The Home Service Expert Podcast - Why Most Deals Fail with Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Kevin O'Leary is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and television personality best known as "Mr. Wonderful" on Shark Tank. Before he became "Mr. Wonderful," he was building software companies and collaborating with innovators like Steve Jobs — experiences that sharpened his belief that clarity, product focus, and disciplined execution separate real businesses from the noise. After selling his first company in one of the biggest tech acquisitions of its era, O'Leary launched O'Leary Ventures, a diversified investment firm that backs founders who value data over ego and performance over posturing. His portfolio now stretches across consumer goods, technology, manufacturing, and financial products, reflecting his philosophy that a good deal is simple, scalable, and rooted in numbers that actually add up. Known for his blunt honesty and zero-fluff communication style, O'Leary has become a global voice for business clarity in a world drowning in hype. Both on and off the show, he forces entrepreneurs to think sharper, defend their decisions, and understand exactly why a deal is — or isn't — worth doing.  Timestamps: 00:00:00 Cold Open 00:00:10 Title Sequence 00:00:29 Show Notes VO 00:01:15 Intro Into Interview 00:44:57 Outro  

Most people talk 70% of the day, listen 30. You should actually listen 70% of the day, talk 30. Because when you listen, you get more power. 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 notes, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299, 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 for slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. Today's guest, Harley is an introduction. Kevin O'Leary sitting next to me, known as Millions as Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, world-class investor, entrepreneur, business leader who built and sold the learning company in one of the largest tech deals of all time. He went on to launch Alari Funds and O'Leary Ventures, and today manages a diverse portfolio that spans everything from fintech to crypto to consumer brands,

bestselling author, global speaker, and a straight shooter on personal finance, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Kevin's not here just to talk about money, but also discipline, decision-making, and how to build wealth that lasts. Kevin, I'm really excited that you're here, brother. I appreciate it. Why did you decide to do this is my first question? I love working with entrepreneurs and you know what that room was full of was

entrepreneurs. People that really understand that entrepreneurship is not a destination, it's a journey and we're all in it together and we were sharing our thoughts together. I really enjoyed that session because there's a lot of energy in that room. But that's what it's about. When you start a business in America, it's only a third of the population to pull it off. I mean, it's not for everybody and I'm not telling people to do it, but if you are going to do it, you want to talk to other entrepreneurs, you want to share ideas, you want

to help entrepreneurs not make the same mistakes that I made. So I kind of go through that journey saying, here's what worked, here's what didn't, here's what I've learned recently, here's what I've applied, here's how it's worked. I want to share, you want to give back. This is the way I look at it. What do you think about the home service industry? It's probably one of the best times ever to be in it. Not only technology advancing it, it's never going away. It's never going to be replaced by AI or any of this disruption stuff. It's the core of most people's net worth is where they live and they care about it. It's a spectacular industry. I mean, it reminds me there's two industries that I admire so much that it's going to be around forever. Climate Control Storage, which I came

up in. It's directly linked to the stuff you buy for your home because after a while you store it. I mean, it's kind of like everything that goes on in maintaining a home or a business is a perpetual business, good times, bad times, recessions, whatever. It's always a required service. You know, we run at my company 25,000 jobs a month. And you know what's crazy what happened through COVID is we were deemed essential. And I've been through 2008, as you know, and the multiples went from 10 to 12 to 14 to 18 to 20x. Yeah. This isn't that crazy, 20X?

And it's hard to do the math, really, of 20x multiples on eBay. And then I learned about annual reoccurring revenue. And you get a multiple of that. Yeah. And it's fun stuff. What do you look for when you make an investment? I look exactly for that. How do I get my money back, first of all?

Secondly, how stable is the reoccurring revenue? How risky is that recurring revenue? Like, what would make it stop? I mean, I'll pay way more for a safe investment that has recurring subscription or whatever it is to keep continuing every month. That's what you're describing, and that's why it's valuable. And it turns out the whole market feels that way.

And so these multiples have increased for a reason. It's the safety of the investment. first to return the capital invested, and then to accrue the benefits of a renewed pace of free cash flow. That's very, very valuable. People covet those kind of investments. And so it takes executional skills, too. You have to have someone that can execute that can do it. But if you understand the model on how to acquire a customer and how to maintain it and it generates cash, that's pure gold.

And that's what this business is. That's why it went from a seven to a 20. That's not you or I deciding. The market decided that because that's what the market needs. wants. And so you're very lucky to be in that space right now. Very fortunate. And I think it's going to 6x in the next seven years. And I watch a lot of people. There's a lot of jobs going away. And it's scary. It's kind of scary in a one way. I mean, what do you predict? I just heard Bill Gates come out and say in 10 years, there's going to be a government subsidized. You're going to have to

pay people to live. Because robots next year, Elon Musk, they could cook for. you they could walk the dogs i mean where are we going what do you think about in the future you know i i've listened to that narrative for for multiple generations now and i bet you if you were um you had a family business back 150 years ago making horse-drawn buggies and you went and saw the first car roll off the ford production line with four tires on it and an engine and you say oh we're we're we're dead i mean we're all going to lose our jobs that's not what happened to the economy New technology is advanced productivity. There's a shift in who works on what and where.

That happens. There's this location. But because it's productivity enhancing, the economy actually expands. It's the same argument of saying, oh, well, television is going to destroy radio. That's complete BS. Radio still exists. It comes from satellites now. I don't worry about that kind of stuff.

I don't believe in predicting doom in the American economy. That's never worked. It never has happened. I've never bet against the American economy. It's provided. 8 to 10% return on average for almost 200 years. I mean, we're good at doing stuff that makes it easier to live and more productive. If I need a robot or a car that's going to drive me, great. And whoever was going to drive that car is going to do something else, probably a business

that's more valuable and make even more money. It's going to free human beings from tedious tasks, like flipping burgers. I saw a robot flipping burgers the other day. I don't care. I'll eat the burgers as long as it tastes good. Yeah. It's it. I think a lot about where business is going. And just like you just showed the video of you, I can speak in Russian, Japanese, my AI, Hey Jen, some of the other tools we're using. I just watched a thing. Have you ever heard of N8N? Yes. It's like Zapier, but for AI. I can literally have it research the number one post for home service and build a whole integration. that actually goes out, does the research, writes it,

I'm talking, builds a thumbnail, which Mr. B spends $40,000 on a thumbnail, and it posts and build it perfect for X, TikTok, Instagram. I mean, now you're using the technology. Well, that's what's crazy is, I want to talk to you. Like, I know every major P.E company in the space, all of them. Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, all of them. And they show up with their loafers, their nice watches.

I don't want to get in trouble here. I love you guys, by the way. And they think home service is just anybody could do it. And then I watch them fall apart because they lose the culture. They lose the, these blue collar guys, they weren't raised the same way. Some of them have bad teeth. We got to work on that. And they walk in, they treat them like a cog, a will.

And they watch it fall apart because they say, number one, you can't cut your way to success. And I've seen very few people pull it off. That's why P.E just learned never get rid of the founder. never get rid of the founder. What is that? I don't know if you've ever seen that when they go in and they start looking at balance sheets and income statements and cash flow

and they try to figure out a way to absorb, like make it more profitable very quickly. Have you ever seen that in business? Yeah, yeah, I see that all the time. The challenge is the analysts that do that work have never actually run a business. It's a problem with P.E. and venture capital. Until you've actually made payroll on a Wednesday night,

you don't know what it's like and how hard it is to run a business. and just use the metrics of, okay, I'll put debt on it or I'll change this, I'll change that, and it's going to be more profitable, rarely works out. And the PE guys aren't that stupid anymore. They're starting to realize they've got to partner with the founder, figure out a way to keep them motivated. So a founder in their 60s or 70s is looking for some liquidity for generational reasons,

but they don't necessarily want to stop working. And so the better strategy is to partner with them. Maybe you buy a 80% control position and you cash out the family, but maybe some members want to stay working and they know all the customers. That's a much better model. And you give them incentives to actually work as hard as they did when they controlled it. It doesn't always work, but it works a lot better than just buying it out and thinking you can just parachute in some random CEO that doesn't know anything about the history and the culture. And I would also say something that you touched on at the beginning of this question. about technology. You know, you should use every tool that you can afford to advance productivity,

both personally and in your business, because your competitor definitely is. And I'll give you an example. Damon got me into this. I'm going to pull it out of my ear. This is an IFB, a Bluetooth IFB, a company called Starkey. I don't own any of Starkey. Why am I wearing this thing? This thing is connected to my phone. It reads to me every communication I'm getting, even if it comes in a foreign language, it translates it into English for me. I've chosen five different languages because I'm doing business in the Middle East. You can use it for all kinds of purposes. If you've got a bum ear, you can use it a hearing aid, but if I want to listen to the conversation over there, I can tune it to listen in over there. Now, these are not cheap.

$6,000. But this thing has saved my heinous so many times when I travel or I'm doing something like on television, I've got the director in my ear. I'm on live TV and I'm getting my messages on all of my deals. And this year is reading it to me. And I'm able to absorb that and be more productive. So the minute I get off air, I can call. Thank you, Damon. Thank you, Starkey. I mean, I'm not the only guy. I mean, a lot of the sharks are using these things now. And Damon brought them to us. That's great. It's very cool. Very cool. You know, I'm going to get one of those clips that that actually monitor everything I do in the day. Yeah. And they listen to everything. And I just know my assistant, my executive, she's right over there. She's the best. Ashley. She's hiring another assistant

for her. And I said, they've got to be using Chatsubbt5. They've got to be taken. I mean, we use that. I use that every day myself. Our entire companies use it. We all have subscription services. We look at our social media, put it through all of the models to see if we can change one or two words. You know, a 15 second commercial has 75 words in it. Which 75? Because we spent a lot of money on digital advertising. So we're testing. We'll do three versions, we'll put it through chat TVT and other models and say it'll change two words, then we test it in the Florida market, boom, it worked better. And so, you know, it's kind of like, maybe testing, yeah. Yeah, but testing works. I mean, you can do it by geolocking your Facebook

buy or whatever you're using. And it's so easy to do it now. Like, it's not that complicated. You know, it's interesting. I just thought of this is I'm a big fan of attribution. I have 7,000 call tracking numbers. Every single landing page has a separate UTM parameters. Like, I know a Exactly. We spend right now on average 3.75 million a month in marketing. And it's important. What do you think you make back on that? I think you make $9 million? What do you think? No, I get my advertising budget is 12%. So I almost get a 9.4%. My ROAS, I'm getting almost a 10 times return.

Oh, that is anything past seven. you've got it nailed. Anybody, listen, I see lots. Very rarely do I see a business at past seven raw ass. That's really hard. And if you're getting 10, you fine-tuned it. That's amazing.

I spent a lot of money on branding. Even our trucks is a logo. It doesn't have a phone number, an email, doesn't have any of that stuff. Doesn't have the BBB or Angie's List or Yelp. It's a driving billboard. But one of the thing that was really interesting is it's been very, very hard for TV,

radio billboards to get attribution. And I saw that you had some... Changing, changing. And that's what you're... Yeah. Tell me about that. So, you know, I have, we spend so much money across 54 companies. And one of them I was involved in called ERC. We all did the ERC loans and I actually built a business to help companies get ERC loans because it was the only way small business could survive. And we started advertising. We were spending about three million a week. And, you know, a lot of it was digital. And then I got approached by a company called Tatar, he saying, have you tried television?

I said, no, we're doing, he said, why don't we do a test? And it really worked. We found the Golf Channel was much better than buying digital. So, unfortunately, at that time, it was for only guys that were spending like three million bucks a week in advertising. And I said to the owner, why don't we form a partnership, let's call it Wonder Ads, and create a buying consortium.

And so that all of my companies can use wonder ads to do television. And so you go to wonder ads and you run small budgets and we aggregate the buying up to five or ten million of all the wonder ad participants. And then we buy, whether it's golf channel, CNBC, CNN, Fox, Fox business, whatever. But the way you can get the attribution is you put a pixel in it. So you can actually track. And every Tuesday, we know exactly which channel produced the highest ROAS. And we found that now a third of our advertising is done on television and on streaming services. Right.

We never did that before. OTT. And that was Wonder Ads. That's what we did it for. And so anytime I see a business that works for my 50 companies, I want to share it with everybody. And we form a company. And that's what we did in the case of Wonder Ads. And it worked.

And now 30% of my spend is in the strangest places. I was watching some home shopping thing. and oops, there's one of our company ad popped up in 15. And I asked them, you're getting good raw eyes? And I said, yeah, it's our number one this week. So you pour the gasoline on where it's working, and you pull back when it stops. And a lot of people don't know. A lot of people just know what's in their account.

What I'm going to talk about here a little bit is four KPIs I track that I can build the budget. I could go into any business. I don't care if it's dental. I don't care of what country I'm in. Their booking rate, which is your contact center, is when the phone call comes in or the lead comes in. conversion rate when you're door to door knocking and you meet the client, the average ticket, and the cost per lead. I don't like cost per acquisition because this funnel already builds

that into it. And with those numbers, I could actually build the future of any company. And I'm like, how do you do more with what you got? Everybody's saying I need leads. Well, when COVID, everybody said I need people. So I look at marketing is how do I attract good talents? And one of the things, if you're going to build businesses, how do you acquire great talent like what do you look for how do you find great talent why have 54 companies too is why not put it all into one well it is in the holding company they're all owned either through debt or equity not all in a control position but many of them it's a portfolio strategy and in any one time you know

within that portfolio there's a catastrophe happening or a euphoric outcome I have one that just yesterday told me they're getting sued and then an hour later I get a phone call from another saying they're going public and they're going to be listed in three weeks. I own a huge piece of that. So, I mean, I get the portfolio strategy is his heartbreak one hour and euphoria the next. And I've kind of learned that that's just the way it is in life. You're going to have good, bad and ugly. But having many companies means the outcomes generally I look at on an annual basis. 17%.

Well, we've had better years. That's not the greatest. Private equity gets 22. So we have some work to do. But 17 is pretty damn good. It doubles in four years. I just... Yeah, no. It's... I'm very proud of what we've achieved. And that means we're doing a good job, managing them.

They're profitable. And then, of course, on top of that, we get the distributions every month. I'm getting checks from pretty well everything. And that maintains and supports the community, you know, the families that work. Our biggest cost increase, social media, boy, it's expensive. I mean, we're just spending a fortune generating content. And as long as our ROAS is four or better, as you know, we're happy with that spend.

Have you ever heard of a guy named Roy Williams in Austin, Texas? I have actually. The Wizard of Ads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've worked with him, and he said quit making ads transactional. Tell stories. Let people get to know. You talked about that on stage, is let people see who you are.

So I started writing ads about me and my dad working in the garage, working on a car, and people just relate to it. And if you could tell stories on ads and not say, we're cutting prices, 15% off, and that works. But it's kind of a race to the bottom. Walmart figured it out, but nobody could ever be Walmart again, I don't think. Well, their scale of purchase, you can't beat them. But your point is, it's being transparent about who you are.

And if people want to be part of that community and that culture and that vision, they're going to become your customer. And those are very valuable. And I agree with that. That is the Wicked Cupcake Story. What we learned from Wicked Good Cupcakes. That whole thing was unbelievable what happened there. I mean, cupcakes are a total commodity.

Anybody can make a cupcake, but they turned it into a massive business, and no one saw it coming. It's crazy. That's a great story you shared. I tell customers, I was in the garage for nine years. I'm an overnight success of two decades. So I was running jobs. I was running six a day, six days a week, failed relationships, never been married, no kids, but I got a fiancé now. Congratulations.

I'm very excited about it. I'm going to be an old dad. That's good. But I say, you know, Mr. O'Leary, here's what you need to do. Here's what you should do. And this is the third one that works every time. My mom worked three jobs when I was a kid. She worked her ass off.

I love my mom more than anything in this world. Here's what I'd be telling my mom to do. That's the question? This is what I tell people. This is what I'd be telling mom to do. Yeah. And I always give them what I would do for mom. And if I could treat people like mom, they keep coming back.

Well, I have a similar story. I learned so much of my mother about how I conduct myself today. She told me something once that I've never forgotten, and it's actually changed who I am, I think, over time. Always tell the truth. She said this to me. Always tell the truth, and you'll never have to remember what you said. Which is very hard to do in the moment,

because when you tell people the truth sometimes, they don't like it. It's still the truth. And that in the context of Shark Tank made me the bad guy, but I'm actually the friendliest guy because I'm telling you, you have a bad idea, and you're going to go bankrupt with it. it and it's, you know, you should try something else. But the point is, you get great lessons from mothers because they care a lot about you, but that one for me was great. And she taught me how to invest, even though she wasn't an analyst or anything, diversifications, everything,

and always get a check, either by a bond with interest or a stock with, you know, a dividend. And that's kind of what I did. And she was right about that. But, you know, it's really become an interesting journey for me. You always have mentors in your life. And there was another guy named Jerry Patterson who said, you know, you really should focus on things you've got to get done during the day and not listen to all the noise around you. He was actually a hockey agent, the first guy to bring in a Russian hockey player into the NHL, which was really controversial, but he did it. And he was my partner in a company called Special Event Television. We used to shoot the intermissions in Boston and Detroit and New York, you know, for the league. Red Wings, go Red Wings. Yeah, I mean, it was

So I really got involved in hockey instead of 1980 to 85 when Gretzky was in the league. And I learned so much from Jerry just about how to conduct business. And I learned a lot about hockey and the game it's become and about professional sports. There's so many different lessons you're going to learn in your life through your journey. And you should always pull knowledge out of everything you're doing. And it just makes you a better and more productive entrepreneur, I think. You know, I think Ben Hardy, Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan, I don't know if you know them, but they wrote several books, Who Not How is one of my favorite, just the cliche or the message of who.

How do we get the right who's? I love when I walk in a board meeting, everyone says no to me. I have no yes people around me. But you've got to have the data, and I will pull the Trump card every now and then. But how do you get the right people on your job? team, what do you look for? Because I hear people way smarter than me, way better at their specialty that they're at. But what do you do to find the talent when you're looking at companies? What I do, and I've changed this recently, in the last three years, the right people are ones that

can work within the team on the mandate that everybody agrees on. So they're all going in the same direction. But you don't know that when you hire somebody. You're not sure. So don't hire them. Hire them as contractors first. My standard deal is, look, let's work out your contracts. if you were already successful. Let's get that and put it here on the shelf. But I'm going to pay you 30% more to be a contractor for the next six months. And at any time during that six month period, we can change our minds, say you fit into the team, it's all working, or you can walk away saying, I don't think it's going to work here. And it won't be a blight on your resume. You just acted as a contractor, so you don't have to say you were hired and fired, and I don't

have to do the same to you. And then you'll just find out if you fit into what we're doing. And I do this with the CEOs for sure. I just hired a new CEO for WonderCare. And I'm And I made that deal with him and he agreed. He liked it. This guy's a rock star. And he's come out of a giant tech company, not necessarily a watch guy because it's a watch insurance business, but that doesn't matter. He understands the tech and how to operate and how to build the website and how to advertise

and all the rest of that. But he said, I love this idea. It gets me a chance to feel the groove, get in the cadence, work with you and the rest of the team, understand what we're doing together, go to all these countries with you. And after six months, if I'm on board and you're on board, we just take that contract off the shelf and boom, he owns a piece of the company. is the CEO, is an option pool. This really works.

It really works. I've done that. And I listen to you talk about that. Yeah, I know. It's a great idea. And so you're paying 30% more. Who gives a damn? It costs you a lot more than that to hire somebody and two weeks later fire them.

Yeah. That's crazy. And so this is my new strategy. And that's how I find great people and they appreciate it. And it just plain works. When you share everything like you do and people always ask me, why do you give me your playbook? When people come into my shop, my competitors, and I say, well, you know, you're more likely to be a millionaire than have a six-pack,

and I can tell you exactly how to get a six-pack. You still got to do the work. Less than 1% of the people will do the work, but you share everything. Yeah. I mean, look, you know, I'm happy to share it because I know the magic sauce is executional skills. You can understand how a business is successful. You can't necessarily execute the same way. Great ideas are diamond dust, and executional skills are impossible to find.

Great people have them, their ability to set a goal. and achieve them consistently over and over again. And that comes from being a great salesperson, learning that way. I like to see people come up through sales because they understand how hard it is at the beginning of the month to be zero and then have to hit the goal every month. I did that for my whole life, still do. But just because you know how a business is operated and it's transparent about it, I bet you less than one out of ten people can do the same thing.

It's very rare. Yeah. I mean, less than that. You mentioned you worked for Steve Jobs. I love the fact that he goes, if you hire great people, they'll tell you where to go. 100%. He also taught me about the concept of signal and noise ratio, which I've really adopted. He would argue that you need to get three things done every day, whatever they are.

Three to five. Three to five things you have to get done every day. And that's the signal. The noise is all the stuff that comes at you that stops you from getting the three to five things done. And so you have to identify the three things. And then you have to fight off all of the noise coming at you to stay within 70-30 ratio. You've got to block out 70% of the noise so that 30% is getting the three things done. And so I've kind of adopted that too.

You've got to understand you will get stuff coming at you all day that doesn't matter. And because you push it aside, people get pissed. I know. They feel they're not important. Well, the truth is, they're not. what they want from you is not relevant. It's not important for your mandate. And what matters long term is that you're successful.

You will keep your friends and family, and you will have respect. People don't have to like you. They have to respect you because you can achieve things. That's what matters. You will always have respect if you can achieve things. If you try and make everybody like you, you will fail. You will fail because you'll spend your whole day dealing with noise.

That's the problem. You know, you mentioned you hire the CEO. When I learned about equity incentive programs, you can call it phantom shares, you can call stock options, you know, the biggest best companies in the world, private equity, they'll do a 10 to 15% pool and they know how to use it strategically. When I learned about this, by the way, I hate ESOPs. There's some tax advantages to ESOPs, but equity incentive programs gives people a stake in the outcome.

And if you do them right, you make a lot of millionaire. and you make a lot of owners. You know, how do you feel about equity? I 100% believe in it. You know, often, my model often if there's an operating business, someone comes to me and says, let's start this operating business. It's my idea, but I want you as an investor. I'll say, look, I'll do a 70-30 deal with you.

I'll do 70, you do 30. But the minute you hire somebody that needs equity, we get equally diluted. So we start at 70-30, and then as new people come in, we equally, get diluted. That makes the person who's running the deal, the guy with the 30%, sweat every hire because he or she is also taking the hit. The dilution. And so, but I want, they know they have to give away some. And as the business grows, they keep giving away and they have to, because they're, because I believe everybody that's important to the business should have some sweat equity in it, whether it's an ESOP or it's an RSU or it's an option. I don't care what the structure is,

depending on the state, the tax efficiency. But that person, everybody is sitting there thinking every day about how do I keep as much of this for myself, but I know I can't be a pig. It's a wonderful dilemma. And we're never 70-30 by the time the business gets sold. We're fractional by that time. But we've created something of so much value,

which is a different model than the agent model, and you pay your agent 10%, because they have no outcome. You know, in Hollywood, you know, if I get a roll or something or a Munchartang, somebody's making 10% of my salary for being the agent and 5% for the legal. That's the typical Hollywood deal. But they don't determine the outcome of the performance. So, you know, that's the maximum they're going to get.

And those are the two kind of things. You start off a lot more if you're going to be a founder of a business. But if you're just a service provider, you get 10%. And that's kind of the way America works. It's a great, great country. You know, I was on, I got the opportunity. I was at this Freedom Summit with a guy named Alex Epstein. And I got an opportunity to meet Mike Rowe.

We clicked. He's a big guy in the blue collar industry. I got an opportunity to be on his podcast. And what I've realized now about myself is a lot of people love me. A lot of people hate me. And I'm sure you get the same. But on his podcast, there was 4,000 comments. And not one of them talked bad about me.

They were all great. And that just goes into the brand. And from your perspective, how do you build a brand of somebody in there that's a million dollars, a million dollars revenue of plumbing? What would you say the core essentials are to build a brand? Like Mike Roe, everybody loves the guy. Like nobody talks bad about him. He's done a great job of that. Brand building is now storytelling. That's what it is. And I think telling a transparent, honest story. about who you are, what you do, how you provide services, what matters to you and your community of customers. That stuff is the only way you can build a brand. And then what happens is if you are a great provider, the customers start talking about your brand,

your company, your service. And they're the best ambassadors, they're the best advocates. They're the best advertisers for you, and that's why you have to spend most of your energy taking care of them. And the ones that are the noisiest ones are the squeaky wheels that are the most valuable. You know, it's such an amazing thing, and I talked about this in the presentation.

Unhappy customers are very valuable because they give you an opportunity to make them happy again. And then they become the biggest advocates. And so you should spend a lot of time taking care of unhappy customers. And they become a huge asset to you. No matter what it takes, you've got to solve that problem. Even if they don't like you, you don't like them, they will admit after they've been provided the service. and they've been made right by you, this is the company that I'm going with.

This is the one I use because they take care of me. And I spent a lot of time talking about that in there today because I think it's very important information. I've seen it happen both ways. It's really very important. You know, I used to take all the one-star Yelp or Google calls myself. And I'd call them up and I'd say,

listen, I'm so embarrassed that this happened. And your time's important. Can you tell me exactly what went wrong? And I just, all you have to do is let them talk. And I just listen. And I would listen for 10 minutes and I go, that is so embarrassing. I'm sorry. And I'd make it right.

And those people became raving bands that my ambassadors. And, you know, 25,000 clients a month, we make mistakes. Of course. And we learn from those mistakes. Yeah, but you're guaranteed to make mistakes and you have to learn from them. But that's brand building. I mean, it's customer service in every business, I don't care what it is, financial services or HVAC or plumbing,

it doesn't matter. It's customer, customer, customer. Then employees and then shareholders in that order. You don't have the business. You don't have customers. It's that simple. I don't know. I think my internal clients are a little more important than my clients.

Because if I treat them right and they care enough, they take care of the clients automatically. Well, it has to be, to me, I'm always monitoring. where we sit in customer satisfaction reporting. Net promoters score type thing? Yeah, it's just, there's so much data you can scrape now online about where you fit in the plethora of competitors on every business and what people say about you.

You always want to be monitoring anything that goes viral in a negative way because there's a reason somebody's pissed off and spending energy to make your life miserable. That's the thing about a pissed off customer. They'll actually spend a lot of energy to make your life miserable. They want some kind of revenge.

Yeah. And you don't want that. It's not good. It's stupid. Sometimes they turn around and they sue you. And I'd rather settle. I'd like to find a way to solve it. You know, it's crazy.

That's just the nature of how business works. I ask three questions. And I love these questions for you in particular. What's one piece of game-changing advice that you wish you knew in your early 20s? To reverse the ratio of talking and listening, most people talk 70% of the day, listen 30. You should actually listen 70% of the day, talk 30. Because when you listen, you get more power, you understand where you're at. I was taught this by one of my women CEOs a few years ago.

She said, Kevin, you know, you talk too much and you're not listening. And you should try reversing it and see how powerful you're going to become. And she was right. It helps you a lot to just listen. Listen, go into a meeting and just listen. And sometimes there's an uncomfortable moment you don't see anything and they start giving you information they didn't want to because they feel socially uncomfortable. I don't feel uncomfortable. I'm happy to just listen and it's very powerful.

It works immensely. That's one thing I wish I'd learned in my 20s because I talk too much back then. But now I don't. I'm very careful. I just listen. What's a millionaire habit that set you apart from the rest? Not a millionaire. I don't even care about a millionaire habit.

Just what's one thing you do? You mentioned seven hours and 20 minutes. You mentioned no alcohol three hours before. The best wine, the best tequila. You mentioned you go for a long walk, 10,000 steps. But what do you think that you do, that you've learned that kind of no one else is really doing? What I've learned, and I've started to do it recently,

is I try and spend about 30% of my day doing something that's outside of my comfort zone, something I'm completely uncomfortable about that I don't know how to do, I'm going to learn it. and that's exercising the brain. The brain wants to do that. You never give it that chance. You're always staying in your comfort zone, and that's very bad.

So I'm trying all kinds of things that I thought I could never do, and it's helping me immensely. Recently, I took on acting. I've never been an actor. I'm dyslexic. I can't memorize lines. Well, I found out a way to do it. And that's helped me on other things,

and it was an amazing journey for me. I don't know what it'll lead to. But it was a hell of an opportunity, and I did it. And you can judge for yourself. It's a movie called Marty Supreme. It's a big movie with Timothy Shalameh and Guine Paltrow, and I'm in this movie as an actor and check it out. We will.

If you had to start over tomorrow with $10 million, but you still got all your connections. $10 million. What are you doing with it? I would do what I do now. I would diversify my holdings into, you know, I have a very simple rule. No more than 20% in anyone's sector.

the economy there's 11 sectors no more than 5% anyone's stock or bond or crypto but there's one there's one thing i do break the rule for and that's real estate i have 31% of my you know net worth in real estate and um i've been a developer my whole life and so doing you know real estate is what i do it's a core and you know i've done everything from climate control storage to uh you know luxury condos or whatever. It's just, and right now the hot sector in real estate is data centers. So I'm doing that. But I like real estate. You can touch it. It never goes to zero unless you put too much leverage on it. And so, you know, I very careful about how much debt I put into my equation. I keep a very low debt ratio. I want to be able to survive debt. And because I went through 2008 in real estate, that was

pretty tough. So it's kind of learning from the past experiences. But I take that $10 million and I think I could probably do well with it by just being diversified. You know, I think a lot, money for me now is a KPI. It's kind of like it's not going to change the way I live. It's just not. But I find that the goals keep getting bigger. The goalpost always moves. No matter how much I succeed, no matter what my body fat is,

no matter how much I'm praying, no matter how much time I'm spending time with family, it's just it's never I've never arrived and you talk a lot about investing you know a lot you're you know a lot of people at what point I mean what's it all for I mean you said you still spend weekends with your family you go anywhere in the world but I mean it'll never be enough there's always yeah I don't think about it that way I don't need more money I need more time and so you can't buy time obviously so you want to use it the best you can You know, money is sort of the index by which you can judge as an entrepreneur success or failure.

If you do something well, you're going to make more money and you can decide what to do with it, reinvest it or do whatever you want. But it's a derivative of what you're doing successfully. It's not the goal. You can't create a business without it, obviously, but it's a derivative of success. If you make more money, it's because you've been more successful. And but it, there comes a point where it doesn't change your life at all, whether you have, and I would say to young entrepreneurs, your goal is trying to get $5 million in the bank

somewhere making, you know, just treasury returns as your safety net. A 4 to 5%. Yeah, that's all you're going to make. But you have it there for whatever happens, you know, medical emergencies or catastrophes, whatever. And after that, you're starting to build generational wealth. It's very hard to make that first five really hard. It's hard to make the first million.

But if you can make a million, you can make five. You can make five. You can make 50. If you can make 50, you can make 500. It's just you have it in you. You only need to prove it to yourself once and then go do it again and again and again. But it's at some point, I mean, I don't know what the number is for those people. I don't know.

How much do you need? I mean, what more do you need? You got a beautiful house. This depends on if you love boats in general. Okay, well, I get that. You know, what I do, listen, I've owned planes. I don't want to ever own a plane again. I want to lease the hours, and I want an operator to run it and deal with the pilots. Yeah, charter it. Yeah, yeah. So I probably chartered 250 hours a year. And so that's a lot of plane time. But I don't consider that a luxury anymore. I just a necessity. For me, today, I'm going to be in three cities. I got to get there. And I got to get there on time. And so I'm not excited about. getting back on a plane that people think that's a luxury. No, it isn't. It's a pain in the ass. Who wants to do that all day? I would rather transport, teletransport myself, as opposed to sit there,

like in a plane for hours and hours. Not that I want to whine about it. I'm just saying, you know, oh, if I could only own a plane. Why would you want to own a plane? It's utility. Well, the deal is all I care about is that I have Internet, because I get a lot done on a plane. And Starlink on planes works better than the hotel internet does. That's one thing. That's what we're looking at, is making sure that we've got great star. Like, who's there, if the rest, I don't care if they're dead or alive. Who do you look up to, I mean, Jesus, maybe, but who's somebody that you just are like? Man, woman, old, young, or dead or alive? Who inspires you the most? And maybe, obviously, I know your mother had a big impact.

Yeah, of course, of course. But I think the guys that had most, impact in terms of how I look at it was Steve Jobs and now Elon Musk, who's 100% signal. He has no noise. It's made him very awkward socially, obviously. But look at what that guy's produced and how successfully is in so many different sectors. Every mandate he takes on, he's wildly successful. You know, it's just sort of, he really, really understands that the metric of spending time on the things that matter. I've seen him walk out away from a conversation midstream when he realizes there's no value here. Yeah. You're not going to waste time. You're allowed to walk out on meetings. You don't feel value. No, no value. And so I understand why he does it. And I think

he's achieved a lot. He's a good example for people to understand their whole noise signal ratio. And I think, yeah, I just look at executional skills. I look at what's the mandate? When does it get done? Is it achieved yes or no? The rest is all BS. Like, you know, and people that come to me and say, look, I want you to invest in me. I've had a couple of failures. And I've learned from my mistakes. And I asked them, you know, why did that last business fail? And they start blaming everybody else except themselves. Blame these two fingers instead of these. And I always say, you know, you own it. It failed because you screwed up. The only person responsible of a failure is you. And you spent the last half hour blaming everybody else, including the market, I'm not going to

invest in you. You don't, if you don't understand why you failed, why would I want to invest in you? You should every time you fail, you should own it. If you're an entrepreneur, it's not anybody else. It's you. You're the reason. And if people ask you, you should tell them the truth. I love it. We're going to wrap up here in a minute.

You know, I'm a big reader. When I was 2007, my CPA handed me a book. And he goes, when's the last book you read? I said, 11th grade, a kill a mockingbird. He said, why don't you read? I said, I don't really like books. He said, well, read this one for me. He's called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.

And I came back the next day. I said, this is the best book ever. He goes, here's the ultimate sales machine. Then he said, this is the richest man in Babylon. And then I just started reading like crazy. And I read several books a week. What is the most impactful book? And there's several, I guess, depending on the sector.

But if you had to pick a book that was just like changed the way you do things, how to win friends and influence people is probably one of my favorite. But what would you say is a book that is the game changer? I think Keith Richards' autobiography, I've read many books, but that one really, it's a huge book, and it's all about his life. But there's so many lessons to be learned in terms of longevity and focus in that book about sticking on mandate. And even through all of the problems he had, including drug addiction and getting arrested

and all this stuff. The guy knew what he wanted to do and what he was good at and how to do it. And look at the success he's achieved. And I think everybody should read that book right from the early days when he was, you know, in junior school in England and just realized there's a lot of lessons. He's very transparent in it. There's some tough parts in there. But just his journey in his life, I think, is remarkable.

And he's still at it now on mandate doing what he does. It's pretty remarkable. That is a book about perseverance, perseverance and understanding the power of focus. It was really good. All right, close us out, leave us with something for the listeners. And by the way, I really appreciate you being here, brother. You got it. Well, I really enjoyed it.

This was a fantastic day. If you ever get a chance to come one of these sessions, you showed, it's just a group of entrepreneurs just talking about building businesses. And I think there's nothing more noble than that. And I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. 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 that 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 for slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.