Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
The way I want to come at it today is through focus. Because the metaphor is everyone's looking for gold, but they're all digging holes three feet deep looking for the gold. And they dig 100 holes three feet deep. So we're kind of doing, to mix metaphors now, we're doing everything kind of okay-y.
but not doing a few things really well and better than everybody else. And the gold is 300 feet down. That's the problem. The gold's deep. So rather than 100 holes, three feet deep, let's just do a few holes and go really deep and do them well. And this model is taken from Clay Collins. He came out with something called the five ones.
And I've expanded it to call it the seven ones. And I'm not saying you guys should follow this religiously. But as we go through the model, I want you to count how many you have at each level. Like I'm saying you should have one at each level. Count how many you have at each level just to get a sense of how diluted or scattered your business may currently be.
And if you choose to take even two or three of these things and say, all right, we're going to target, we're going to focus down to one thing at each of these levels and do that really well, I think it's very likely you'll do better. You'll start to outperform your competitors. You'll make more money and you'll be able to get more time off.
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.
1-299 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, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert.
I will tell you today I have a little bit of a cold, so excuse my sickness, but always going to bring the fire for this amazing audience.
Today I have David Wood, and David is not based in L.A. anymore. He's in Asheville, North Carolina, which is awesome. He just moved out there. It's round number two. He's an expert in coaching, business growth, and leadership. He's the founder of Focus.CEO. He started that in August of 2020. He's also the CEO of Tough Conversations International. He's also the CEO of Play For Real.
And he's an actor and director in one of the world's largest coaching businesses. He has trained high-performance entrepreneurs, executives, and even prison inmates around the globe, becoming the number one on Google for life coaching. He's the author of Get Paid for Who You Are.
with a Ford by Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup fame, who is the host of Tough Conversations podcast. He's also made successful appearances on CNN Headline News and Columbus University. David, as always, it's great to have you back on the show, brother. Thanks, Mike. It's good to see you, sick and all. I just want to say, you know, when you mentioned CEO of this, that, and the other, it makes me sound like I'm ahead of this multinational conglomerate
It's really just I've changed the name a couple of times of the business. So it's one business. Now it's called Focus.CEO, but I've enjoyed some other names in the past. I just didn't want people thinking I'm like a multinational corporation. It's mainly me. It's mainly me coaching business owners to grow their own big conglomerate. Yeah, listen, we've had you on the podcast. It's probably been...
about a year and we've been talking about around number two we've talked several times about it and um let's just talk about a little bit about the first podcast what we went through and just about what you've been up to and who your your target client base is and what you do for them yeah sure so
I'm a generalist. I'm a business coach for business owners. But because I've done 25 years of personal growth and my own therapy and whatnot, I'm also a life coach. So one guy wrote to me and said, I feel more like I've hired Yoda than a business coach. So you never know what you're going to get in the coaching sessions. But most people, most business owners I talk to, they want to double revenue. So usually we'll start there.
The second thing that they sometimes want, depending on what stage they're at in the business, is to double their time off. So I'm like, okay, great. We'll start there and then we'll probably find what else you really want underneath that. And to do that, to double your revenue and your time off, usually people need to double their focus because the human mind is like a monkey on crack and it's worse for business owners and even worse for entrepreneurs because we see all the possibilities.
So last episode, we covered nine steps to double your revenue and your time off. And in particular, we dove into two of those. One was how to focus over the correct time periods, one year, three months, one week, one day, and then even knowing what you're going to achieve in the next 25 minutes.
We went deep into that. And then we also did the 4D audit. When you're ready to buy your time back and leverage so that other people can do what you don't want to do in the business, 4D audit comes in really handy. And I got a lot of really good feedback from that episode. And I'm still working with a number of your listeners, helping them to grow their business from that. So the topic seemed to hit home.
You know, we just did a budget meeting for garage door freedom and home service freedom about a week ago. And I will tell you that these last four years have been very generous to us in the home service space. COVID, as bad as it was, it was the best thing that ever happened to home service. I mean, if you weren't printing cash, if you weren't doubling, there's issues with your leadership, maybe your KPI tracking. I mean, we couldn't hire fast enough. I had one class that
of 55 brand new technicians in one month during COVID. I mean, there was more jobs, more demand than we could have ever wanted. And what I want to tell you, David, is I've kind of got insider knowledge about certain aspects of data in our industry, very close with Service Titan Housecall Pro. I know what's going on in the back end of Google as far as search volume. This is the first time we saw negative decline month over month. When I say month over month, it means November versus last November. It's...
Not good as far as demand calls. It's a weird time. Interest rates are through the roof. And what I told everybody, we went bowling that night. It was a Monday. And they all said, man, we're going to double. We're going to triple. And the way you start out building a budget, David, is you put basically what's my average ticket? How much revenue do I want to do? What's my average ticket? Divide that by your booking rate. Divide that by your conversion rate.
And you're left with a number that you got to multiply by your cost per acquisition. And that's how much you should spend in marketing. And I said to people, how do you expect to triple when you're showing three months in the last three months, a decline on month over month? And the only caveat I want to tell people right now
is a lot of times when they say we're going to double or triple they go buy 15 trucks and then they hire all these people anticipating their growth that they wanted to do which is kind of a death spiral because now they got all this overhead but they don't have the call volume therefore they're paying minimums they're trying not to fire people but they're barely making payroll because they kind of over hire they built a massive training center i'm interested in hearing what your point of view would be because i always say
hope for the best, plan for the worst, be very lean on your hiring. And what I always have done is replace people. We top grade. I don't just hire a lot of infrastructure in anticipation of growth. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. I like how you work backwards from the revenue you want and work out how many leads, how much traffic that you need. And if you don't have that, I mean, any business is going to starve if it doesn't have
the minimum traffic that it needs to get the sales to cover the overhead. The way I want to come at it today is through focus. Because the metaphor is everyone's looking for gold, but they're all digging holes three feet deep, looking for the gold. And they dig 100 holes three feet deep. So we're kind of doing, to mix metaphors now, we're doing everything kind of okay-y.
but not doing a few things really well and better than everybody else. And the gold is 300 feet down. That's the problem. The gold's deep. So rather than 100 holes, three feet deep, let's just do a few holes and go really deep and do them well. And this model is taken from Clay Collins. He came out with something called the five ones.
And I've expanded it to call it the seven ones. And I'm not saying you guys should follow this religiously, but as we go through the model, I want you to count how many you have at each level. I'm saying you should have one at each level. Count how many you have at each level just to get a sense of how diluted or scattered your business may currently be. And if you choose to take
even two or three of these things and say, all right, we're going to target, we're going to focus down to one thing at each of these levels and do that really well. Uh, I think it's very likely you'll do better. You'll start to outperform your competitors. You'll, you'll make more money and you'll be able to get more time off. I love it. So,
You said seven ones, and I think what we should do is just jump right into it because I think there's a lot of content here. So let's go ahead and take a deep dive into what these seven ones are and how they're relatable and what we should think about each and every one of these seven. Great. And I want to use a hypothetical business example.
as an example. And you and I can riff for each level on what an example of one would look like instead of three or four. So what's a classic home business that you help people with? I'd say a big one out there right now. I mean, garage door freedom is pretty massive, but
I think there's a lot of people in HVAC. HVAC and plumbing seems to be one of the largest categories in home service. That's where all the PE guys are focused on. I get about 10 calls a week saying I'm going to go into HVAC, which is conditioning and heating. So all I know about HVAC is I think I have one in the house that's like a pump for the heater. Yeah, that's what it is.
Okay, great. So that's perfect. We'll use HVAC as a business and then you guys will be able to extrapolate this to your own business. So the first one is you want one target market. You don't want two, three, four, five or seven target markets. So for an HVAC business, Tommy, what's an example of one clear target market?
You know, my buddy has a massive, massive company doing several hundreds of millions a year. And his target market is dual income, husband and wife of between $110,000 and $130,000 cumulatively. He identified his as household income. There's other factors. We could talk about credit scores. We could talk about age of home. But I think the target avatar he's looking for
as a husband and wife or you know two partners in the home that have 110 to 130 000 of revenue per year okay great so i consider that a fairly broad market but still it's more targeted than we just help everybody and um one nice rule of thumb is to pick three characteristics that define your target market because you want to drill down and here's a
Now I'm switching to another business, but I heard this guy who does cabinet making. He shows people how to make their own cabinets. And so he first chose woodworking. I'm going to train people in woodworking, but that's too broad. So his second thing was, it's going to be cabinets within woodworking. And then he decided because he was an old geezer, he's like, I don't know, he's 65, 70. He decided it was going to be cabinet making for old geezers.
Now that's drilled down. He knows who he's talking to. So that's an example of a target market. So with the HVAC, maybe you focus on a specific region, right? Maybe what's another correct? You said it could be type of house. So it could be you do new homes or you- Yeah, so example, my buddy in Dallas, he targets-
only 3,500 or more square feet because at that point they have a second unit. So when he's going in the home, there's always that opportunity to not only replace the one unit, but you're getting the second unit. You're adding the two thermostats. You're making the units that can talk to each other, which is a pretty good opportunity to isolate that factor. And all this data is available. It's called regression testing. And if you, I think a lot of people, they kind of guess at their avatar.
They never really took their customer list and scrubbed it against certain data and attributes that make those. Why wouldn't you take, you know, for me, I have 950,000 past customers. We've taken our data and we realized what the buyer pool looks like, who spends more money. And we really isolated a lot of factors in what our potential, you know, it's a 10 year old house.
We know the credit card rate. You know, we know if they get financing or not before we there's a lot of factors. So, yeah, I see what you're saying here is really identified because most of us say anybody with an HVAC unit is our client. If they've got an air conditioner on their house, they're our client.
Right. Or you could say, if they don't have an air conditioner in their house, we just do new installs. That could be a target market. I like what you're saying, Tommy, because I think you're showing people how deep you can go. You can really get the data and back it with science.
But for the purposes of this podcast, if all you do is just narrow your target market more than you have so that it's pretty clear, even if you're taking a guess at it, then I think you're ahead of the game. You'll find out after a month or two or three of really drilling into that target market if that's the right one or if you need to tweak it a little bit.
And if you want to go deeper, Tommy's just shown us how you can really dial it in. Now, a lot of people ask, but what about the money I'm leaving on the table? What if I just do new installations and people want me to fix their current installation? That's
Fine. It depends how narrow you want to go. A friend of mine, Maria Sipka, is a brilliant entrepreneur. And she had this business that was doing really well in one niche. And people kept begging her, will you franchise this? Can we use your model so that we can go into another niche? And she wouldn't do it because she knew any second she spent on that was a second away from being number one in her market.
And I thought, that's focus. Now, you don't have to be at that level of focus. If you, for example, I coach. David, I disagree. Here's the problem. We're entrepreneurs. I tell people the story about how I took on a job, a gate job that I knew very little about. And it was a friend of mine and he wanted a solar keypad. And I went back to this job at least 25 times.
And because I charged enough money that I thought I was going to make a lot of money. I mean, I overpriced it. I said, if I'm going to take this job, I'm going to charge a high price. I still lost money. And there's so many people that say, hey, my customers are asking for more.
I went out to a commercial shop in Chicago and they're like, one of the commercial guys said, I just got this new software to learn about being a locksmith. And I said, so you guys do docs, levelers, now you're locksmith, now you're doing this, now you're doing that. And you're learning as you go. What's the profit margin of the locksmith aspect of the business? No answer. They have no idea. I said, how much are you guys making on docs and levelers?
Not really sure. How much infrastructure is your overhead for those businesses? We don't really know. I think sometimes what I've always told people, David, is when you really murder something and you put all your eggs in one basket, and I'm talking all of them into not just a one-gallon bucket, not a five-gallon bucket, but a massive own market share. When you own so much market share that you start getting literally there's always this threshold of,
that it's impossible to grow without spending a fortune so when you've hit that market size then you can look at taking on another one because you've you've grown as far as you possibly can but so many people they're like i'm gonna franchise i'm like man you must david you're gonna franchise you must be doing like 10 million dollars of ebony in your market no no we're doing 300 000.
well you must have systems galore you must have worked out things with your manufacturer your distribution centers you got a whole recruiting model you got a national website that ranks you've got literally recruiting training how you're going to set up your trucks how the ipads your crm set up national call center no no but we got something pretty good so why do you want to franchise because people like our model they like your 300 000 model and now you're going to franchise like they don't take market share they don't have these they just say
i don't want to do the work i want to have somebody else take my problems and buy my franchises it's what i hear so i know we're getting a little off topic but i just i want to warn people i think your analogy was great is focus focus focus wear blinders racehorses wear blinders i like it a lot of these people man they hear an idea and they're like man i think i'm going to start a restaurant one of my buddies has a bar restaurant he's killing it wait you do home service
So you're kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul. And all of a sudden, now you got two problems. And then, hey, listen, my buddy's making a lot of real estate. So I just bought a second house that I'm going to flip. How much of your focus is going to be on that flip versus your core business? And then everybody's getting a side hustle. I keep hearing this side hustle bullshit. And I'm like, why wouldn't you put all your eggs in one basket? Why don't you focus on this one thing that you know, that book, The One Thing by Gary Keller.
I love it. I love it. So guys, if you're up for going hardcore, then yeah, don't even take on other business and just be the best with this target market. And if someone's not in that target market, refer them to someone else. But at minimum, what I'm suggesting is that you work out your primary target market and then devote all of your marketing materials to that market, your scripts for your customer support.
are all designed to speak to that market. Your materials, your website, your design, everything is designed for that target market. And if you want to go hardcore like Tommy suggests, I love it. I think it's noble and you'll probably do well.
but a minimum focus on one. And if other people come to you and say, hey, would you take our business? Okay, maybe you take the business, maybe you don't. I've seen people do that. And they're like, okay, if someone comes to me, I'll do it, but I'm not chasing them. They come to me. So that's target market. Let's jump to number two, Tommy. The next one. First one is target market. You want one target market. The second one is one problem.
Now, people who are looking for an HVAC, they might have a whole number of problems. One is they want to heat the house. What are some problems they'd have with an HVAC? Maybe there's some leakage.
Somewhere. Tell me. Yeah, well, I'll give you a dozen problems. It gets warmer in that room than the next room, which means the thermostat and the blower is not working correctly. It could be I want to go smart home, right? So I want a thermostat that I can control that's a little more efficient, that when I'm not home, it's not working as hard because there's no reason to heat the house or cool the house as much.
It could be that, you know, there's more efficient units that run off of different type of gas, which is obviously a lot of people are in efficiency and going green right now. But typically what happens is just 99% of the time is I don't want my HVAC unit to go out and it's not blowing cold. And is this the best thing to keep kicking this down the road?
Or is it the best time to replace it? And that's where everybody that I know in the HVAC industry, their goal is to sell a new unit every 10 years. Okay. So let's pick one problem for this exercise. Let's say the electricity bills are too much. It's inefficient. It's become inefficient. And we're going to help you save money with your HVAC. We'll make it more efficient, help you save a bunch on your energy costs. That's what we do.
Now, as you can see, these people, they may have a number of different problems, but get known for one so that whenever someone has that problem, they hear a friend talking about that problem, they think of your business. And also get really good at solving that one thing. If you're solving 10 problems, you might become okay at solving all of them. But if you put all your focus into having them be more energy efficient, you'll learn stuff the other people don't know.
Because all your focus is on that. That's what you know. There's a guy, Max Hitchens, was president of the World Speakers Federation. And he said to me once, David, if you become an expert in your niche, people will drag you out of that niche to help them with other things. Or they'll try. If it's Tommy, he'll be saying no.
I'm focused, but people will drag you out to work on other things. He became known for hospitality, the hospitality industry, an expert in that. And he started speaking on that. People would grab him to come and speak on anything because he became number one in the hospitality industry. All right. So that's one problem. Number three, one solution.
So let's say their problem is energy efficiency and their bills are too high. You might have four or five different ways that you can solve that. You might do a new installation. You might be able to repair the current one. There might be three other ways you can do it, but we want one solution and that could be one product or one service. Now people say, but I've got other services and products that'll make money too.
If you're not going to go hardcore, it's totally fine to have other products and services, but what's your flagship one? What's the one that you want to sell to every single customer ideally? That's where all your attention goes. If you say to a customer, choose from these five things,
Some of them will go, it's too hard. So have one product that you get really good at. I made a mistake, Tommy, when I started coaching coaches back in 2002. I created this product called the Coach Start Manual and it was doing really well. And because I was a creative guy, I went and created 12 other products. Now, some of them were crap.
Some of them were pretty good, but I got so diluted in all my marketing efforts. And if I just put say 90% of my effort into selling this one product and then 10% into the upsell once they had that, sure, there are other things once they're there, but I didn't do that. I also could have put so much more effort in making it amazing. It was good. I sold maybe half a million dollars worth of this manual.
But I could have made it amazing so that people read it and just couldn't help telling their friends, this is the best thing for coaching that you can find. I didn't do that. And it would have saved me a lot in marketing if I just achieved excellence with that one solution. Yeah, well, David, I think a lot of people that are listening are probably saying to themselves, well, what about Elon Musk? What about Jeff Bezos? Well, really, the main thing you got to realize is,
When you have enough money to get all the resources and get a specialist into one category, and you really have the money to commit and get a staff and actually go hard in the paint with a new marketing source, you can expand. But typically, the people we're talking about is they're barely making ends meet at their one product and their one solution. They're barely, and if they just, they say the money's in niches, right? Really find a niche and become the expert
Because otherwise you're a jack of all trades. You're a master of none. And I mean, a lot of people that don't, they don't have any depth. Like you said, they're three feet instead of 300 feet. And if they only focused, I talked to a guy the other day that was going in hardcore at one product and it was a Mitch, a beachy product for heating. And it's an add on unit that actually is almost like a space heater in the wall, but it's efficiencies through the roof. And I love talking to him because he's like,
I am the best at this. I know everything about it. I worked out better pricing. He went hard in the paint of 20 reasons why he was going after this one thing. And I agree with you. So many people are like, people are asking for more, so I should just do it. I mean, if you got every single client asking for that, which is almost impossible, and I doubt that's true, then maybe. But I think you're absolutely right, is know this product inside and out, become the expert at it, become the known for it.
and you'll be better off. Yeah. It's so tempting. Like, oh, if I have a side thing, maybe that thing will, maybe it'll be fun and maybe that'll take off more than the other thing, or it's just more money. But I had one client who said, I've got this opportunity to buy a business and they're selling it for a million and I think it's worth more. And I said, all right, let me just get this right.
with all your free time and attention, and the fact that you've become number one in your market, and there's no more market share to get, and there's no way to improve any of your products, and you've got so much free time that you're thinking, I'd like to dive into a whole second business. And there was about three seconds of silence and he went, all right, point taken. That was the last we talked about buying that business. He didn't have the RAM in his head.
The client this week said, "I think there's a good opportunity to buy this business." I said, "Do you have the headspace to take that on with everything else you're doing?" The answer is no. It's more something that he's going to table for later. If he masters enough of these ones,
and is able to leverage as well, then yeah, okay, now we'll look at go and apply your success in this one business to a second one. I like to think like Jeff Bezos, I don't know anything about that guy, but I like to imagine that he didn't begin that way.
He didn't say, all right, let me start with seven businesses and see what happens. I'd like to know the answer to this, but my guess is there was some focus that happened before he diluted. And when we get to the seventh one, that's when we can release you to go into wider territory. So next one, number four, the fourth one, one lead magnet.
Don't have a bunch of different things on your website that people can try out from you or get for free. You can experiment maybe with two or three, but then pick one. Every single person that hears about you, they get your free report on how to save money on your HVAC. The top three things you must do to save yourself
$500 on your electricity bill with your HVAC. There's your download. Or it could be the top five mistakes HVAC owners make that they regret. Something like that. One lead magnet. You know, Tommy, it's still amazing to me the number of websites I go to, and I can't tell above the fold of the website how I can give them my email address in exchange for something of value.
It's just fascinating. There's a guy named Marcus Sheridan who wrote They Ask, You Answer, and he also wrote The Visual Sale. And you're right. And Joe Polish talks a lot about how he used to have a free phone call to hear. It was a 10-minute free recording in the 90s about the 10 things you need to know before you get your carpet clean. And he made a fortune doing it.
He literally licensed this product of how to do it in the 90s. That's before you could send. That's before we had stuff like HubSpot and Zapier. And I think you're absolutely right is giving that. And Marcus Sheridan has a company called River Pools. He's booked out two years because he's educating people about pool systems. Do I want granite? Do I want pebble tech? Do I want... And through education, he became the expert. But here's the coolest thing about that download. It's usually called a buyer's guide is...
If you connect it through something like HubSpot, you could actually see where they went and visited, how much time they spent, did they play all the videos, where the hotspots were. So if they went to financing, right? So if you got an HVAC download and they spent 10 minutes or 20 minutes learning about getting financed, don't you think you should send a technician out there that knows a lot about getting them through the finance process who's the best at it?
i just i think it's the ultimate advantage and if people haven't read that book it's taught me a lot and i've had that book out to 100 people marcus was on the podcast years ago but i think you're absolutely right is having a free download of information to do before you possibly hire somebody or like you said you can figure out your niche but one lead magnet is amazing
Yeah, and if you want an example of email capture, my website is focus.ceo, and you'll see it's designed so that above the fold, before you do any scrolling, you can see an offer to give you some information on how to double your revenue, double your focus, something like that.
Because when people come to your website, not all of them are ready to buy. Most of them are not. Most of them are not going to buy right now. So we want to get their email address so that we can build a relationship with them over time, send them useful things, build trust so that when they are ready to buy or they need to refer you to someone, boom.
There's the email and they click and they do it. So that's one lead magnet. And what you mentioned about Joe Polish and that free call, I think can take us into the next level, level five, which is one conversion tool. So the lead magnet, sometimes that'll convert someone to a sale, but often it's just a step in the right direction. What's your conversion tool? Is it a sales call? Is it a home visit? Is it a webinar?
I know a lot of people selling information or coaching will do a workshop. And there might be a funnel. It might start, we've got the lead magnet, and then we've got a Zoom, and then it might be an inexpensive workshop so I can really go deep with you. And then that converts people to the year-long course. Yeah, when we think about the free steak dinner for a timeshare,
Like that's the best example I can think of. They're sending everybody to a hotel. You got to listen to our hours, the speech, but it's beautiful steak dinner, right? That's what they use as their conversion tool. Yeah. Yeah. And you might have two or three or four. And again, it's okay to test for a few weeks and see which one does best. I like the book traction.
Because I was always wondering, we want to focus, but how do you know what to focus on? Well, the middle ground is you pick two or three, the most promising, test them out, take the one that does better and then go deep with that. So that's your conversion tool. And then number six, one of my favorites, the sixth one is one traffic source. How many traffic sources do you have?
Or are you working in your business? And I understand the temptation. I'll do some SEO and I'll do AdWords or Facebook paid marketing and affiliate marketing. And I'll try a referral strategy and I'll build alliances. Like totally get it. That's okay for a limited amount of testing. But then you want to pick one. If it's going to be paid advertising, get so good at that.
If it's going to be SEO, dominate the market. When I first started coaching, it was easier to rank. And I was ranked number one, four and seven out of 10. They don't really allow duplicate listings anymore, but people complaining because I was dominating the market there. And I got all of my business from free search engine traffic.
It's harder today to do that, but if you're going to do it, do it better than everyone else. Also, some of these things really take time. As you would know, Tommy, you can't do SEO for two weeks. You probably want to commit to SEO for three years so that you can start to do really well. This is another example of digging 300 feet deep instead of just three feet deep. David, I just hired somebody full-time for email and SMS marketing. And
I do believe if you've got a specialist who's the very, very best in one thing and they can dig deep and you can build your team. And I'm garage door installation, repair and maintenance. And instead of going into HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, solar, on and on and on pest control, landscaping, I just decided to take this model and duplicate it. Right now we're in 34 markets, 19 states. But I found specialists at pay-per-click.
I found specialists at GMB Optimization. I found specialists to do LSA. I found specialized, you know, every single category. There's a lot of people, they spray and pray, and they don't really have attribution. They don't really know where the leads are coming from. I've got 200 pages just on my lead source conversion rate traffic. And I think when you reach a certain size, we're going to do 200 million this year.
Obviously, I don't think that once your brand becomes large enough that there necessarily has to be one channel. But I think for most businesses that are doing under a million dollars, the prime person listening to this is you should be focused because you're throwing money at radio, TV, you're doing some billboards, you're doing some stuff on Instagram and Facebook, which is meta, which is a different, completely different buyer cycle. And then you're not...
You've never focused on one thing, so you don't really know what's working. And I think this really applies to that. Yeah. Well, you bring us to a good topic, and this is perfect to go into level seven, the seventh one, because when is it okay to expand? When is it okay to go for a second product or a second traffic source or something like that? Well, the seventh one, and most people, I don't think anyone's ever guessed it,
It's not really intuitive. But the seventh one is one year. Give yourself one year to focus on this target market, this one problem, this one solution, product or service, one lead magnet, one conversion tool, one traffic source. Give yourself a year or $1 million in revenue.
You might say, you know, I work now, some people get to a million pretty quickly. So that may not count. But if you, I imagine you, Tommy, you've got so many systems dialed in and you've got the cash flow to support getting an expert in pay-per-click, getting an expert in SMS marketing. You can do that.
Most people that I talk to, not at that point. They've got the temptation to expand, expand, and I'm suggesting resist it as a discipline for one year or $1 million. And then when that's done, that's not permission to go into five traffic sources or five products.
I would still urge you to say, well, what am I going to focus on now? And it might be, I'm going to bring in a second product, or it might be, I'm going to bring in a complimentary target market.
Or it might be, I'll bring in a traffic source. But don't go crazy on all of them all at the same time because then you're going to be back to that same problem of not knowing exactly what's working, not doing everything well. So that's the rant on the seven ones. And thank you to Clay Collins for getting us started in that direction. It's a beautiful way to focus your mind. And so if you haven't been doing this already,
I recommend going back through that list and I'll say them now so you can write them down if you want. Go back through that list and write down how many you have at each level. How many target markets? Just jot down a number. How many problems do you solve? How many solutions do you have, i.e. products or services? How many lead magnets? How many conversion tools? How many traffic sources are you putting time and attention into?
And that'll give you a good sense of how focused your business is right now. And then you can decide if you want to go and trim a bit. I don't imagine you're going to drop products or drop services or even drop target markets. You can if you want. If you're going to go Tommy Hardcore Mellow on us, I like that. But you can decide where you're going to put your attention. Say we're no longer going to put attention on these things. We're going to get really good at these ones.
Yeah, I think this is a good exercise. Target market, one problem, one solution, one lead magnet, one conversion tool, one traffic source, and then one year. And a lot of people, I know we see success everywhere. And I just be very careful on where you're seeing success. And I just want to give this caveat because...
Richard Branson has enough money to hire COOs of the best companies in the world. He's got 400 companies. And he's got enough money, but he went hard in the paint for two decades to build his wealth to be able to do this. And they became an incubator of businesses. He's done a fantastic job. Donald Trump. We always look at these really wealthy people that have figured out systems, standard operating procedures, checklists, and methodology, and manuals.
And unless you have discipline, don't compare yourself to those people. And also don't compare yourself to everybody you see on social media with the private jets because they're renting a private jet. They're not living in that house in Malibu. And I've looked behind the scenes at their financials and quite frankly, they're broke. So I always say follow people, success leaves clues. But a lot of times you look at the clues on social media and it paints a picture, but they're really miserable behind the scenes.
Elon Musk just did an interview saying he's super lonely. He goes to bed at home at night, usually alone, even though he doesn't have to. And what I tell people, David, is build a business that you can sell. Because a lot of people, I had everybody raise their hand, a thousand people. And I said, who wants to sell in the next five to 10 years? 40% of the hands went up. So what do you want to leave your family with? Do you want to leave them with an opportunity to...
have true wealth and have options in life because money's a tool? Or do you want to leave your family with a broken business? Because tomorrow's not promised. And what I would tell people is you don't need $100 million. And I say, start with the end in mind. How much would it take to pay off your house, leave your kids with great money and have financial freedom where the money's working for you and you've got enough to live comfortable life. And that's what your first business should be to get to that size and take some chips off the table.
And a lot of people hate that. They're like, you proved that you could get to... I took two decades to be where I'm at. I started in my early 20s, I'm 40. So I'd be very careful because I had days that I did not want to be in the business. I had days that I felt like giving up. I had sacrifices I made. And it went with a lot of Saturdays and Sundays, a lot of weekends, nights, and holidays. And it's easy to envy two decades of hard work. But what I would say is,
Pick a goal, really work with a financial planner on where you need to be. And I can get you to your number very, very quickly. Just with the methodology, average ticket, conversion rate, booking rate, cost per acquisition, we can hit that number very quickly. Private equity is swarming into home services. And I just would say your business doesn't define who you are. You define who you are. And people are like, if I sell my business, I'm done. Like, that's my identity.
And I feel bad for those people because now they got five, 10 million in the bank. Opportunities will find them. They just signed a non-compete in that area. They could go to another market, build the same thing they had or go into other things. But now they have money to work with.
And now they can go to Disney World and cut every line first class. Now they can take their dad on that fishing trip they promised him a decade ago. Now they could buy their wife the ring she deserves 15 years into the marriage. Now you can actually put your kids in private school. And I think when we try to live this life as we're building a business, you end up stealing from the business. And I don't know what your thoughts on this, but it's really hard because people are like, I want to be 100 million. And I'm like, but how many people are you going to help? How many employees are you going to give money to?
What is the goal of that? Is it just because you think you could, so you should? Does that resonate with you at all? I like how you're painting the bigger picture and reminding us of why we do it, because it is largely a means to an end. Part of the joy is the joy of the game. You probably shouldn't be in it if you don't enjoy business and creating and building. But
why are we doing it? And at the end of the day, we want financial freedom. We want our families to be taken care of. And also the pride of having created something extraordinary that really serves people. So I like that reminder. I sometimes get on these interviews and I start getting into the nuts and bolts and I can forget
that, you know, the reason I do that is because that's where people want to start. But where I get really interested is when we get into the personal of like, okay, what are you going to do with that time off? And then how are you going to connect deeper with your family? And then are you taking care of yourself as well? Like you have this business so that you can live a great life normally.
So yeah, I like that. I'll steal this from Taki Moore. He says, I'm happy to give away information for free. I charge for implementation. And I'll make the same offer I made last time on this podcast. And it was an experiment back then. And it went really well. I had a lot of people reach out. And I'm still working with a number of people from your show, Tommy, who love you, by the way. They'll just idolize you, some of them.
So normally I charge a flat fee and I've been doing this for 20 years. I charge $2,000 a month to work with me and we go and implement this. But I realized a lot of people, it depends where your business is at. If you're not pulling in over a quarter of a million a year, it doesn't make sense to pay a coach two grand. I wouldn't. So what I offered on the last call, and I'll do it here too, is this sliding scale of
where instead of a flat $2,000, I will charge between $300 and $2,000 a month, depending on where your business is at.
So if you're interested, here's how to apply for that. And I will create five spots for this. So the first five people I agree to work with can have this sliding scale. And the way it works is go to focus.ceo, not the .com. I got the CEO domain, focus.ceo. Go to the bottom and click apply for coaching. It doesn't commit you to anything and it doesn't commit me to anything. What it will do is we'll have a 15 minute call and see if I can help you and how.
And if we both agree we want to work together, we'll pick a number between 300 and 2,000 that feels right to both of us. And if we find that number, we'll get started. Also know that
There's a five to 10 minute form that will ask you some very serious probing questions about your life and your business, where you want to be and what's holding you back. So it's not just like, oh yeah, I'll get on David's calendar in like 10 seconds. No, it'll take you at least five or 10 minutes of reflection to earn that call. And then I'll have some really good information to dive deep with you.
And mention two things on the form so that I know where you came from and I know to honor this offer. Mention Tommy Mello and Sliding Scale. Otherwise, I'll be assuming that it's going to be a fixed fee. That's my offer. Awesome, David. It's always refreshing to get you on the podcast. You talk a lot about focus and you definitely...
I think entrepreneurs need that more than anything. We have this ADHD and it's very, very hard to wear blinders. And if we just got more focus and discipline in our lives,
I promise everybody listening would be 10 times happier. We'd be better fathers, better mothers, better sons and daughters, and we would be better off because very few people have this ability and they need help. So you're focused on getting to your next meeting and I really appreciate that. So David, we'll connect later. Thank you for doing this podcast. It's always great to speak with you.
Pleasure, Tommy. And I appreciated everything you added. Took it to another level. I'll talk to you later. All right, buddy. See ya. 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.
