Q&A with Tommy - How to Engineer Brands and Businesses That Sell Themselves
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Well, if you're not making a profit, it's because you don't have A players. There's a lot to unpack there, but think about it. Either you're not priced right, your conversion rate's off, your booking rate's off, and your service ticket's not averaging what it should do. I think you gotta get good at what you're doing. If you're not profitable, it's because you've got the wrong people and you're not working on the business. And you're probably walking in on a Monday saying, a lot of shit going on, lots of emails to catch up on, lots of crap.

You don't know exactly what you should be doing today to make the company profitable. And that's the scary thing. You know, when we walk out of these meetings, 100 slides, all this information, and you go through and look at this, just look at all these details. That's some of you guys are listening that might not have access, but look at all this data, all in red and green and different bar charts, line graphs, Gantt charts,

I mean, there's something in your business that we need to find out and make it profitable. 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 asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES 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 elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. It's today's Q&A.

had a pretty late night last night cigars uh the neighbor had invited everybody over and uh some of you guys know i uh i live in paradise valley arizona pretty big lots you don't really get to know the neighbors and it was fantastic it was uh the neighbor actually owns homes for juveniles uh kids adolescent kids that uh he's got 40 homes in arizona super awesome guy

Got to meet another neighbor, 44 years old, great guy, great family guy. Opens up T-Mobile stores across the country, doing about $50 million in EBITDA.

So just really amazing. If you guys have not spent the time to meet your neighbors, one of the things I highly recommend doing. And I'm very glad Simon decided to invite everybody over. So we're going to start getting together more often. Pretty cool just staying out with successful people, different walks of life. The new book is called Elevate. If you guys have not read it, I know a lot of companies have been really checking it out, listening to the Audible version, doing a book club with it.

And I'm really excited because Freedom is coming up. Home Service Freedom. The Freedom event is next week, November 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. And some people said it's hard because it's around Halloween. I'm sorry. There's really no good dates to have an event. It's just a hard thing to really figure out the perfect date. Authority Brands is having their event in Orlando at the same time. But I got a lot of great questions in here. Really looking forward to doing these Q&As.

I know it's a Monday, so people are walking into work and probably not going to get great attendance on this Q&A, but we'll try to bring some fire. A1, I want to show you guys some stuff we've got going on right now. So when we go through a month's worth of data, it's pretty thick. We look at a lot, a lot of things, and that's part of the stuff I'm working on with Home Service Freedom.

is to be able to get each and every company the KPIs they need to make really great decisions. Understanding that, well, an example is AR, right? We're at 7%. We're going to get that down to 0.5%. We were doing a lot of dry runs after we fixed the garage door. We were going back to the house because they manually leased it or they kicked the safety eye. Get in front of that. That's going to add $3 million of revenue to the company for opportunity costs.

Oh, we've got an outbound call center initiative we're kicking off next month. You just look at all this stuff. So many people out there right now are struggling. And the Fed came out and said they're probably going to raise rates again. So right now it's already at 8%. Inflation didn't drop below 2%. So they're trying to figure out what they can do. And it's going to be tough. I talked to Goldman Sachs. They have a pretty good economic outlook. They think rates will come down at the end of next year, fourth quarter. But it's all speculative at this point.

Yeah, the neighbor came over afterwards, and we went out and just had cigars and just kicked it for a couple hours, actually. So I didn't sleep as much as I typically like to, probably six hours, and I tend to want to get eight. So if you're wondering why I'm not my sparkly self, I've been on the phone all morning, but Jordan's bringing me a double espresso. So I'll be coming back with it. So let's see.

Tyler, appreciate you. Miguel said, "Hi Tommy, you're doing such an amazing job. Thank you for all that you do. Please talk about bookkeeping for small business." Yeah, so I'll start there. Nobody that I've really met other than private equity guys does a fantastic job of handling their books. A lot of people are just using a really ordinary bookkeeper.

And my whole thing is it should be a fractional CFO that understands how to renegotiate your contracts with your vendors. They understand tax planning. They're talking to a CPA. They understand how to get you the numbers closed by the 10th of every month. Megan Lice does a great job. I've worked with Ellen Rohr. I've worked with her sister, Gail. Ultimately, one of the things we want to bring you in the Freedom Group in particular is

is having, I've got full-time people that I've got six full-time people. All they do is work on this report all month. And it's, it's, it's crazy because we get so many answers from the reporting. There's so many things that, that we've self-corrected. And I think a lot of people that they've, they've been happy at single digit profitability, eight, nine, 10%.

And I feel like you should be at 20, 25% when you're running on all cylinders and you're making the right decisions. So bookkeeping is an amazing thing and it's an important thing. And you really need to spend some time on it. The reporting I really focus on, I really look at our balance sheet quite a bit. So there's three main things. I want to look at cashflow, balance sheet, income statement. But we dive into things market specific. We look at key metrics in the call center. What on this report I'm talking about, my operations meetings.

We'll take a deep dive into marketing, cost per lead in a market. And we've got a whole project board. And it's one of the books that Matt recommended. It's Come Up for Air by Nick Sonnenberg, Getting on the Right Technology.

and then another great book that i just gave to my buddy brian burton is uh come up or um buy back your time dan mertel was just in my office last week and he's gonna be uh he should be on the podcast it should be airing this week this week or next week rafael has a question my dad's business has been around for 20 years no crm no service agreements no organization no employees

I was laid off from my job in late July, and my dad asked me to help him with his business. I don't know about HVAC or electrical. He said, I don't know much about HVAC or electrical, but I have 14 years experience in tech sales. I know my dad's business has potential because I've gone with him to meet his loyal customers, and they absolutely love him. Prior to me joining, I was using QuickBooks for everything. I set up Joyce for services, LSA and GMB, and Yelp.

open phone and our website and hired an accountant. My dad's business has plenty of work, most of which he can't even take because my dad is only the technician. I know we need to hire, which is what we are planning to do as soon as our accountant gets our numbers back to us. I'm going to set up a demo with Housecall Pro and Service Titan in the coming weeks. And now I'm not sure where to go. Well, if I was in your shoes, Rafael, I would focus on the manuals.

I would focus on hiring. I focus on an org chart. I would make sure that I got a plan and start working on the budgeting. And actually, I'm going to be putting something in the Home Service Expert Group on Facebook.

that we're having a budgeted meeting and whoever wants to come it's super cheap tom howard's going to be leading it up it's going to be a game changer i promise you guys whoever comes to this budgeting event it's going to be in phoenix i'll have that posted by the end of the day let me make a note but budgeting is super important and what else would i do i mean if the leads are coming in it sounds like it's more of a hiring issue so

you need to be able to build manuals and train technicians and joe cunningham does a pretty good job of putting out good technicians so that's a resource i would use you're only as strong as your weakest link and when you start hiring you notice that more and more you want to find people that are lively they smile all the time they're energetic they're the cup is half full type mentality mindset and just don't hire the wrong person because when you're small

One bad hire could set you back a year. When I make a bad hire, we really don't make a lot of bad hires. Like it's one of the things we've been pounding on is just do not bring me anything but a 10 out of 10. Do not bring me somebody that does not want more for their life, that dreams bigger. So Rafael, I think getting organized, getting your numbers dialed in, getting an org chart, building your budget for next year. And the budget should work off of leads.

How many leads can we get? What's our average ticket on those leads? What's our conversion rate? And how many of those are we booking? And that's how you build a budget. And you say, how many more leads do I think I can get in May? How many more leads do you think I can get in August? And start building up the leads and reverse engineering it instead of picking an arbitrary number. That's kind of how you build a budget. Let's go to

Rafael Zahn here. Since I started helping my dad with his HVAC biz, I started listening to your podcast and it's been so helpful. I feel like I'm in over my head, but we're moving in the right direction. Just wanted to say hi. Well, that was for you, buddy. Hopefully that helps. Jeff K. asked where you're located. What type of things would you have a data integrity person focused on for a garage door company that is under 10 million?

So my data integrity people, the biggest things they look at is each invoice. They make sure we actually built a tool that extracts all the data from service Titan. And it's what we're looking to make sure the signatures are there. All the pictures were there. They didn't skip any steps. We've got all the data. We've got the age of the equipment and what we offered. I mean, it's important to keep them accountable.

that we offered everything that the customer deserves to get offered to. A lot of times technicians will say the thing like, this customer would have never bought, so I didn't even offer it to them. And that's just not fair. They made an assumption based on the customer's landscaping or they said no to one thing. So getting on a system that you're checking to make sure we're offering everything. You know, it was interesting. Brian Burton came to my house last night, Waste No Day podcast. He's a big guy in authority brands.

And he said, there was a study done, it's about 15 years ago, that 85% of salespeople don't ask for the sale. And if you guys know Joe Chris, our Uncle Joe, his major famous question he's known for is, what should we do? That's asking for the sale. It's showing different options and asking. And Brian says something a little bit differently. He says, I could have everything up and going here by the time the kids are home from school. Do you want me to go ahead and get started? And he shakes his head.

And they both are effective. But I think more than ever right now, Jonathan Wissman came to my house. More than ever, people need to fix their sales game. They got to quit asking for more leads. Continue to do marketing and try to get more leads. But make more with the ones you got in your four walls. And Jonathan Wissman, reengaging with him, getting him helping again. He actually had us out to his house once.

He said, I want things done cheap as possible. He was just kind of screwing with my guys to see how they would react. And my guys gave him the dog and pony show, told him everything, but said all the other guys get better jobs because he started, he said who he was and that he's worked with us. And it just kind of pissed me off because he said they weren't dressed right. And then they didn't even ask about a second door. And that really bothers me.

Because as a business owner and the founder, and I think we're one of the best run companies out there, just to know that he had a great experience. They ended up selling him more things, but it wasn't amazing. It wasn't over the top. And it's something where we're going to work on and we're going to get it dialed in. Hey, Tommy, I really need to get my finances under control. I'm really having a hard time with seasonality of my excavation business.

Do you think Megan likes could help? Yeah. I think Megan likes this. If you guys don't have really, really great control over your financials, that's where you need to go. That's every ounce of me says it's kind of the Al Levy manuals. And a lot of people, they don't find success with that. Leave me like I did because they don't apply. They don't live what he says down to the T. They don't use his hours that he gives. They don't integrate and implement everything.

and make it a part of their culture. And that's a big mistake. So, and then not having financials is like driving a car without anybody behind the steering wheel. It's like someone's hitting the gas, someone's hitting the brakes, but no one really knows where you're going. And I think for a lot of small businesses, we say, well, we got money in the bank, so we're good. It's not fun to look at balance sheet and income statements. It's not fun to like analyze that stuff.

It's great when you get somebody that understands what they're looking at and where to be putting your time. Cost of goods sold, marketing, taking a deep dive into this stuff. And I can tell you, the more I learn how to take a deep dive into the company, the more I want more data. And I ask for more each month. I mean, it started out as 50 pages.

This one's over 100. Last month was 150. Now, because we're coming out with our budgets, we kind of lighten this one up because it's been a lot more work coming up with next year's budgets. So pretty interesting. How can I find my next key hire who I should recruit next in the restaurant business? Well, it's a great question. Who should I hire next and how do I find the next best person? What I tend to do is I tend to figure out what I hate doing the most. Where's the business...

Where am I stepping into the most that I don't enjoy? And that's my next hire, especially when I was a little bit smaller than we are today. So I would really focus on where can I buy back my time? And that starts with getting out an old spiral notebook. Hopefully it's a calendar. And you write down where you're spending a lot of your time. You're just making notes for about a month. And you highlight the ones that were productive and you highlight in a different color the ones that weren't.

And you start delegating this stuff. Like I don't look at my own email. I look at the important ones that come to me after they've been filtered. I really have gotten to the point where I don't do a whole lot of stuff that doesn't make sense for me. And that's what you should be doing. You should be saying, well, who's my next key hire to put more time for me to focus on the business? I have a client that is hoping to spend 10 to $20,000 wrapping their vehicles. How do I help them measure the ROI on this?

We are in the moving industry in Indianapolis. So you're a moving company, Chris, that's got a client that's about to wrap a vehicle. I mean, listen, at the end of the day, if the wrap is done properly, it's a driving billboard, right? I mean, ROI, it really is hard to get attribution models for your vehicle, but your vehicle is the most important thing to wrap. I mean, and then the trick is put the wrap vehicle on the website. So

You know, me and Dan just recorded a new podcast. It's not going to be coming out very, probably not in the next month. But what I can tell you guys is if you're ever going to really, really be successful, having your logo and your wrap and your website brand and your yard signs and your valve pack and your Clipper magazine and the billboards, everything needs to feel the same.

And Dan has a bunch of studies. If you go on kickcharge.com, you can kind of see he spends a lot of time measuring ROI. And there's all kinds of facts on his website. So I would start there if you want reports and case studies. But there are a lot of stuff out there. I can just tell you, I was doing 40 million. Dan just made a post. It was four years ago.

I was doing 40 million when I met Dan and now we're about to do 200. And I don't think we could have done it without the new wraps, the clean wraps that look very, very good. That it's not so many people. They wrap their vehicles. They put everything they do. They put their phone numbers and websites and looks, it looks like shit. It really does. It doesn't really scream out what they do. And I think that it's a mistake. And I don't think you need to put everything you do on your wrap. If you do a soft washing, uh,

You don't need to put that you do gutters and roofs and decks and concrete and garages. Don't put all that shit. No one needs to know all that. They know what you do. Hopefully the phone number is a phone number like 898-DOOR. That's one of our phone numbers. And if not, 800-844-A1-GRADGE is a good one because it kind of says the name of the company and the phone number.

but it's not like a lot of people are going to call you from that um and if they do they're just going to search you while they're there so make sure it just has your brand and i i think the roi what does a good rap do for your company number one it lowers your marketing costs number two it tells the client that you're legit when you park in front of their house they tend to want to spend more money they don't think it's chucking a truck number three

employees start to engage more, especially when you wrap the building inside with the whole logos. I think it's fascinating that people won't make the investment. The number one thing, they put all their time, money, energy, they're gambling with their businesses' lives, and they're not sure they want to spend the money on the brand, the brand that feeds them, the brand that they're spending all these marketing dollars on, the brand that they're trying to go on Indeed and Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter to recruit, but yet,

They don't have a good logo. They don't have a mascot. It's mind boggling to me. And I've kind of been in that. I understand where they're coming from. They don't have the money. One of the things Dan Martell said to me last week, he said, you know, Tommy, he runs this best practices group for software companies. And he goes, people don't, they need to learn that if they buy, like they want to be bought from, think about that. They buy like they want to be bought from. What does that even mean?

It means that I hire people and pay them. I've got a lot of coaches, a lot of consultants that I work with, and I'm bringing on more. And I don't try to get them down on price. I'm not always trying to figure out how to screw other people over. I buy like I want to be bought from. You give a price. And therefore, when we go out to a house, I feel like most customers go with us. And I think it's a lot to do with how I buy and how my technicians buy. And I talk a lot about that kind of,

that mentality is most people are so afraid to spend money, but they say, how come nobody will spend money with me? You know, I can't even sell an HVAC unit for 10 grand. You look at some of the companies I know, they're averaging over $30,000 for a 510 unit. Well, they're selling a lot more than just the 510 unit. There's adding insulation and putting new tubes for the HVAC. But you think about this, there's companies that can't sell for 10 grand

There's companies that are averaging over 30, but they're selling a couple other extras. They're looking at air quality. How do you make the difference? Well, I think you invest into your brand. Then it takes time. You can't just grab your vehicles and expect to sell stuff for more. You got to become a better company. You got to show up the same day. They got to have a great experience on the phone. Your market needs to tell them that you're a great company. Then you need to wow the customer from before you even get there. You need to make a phone call, let them know that

You're honored that they chose your company. I'm stopping off at 7-Eleven to go pick up a Gatorade. Is there anything I can grab you to like monster, do you like coffee? Hot, cold, what can I get you? I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate it. You got a profile picture of me. I also have my family in there and you can see that I'm a big skier and I love soccer.

And I just want to let you know, I'm looking forward to getting to your house. I got everything on my truck. I got all the right tools and we'll get you up and running in no time. And once again, we're honored that you chose us to be your garage door company. And needs to be that wow experience. You need to have perfect training that the guy's doing the same thing every time. Go above and beyond with the clients and you can start selling stuff for a lot more money. But, you know, we don't get a lot of warranty calls like we used to. We've become a better company.

We get out to warranty calls if we do the same day and people pay for that. I mean, to have the infrastructure to handle what we need to do with this many calls in 19 states, we need to charge for it. And the people that say, I'll never tell you how much to charge in your company because I don't know. I'd have to look at a lot of financials to establish if you're charging enough. And there's always a point of you can't raise prices anymore because it's absurd. And I think we're not the most expensive. We've got options that are a little bit more.

but we're also not the cheapest and i think we you know understanding how to train people but they got to have the right brand behind them going back i could spend the whole day talking about vehicle wraps and dialing in the website to make sure it's congruent and it's symmetrical riker said knowing what you know now about private equity and what they bring to the table would you have gone back and sold sooner i don't think so i think my timing happened to be impeccable

I don't think I would have sold sooner because I got an offer. I'm not going to say the company, but I got an offer for $123.5 million. And it was about 18 months before. And we did a lot better than that. So a lot of people think they're going to take it to the next level. I had the stuff right in front of me that I needed to do.

And when you know you're going to be doing an event, which is selling your company, you start making different decisions. That's why I'm starting the Freedom Event. That's why we're starting the Home Service Freedom Group is because you know you need to do all these things, right? You know you need to do audited financials. You need to get on accrual accounting. You know you need to fix a couple of markets. You know you need to top create a couple of people. When you start setting dates...

you start kind of thinking, how do I really make this company look amazing? And it's amazing to me that most people don't run their businesses like they could sell it at any time, like build it to sell it. John Warlow wrote that book, Built to Sell. And it's just fascinating that people do not build a business and they say, I don't ever want to sell. Why? Well, it's so comfortable and I'm making great money. Really? You might be making a million dollars a year.

Why not get a check for 7 million bucks, roll some of that equity for another four year plan, bring another 6, 7 million out and don't lose your identity. Now you've figured out how to do it. A lot of people that go through life in their only business and they get done with it and it's not what they thought it was. They say, I got all these customers, but it's not worth much.

And why not go learn from the best of the best on how to build a business, the reporting, how to put together a board, how to raise capital, all the stuff that I'm involved in right now. I feel like the mindset is broken. Well, I sell my business when it's bringing in a bunch of cash. Well, how old are your parents? How old are your kids? Are you really living your best life? Because I'll tell you what, throwing 5, 10, 20 million, 100 million in the bank,

knowing that no matter what the economy brings, you're gonna be able to buy when it turns into a buyer's market. You wanna talk about becoming a billionaire, you gotta have a lot of money in the bank. And unfortunately for us home service guys, the majority of the money's made when we do a transaction. And private equity gets a bad stigma because there's a lot of deals that go south because these guys get out of Yale, Princeton and Harvard, and they don't know how to treat people. They understand the numbers,

Luckily, I got with Cortec and these guys are fascinating. They're very good partners. And I really, really like these guys. And we work well together. And they understand. They go, Tommy, this is your business. They couldn't believe how much money I reinvested. They said, you're nuts. And I asked them to do more. I asked them to put 60% back in. They wouldn't let me. I'm 47%. So I wouldn't have done it right at the same time, Riker. I would have done it exactly when I did it.

But if you ever want to talk about it, me and you can jump on a call and we can talk about when the right timing is because the timing is when it's planned for. The timing is to maximize value. And really what it's about is maximizing EBITDA and having a quality of earnings done and knowing that you're well-rounded, knowing that someone's not going to give you a huge discount because you're unorganized and things aren't dialed in. Let's see here.

Lucas said, hey, Tommy, I'm 21 years old in Alberta, Canada. Started a garage door business a year and a half ago. I have two trucks, four techs, and two subcontractors. A large commercial builder wants me to do a lot of their new commercial construction. This would take about 90% of our workload. How big should a customer be before I refuse to work? I get worried about putting all my eggs in one basket, especially since the residential side of the business is growing rapidly. I also have fear of missing out.

Lucas, if you can get to the point where you're at 55 to 60% gross profit, I would take that client on if I were your size. Just make sure you've got a pretty deep bench. And what I mean by that is you don't just have one guy that can handle that load. If your residential side is growing and you've got a great guy, first of all, get it on paper. Get in a contract, say, I'm going to be hiring people and building my business to be able to support the demand that you're bringing us.

So to do that, I'm going to need to put it on paper. I would absolutely do that. And if you ever want to talk about that business, there's nothing that gets me more excited than talking about garage doors. I mean, it's my favorite thing. So if you ever want to chat, I'd love to talk with you. And we can talk about how you're going to grow this business into a monster. And if you're ever looking to partner,

what i love is i love people that are hungry that realize that a1 is a great company that can pay a lot of people come to me and they say man once i hit two million dollars of ebony or once i hit three million once i hit four million of ebony and i'm right here ready to go and i'll help you get there and if you don't want to sell i don't care i don't take it personal i just think i think you would really dig it i think some people come in and we parted with a lot of people

And it's not run like a small business. There's responsibilities, there's structure, there's delegation, there's different authority levels, there's meetings. And it's not like this kumbaya, like everybody's playing by the seat of their pants like most people are used to. They're like, man, you guys are just, it's almost corporate.

But that's how a big business should run. It shouldn't be firefighting all day. It should be super organized. And it should be everybody's working on records and goal setting and setting the budget correctly. So I know people think, man, I just want to work alongside of Tommy.

I make a lot of videos for the guys. I interview a lot of the technicians. We just came out with some really cool reporting that I could give high fives and send videos out, telling them they're amazing. We got the Facebook group, but I'm involved with a lot of meetings, but I am not in the day to day. So, you know, if you're looking for somebody to just be around, that looks like they're just suffocating all the time, I'm not your guy. You'd walk in and you'd say, man, Tommy, he doesn't really have to do much. I do. I'm busy.

You see my calendar. I'm slam. But it's pretty easy once you get things dialed in and you hire great people. But Joe, I would definitely take on that. Or no, I'm sorry, Lucas. I would take on that contact. Joe Co said, hey, Tommy, I love all your content. I'm a one truck guy doing pull service. I'm trying to find my first employee so I can start and turn this job into a business.

How would you go about finding the first guy and how do you transition your customers that you have such close relationships with? Yeah, great question. Joe, here's what I would do. I would hire somebody that blows the socks off. I would spend more money on my first employee. And this is controversial. This might be different than most people say. In this market, I would pay extremely well to get an apprentice. And extremely well to me in the pull service, probably 18 bucks an hour.

And I would hire a really, really good person with a great smile that's energetic, that's already working somewhere else. So you're going to steal somebody, maybe not from a pool company, maybe from a restaurant, like a busboy or a server. And what I really start working on right now is how I'm going to pay them. How can they change the outcome? Obviously, on a pool service, the more routes they run, the better. And there's some sales involved.

So I say, what are some of the outcomes I want for this particular individual? And the first thing I'd work is their manual that tells them their tattoo policy. It tells them what happens if their truck breaks down, what happens if they run out of chlorine, what happens if the customer needs a new net. It's got every freaking detail on how to do their job. What happens if a pump goes out? What happens if there's a leak? Everything is documented. And I spend my time doing that. I'd also start recording myself doing it. I call it the Zoom method.

Dan Martell calls it the camcorder method. And you start recording everything. And then you get those videos chopped down into, here's what happens when I go to the customer's house. And then the next step is going to be you going out and doing it with them. And you showing them exactly how you want things done. And you document everything. You build checklists. You put it into the CRM. You should get pictures of verification. And then the next thing I would do

is make sure these people have a close relationship with who you hire make sure that he wows them make sure he's got a personality and make sure that he's very very happy go lucky to where when people meet him they're like wow this guy's really cool we really really like this guy we're glad he's the person you chose to be on our property doing our pools now from there they're going to get comfortable with him and now you could go back into the office and i would do that with the first three employees

And then what'll happen is one will be the clear, like five out of five stars, just really killing it with the clients. He'll be selling well, he'll be getting great reviews. He'll be not missing days. He'll be picking up shifts when you need them to emergencies. And that's the person that'll become your trainer. And as the business grows, you'll start to develop a training center. You might even have a house at an HOA or a community pool that you tell the clients you're gonna give them a discount because you're gonna use that as a training pool.

some really important things to think about. Justin Giordano said, I'm starting a roofing and gutter company in beautiful Michigan, working with Kick Charge, Rabbit Hire, 1SCO and others. I have individuals ready to invest. What would be the maximum equity you would feel comfortable giving away to properly have everything in place to grow and perform from day one? Well, equity is a really hard question.

I always look for a competitive advantage. Even if I'm in your shoes, Justin, I'm not looking for capital for money. Brandon Dawson runs all of Grant Cardone's companies. And what he used to do is give equity to the clients. And it's an FTC compliance thing, Federal Trade Commission. But if they spent a certain amount of money, he locked them in by giving them equity. Very smart man. And

What are these equity holders going to bring you? Are they bringing you any know-how? Are they bringing you any clientele? Are they bringing you certain banking relationships? I'd be very careful with how much equity I give when the company's not worth much. I would have to ask you your valuation and how much capital you're raising, what the capital is going to. I mean, there's so many more questions I'd have, Justin. Why would I bring equity holders in in the beginning unless I needed cash?

I'd rather use an SBA loan personally. They give away equity when I'm small. And what's the maximum they'd give me valuation with something that's not... I mean, what are you going to say? The business is worth 10 million. Give me a million for 10%. That's tough to swing. I don't think I'd invest in something that's not proven yet. So I got more questions on that. Aaron Kimbler said...

I want to know how you handle fear. My trainer says it's about building confidence through repetition, but I have to start and I'm scared. So I end up with nothing. How do you handle fear? I know there was a point where you were young and afraid to approach people or were you just always confident. Do I improve my product knowledge role play, which sucks. Appreciate anything in advance. Yeah, I think people run through fear. They go to the doctor because of fear.

They run their business out of fear. They run their lives out of fear. Fear of missing out, fear of getting rejection. I don't know if there was a moment of my life. I think when I met Gabe Means, my old partner in A1, from 2007 to 2010. I remember somebody was talking shit about me and I was there and Gabe goes, don't you ever, ever say anything negative about Tommy. He goes, or I'll beat your ass. He goes, this dude is the most passionate person

caring man you'll ever meet. And I couldn't believe it because I didn't even stand up for myself. I don't remember the situation. It wasn't even a big deal. And when I learned that he just didn't care and I needed to, I learned a lot about just self-confidence from Gabe, where he was just like, dude, tell the customer what's up. He's like, you're not even helping them if you're not. And he'd walk in there and just not give a shit. He stopped caring what people think. I mean, he was great at what he did. He's one of the best salesmen I've ever met.

But I don't let fear dictate anything anymore. All my decisions, I'm a big whiteboarder and I strategize a lot. And I know you got to stop caring so much. There's a lot of people that might not like me. And I'm sure that they're out there and they hate the thought of Tommy Mello or whatnot. But I don't let that get to me because I know that I'm a good person and I know that I care about people.

And I think role playing is important. I think if you can't do that in practice and get very comfortable doing it and practicing what you're going to say so it's repetitive, you're not going to stand a chance. You're not going to become better. Me and Brian were talking yesterday about I'm going to get each technician a notebook. I don't want them to write the job on the top. And I wanted them to put what went well, what they could have done better, and start really journaling after every call.

And really reflecting at that call and spending 20 minutes filling it out, saying, I tried this, I did this. You know what really works at the gym is when you keep a log and you know how much you're lifting and you go up every single week. And the same thing should be in business. So start taking notes and reflecting more and getting very comfortable. I don't worry as much about what people think. So I think that's the best advice I could give.

Trent Jackson said, "At what point is the territory saturated to where regardless of your marketing, you aren't going to gain any more revenue? Is there a number?" Yes, generally people say 20% of you and 20% of the market share. And I'm gonna post a video that explains how that works, how you can kind of reverse engineer market share. I'll put that in Home Service Freedom. Tom Howard at Vertical Track talked about it at one of my events.

I broke it down. But I'd say very few businesses, Parker and Sons will do 280 million this year. They do HVAC plumbing, electrical, water quality, air quality. They do some man cave stuff. But are you doing 280 million? I doubt it. So I doubt you're anywhere near where you've hit a penetration level. And here's the other thing that no one really talks about is when you're innovative, you could actually come up with new ideas.

to create demand where demand never existed. Like before an iPhone came out, no one wanted a touchscreen phone. They didn't think it would work. Blackberry. If you guys ever watched that documentary, fantastic documentary, I believe it's on Amazon. They didn't think that anybody was going to like having a phone. That's a touchscreen. So I think, uh,

Sometimes you could build products that create new demand. Roy said, do you buy or lease your vehicles and why? I've heard private equity groups lease more than buy. Is it just to minimize surprise repairs and keep a more predictable P&L? Or is there a tax code benefit that most of us just don't take advantage of? I don't understand why it makes sense for us to lease, but I know there are people smarter than me that do it. So I lease.

What happens is you do a lease program and we use enterprise and you can buy it after five years for $5 because it's a lease to own. It's much better on cashflow. You can accelerate this year. You can accelerate the depreciation 80%. But when you buy, the intent is never to sell. It's to drive them into the road. I replaced my vehicles usually at 100,000 miles or after four to five years.

I want new things on the road and I buy the plan that covers everything except for like tires and windshields. So it's got all the hard parts, the transmission and the engine. And when something goes wrong, it's just covered. They replace it. They put the new parts in. And there's a couple of things they don't cover, but it's got roadside assistance, all that stuff. And the mentality from the technician is just they're driving something that's newer, right?

and they might drive it for three or four years and we'll replace it for them and they'll get into something new because the wraps get old they get sun damaged the vehicles start looking a little beat up and then i layer all of them with plastic like to protect from dents and then we resell them if you looked at a graph there's a perfect time when it's still worth a lot of money so i trade it in for like 20 grand i get the 20 grand towards the 50 000

And the lease payments go down a little bit. So I'm always replacing them. And when I was smaller, I used to think I'll just buy used trucks. I'll wrap them. I'll make them look good. And then when I hired RapidHire, the number one question was, do you guys have new trucks? And after seeing my top guys get broken down and the customer not having a uniform truck where I can take pictures and it's all uniform, it's like, I think it's much more advantageous to lease, to own,

buy it off, sell it, take that money you profited and roll that into the new truck. That's the way we do it. Probably not the best answer. And my CFO would give a much better answer. So I'll get that. I'll go ahead and I'll have him and I post about why we do that under the group. So look at the home service expert group later. Mike said, what are the top things you do to prepare your company for a seller partnership?

So you do your own internal quality of earnings. I would get an audit, make sure my financials are tip-top shape, all in accrual accounting. What else would I do? I'd make sure there's manuals and standard operating procedures for everything and make sure that my place is pristine, it's organized, there's processes. I'd make sure to trim all the fat. There's non-performing people. I'd work on getting their will to where they're motivated to get better here in the next month.

Or I'd see them on their way and give them an opportunity to go work for one of my competitors. But I'd make sure my org chart, my business, my three-year plan is dialed in. And when you're going to partner with somebody, there's going to be a lot of questions. So think through everything that they're going to ask. What happens if there's a huge depression? You just work through everything and make sure it's all written down. What we did is we did a SIPP.

And if you look up what a SIP is, it was about 40 pages and it was super organized with everything from soup to nuts. It was like the highlights of our company, why we're different, the market cap. We paid $600,000 from a market study done on the market cap of garage doors from Parthenon. So depending on how much you're trying to get, Mike, and we can talk a lot about this. If you want to reach out to me, we can do a little recording and kind of go through what's on your mind or what you're going through.

Chris said, when looking to purchase another company, what do you look for? Company culture numbers, whether or not they are used to training. You know, when I buy a company, unlike 99.9% of other businesses, I'm paying attention to not as much their balance sheet and income statement. I want to know what their KPIs are. And you guys have heard me say this. I want to know how many calls they're getting a day. How many of those, what are they booking? What is their conversion rate when they show up to the home and what's their average ticket?

And they're not spending a lot of money on marketing. It's great because they're getting a ton of calls. So I look at it as a marketing source. Now, I want to look at each individual person and I want to know what they do. And I want to talk to the owner and management and say, what do you like best? Where does this guy need the most help? And some of them are a fit for A1. 99% of the people make it through our training and stay at A1 and they're great. Some people just don't want to go through the change. They're not ready. They hate change too much. They're like, I don't want to be organized.

I don't want to go work for a company that's going to have meetings every week. I hate meetings. They're literally, they kind of force themselves out. But one of the things that really helps Chris for a company that I'm looking to purchase is that they join in Garage Door of Freedom because they'll start getting their service title dialed in. They'll start understanding how the truck should be set up. They'll start investing in their training. They'll start understanding their chart of accounts and how it should roll into QuickBooks. And they'll start understanding processes

That's why, I mean, listen, anybody in Garage Door Freedom that ever wants to sell, they know they've got a buyer. I'm in, because they've invested in themselves. It doesn't mean they have to sell. Some of them might, some of them won't. Some of them might not. They know that I'm here, ready to go, because they do a fantastic job. They figured out performance pay with us. They figured out how to set up a training center. They know how to recruit. Most of the companies doing really, really well that are in Garage Door Freedom. That's why we're starting Home Service Freedom is because

I just had people showing up from vertical track that were plumbers and house cleaners and all kinds of different walks of life. And I said, I better open this up to everybody. I'm going to go over today. You guys don't all need to stay on. There's only 28 people here. But I enjoy this and I want to give you guys time and I've got some time. So I'm going to do it. Jake Morales said, who do you use for insurance within the business? Liability workers, comp auto.

Feel like we may be overpaying and would like to know someone of your caliber uses. Let me get back to you, Jake. I'll make a post about this. I know we just switched companies. We generally, we keep the insurance accountable. We go to, insurance is a weird deal, how it works. Because when there's already a bid out, they go to all the same carriers. And then we pay for, I pay for a portion of Aflac too. But let me get back to you on that one. It's a great question.

I think our premium is going to be going up because we had quite a few accidents this year. One of the policies I just added, we used to do a drug test after every accident. We're only going to do a drug test if it was your fault. Marijuana is a weird drug. It shows up in your system even when you're not high. And I had to let go of two good guys that said, yeah, they took a gummy the night before.

but they weren't high when they were driving. And it's really hard to prove that. So my insurance is kind of screwed right now. And then they got what's called the EMOD score. And that's getting a lot better for us. It's how much times you guys are claiming something goes bad. And we've got a way to kind of get our EMOD score better. And it's something we can talk about. What should a fairly green HVAC company's marketing mix consist of in your opinion? What percentage of marketing spend should be allocated to each?

Yeah, I'll break that down for you. I believe that a smaller HVAC company, if it were me, I would be maxing out. I'd find a company to optimize my GMB. That's where I would start. I'd focus on reviews and I'd focus to get number one ranking in my Google My Business page. And it's called something different now. Second thing is I'd be maxing out local service ads. I've absolutely spent a fortune on that. And I'd have a complete long-term two-year plan for my website.

where I'm link building, getting the content. We're rebuilding our website right now, again, and it's going to cost about 200 grand. But the goal is to increase conversion rate dramatically. And because we've got such a high domain rank and we're adding a ton of content and we're changing the H tags, we're putting in new schema data, we're putting in new metadata, the tagging, the conversion, the hotspots, the reporting,

SEO is a serious thing that I invest a lot of time and money in. So I would be focused on that. PPC would be the last one and make sure to optimize Bing as well. And that's when I use like a teeter-totter for demand. If my guys aren't busy enough, you could turn up the PPC. Be part of BNI, I'd invest in great stickers and great yard signs. And I might do like a direct response mailer like Valpack or Clipper or Money Mailer. What I'd be spending a lot of time with is relationships.

When you're small and you're a little bit more flexible, I'd be talking to realtors and building up a lot of business that basically pays all the bills. I'd really be focused on relationships. And that's more of a time commitment. But I'm hiring somebody full time to just be doing outbound calls to set me up for HOAs. I'm going to build the whole plan myself where I'm dialing and I'm dialing it in and I'm building the processes. People say, you're the CEO of a huge company. Why would you do that?

Well, a lot of times I just like to have fun and get proved a point and build the SOPs around it. If I spent a whole week every day building SOPs, figuring out how to close, and then I could hire somebody, then I write the manual, prove out that they could do it. And then I could hire 10 more. I mean, we're in 37 markets. So what if I built it to where I had one person per market that's just filling up a book of business and we're getting into commercial? Something I said I'd never do. And

Commercials are weird. It's a different animal. But it's funny, Keegan called me a couple of weeks ago and he's got a neighbor in Naples, Florida. And the guy is, I guess, a billionaire and he does all commercial. He goes, why would you ever do residential? Now, the problem I have with commercial is it's a different skill set. It's much harder to train on. I mean, you got to be the more commercial guys I meet. They're usually in their 50s. They're very, very smart. They've seen everything. They could work on anything. They're not afraid of heights.

And my fear was it's different insurance. Your AR is ridiculous. Some clients never pay. So it's a different truck set up. It's a different insurance, a different performance pay. But is the juice worth the squeeze? Yes. I think the problem is some people go do all commercial. They do everything. And they don't even have a manual for residential, which is the easiest. And I look at it and I go, you guys have one guy that understands how to do that. If he leaves, he's got you by the balls. I'm sorry, but

how do you be successful when you only have one person that understands it you have one truck set up you only have one scissor look so going into commercial i would just say spend a lot of money make sure you're very very profitable buy the right truck setups get the right insurance get the right training we're going to invest a lot of money next year and we're going to own commercial we're going to go into it we're going to we're going to go after the big contracts and that's more relationships once again

So let's go back to these questions. What types of things are your Torch team doing for technicians on-site? How do you encourage techs to utilize this resource? So Jacob, most of what the Torch program is built out to do is closed-door sales. Now I've got another team that Michael Werner created this software that's something X, I forget what it's called, but allows us to virtually work with clients.

when they get warranty calls. But I would tell you that the majority of what they do is they're there to, and now I have a dispatcher sitting in the middle of the relationship with the Torch member. So the technician calls the dispatcher. She says, did you get everything? Are both parties aware? Is the customer pre-qualified? Did you have any magic moments? How do you feel about them wanting a new door? Are they excited about it? Are they five out of five understanding they need a new door?

And the conversation is pretty simple with a virtual product specialist. They get on the phone with the client, they say, it sounds like you need a new door. The first they joke around, introduce themselves. And hopefully the customer says, yeah, it sounds like I do. And then you go through and say, I'm going to give you about six options. I'm going to go through each one of them pretty quickly. And then you can pick when you like. And that's basically it. I mean, our job is to build a report. The job is to be on the phone call 15, 20 minutes, make the sale.

And trust me, everybody's out there right now, every coach in every single company saying, oh, yeah, we're going to do what you guys do. It took three years to build this program. It's not easy. Anybody that thinks closing over the phone and setting up a closing team is easy to make it uber successful. It's not easy. I'll just say that because you got to work on the technicians more than you got to work on the torch person. It's complicated.

Rikers said, Chris Boreink put a call track number on there and tracked the type and amount of leads. Yeah, obviously get a call tracking number. But I mean, once again, the point of marketing on a billboard is never to figure out attribution. I don't put my phone numbers or website on my billboards. All I'm trying to do is get people to notice my company. Let me ask you guys a question.

If I was to give you a million dollars for every blue car today you saw, not in your parking lot, not in someone you know that is a coworker that has a blue car, but every blue car that you pass today, can you come up with every blue car for a million dollars each? I mean, you could rack your brain, but you probably wouldn't be able to recollect every blue car. And that's the whole thing is we've got this brain of ours that needs to basically delete almost everything. You don't even know what

How many stop signs you stopped at today? Our brain is just wired to not focus on everything. So you got to stand out and you want to be the person that repetitively, they see the sign. They don't know they saw it, but they know when they look up broken garage door or garage door repair, they'll be like, yeah, A1, I've seen them. I know them. I've seen them in my neighborhood. I've seen their billboards. They're a reputable company. So your job is,

is not to get attribution for your vehicles. We've proven how to pay for itself over and over. And trust me, I've got call tracking numbers on everything. But if you're like, someone might tell you in six months, I'm just not getting enough phone calls that pays for the wrap. That would be the dumbest thing in the world because they're actually getting way more phone calls. What will happen when you get more of your vehicles wrapped and you get more billboards and you don't have phone numbers or maybe not even websites on them?

What'll happen is your Google will start getting better results. Your ValPak will start getting better results. Everything will start getting better results. That's the plan. And ticket averages should go up because people are spending more. Jeff said, it's the best investment ever. It makes you stand out. Teresa said, agreed 100% on what to include it on wraps, brand logo, tagline, website. Can use a phone if you want, a vanity number like you mentioned if you have one. Wraps are a moving billboard working for you every day. Least expensive lead you'll ever get

Any advertising you'd pay for. Absolutely agree with you. Rabbit hire a pro. If you guys need somebody and you're looking to hire somebody, obviously they're not for everybody because if you do not want to work with them and you're not going to follow up, the problem that most people that Jody says is that work with bigger companies is the HR person is not very good.

and they don't make people feel special, and they don't have a process, and they say, this is not how we always used to do it. No shit, that's why you hired us, because you suck. You're not good at what you do. So we're going to come in, and we're going to interview. We're going to get you great applicants. We're going to redo your videos. We're going to build a really, really nice funnel, and then you guys still need to interview. You need to show up and smile and sell the company. They're not magic. They don't hire people for you. You still have to do interviews.

You still got to put good stuff out there that people want to work for. You still got to get a 401k in medical and do PTO. People are like, I tried rapid hire. It didn't work. Yeah, no shit. I tried out Levy's manuals. Show me how much you're reading them. Show me all your guys have signed off on them. Like everybody says, I'm doing what you're doing, but I'm not getting the same results. Are you? Are you doing the same stuff I'm doing? Because it sounds like to me, you spent some money, but you didn't implement anything.

I am buying a small company, 1.2 million. I have a plan to get to 10 million first year growth done through sales and processes. What are the immediate pitfalls to look for? So the immediate thing is you want to go from 1.2 million to 10 million. Sounds like to me, you want to spend a lot of money and that type of growth, one really bad decision could set you back dramatically. I think one of the main things are

You're obviously going to need to do a lot of hiring. So getting your training dialed in, creating the culture where it'll create itself. I think really getting buy-in from everybody and know where you're running towards. See, I think selling a company is what everybody should do and set a five-year plan or a two-year plan or a three or four, not a 10-year plan. Every single person that's listening right now could set it in five years. They can do a lot in five years. They can become extraordinarily wealthy and they can bring people with them.

That's what I talk a lot about is letting the other leaders of the company that are bought in and paper it. Like, it's so funny. I hear about these companies all the time that they say they're going to give money to their people, but they never do. I think they're horrible human beings. They're selfish and it's going to come back to haunt them. Trust me. They might be happy with the money they got, but you know, I've been really, really thinking a lot about this and I want to, I want to share something with you guys.

The reason I started Home Service Freedom that's getting launched here November 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. The reason I did an equity incentive program, which is now Profit Units. The reason why I helped so many people is I love to watch people come up. I love to change family trees. I think that's really what my calling is. It's helping people understand that money is a tool and how to use it properly and how to change their family's lives.

And a lot of this is going to go. My neighbor was over yesterday and he said, man, I'm in YPO. And he said, the most important thing for me is understanding how I don't ruin my kid's life with money. And so that's something we're going to talk a lot about and how they don't ruin relationships. Because those who know me are going to learn real quickly that I'm going to work with you to become a gazillionaire. Hopefully you got 10 million in the bank within the next three years. That's what I want.

And I like taking people with me. I never want to have to pay people's way. I want them to learn the best gift you could give is how to actually make money because then you feel good about yourself. And it's interesting. People walk away with a lot of money and then we learn how to do it again and again and again and again. And it's easily duplicated. The problem is they lose their identity and your identity should not be with your business. It should be with your family and friends and relationships.

Hey Tommy, Chris here with Service Plumbing. Can you share details about performance pay, specifically percentages and hourly amounts? Can't wait to meet you in Orlando. Chris? Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about that. The things that work for me is I take the parts cost out and I do 15, 17, and 19% of the ticket. And the scorecards look at a lot of things, warranty calls. They look at customer satisfaction,

They look at global overall sales. It looks at service to sales, pre-financing and service agreements and ticket averages. So we've got this whole scorecard and you move up to 17 by getting $500,000 of sales. Then you get to a million, you get 19, but you won't make it long at the company if you're getting a lot of warranty calls and bad customer satisfaction. Now that's on service.

on door sales it's eight nine or ten percent and the door sales are paid on the installers get paid basically for sold hours so it's a different type of pay and they can also sell up sales and they make a higher percentage because they're out there with the stuff so they make more so hopefully that answers some of your questions i'm going to get into a lot more detail of the event which you're going to learn a lot roger i appreciate it brother

Tommy, I met you online. I would like to know how I can get 30 minutes one-on-one regarding my startup strategy. Jeff, if you want, you can email me at a1leadmanager at gmail. Then my assistant will get it in a book of time. She's going to ask a bunch of questions. We've been really working on how we could share when I do content with everybody because a lot of people have the same questions. If you've got any questions, you can go to homeservicesexpert.com forward slash questions.

And if you want to order my book, it's elevateandwin.com. And it comes with a bunch of amazing stuff. Definitely recommend Elevate and Win. So performance paper installers is sold hours. It's always going to be sold hours. And they got an opportunity to upsell. And now I'm upselling in storage. Ryan Ruff said, what is the KPI for call booking rate? Well, in the call center, I look at abandonment rate as well. So I want to know your booking rate. I want to know, I think you should be above 85%.

as far as percentage of booking. I think the average of home service is 45%. There's so much money that's lost in the call center. It's ridiculous. I think if everybody took a deep dive today into their call center, they would find a lot more money. Have you ever considered using canvassers instead of traditional marketing? Yeah, I have a door-to-door team. Lenny Gray runs it. And Lenny and I are going to continue to work on it. And my goal is to start making a profit on door-to-door.

Got a lot of things in the works going into next quarter, Q1. And my goal is to have 100 guys in each market knocking on doors, putting stickers, selling storage, selling my Q. And once I get that dialed, it's been three years in the making. We're going to go in and take over markets because we're going to be putting our sticker over the tops of everybody else's over the course of a couple of years of doing that in a market.

with getting great reviews from Google, it's a game changer. I mean, no one's gonna be able to compete. So yes, I agree, canvassers are fantastic. What's up, Tommy? Love your content. Just got my HVAC license. I wanna start a company. How should I start? I'm still at another company. I'm 24. Well, first of all, save 100 grand. Start stocking the money, build your credit, start an LLC, start building your business credit, get a business plan together. And I know it sounds cliche,

And it sounds like, yeah, business plan. It really is important. I would start lining up an SBA loan. And the best way to start, save your money. And then I would say, listen, I go talk to the owner of your current company. I'd say, I want to start a business in six months. Now, understand that he might be willing to fire you right then. So get your money saved. Have your LLC formed. Have your EIN number originated. Start thinking about the business name, the RAF.

how you're going to get your first vehicles, understand your insurance. All this goes into a business plan. What are your first campaigns going to be? What B&I group are you going to join? All these things. And then what I would do is just, once you've got all this stuff established, I'd go talk to the owner. And he might say, hey, man, listen, work for me for another six months. And I'll tell you what, I'll give you an opportunity to make way more money. I had a guy recently come up to me and said, I'm thinking about starting my own business. I said, great, I'm all about it. I said, how about you...

stay for another year, you get equity in the business, and then you stay through 2026. Now here's what I'll offer you. I'll give you 8% of every lead you get. You're gonna get a couple hundred grand in equity if you make pinnacle trip next year. I said, you wanna start a business. You don't even know if you know how to self promote. Let's just use A1 as a test case. So what if you're lining up, if you're lining up 50 grand a month, I say it's a pretty good start. We'll help you learn how to do marketing. We'll help you build relationships.

Might as well test it out with us. And if you don't want to, you call me anytime. I'll help you get the business of them going. You'll be my competitor. Maybe I'll buy out in the future. I don't care. I want your life to be enhanced to the fullest. But what I'm offering you makes a lot more sense considering you're not very talkative guy. You don't really know how an LLC is formed. You don't understand EIN. You don't understand insurance. So why don't you become an entrepreneur? You work under me.

And then we'll help you establish these skills and get the business plan together. And in 2026, if you want to, and you're not making enough money, go do your own thing. It's not that far away. And now you'll have a half a million dollars to mess with because you're going to save your money. You're going to put in your 401k. You're going to make it to pinnacle the next couple of years. And, you know, you're just going to make capital gains on that, which is not ordinary income. So you'll make more money with me. And then if you make that 8%, let's just say you get to the point where you're selling a million dollars a year.

8% of that's an extra 80 grand. And you don't even need to be the guy doing the work. So I gave him a pretty good opportunity. How do you feel about businesses without reoccurring revenue? I like them. I mean, garage doors is rarely reoccurring until I started selling service agreements. I mean, they'll call you back in the future, but if you're thinking about landscaping, like architecture, I think it's a great industry because you get such a huge ticket and then hopefully you can sell a maintenance agreement with that. But yeah, I'm not afraid of businesses without reoccurring income.

Now, the SaaS model, Software as a Service and reoccurring in service agreements is the best model out there. That's why it deserves the best multiples. What you said about the billboards. Love what you said about the billboards. So many people forget how important building a brand is. Thank you. How do you feel about the exterior cleaning industry? You know how I feel about it, Corey? I feel like there are very few people that ever break through $5 million. And I feel like people do that for a lifestyle business.

I feel like if I was going to do it, I'd do it commercially. I'd be a lot of service agreements. I do hard stuff. Now, what I would do if I was in that business is I would look at all the aluminum siding. I would look at all the decks, all the wood treatments, all the gutters, all the roof, and I'd find out their warranty plans.

And I'd go through neighborhoods of builders and I'd say, just to let you know, your warranty is void if I don't do this work. And this roof is going to cost you $30,000. I could save you between your aluminum siding or your stucco and your deck. And we'll do a clear coat on this. And I would raise the ticket average and build it into a necessity. And I would get it all through service agreements so that I could have expected income coming in. And as I build this out, it would deserve a better multiplier.

And what I would do in that business, the problem is your average ticket will never be what HVAC and roofing is, right? So I'd build a good business of reoccurring income and then I'd sell it. I'd get a 12X probably. I'd build it into a $10 million EBITDA company and get a 12X because it's all reoccurring. And if I was going to build a franchise, I would probably build it in that industry. And

The thing is about a franchise, you got to have every single system. You got to have the website, the marketing, the call bookings, the training, the recruiting. It should be in the CRM. It's all decked out. The only reason to start a franchise is if you want to scale quickly and have great business owners that have experience. If I started a franchise, one out of every 10 people would make it through my screening process. I would not sell franchises just to scale. I would sell with the right owners. The franchisees would be very, very, very smart.

And they'd be very good at business and they'd pay a hefty amount to get in because I'm giving them a business in a box. And they're going to have a lot of responsibilities and I'm going to have a lot of rights. Most people start a franchise because they go, well, I get 6% reoccurring and I'll just sell it to any jackass that wants to buy into it. And then they realize how much they screwed up and they realize, man, this guy's giving us a bad name. Man, this is taking more time than I thought.

So franchise models are great, but most people don't think they're like, I got something pretty good. I bring in an 800 grand a year profit. It's not worthy of a franchise. You need to prove that out in four markets. So be careful what you wish for. Adrian said, does they want to run Facebook ads? Do you think, what do you think of that ad platform? I think Facebook's amazing. I don't think we do as well as Google, but we're bringing out somebody full time to run social media. So yeah,

We had an interview last week. We've not been huge on it. That's one of the biggest opportunities that we've identified. Also, the Spanish market, 40% of Arizonians speak Spanish as a first language. So we're going to be going to the Spanish market. I've been talking about this stuff for a while. I finally got a really good VP to kind of help take my vision and put it on to doing so. You know, I got to hit $110 million in 2025 of EBITDA. Might not hit it. Might exceed it. Not really sure yet. There's a lot of...

things that are going on in the economy. But even if I don't hit it, I'll take significant market share. Maybe it's not 2026 that I sell, maybe it's 2027. But ultimately, that's where I'm going to make, I mean, I did pretty good. I mean, I threw a couple hundred milli in the bank after taxes, so I'm fine. But this will put me at billionaire level.

So that's where, and home service freedom is not to make money. That's the crazy thing. I'm using the money we're going to be collecting from that to build a team. And there's opportunities that'll come out of that. Like this podcast, I didn't build this. I don't make money doing podcasts, but it does give me access. Oh, by the way, this podcast is now number 11 in the world for business on Apple. Might be just the United States, which is still 90% of the competition. So we passed up.

Jocko and Bradley and all these other guys. So now I got to get, you know, you guys aspire to be number one. Now I'm going after number one. I need to figure out how to hit number one in home service. So that's the plan is not home service and business. And so just know this, guys. I think a podcast is pretty cool. I enjoy it. But just know I'm bringing a whole new

Fire to this podcast. It's gonna be done ten times better and I want you guys I think it's a good podcast, but it's not great And I think it could be great and so we're gonna treat the podcast Like it should be treated and we're gonna make sure to get the guests prepared We're gonna make sure that you guys have a lot of takeaways and notes We're gonna make sure that we reference books to give you the ability to get the books just with links. I

We're going to make sure that we bring on guests that will change your business. And that's the plan is I think we've done a great job up to this point, but I'm never satisfied. I think there's a lot more work to do. And I want to bring you guys the best of the best. I want to make an impact in your life, your business, your family's life, your employees' lives. That's what I want. I want legacy now. So the money will come.

I'm not worried. A1 is my money. People ask how much you get paid if you get speaking. Sometimes people give me 25 grand to go speak at an event. But I don't need to make my money from speaking. I like just sharing my story, my thoughts, my KPI driven processes. So money is not the end all be all.

I love doing events in Phoenix because I don't have to go anywhere. For me, there's an opportunity cost of going to an event. So if it's a big event, I like to be at those events and I like to meet people and I like to talk about the podcast. I like to get people on the podcast. And so hopefully you guys continue to ask questions. Remember, homeservicetexpert.com forward slash questions. The more the merrier. I'm going to post some stuff later about insurance.

We're going to post about the vehicles and I'm going to post about taking market share. So just look for those on the Home Service Expert page. I'll make sure they get done. And thank you for tuning in. I appreciate it. Let me see this one. Just finished listening to the podcast with Grant Cardone. Love what you say and how you say it. All is true and inspiring. How do we hire the best employees, A players, if we're not making profit now? Well, if you're not making a profit...

It's because you don't have A players. There's a lot to unpack there, but think about it. Either you're not priced right, your conversion rates off, your booking rates off, and your service ticket's not averaging what it should do. I think you've got to get good at what you're doing. If you're not profitable, it's because you've got the wrong people and you're not working on the business. And you're probably walking in on a Monday saying a lot of shit going on, lots of emails to catch up on, lots of crap.

You don't know exactly what you should be doing today to make the company profitable. And that's the scary thing. You know, when we walk out of these meetings, the 100 slides, all this information, and you go through and look at this, just look at all these details that some of you guys are listening that might not have access, but look at all this data, all in red and green and different bar charts, line graphs, Gantt charts,

I mean, there's something in your business that we need to find out and make it profitable. Hi, Tommy. I've been watching your content for a while now. The podcast with Frank DiMarco the other day was terrific. I'm a marketer and I have a product that could definitely help you get that 110 million. I would like to ask how you prefer I approach your marketing team to introduce our system. Well, send me an email. A1 Lead Manager. We'll book a time. I'll get you with Robert and Chase.

And depending on what the product is, I'll get you with the right person in the company. And we're always glad to look at things. I mean, that's what's nice about this podcast as well as people come to me and they know, you know, they know we're a big business that adopts things that we're usually the one debated and alpha test different products. And if we believe in it, we'll do it. And we'll get behind you on the product and see what you guys are doing. Anytime someone has anything to do with marketing, I'm usually involved.

We just signed. We're sponsoring the Knights hockey team. And it's a pretty big opportunity. It's 350 grand a year, but we get access to their social media. We're getting a backlink from their website. We're getting all the seats at the game. We're having our mascot going to be at the games with a Tommy figure, caricature. And we're going to make a lot out of it. We're going to have a lot of gamification and a lot of fun things. We're going to blast this all over the radio.

And if this works with this, with the Las Vegas Knights, we're going to do five other sponsorships. It's going to blow a couple million dollars on sponsorships probably next year. We're going to know a lot more about it towards the spring. But those are things that you look at Ishmael. Ishmael was sponsoring the baseball league. But you got to understand how those things work. You just don't you can't just pay for a sponsorship and expect it to have a good ROI. So.

Anyways, I've been talking a lot here, guys. It's Monday. I'm going to let you guys get back to work. I hope you make it a great day. I will post more into the group. If you guys got more questions, try to post pictures, videos, questions, a selfie asking the question. The more context I can get, the better.

And I hope you guys have a wonderful week. I love these Q&As and I appreciate you guys listening. Thank you guys for making the podcast so extremely valuable and ranked so well. The more reviews we get, if you enjoy something, put a detailed message, like it, bookmark it, all that great stuff. We appreciate you doing all that you do and being part of these. Any feedback is always welcome and make it a great week. Finish off the month strong. We'll see you guys later.

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 helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper...

to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward 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.