, the question is, and seeing what the problem is,

like, how do I align their goals with my goals? Because right now, his goals aren't aligned with you because you want to make sure that he's making more money, but you've built a system that has two different goalsets in there. One is the money they want to make, and two is their scorecard. And the issue is that you're going to have people in your company that want different things because they're at different spots

on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yep. so the guy that's just at low ends like and at contractors have this issue all the time um the guys that are at lower levels of maslo's hierarchy so for people that don't know maslo's hierarchy it says that the bottom needs in life are like biological and safety needs um and then so you got food water shelter you know that kind of thing biological then above that is safety so safety is like the part of town maybe i'm getting shot at my part of town like people there's robberies in this part of town i want to move out of that So as soon as once you get all your biological needs met and you can eat and you have a roof over your head, then you're like, man, I want to be a better part of town. Like I don't want to be in this part of town. Then the next ones above that are love and belonging. So they want to be part of a team.

The next ones above that are esteem of recognition. And then above that is self-actualization. So the thing is, is that if you have somebody that isn't getting their biological needs met because they don't make enough money to pay for their groceries, they don't care about your team environment. They don't care about love and belonging. They don't care about esteem recognition. they probably don't care give a crap out your scorecard either they just want to make sure that their money comes on their paycheck to pay for their bills but as soon as they have all that paid

then then they're looking for esteem and recognition and they're looking for love and belonging and so mazzazzariker says you get incentivized by the upper levels as you move up now in every company what i tell people is you're not going to know where a guy is in that level because you can go up and down any time you might be killing it and then everything's good and then all of a sudden you get a divorce and you got no money now and all of a sudden you went down three rungs and now you're like just trying to get to a good part of town and not get shot at. So you have to build something in your company like you have, which allows them to get their money that they make. And also, if they're looking for a state recognition, they get it. If they're looking for love and belonging

and the team environment, they get it. If they want self-actualization, you got like, you know, giving things to charity and doing community events on the weekends or whatever, like they can get that too. So they get all of the things in their company. The problem is that when we do these things, sometimes in this case, you have a steeper recognition that people need, that they want. want because they're at that level that competes with what you're actually trying to get, which is to get them to generate revenue on the job. What I would do is I look at the incentive on that job and not say like, okay, it's, you know, on your scorecard.

Maybe you need another thing on the scorecard that shows like consistency on the job. So it's like, all right, every single call, they're actually just, you know, making something happen. Then you have another one that's an average ticket. Yeah, but you know as well as I do. the guys like Phil, they like to say I got the highest revenue. They like to say I like the highest sales. Guys like Dale Steele, you know, and now I got the guys on my team that you know.

Like, it doesn't even matter what the other scorecard stuff is. There's a lot of other stuff on my scorecard. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, do they feel like, though, that they can look and say, look, I have the highest in this. Some of them do. You know, Morris Jenkins came up when I was out there recently, not that long ago. He said, first of all, you need three tiers of leads.

And then you need to praise. There's a different score card for the second and third. tier. He said, the top guys, I go, what if there's no tier one leads? Then they don't run jobs. They only run tier one. Tier two, you could be at the top of that. Tier three, you could be at the top of that. And there might be a different scorecard alignment, even structures of pay depending on the level of lead. It's complex, but it's something worth looking at. But it's nothing that's going to like break the company. It's just, and by the way, I'm getting the top 20 guys together to discuss this because the only way I know what to do is ask questions and say,

What's working? Tom, we got three minutes, brother. I want to ask you real quick. Fetching millions, you wrote the book. Why did you write it? I just wanted people to be able to see what's possible. I wanted them to see what happens in the industry and what can go on. I realized when service titan was going public, about six months before that, the Wall Street Journal published an article called the New Class of Millionaire. And it was about air conditioning and plumbing contractors. And I realized mission accomplished. That's what we wanted. We wanted people to realize what the trades can do, how profitable it can be, how much prosperity can bring to the people in it,

and just pass that word out to everybody. And so that's why I wrote the book. What's your new favorite book that you've read recently? Oh, gosh. I just picked up one called The Flipside. It's about one of the, she's the fifth Thunderbird pilot to be a woman and being the Thunderbirds. And she talks about using fear and turning it into a driver

and making it your, your friend. And I've just been reading out in the past few days, and I'm just really loving it. And close us out with a final thought, brother. I could, we need like two hours. We both have tight schedules today. We're here on a Friday, which I appreciate. Close us out with whatever's on your mind.

We talked about a third of what I wanted to talk about. I got to tell you guys, I think just make sure that you're pushing all of these things and you're making sure that you're constantly developing. You're probably listening to this podcast because you want to learn. Make sure that you're going out and learning all things that you can, even the things that you don't like. If you don't like accounting and finance, pick up accounting and finance. If you don't like marketing, just do it.

You don't succeed by going and doing the easy things. If people succeeded by doing the easy things, guess what? Everyone will be successful. You're going to be successful by doing the things that other people don't want to do that they don't want to get good at and they don't want to perform one. never going to be successful doing what everyone else does. Last thing, how do people get a hold of you, Tom?

On Instagram, it's at Real Tom Howard, and it's probably the best one. In addition to that, my email is T. Howard at servicentin.com. And, yeah, email me there. Tom, it's always a pleasure, my man. I'll see you. We got an Australia trip. I want to do a round two if you don't mind. This is just round one.

We'll do another one in Australia. Sounds great. See you all right, my brother. Thank you. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization.

It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700-plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevate and win.com and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.