The Home Service Expert Podcast - Why Building A “Bench Of Employees" Can Save Your Business

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Joseph Sheehan is the owner of Colony Pest Management, Inc. and the co-host of the Colony Confidential podcast. In 2003, after working for his father Ed’s company—a part-time position he held since he was five years old—he established Colony. Since then it has grown to $2.5 million in yearly sales by providing essential pest management services all over the New York Tri State area. In this episode, we talked about pest control, customer service, team building, strategic planning, small business, environmental awareness...

And I think the only way to grow is to let your margins drop. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that first-time entrepreneurs make is, I'm doing the work and they don to get employees and they're like, oh my God, I'm making no money on this $30 job anymore because they didn't price it right originally for growth and to get where they want to go. I agree with you 110% on that. Like anybody out there listening that is starting a business today, make sure you know the industry pricing and try and stick within that because I think a lot of people try and sell on price instead of on quality, especially in the home service business. Commercial, it's a combination of both price and quality, but in the home service, I feel like when you get that residential customer and you do quality work and they agree to your price already, it's a customer for life because

it's the quality and the pricing that works together. Because sometimes you could even lose a job if you're too cheap. They'd be like, why is this guy so cheap? 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. It's Tommy Mello here with Joseph Sheehan, and he's out of New York. And he is a specialist when it comes to pest control, customer service, team building,

strategic planning, small business, team building, strategic planning, small business, and environmental awareness. He owns Colony Pest Management since 2003. He worked part-time for his father Ed's company, Checkmate Exterminator, since he was five years old. In 2003, he began building Brooklyn, New York-based Colony Pest Management, a business that has grown to over $3 million in annual sales by providing integrated pest management service throughout the New York tri-state area. He's also the co-host of the Colony Confidential podcast,

a huge podcast in the termite pest control, basically bug world. Joseph's really well-known in the home service industry. Joseph, I really appreciate you coming on today. Tommy, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So you started when you were five with your dad. Tell me about your whole upbringing and what got you into home service and pest control. My father's first generation American. His family, we're from Ireland. So he was the first one here and he was always taught the American dream. So growing up, I was one of those kids that was never handed money, even though my father had money, even though he'll say he didn't.

But if we wanted to go to the movies with our friends, he said, yeah, go downstairs and take this shipment in and I'll pay you $5 an hour or whatever it was. But at five years old, his thing was all of us went out with him on a route in the summer or on a day off from school or something and learned how to treat or any, you know, roaches, mice, et cetera, any kind of pest. We did everything from one bedroom apartments all the way up to huge hospitals. And that was just his thing at five years old to teach us a trade, which that may or may not be to be young. But of course, with my kids, I did the same thing, took them out just to show them. I didn't put a spray tank in their hand, but, you know, just so they could see what a day was like.

But that was life growing up with it. Dad, can I go to the movies? I mean, even it got so competitive in my household that me and my brother, you got 50 cents to go get the newspapers every Sunday for him. But the way he did it was whoever wakes up first, just go and get it. The money's on the counter. He left $3 because the Daily News and the New York Times was $2.50 back then and 50 cents for us. So me and my brother used sometimes a shit. I remember getting up at four in the morning at like seven years old so I could get that. So he taught us, certainly taught us the value of a dollar from that age, from five years old on. And then as we got older, it was just a natural progression. Every summer we worked on a truck with one of his guys.

When we got a little bit older, he let us get into office and see how the office ran. So he just taught us by making us work to make money. He taught us the business and taught us the value of dollar at the same time. And it just morphed from there. I mean, I pretty much went through all of my school up until high school, telling the teachers things like, I don't need to know this. I'm going to run my father's business. And then I graduated high school, which most people didn't think was going to happen because one might say I had a troubled childhood, but I made it out alive and well, thank God. I can't say the same for some of my friends growing up. But in high school, I graduated and at my high

school commencement, he said, oh, congratulations. This is great. $200 rent is due on the 1st of July, which was essentially two weeks later. So I started working for him right away. And I worked six days a week, probably like 50, 60 hours a week. And I hated it. It wasn't pest control. It wasn't having to go to work. It was just working and living with my dad was troubling. So after about six months, I went back to my high school, spoke to one of my teachers there that was like a mentor to me, and she helped me get into college, and I, okay, here's your college contract. I'm going to pay all the college, but only if you maintain a B average. And if you get a C or less than a B, even in your last

semester, you got to pay me for everything. And now it was a legal contract that he had his attorney's drawer up and I signed it. And that definitely, I went to college, my eight friends that I met the first week in college, seven of them all were on academic probation. And I partied with them just as hard. But after partying, whether I was drunk or not, I still got up and went to class or got my work done because I didn't want to pay for college.

And then my sophomore year, he got an offer to sell his business to Terminex. And I told him, he was like, if you're going to take it over, I'll wait. And I said, well, what, you know, I asked him what the deal was. The thing is he had been waiting for, he could retire and never have to work again. He sold in 98. I graduated at the end of the 99 and started working. I had a case management job with my fancy psychology degree that paid maybe $550 a week. And his friend in 2000 was servicing Belmont and Aqueduct racetrack. And West Nile virus hit that was originally thought it was eastern equine encephalitis.

His friend needed somebody to work two nights a week. And his friend was paying me $300 a night to treat the bonds. One night was Agaduck. One night was Belmont. It was like 10 hours worth of work a week. And I was making $50 more a week than I was at my fancy college degree job. And it just morphed from there. That guy gave me a job and I put close to $200,000 in new business on his business. Then I told him, look, I can't keep building your business without a piece. He gave me a piece of new business coming in. And then I sold a really big job, not really, but it was like $2,500 a month. And he didn't

want to split it with me for stupid reasons. He knew somebody, but it was dumb. And that was the end of him and I. And I went and bought a small route. The guy said he was doing $8,000 a month and he was really only doing about 3,500, but I bought that and just bust my ass. That was in 03. Just bust my ass from there and started growing it. And never look back. It's probably the best thing I ever did in my life. Two things, the best thing I ever did in my life, not taking over my father's business and then starting my own. I love it. I love it. That's a pretty cool story to hear. You were, I think upbringing has a lot to do with entrepreneurship. Pest control. I keep hearing about pest control. Every, every corner I look at, there's more people getting into it. And I've needed it.

I've had a termite issue. I've had, in the past, they drilled a hole in the cement. The difference between the garage door, HVAC, plumbing, electrical industry from pool service, landscaping service, or extermination, pest control, is it's all about routing. You get repeat customers. You got much better lifetime value of a customer. And I think it's probably worth more because you can buy a book of business and people don't even know that it's a new ownership. I mean, you'd probably want to tell them, but it's definitely that type of business. Even though I hit almost the same numbers, the same payroll every month, it's weird how it works. It starts to stabilize as you get bigger. Your business is nice because you get a little bit better on the routing. You pick up more customers on that street. You get

more efficient. You can squeeze more dollars. Tell me what your take is on the difference between the typical plumbing HVAC company than more of a pest controller, like a poll service? Well, I think the biggest difference for pest control is that, and COVID-19 has certainly shown that, is that it is an essential service that's not just an emergency-based type essential service. I mean, even in the credit crisis of 2008, 2009, whatever year it affected you, wherever you are, we had some of the biggest numbers ever because at that same time in pest control, bedbugs exploded. So anyone in pest control that you talk to probably didn't even feel that credit crunch back then. And for all intents and purposes, people used to say recession proof,

but proof is a strong word, but it can withstand the recession. This COVID-19 is the first time in the history of my business that I've ever had a negative month. And it's because we're so heavy on the commercial end. My friends in pest control that are heavy on the residential end are not having the same issue I am. They have very minimal losses because they're still able to maintain that residential model. Because like you said, it is recurring revenue. And the cool thing, if you do it right in pest control, that recurring revenue model, your accounts receivable can be amazing too. Because most home services for pest control are done on a quarterly basis, but it's almost like a subscription-based package that you sell. So let's say normally you would charge $120 a quarter. So now you charge $40 a month,

you get a credit card or you get an ACH approval from the customer. So if you do it right in residential for pest control, your accounts receivable will look negative because by the time you get to that job in June, it's already paid for from the previous Azure bill in the card. And the margins can be ridiculous. The smaller the business, the better the margin. I think that's probably normal. But even these large companies are probably between 10% and 8% and 12% margins, if not higher. Oh, yeah. The smaller companies, like between 1 million and let's say 5 million, are probably somewhere between 20% and 30%. You know, it's funny that you mentioned that because, well, first I wanted to say that we're very fortunate too. We're a central service. We had our best week last week, our best month last month,

and our best day ever last week. Very, very fortunate to be where we are. My cousin called me in Colorado Springs. I got him into the garage door business and he said, you're not going to believe this, but my accountant just called me and I hit 26% last year, margin, net. And I said, dude, that's when I was younger in business. He's a little bit older than me, but the difference is when I used to be a smaller business, I used to go out and do the work. I used to take the phone calls. You want to maintain a really good ratio. And I don't talk about this very often. I learned this from a consultant, but you want to make sure you have ratio. And I don't talk about this very often. I learned this from a consultant. But you want to make sure you have a ratio that you have at least two workers, at least two, to every single person that's not out there turning a wrench or spraying or in your business.

I think it's probably a lot of chemical treatment. But also, I love the fact that you got the canine dogs. I want to talk about that, too, the dog st stippers that find the bed bugs. But, you know, I think that's the difference. When you're a small business, the margins are through the roof. But here's the problem. When you leave your business, Joe, the small businesses, they don't exist. They don't make money when they sleep. They make money when they work. So of course, I think there's a misconception because your margins go down a little bit, but you're not out there working. Does that make sense to you?

A hundred percent. I think the only way to grow is to let your margins drop. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that first-time entrepreneurs make is, I'm doing the work and they don't value themselves as they should. So especially I see it a lot in my industry where guys start out and something that should be 50 bucks, let's say they charge 30 and then they start to get employees and they're like, oh my God, I'm making no money on this $30 job anymore because they didn't price it right originally for growth and to get where they want to go. I agree with you 110% on that. Anybody out there listening that is starting a business today, make sure you know the industry

pricing and try and stick within that because I think a lot of people try and sell on price instead of on quality, especially in the home service business. Commercial, it's a combination of both price and quality, but in the home service, I feel like I mean, commercial, it's a combination of both price and quality. But in the home service, I feel like when you get that residential customer and you do quality work and they agree to your price already, it's a customer for life because it's the quality and the pricing that works together. Because sometimes you could even lose a job if you're too cheap. They'd be like, why is this guy so cheap? And you'll lose it off that. I'll tell you this. I used to look at

industry pricing. I worked with a consultant, her name's Ellen Rohr. And she said, Tommy, who cares what the industry charges? She said, why don't you add up all your bills and figure out the price that you need to charge to make a comfortable margin, like 15, 20%. She goes, buy yourself new trucks, keep your air conditioning super cold in the summers, get new computers all the time, have the best software. And so when she said that, we spent a lot of time on a whiteboard. And I charge more than most people because I compete on timeliness. I'm 24-7. A lot of people say, well, I don't work nights and weekends. Well, you can't afford to because you can't pay people to work nights or weekends. Number one, number two, I don't work nights or weekends either.

I mean, I'm always on my phone and trust me, I go into work, but I'm overall, I wouldn't consider what I do even work. Cause I love what I do, but ultimately you charge the right prices. You know, I think we've done in the last year, 3% increases. It's so funny because I get all this stuff from our vendors. You know, you've got vendors in pest control and they raise their prices three, four times a year, minimum, scrap metal, metal changes. Guess what? Every time they raise my price now, I raise my price. If they raise my price, I'm raising my prices. And I don't feel bad about it. I don't feel bad at all.

And you shouldn't. And it's funny because the commercial sector is always an issue. But last year, we were trying to raise a big commercial client about 7% and they thought it was out of control. And I had to get on the phone with sourcing and explain to them that every industry, including ours, was affected by the tariffs that we put on China. I was speaking to somebody with an MBA that was so dumb. They look at pest control as this dirty image. What are chemicals? I had to explain to him, listen, the petroleum that goes into the plastic that we use, the glue that we use, the metal, this, that, and the other, the products are coming from China to make this stuff. Once I explained it to them, he got it. You have to be able to back up exactly what you're doing. Why are you raising your prices in the middle of the year? Well, hey, my vendors raise their

prices, so we need to raise our prices too. And I think the right customer, I learned something very similar a long time ago. You raise your prices, you don't feel bad about it. And the people that leave you are probably one of your biggest headache customers anyway. And even if you break even, you have less work to do and you're still making the same money and that's okay. And it is because your margins are the same or better. Well, listen to this. I doubled my prices on my Christmas light business, you know, and I'm not as involved. I'm more of a silent, but deadly partner. But, you know, we figured out what these prices just don't make sense. We lost money the year before. So we doubled the price. We lost a little over 30. It was between 30 and 40% of our clients.

So we double the price. So we take a hundred. I'm just going to use numbers that make sense. A hundred and we double it to 200 and we have a hundred clients. So we go down to, let's say 60 clients. Now we're getting, instead of a hundred times, a hundred is 10,000. We're getting 12,000. So by doubling our price and losing, let's say 40% of our clients, we ended up only having to do half the work and make more money. Exactly.

And a lot of people miss that. A lot of people say, but you know what I hear the most, Joe, you don't know my market. You don't understand the weather here. You don't know this. You don't know that. I hear this in my industry with my own market managers on a daily basis. And I'm like, dude, I don't think you know this,

but I'll go to any city and show you guys what's up. I'll build relationships. You know, we were talking about market managers the other day, and I said, look, market managers are supposed to grow the market. But you know what else they're supposed to do? In my opinion, they're supposed to be this leader that says, I know all my technicians' names. I know their wife's names. I know their kids' names. I know all my vendors' names.

I'm out there networking every day. I'm always looking for talent. I'm always looking for new big clients. I'm looking for ways to grow. And I think it's important to have a leader in every single market. I think that leader should be risen to the top. I used to anoint people as a manager and say, I'm hiring you as a manager. And I just, my mentality has kind of changed over the years is they come in to train. I'll hire somebody. For example, we're going to be expanding into a bunch of new states here in the next two months. I'm like, let's hire five guys, amazing guys.

And usually it's guys because I've unfortunately not been able to hire a girl technician yet. And I've tried, but it hasn't worked out. So I get five guys and I said, these guys are coming in to stay with us for five to six weeks. Let me see who rides the top. Let me see their personality profile, their personality index. I'm just a big fan of prove it before I anoint you. And let me ask you this, what's your day-to-day look like now in comparison to maybe 10 years ago or 15 years ago? It's phenomenal. My day-to-day is really managing relationships and money. That's literally it. I built very similar to what you're saying. I built my business on networking

up until 2012. Our marketing budget was under $20,000 a year. In 2012, we were like a million two, maybe. Then we started marketing more, but our marketing budget now is still compared to the industry is way below because it's a percentage of the whole business. Percentage of revenue. Yeah. 5%. That's a very good number. It's a lot easier to hit the 15, 20% mark. I see a lot of people, they overspend stupid stuff. If I was to look through most people's bank accounts, it's very, very bad. When's the last time you used your gym membership, I ask them, because it doesn't seem like a lot, but it's 30 bucks a month. Who's using this Adobe Suite? That's 99 bucks a month. Who's using this, this, this. I can literally go find 3% in most companies right off the bat.

Then you figure out their marketing. Then you look at their call booking rate. They don't answer their phone because it's technicians that became owners most of the time. And you know what they hate the most is when the phone rings and they don't answer it. They're like, I'm on a ladder. And I'm like, you want more business. The hardest thing I think, and I want to hear your perspective, Joe, the hardest thing for a technician that becomes an owner is to learn how to own a business. It's hiring. It really is. I

think the hardest part is to get organized, have systems, standard operating procedures, manuals, and how to learn how to book phone calls. Because you know you can't book a phone call if you don't have a tech to run the call. I remember probably the hardest thing in the world of anything is your first hire. To get them, because you know you're going to do the job better than the first 10 guys you hire. You know you're going to be out there putting stickers, cleaning up the house, handshaking, building relationships, and these guys might not do the same stuff. I mean, what's your take on that? No, I agree 100%. A long time ago, somebody told me, don't work in your business, work on your

business. And it's been one of the better pieces of advice ever. And it's been one of the issues that my father and I have argued about over time because he still built a successful business. He was a couple million dollars a year in the 90s, which, I mean, he was crushing it. But he still had a work truck that he had, and he still went out and visited people. Now, because that's ingrained in my head, I still have a small thing in my car because I still have the mentality. If I'm visiting you and you're my customer for whatever reason, and while I'm there, you say, oh shit, they saw ants at XYZ. Even if I'm in a suit or dress well, I still want to be able to offer them. I could do it because that too goes a long way when they see you as the owner able to do it.

But I still do work more on my business. I'm not out doing calls every day and hiring. The first employee is the scariest thing ever because it is, as you build your business, you are letting certain things go to a certain extent. And I agree with you building those processes. And when you and I first spoke a couple of weeks ago, I told you that we had just finished building all of our technical processes out. And we're in the process of completing all the office ones. And you see a difference in everything. Once you have those processes in place and the manuals and everything you're talking about, you see that all the shit you were trying to do one-on-one as you were building your business, this is taken care of because now

you could just go to the metrics and the KPIs, if you will, and say, hey, yo, Schmo, you're not hitting your KPIs and building that management team. And you're right, making them prove themselves because we had a great technician that wanted to be a service manager. And we put him in that position and we didn't do it properly. We did it based off his technical knowledge and he wasn't able to do it. Thankfully, he's still with us as an asset to the team, but he also realized he wasn't able to do the job. But that cost us tens of thousands of dollars to try and get him up to speed and then figure out he wasn't up to speed.

So it is. And I hired a director of operations probably about 10 years ago. The best hire I ever made, the most money I ever spent on employee at the time, he's since almost tripled that initial salary. And he's a home run. He's put over a quarter million dollars on the business just through me teaching him how I network. And I spent probably six months with him where I went out every day with him and showed him how to run the business, what to do. And I sent him out with my best text to learn the technical piece. You have to put the time into them, but I do agree with the predictive index. Did you just say something about that? We started using that and the way that works with having someone take it and then matching it up to the job description. And then you're able to ask interview questions based off

that. It's a frigging game changer. It's a game changer for even I took it and all my top managers took it even for us to communicate with each other. Because when it matches you up and says, this is what you guys do well, this is what you don't do well, and this is how to correct what you don't do well, was amazing for us as a management team just to realize, like, I can't talk to Joe like this or I need to address it this way. It's been a game changer for the hiring piece. Yeah, yeah. No, it's exactly what you said. It's hiring and it's learning how to deal with different people because, you know, one of my managers said, dude, this makes so much sense.

I used to get mad at you because he'd want to give me every freaking detail and tell me all about how he worked on it for five days and spent an hour with me. And I'm like, dude, give me the overview for three minutes. I don't want to know. Like, I want to see the results. You know, there's an old thing I heard a long time ago is, you know what I used to hear a lot too, is what happens if I train this person? I put my time, love and care and focus and energy and they leave. And the thing you got to ask is what happens, Joe, if you take your time, energy, focus, and they stay. And I spent a lot of time training

guys on how to network, how to hand out business cards, what to say to customers, how to build. And the one thing I've learned probably two, three years ago is what's in it for me. So why the hell would they spend all this time handing out business cards, creating millions of dollars for me? Well, what I've learned is, how do I make it what's in it for them? So on every one of their business cards,

they've got a call tracking number. If someone calls in through that call tracking number and books an appointment that gets ran, they make 8% on that. So they are little marketers everywhere in my company. I've taught the CSRs. I've got the dispatchers that are out there handing out business cards. And I'm like this, if you could go through a whole, you know, the old school business cards come in like the brown, it's probably like, I don't know,

15 inches long. If you can pass out all those in a month, you're doing it right. If you can't get through all those, there's something wrong. And it's crazy because you post on social media. You're involved in Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Now you've got TikTok. You've got all these different places. All these things work. You just got to regularly post, have good, interesting stuff. And man, I'll tell you, I love it because a company that's built on relationships more

than they're built on, let's say, maybe a Google or an outbound call center or mailers, and you build a fence around your company with service agreements, it's just a gift that keeps giving. I couldn't agree more. We do something similar. Everybody that works for us, just by handing out a business card with their name on it and the office staff has to ask, how'd you get it? I like your idea about having their cell phones connected to something that tracks it. I just wrote that down, but we give them 10% for the lead. They don't have to sell it, especially if it's commercial, but just 10% for the lead if we sell it. And then we also, for reviews, I don't

know how you do reviews, but we're giving money for reviews. And then we pay it out in a gift card. After 20 reviews, we give them a gift card to wherever they want. And that's helped a little bit. But it's new to our team. So we just have to stay on top of them getting to do it. Someone else gave me a good idea with the review piece. He said, instead of just doing monetary, give them X amount of tickets and then have a board of prizes and let your staff pick the prizes, whatever they want to pick. It could be a TV, it could be an Xbox, it could be anything,

it could be a Crock-Pot. And then they could put their tickets in at the end of the month, and then you pull a ticket and whoever's ticket it is, they get that prize. So we are looking at ways of incentivizing everybody that works for us, aside from the KPIs that tie into their bonus, because everybody has a bonus tied to KPIs from service technicians, canine handlers, all the way up to the director of operations. So yeah, I agree. It's all about incentivizing them to keep them to stay. That's why we have all of these things, healthcare 401k, how much do you match, time off. When people come to me and they're like, oh, I'm making a dollar more an hour. I'm like, okay, but what else do you have? And they have nothing. They pay for their own gas

in their vehicle. And then they come to us and they're like, holy shit, I make more money now because I'm using a company vehicle. I got healthcare. I got this. I got that. So it's about showing the value of why they're with your business and why they should stay. Even all the way down to prior to COVID-19, we were doing four to six events a year for the company. We had the Christmas party, and then we had a family event in the summer where we took everybody. We've been doing Belmont Racetrack for the past couple of years. just to you know to make it more of a community and a team and it's been paying off we went from the average length of somebody working for us for like it was

maybe like four years now it's up to like nine so with those things that we implemented we've seen the change yeah i think if you know i love the idea of that to give the tickets out unfortunately for me it would have to be some type of uh email ticket because i've got guys all in you know all these different states dozen states i think making sure you've got a crm that you could add some technology like a bird eye bird eye right now i've got more reviews on Nextdoor, on the BBB, on Google, on Yelp because of BirdEye. BirdEye is just something that messages the customer when we finish, good or bad. Most of our stuff is good, so that works really well. Obviously, incentivizing technicians, especially find the ones you want.

So what I mean by that is if you don't have any reviews on Facebook or next door, go after that. If you don't have any on Yelp, here's my little secret on Yelp. All of my CSRs have a second screen up with Yelp account. They type in your email when they get it from the customer and they find out if they're a Yelper. If they're a Yelper, we tag that customer that they have a Yelp account. Then my technicians know, Hey, listen, if they're a Yelper. If they're a Yelper, we tag that customer that they have a Yelp account. Then my technicians know, hey, listen, if you get a chance, we want to make sure we delivered five out of five service. We always say five out of five service.

That's the trick is five out of five, five out of five. The CSR say, we just want to make sure we deliver five out of five because everything's five star, five thumbs up. Five out of five is Facebook, Google, Yelp. So we've learned it basically. If they're a Yelper, we want to ask them for a Yelp. If not, we're going to be asking for a Google or Facebook. I get a lot.

And here's the thing, Joe. What I'm starting to do now is get more testimonials. I want to get a video testimonial. I want to get a before and after picture. I'll have them write a handwritten review. And I'll say, would you mind writing a little paragraph just that I showed up on time, include my name. I'd love to give it to my boss. He loves this kind of stuff. Then I take that beautiful handwritten letter that you can't fake. You take the before and

after and a customer testimonial that took all together, took less than five minutes. And now that's going all over the internet and I can repurpose that into 20 different things. Then guess what? Next time I'm in your garage, Joe, I say, look, a customer, Mary, that lives right down the street from you, she wrote me a letter.

I don't know if you've ever met her. She's a sweet lady. Here's a handwritten letter. So now you're going to go, wow, he's worked with my neighbors. And people trust you. They trust Google. They trust all these places. But I just love an old handwritten letter with a real testimonial because I can get

that thing 10,000 views between handing that out to all my guys to put in their presentation folder. I have everything online too, so they can just hit a button on their tab and pull up letters of recommendation. I mean, those are the things that I think people need to think outside of the box, especially you're a guy that does commercial. I mean, you get one big account, it's worth probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would get a handwritten letter from every one of those main owners or general managers. And I'd go, I'd bring those in. And my newest thing, Joe, is I'm doing $5 gift cards for Starbucks, just in a nice handwritten letter to huge customers. So property managers, huge realtors, custom builders. And then I say, listen, I want to

have a virtual lunch with you. 20 minutes, I'm going to order you Uber Eats. I want to go through a quick presentation, not take up much of your time, show you how I could increase your curb appeal on all your projects and also save you some money. And if you want to, if you like what you have to hear, great. Maybe we could get an opportunity to bid. If not, at least you'll know we're out there if your current providers make a mistake. And I'm telling you my plan to roll this out, I'm going to, I'm going to quadruple my business. We're going to be in the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions because of this. Because now with this pandemic, people are used to being on, I mean, what are we doing right now? We're

on a Zoom call. So anyways, a lot of ideas. This is the kind of stuff I love to talk about on the podcast and hear stuff from you. Because if the listener could take one thing and implement it and I'm you know I think there's probably a lot of garage you guys that listen to this and I hope they do because there's enough water in the ocean for everybody you know what I mean I do and in our business it's the same so it's funny you mentioned that about the zoom and it's a different world that we live in so prior prior to COVID-19, we were doing customer events at a cigar bar that we're members of. And we were telling a customer, bring somebody we don't know that you're friends with that might use our services. And we're also going to have other people there that you can network with in your industry. So we were inviting

property managers, engineers, healthcare, all of our commercial sector and people, real estate managers and big portfolio of apartment buildings. And we were bringing them in, everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people in business like a good cigar and maybe some drinks. So it worked. The first two that we did were amazing. And now with COVID-19, something that we're thinking about doing is a Zoom call. This is the tricky part that we're trying to figure out. Getting the address and shipping the people we would invite a cigar rolling kit and having the person that's the cigar roller on a Zoom call, teaching everybody how to roll a cigar and trying to do the same thing. Similar to what you're talking about, but more of a piece of camaraderie to it where there's a bunch of guys in the Zoom chat also speaking to each other about

business, but at the same time, still getting something from us like that cigar kit. And the cost, what we've seen is minimal. It's actually cheaper than if we took them out for drinks at the cigar bar. So we are talking about doing that now because our next event was supposed to be May 22nd, and we don't see that happening. What I love about it is the more people that I can have working from my home base in Phoenix. My best piece of advice I could ever give, I've ever said on the podcast. Everybody should write this down. Think about it. Find specialists. Instead of having a person do 10 different things, hey, he's going to

jump on a Zoom call at noon. He's going to jump on another meeting. A lot of people say, well, I have a CSR. I'll just have them do this. I'll have them also do my dispatching. I'll also have them be my accounting. I'll also have them be my self-service agreements. I'll also have them calling customers to do reviews. They suck at everything. And then you wonder why, what if you had one person, their whole job had KPIs surrounded about it. They were the ultimate accountability. And this person, all they do all day, they have four breakfasts for 20 minutes, four lunches and four dinners. And they get to, they get to eat for free every time, but they're ordering Uber Eats

and they're jumping on 12 calls a day with decision makers. And literally you're monitoring and measuring everything. And they get so good at it, they realize the follow-up sequence, the things that gotta happen, the technology stacks. Imagine if they got so good at it that they were developing, they're doing 12 a day. Let's just say

that turned into 20 amazing relationships a week. That's 80 new people a month. Now I have a guy with me, Joe, that spends over a million dollars. Let's just pretend the average contact spends a hundred thousand. The money is just staggered. It's a million bucks a month on top of every month it goes up. So the first month you make a million, the next month you make 2 million, the next month you make 3 million. You add it all up. You just added $60 million to your bottom line. And we're not talking rocket science here, but this reason I wanted to bring this up just isn't for this Uber eats role. This is everything. Instead of giving people 10 things to do, like I split up service and door

sales. I split up installs from service because a lot of people make their service techs install doors too. They could do both. I'm like, wait a minute, you need a different truck to be able to be optimal. So you're going to have to switch trucks all the time. Or you could have a truck and it's just a pain in the butt to find parts. I've done both. And you find specialists. And if you're a true specialist and you find somebody to specialize in one thing and measure it, the small business mind says,

I'm too small. I'd rather have one person doing five things because I can't afford five new people. And I understand that. And it's fair. It's a fair question. But if you ever want to grow, find the biggest missing piece to your company and hire someone that that's all they do. The only thing they do and watch what happens.

It does. It makes sense. And I think as you go from a small business and as you continue to grow, a lot of these things you either learn by listening to smarter people like me, listening to you now, or you learn the hard way or you never grow. And that's the thing. And that like our growth was minimal from 2003 to about 2010, because I had an old school mentality, much like my father, where I had to do everything. And once I got that out of my head, the growth was just ridiculous. And we had multiple 40% growth years. In the beginning, when you're doing $40,000 a year to get a 200% growth is nothing. But as you start to get into that, we hit a million. And then the year after we hit a million, we had almost 40% growth years.

It was ridiculous. And then now, remember, my marketing budget is a joke. Without that, we still grow on average over the past, let's say since 2012. So over the past eight years, the average is probably 20%. As we've been doing it, we have been putting new pieces in to continue that growth. And we were in position this year to have another 40% growth year. But we'll see what happens with COVID-19. You know, I think we're going to recover quickly. I heard this morning on the news that they're going to end up putting $9 trillion into this economy. Now, here's the thing. There's going to be a few winners that really suck up that money, and there's going to be a lot of losers.

And I promise you, I'm going to be on the winning side going right now is the time to do more marketing. It's time to scale your business. You push me in a corner, watch what happens. And I love that because other people I see going, oh no, oh no, oh no, I can't, I can't, I can't. And I'm like, okay, great. This makes it easy for guys like me and you. I wanted to know, what are some of the challenges that you think are unique in running a business in the pest control industry? Certainly the public image is a challenge and my industry doesn't make it that much easier because you have the smaller guys that don't think about professionalism.

Since day one, when it was just me, I still had a uniform. I tucked my shirt in. I still look presentable. I had an extra uniform in the car because I was doing work, getting dirty, but I was selling jobs also. And I wasn't showing up. I would change in the car like Superman and get to that house looking fresh, impressed to sell the job. But I think the challenge for us is image. The national association and our local association has certainly tried to help with that. But that's one of the biggest things my father instilled in me too, is that you don't just have to do good work. You have to have a professional image. And I took that to another level with dressing and stuff because I always liked nice clothes growing up. And now I'm known as one of the better dressed people in the industry, which is cool.

I really could care less about it. But I always liken that back to how my father raised us. But I think the image is a big thing to overcome. And we've even gotten people like customers say, oh, I didn't even know pest control was this professional. And the other pieces, of course, like everybody else is hiring. That's it. And liability, like killing bugs and doing the work is the easy part for us. The rest is the hard part. It's getting good talent, maintaining the talent, getting the image out there, the integrated pest management piece, explaining to people that while all pesticides are toxic, the way we apply them and the level of toxicity to chemicals we apply, it's not that bad for you unless we spray

it down your throat or something like that. When you explain to somebody you're mixing two ounces of chemical to 126 ounces of water, and then you're applying maybe half a gallon of that around their home and then the style within. It's about education. So educating the consumer has probably been one of the biggest hurdles in pest control. But I think we've done a good job of it and we continue to do a good job of it. And then of course, government regulatory agencies that, I don't know what it is, but people with a whole shit ton of money just don't like pest control. It's always like somebody that has a ton of money and nothing to do, like a trust fund baby, that decides to come up with this law to ban rodenticides, which is something that they tried to do in California. Thankfully, California beat that.

Now they're trying to do it in Massachusetts. And it'd be great. Like, okay, you want to do away with rodenticides, but they come up with these plans, but there's no alternative because you do away with rodenticides, which is by far the most inexpensive way to get rid of rodents. But now they have all these plans in place that they want to do. And in California, these business owners got behind it. And then the pest management professionals went to them and said, Hey, listen, you're currently paying $10 a month. If we eliminate this piece, it increases our labor. We have to come back to you more. And you're going to go from $10 a month to about $40 a month. And then all of a sudden the business community was on the side of us in the pest management industry. Because we could still eliminate rodents without the rodenticide.

It just would be labor intensive, which is our biggest expense in running a business. We've had PETA go into large corporate offices and see a glue trap somewhere and send a letter to that company saying, oh, we were recently in your property and we saw that you have glue traps. If you don't remove all of them immediately, we're going to run a smear campaign. Now, it doesn't say that exactly, but it says we're going to protest, we're going to put people outside, we're going to tell the local newspapers that you're doing inhumane rodent abatement. So that is a fun challenge at times because I don't like fanatics,

but they're easy to deal with because they can't see past the tip of their nose. So you have a conversation with them. I'm in a 60-story building in Manhattan. I catch a live mouse on the 55th floor. How do you think I should get rid of it, Mr. Peter? And they say, go let it loose on the street in the middle of Manhattan.

Where the hell do you think that mouse is going to go? Right back in the frigging building. Well, it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Yeah. And that happens regularly. Most people and a lot of people in the government have never even came close to owning a business. I'll tell you what I have done.

I've been an employee. I've been an employee in a lot of different places. And I know what it's like to work with senior management when you're an employee. And you know what the difference is, is I've been on both sides. And you know what? Most of these people have never ran a business.

They've never taken care of anybody in employee. Look at all these Hollywood actresses and actors. They're the ones fighting for everything. There are spoiled. They have bodyguards with guns, but they think you got to get away from guns. Oh, well, those people are trained with guns because I could afford to pay for everything. They are spoiled. They have bodyguards with guns, but they think you got to get away from guns. Oh, well, those people are trained with guns because I could afford to pay for that. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I don't even want to go deep into that. But one of the things that you mentioned is it reminds me of a story. If you get a chance,

read the book, The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chad Holmes. I call it the Red Bible. He says in there, there's this company and they're a carpet cleaning company and they do commercial carpet, okay? And he hires Chet Holmes to be an advisor and he says, I need to get more business. And he goes, well, tell me a little bit about what you do. He goes, we use chemicals to clean carpets. And he goes, well, tell me a little bit more about these chemicals. And what is your unique selling proposition, your USP? And the guy says, well, I know there's something to do with the health factor of having carpets clean. So Chet goes, you know what? How often are your clients coming back? He goes, the average client uses this every 18 months.

Chet Holmes says, I don't think we need more clients. He goes, I'm going to do a case study. I'm going to hire this team and we're going to do some huge case studies. And so what they figured out was large commercial buildings with carpet is actually healthier for the employees because the carpet absorbs the germs. But after every single, I think it was four months or six months, the carpet actually starts to spread the germs because they get filled up and now you're kicking germs around and they're just going everywhere until they're cleaned in a certain process and they explain the process. So he said, we just took you, imagine this, we just took you from getting a client every 18 months to now every six months. So we tripled your business. And they did, they tripled the business just because they did the research and learned. Sometimes it's about

frequency and the value of getting out there more often. And it's just interesting how you could just turn the dial a little bit. You don't need any more customers. I look at my customers here. Here's another piece of advice is I tell everybody, forget. People love to give people big routes. Hey, I want you to do 10 jobs today. And I understand if it's just a pool cleaning company. Of course, you want to just get as many cleaning routes in as possible. I mean, the more the merrier. The tighter drive distance, the more.

But when you're in a company like mine that's selling stuff to people with problems and you're out there once every 10 years, hopefully, you should only be running four calls a day and you should get to know the customer. You should smile, become their friend, have them give you referrals, leave you reviews, talk to you like a human. Some of them offer me dinner. Some of them even I've gotten off work and had a beer with them. I mean, at the end of the day, I think it's important to understand that your goal should be to develop relationships instead of go out there. I'm not in the garage business. I'm in the people business. A hundred percent. I go off in these little tangents, by the way. Sorry. No, I mean,

I agree with that. We're in the people business too. Certainly more in residential and commercial. Commercials had a little bit of a change over the years, but we have one guy that he's probably responsible for six figures worth of revenue a year just because he bounces around so much. And when he goes, the first time he has a pest problem, he doesn't even ask the person to fix it because he feels like I've never had to ask Joe to fix anything. It's always been good. I'm just getting rid of them. And literally every time he leaves, because we built that relationship, within six to eight months, he's calling us saying, ah, you know, I saw two mice. I'm not happy. It's yours. No. And this guy is so good. He doesn't

ask questions about pricing. He's like, come look at it. Can you start next week? And literally we're starting and I'm like, hey, can you just sign a contract? I know we're starting a job today, but can you give me to sign a contract when we show up? Because it's just that for him, it's the relationship that we've built all the time. And it's just paid dividends beyond belief. So yeah, I agree with that 100%.

Let's pivot here to a little bit about team members and your hiring. Do you have any secrets or gold nuggets when it comes to hiring? Obviously, we talked about PI, predictive index. Is there any other things that you found that work really, really well? I don't know if there's anything that works really well. And look, I think constantly looking for things to make that decision better, like the predictive index or whatever, like just, just speaking to people like you, speaking to people in other industries, speaking to people in the same industry, what are you doing to hire? Well, you know, I don't know if there's a golden nugget.

It's tough. It's just, it's constantly evolving. And I think you need to stay ahead of it or at the very least stay in pace with the new things going on with hiring. I mean, over the past five years, myself and my director of operations have been to a minimum of two seminars a year strictly for hiring and retention. And 90% of those have been based towards how to get and keep millennials. And then now over the last year and a half, they're talking about the Gen Zers. I think it's just staying up to date with what's going on, being on as many of those hiring sites that you can be on, finding out which hiring site works better for your industry, hiring a consultant. You spoke about female techs before. We have an HR consultant

that has job ads geared towards women managers for our industry. And when we implemented those in our online ads, we did see more than usual female applicants for technical positions. Two years ago, we hired a female service manager from the ad that was given to us. So I just think it's figuring out what you want and then really paying attention on how to get it and using everything. The predictive index for me right now, we just found out about it and how well

it works probably three months ago. That for us, I feel is going to be a game changer because of that piece where you can attach the job description to the results and see if it's a true fit and even being able to ask the interview questions. So I really think it's just about staying on top of the trends and what's going on and having, if you are a small company and you can't have an HR department, then getting that HR consultant and HR consultants are, you know, like you said before, people say, no, you don't understand my market. I don't have the money. You're never going to have the money if you don't spend the money to make the money. And a consultant is at the end of the day, the cheapest thing you could ever do. In my opinion, we hired in 2019, I got a coach drew Tony Robbins. And then I met someone else

who was like a business coach and we hired her. And it's been one of the best things ever because she's taking everything in my head and is able to disseminate it to everyone else. She worked with me from August to December. And now for 2020, her job is to take everything she and I put in place and to work with my management team first to get them to do what I want them to do. And then at the end of that, who knows? We may keep her on for other things, but it wasn't cheap, but we're already seeing the returns on it.

And she's helped with bettering our hiring process and retention process. So I just think it's about looking at your industry and always paying attention to what's going on, how people are hiring, what people are looking for, asking the right questions, industry-specific questions. I'll give you a perfect example.

Ten years ago, I hired somebody. I was training them, and they picked up something that roaches were in, like a device, and they threw the device. And I said, what happened? And the person said they were afraid of roaches. And I was like, yeah, this is not the right job for you. You assume, and we should never assume. I assume you're interviewing for a technician in pest control, treating roaches, rodents, et cetera. You just assume you're okay

with that. So that's like one of our first questions before we even get them in now. Are you afraid of rats? Are you afraid of mice? Are you afraid of bees? Just to get those answers out of the way. So the more you could learn beforehand and be proactive, probably the better. I'll give you a couple words of wisdom that I've been learning over the last year is number one, people say always be closing. I say always be hiring. Now here's what I love for you to do, Joe. This is a little exercise. Go back 20 years in your business and write down your top producer and your bottom producer and write down the variance. And then let's say you have 10 top producers versus 10 non-top producers, the weak, the really, really weak ones. And I want you to look at this in your call booking center. I want you to look at this in your dispatcher, your warehouse guys,

whatever that might be. Realize this. So many people hire when they need to. They're up against the wall and they make bad decisions when you're under pressure to try to fill a void. So I say always, always, always. What I mean by that is recruiting is not hiring. Even though I'm on every job board, and I'm not only on every job board, but I'm on sponsored ads. I'm not only doing that, but I do my radio ads every so often. All month long, I'll do only hiring ads because they're just as good if you do them right to get customers to use us because they think what a great company to do that for their employees. And then the next thing is social media. Every time, if you end up doing that pick a ticket, you better be filming that. You better make sure everybody brings out their Facebook live and Instagram and say,

we're having a blast right now. The boss has given away an iPad. He's given away an Xbox. He's given away one of these electrical guitar thingies. I don't know. But social media and it's going out recruiting to me means finding somebody that's already got a job. 84% of people want to leave the current job they're at in the next one year. So it's not always, you know, who's on a job board, people that are unemployed or they hate their job and they're looking to get another one. You know, it was on social media, everybody, so many companies that are listening. So many people that are listening to this podcast right now, they don't know their closing ratios. They don't have any contests.

None of their technicians know where they stand in the company. Each one of my guys, I'm looking right here at my CRM. The top guy today is number 10 in the company. Number two guy is number 32. Number three is 52. Number four is 74. Number five is a brand new guy. Number six is the 13th guy in the company. Every month they

get reset to see who has the best closing ratio, average ticket, and getting the most reviews. So I make this a place where people want to come leave their job. They're not looking on job boards. They're not on Craigslist or Indeed or Career Builder or Zip Recruiter or Monster or I could keep going or LinkedIn. They're literally coming to me. So I think there's a lot to be said about that. Building a place where people want to come work, they go, oh my God, that place seems so cool. Are they hiring? Yes, 100%. And I think that goes to always building a bench of employees. And that's something that we realized probably like when I first hired my director of operations, I took him to a business seminar.

And that was one of the things we both took away that you shouldn't hire when you need people. You should always be looking at people. When you get that good resume, you should be interviewing them and you should be holding them for as you're growing to put them into place. Or if you lose somebody or something like that. But an interesting thing that I read, or no, I spoke at the CO2 conference in December. And one of the speakers said 80% of millennials would not do a blue collar

job, even if it pays six figures. When I saw that, I told my director of operations to bump up a recruitment process because now you're only, you really only have technically 20% of the people in the job market. Because 80% of them were like that. And I think they're like almost 90% of the new job applicants coming out. So your window of people that'll even work in my industry is so tight. You need to have those efforts going constantly to bring in new people. And something that I told him was, listen, as we're growing, if we have the weakest

link and we find somebody that's stronger, it may be time to let that weak link go. Called top grading. And top grading is great. But I realized I was probably going to let go of five guys a month ago, maybe about two months ago, before COVID-19. And I gave them the right training. I matched my number one guy and I said, so 10 guys, actually more than five, you're going to work with this guy. You're going to hear his, I want you to hear him when he's in the home. I want you to listen. So we had literally, they're all on a call listening to him as he's in a job. And I said, you're going to call him. You're going to get him on the phone. He's going to tell you, he's going to listen to the call. He looks them up on social media.

He looks them up on Zillow. He goes to town before he even walks up. He knows how many kids they have. He knows exactly what they do for a profession. And he walks in there and they learn how to do this. And I shit you not, they are some of the top performers in the company now because I didn't give them the tools they needed to succeed. And when I did, they said, thank you so

much. And I said, you know what? Your best week ever, you made 1200. You just made 2500 this week. How does that feel? And they said, oh my gosh. I said, what are you going to do with all this money? And they smiled and they're like, I don't know. I'm like, listen, go out and buy something nice. Save up for a house. Start putting money away for retirement. Start putting money away for your children's tuition if you plan on going that route. But, you know, something I was really impressed by is I've heard, I heard your name through my good buddy, Lorne, at Search Kings. And he said your podcast is just, it's like amazing. He said you guys just kill it on the podcast. Call any confidential. Tell me a little bit about your podcast and what people could come to get out of it. So the success of the podcast has to go to my partner, Patrice, who it was her idea and she manages it completely. She produces it. She does the social media. She does everything for it. But it's basically my father, 73 years old. We both

ran businesses and it's a conversation between he and I on how to run a business, what the issues are. Basically what you and I are talking about now, just on a regular basis, we've done technical episodes where we talk about how to kill things or how to implement an integrated pest management strategy, how to educate customers. We do Q&A from consumers as well as pest management professionals. And we've spoken about everything. We did a whole month, probably about eight podcasts on HR because as I told you, my father sold his business in 1998 when HR was starting to be a thing. And my father's very old school where he will tell people things like, he told one of my employees once, you're lucky it's not me because I'd have blown your brains out. Which is an HR nightmare. But the podcast, we call it edutainment

because it's a lot of entertainment, but it is us educating whoever listens on running a small business, the pitfalls. I told you that we were starting to get into coaching ourselves for businesses, of course, less than ours. Our goal is to make the industry better, a better image, more professional. So we're hoping that we touch people that are getting into the business or at a level where they don't necessarily know things and then we can help them. Even if it's not through them buying into our coaching, just listening to the podcast between my father talking about how it was done from the 60s till he left in the late 90s to how we're doing it now.

Because my father comes from an era where their biggest concern was literally just eliminating the pest problem. And I'm in an era where that's our smallest concern. And then the bigger concerns are liability regulations and stuff like that. So the contrast between the two of us is, I believe, what has allowed us to reach the market we have from the older generation to the younger generation, even though I'm not that young anymore. But we originally were going to write a book. And Patrice said, you and your father and how you are is not going to come across in a book. What do you think about a podcast? And she has a media background. She was an on-air personality for like five years. She did some TV programs. So she put it all into play. And then the industry, we were already well-known in New York because my father was a major figure in New York.

He ran multiple associations and was just involved with getting regulations pushed through. And when integrated pest management became a thing in the early 80s, he was like a pioneer for it. So he was well-known in New York. And then also that nationally got a little bit of picture. Then in 2016, Morgan Spurlock made him basically the main character of his horror documentary, Rats, and we springboarded the podcast off of that. It's been a lot of fun and it's continuing to grow leaps and bounds.

We've had sponsors. We're getting some more sponsors. It's just been good. We've gotten some free products. It's funny because people will be like, I want you to try this product, but if you don't like it, could you not talk about it on the podcast? Yeah. So part of our biggest thing in doing the podcast is, and will always be, maintaining our integrity.

We've had offers from people that we don't like their product to speak about it, and we won't. Because we want to maintain what we're doing, and we don't want to be pushing shit that hasn't worked for us. It might work for somebody else, but if it hasn't worked for us, we're not going to say it has. Because we're known as experts, we want to maintain that. So it's been tough turning down money, but we're doing it for the right reasons. I've done a little bit of consulting and I enjoy helping people. And I know the podcast, I hope it's changed a lot of people. I've had people email me, text me and Facebook me, LinkedIn me, and just say, this has changed my business. This

has changed my home life. This has helped our relationship with my wife and kids. So I think giving back to me, it's able to interview guys like you that just come from a different perspective that just one gold nugget could change my business. You know, you move the dial, you know, when you're a $1,500 million company, you move the dial a little bit, it could be a few million bucks. Even when you're a small company to move the dial could be an extra 25 grand in your bank account by the end of the year. I mean, it's huge. It is. And another thing the podcast did for the business is created another level to the relationship because I have customers that have come back to us. They saw the family name and

said, are you related to Ed? And then started using us. And now they're able to have, or feel like they're able to have more of an interaction with my father because he's not out. He doesn't come out all the time because he's not that involved, but certain customers are still like, I'm almost still in constant contact with them as they listen to the podcast. So it's definitely helped business like that also. And some new customers, like I've spoken to people and they've been like, yeah, I heard your podcast, blah, blah, blah. So it's been good marketing and maintaining relationships. I love that. Yeah, it's great. I'm glad you came on mine. A few more questions and I'll get you out of here. What are three books that you'd recommend? Just random books that maybe you've read in the last

year. Leadership, marketing, could be fiction for all I care. Just something good. So The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle was really good. We actually took something out of that book for our strategic leadership meeting. I don't know if you ever heard of the spaghetti challenge, but it's basically giving a group of your managers spaghetti tape and a marshmallow, and they have to build the biggest spaghetti tower. And you have, I think it's 10 minutes or something like that to do it. And it's just a great team building exercise. And the goal of it is basically to understand how you work together. group because they had no fear of just putting their idea out there where you and I or whatever the biggest professional in the world may not may hesitate in putting their big idea out there because it might fail whereas kindergartners are like they don't even think about that so

they're just getting it done that book was very good for me um what's that The law of power book. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think I got that one. Yeah. The orange one. And then for me, something big, big book, right? Yes.

Yeah. And then the other thing that I would recommend to everybody is some type of local regional. I read cranes magazine every week, which is a New York specific business periodical, I guess it's maybe like 20 to 30 pages. But instead of reading something on a global level, depending on where you are. But for me, we're in New York, we recently branched out to DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and that's coming along. But I read Cranes every week because it

tells you what's going on in your direct market and you can have conversations about it. And sometimes you may read about some of your customers in there. We deal with major real estate developers and every so often they'll have the top real estate developers in New York City. And then when you're speaking to one of them, if you say something like, oh, I saw you guys are number two in the city, that's great, or whatever, it just helps to build that relationship. And it's all local. like for me, like the Daily News or the Post or even the Wall Street Journal, I just feel like Cranes is more of a tighter knit. You get more info, the New York City market. That's awesome news. I wrote that down. I'm going to really try to get involved with that and meet some people from that. Someone wants to get ahold of you, Joseph. What's the best way to reach out? I mean, email is always the best.'s jsheehan at colonypestnyc.com.

If you want to know about the podcast, it's colonyconfidential at gmail. You can DM us on social media at colonypest, at colonyconfidential. The canine business is at Synergy Sense or synergysense.net. And at canine, we also have Synergy South, is the dmv branch for the canines that sniff out bed bugs so social media website email whatever the phone number something you don't even think to give out anymore is uh 888 colony 3 so cool and then the last thing i do on the podcast is uh give you a minute or two to just kind of maybe give them a final thought, maybe a plan of action, maybe the last gold nugget or just something that we might have not discussed. So something my father said to me many years ago that sticks in my brain and I love it.

And people tell you you're lucky all the time, right? I'm sure you've heard it. Oh, yeah, he's lucky. And my father told me a lot, because I was really pissed off once. Somebody said that about him to me. Yeah, well, your father got lucky. That's why he sold his business. And my father said, luck is where hard work and opportunity meet, and you have the balls

to seize the moment. And that just stuck with me and continues to stick with me because I could look back on my life and every major decision I made that can be applied to that. I took the chance or whatever word and people don't like the B word ball. So you could say courage, whatever you want to say. And I did. I had the courage to do it. And it's paid off. And it doesn't always pay off.

But one of the best times it's ever paid off, and this was a huge change in mine and my father's relationship, is starting the canine business. So in 2007, I told him I wanted to do it. And he's always been my mentor, confidant. I always bounce everything off him. I still do. And I told him I wanted to do it. And he's always been my mentor, confidant. I always bounce everything off him. I still do. And I told him and he was like, I saw that done before with termite dogs and it wasn't good and I wouldn't do it. And I was like, yeah. And we had a very tough discussion about it. And I went ahead and did it anyway, because I thought it was going to be what it in fact was. And if the initial investment was 30 grand, we made that back in the first month. And I showed him the books after two months.

And it was a change in our relationship and even for me in business, because from that moment on, people used to ask him a lot of questions and he used to answer them. And that moment changed him from answering those questions to saying things like, really got to talk to Joey about that because Joey has his finger on the needle, finger on the pulse, and he knows better than me. And it changed our whole business dynamic to where now I took over the reins. And I think if I took his business over instead of starting my own, that opportunity never would have presented itself because he still would have had the majority control.

So that's definitely a moment where I took the opportunity and had the courage to move forward and it worked out and it changed a ton. Not only did it add that extra revenue piece, but it changed the business dynamic for me and my dad. So it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made in business. I love it. Well, Joseph, I got a lot out of this. I think you're awesome. You're not going to believe this, but I've been everywhere. I feel like I've never

been in New York. So when this whole thing kind of cools down this summer, I might come see you. Really appreciate the time coming on and I'm definitely building a good relationship with you over the years here because a lot more to learn from each other. Absolutely, Tommy. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. And hopefully we could do the same on our podcast soon. Yeah, let me know.

Thank you very much, man. All right. Thank you. Stay safe and have a good weekend. All right. You too. Hey, guys. I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast.

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Leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences. Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling

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