Transforming Data into More Calls and Better Conversions
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When I got into business, I didn't get into the business thinking about selling it. I was just trying to make a decent living. But then as I got smarter in business, I thought, okay, maybe I can build something really meaningful here that I could sell someday or bring my kids into if they wanted to. None of them want to be in my business. That's okay. But then it was like, hey, I had a number in mind. I thought, man, if I can get this company to $20 million, I'm going to feel really successful. And we hit that and passed it. And by the way, that was an empty number for me. It was just a goal. But I

I thought, okay, I'm not doing this again. Because I typically want to say, if I say I want to be a $100 million company, Tommy, it's not because I want to be a hundred, it's not the $100 million you should focus on. It's to what I've built to get to the a hundred million and the impact that we're having at a hundred million dollar company. Because what you know, and everybody at my company knows is giving back is one of my like core, like one of our core values.

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 kind of cool because I was just with Chris all weekend in Vegas, so we got a lot to chat about. Not about Vegas. Not about Vegas. We'll leave that one alone. But that was super fun, man. I had a blast. Shit's just popping, man. Yeah. You got a lot of stuff on your plate. You know, right now marketing's in a really tough spot.

Everyone's complaining about marketing. It's what we've been talking about the last two years. It's kind of COVID's come down. But you are the co-founder and CMO at Rhino Strategic Solutions. You know a lot about business and you run a really big podcast to the point. So let's just catch everybody up with what's going on with you. Yeah, man. So it's cool to come on right after we were just together in Vegas. Yeah.

Cause I got to try and separate. What can I talk about? What can I talk about? I'm just kidding. No, we had a great time. Cause we talked a lot about a lot about business, which we get to do, which is anytime we're together. You know what? Real quick on that. I always tell people that know me. I don't talk always about business. In fact, Bree kills me. If I talk about business, just rarely when I get with somebody that actually understands what I'm going through and I can actually talk about stuff that makes sense is that's what I told you. I'm like, dude, I want to share. And yeah,

Guys like you and Gaynor must always think, man, Tommy talks a lot about business, but I don't. Unless I'm around like one of you guys. Yeah. Anna's like, no, we're not talking about business, Tommy. Anna's reprimanded me a million times. Anna's my wife. Yeah. So just a quick update. I know last time I was on, I was, I think it was...

towards the end of last year, we were kind of finalizing integration from the sale of the business, you know, so I still rolled 30%. So I'm still in it, as you know, and like have a whole other new phase I got to go through here. But yeah, I mean, co founder of Rhino still, along with Anna, the CMO, I have taken over the marketing role. And Rhino is just now one of four companies that I'm the over the all the marketing for. So

But I'm still leading. I'm in the Rhino office every single day. I still have a leadership role in Rhino. So it's kind of weird not having the title, but I'm still doing the same things. Because really anything that's like franchise relationships, OEM relationships, private equity relationships, I take lead on all those things because I'm the one with the majority of the relationships. So that is still my life today. But like I told you, I have this whole next phase of growth I got to go through. But like we were talking about is...

This is like a new era of digital marketing that we're in. Like, it's not the same. It is significantly harder. What we were talking about was to be an elite digital marketing company today, you cannot just do lead generation. Like those days are gone. There's so much more to being an elite partner.

in digital marketing today. And mainly because there's so many tools that you can use to track everything that make it easy for the actual customer to see exactly what you're doing. Because transparency, one of the biggest core values of mine is, and has been since the beginning, is just be honest. Like if you had a shitty month, it's crystal clear you had a bad month.

If you have a, you know, if you had a good month, it's crystal clear that you had a good month. Like there's no questioning what the end result is. And if you don't, if you have that kind of relationship with your customers, then you maintain trust. If you lose the trust, that's, you know, when it goes downhill. Yeah, 100%. I feel like it was so easy to point the finger at marketing. We talk about this a lot. Still is easy to point the finger at marketing. But you look at ticket averages and booking rate.

And you go, because you've got all this data. You've got data about a lot of companies. 17 years. You know that if someone is not a sales organization and they're a call center organization, they're not going to be able to win. I've heard this phrase probably since 2010. And this guy had this on his wall. He who could pay more per lead will win. And why could they pay more per lead? Because they're booking more phone calls. They're getting more reviews.

They're getting that top of mind awareness. Yeah. Average ticket and conversion rate. Two other big things.

And yes, your cost per lead. But dude, I'd rather pay more for a lead that's a home run lead. But we know how to close those. And I still think I got a lot of work to do. And that's the difference. Because there's certain leads that will turn in. I've got a guy sitting in that other room right now. If I send him to a call versus one of my other guys, the other guy might get five grand. That guy will get 10 grand and a smile. And he'll have a raving fan. And...

you know, now I got 425 and I'm like, okay, so how do we train, train, train, train? I see these little companies, man, Brent Buckley's are out there and the dude is like a unicorn. Yeah. Right. They didn't need much. They needed a few unicorns to get a $70 million valuation. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, well, what you're kind of hitting on is the point of this is, you know, lead generate like for all the listeners,

Let me explain to you what I believe this new era of digital marketing is to kind of walk you through the process. You cool with that? Yeah. Okay. So think of an end-to-end solution, right? So I've been generating leads for home services businesses only for the last now 17 years. Only. That's it. It's been my job is generating business for contractors, both home services, home improvements.

But we've also listened to every single phone call since the beginning. So that way, I always knew for any customer of every call that came in, not all of those that came from what we did. Some of them are repeat and referral business. That's a big chunk of what the business is. As long as you're running a good business, you have a lot of repeat business.

So I just wanted to know, I wanted the customers to know, did we do a good job? Yes or no? Because it allows me to hold my team accountable too, right? There's KPIs in there to find out, are we doing a good job or not? Whether it's PPC, SEO, social media, OTT, whatever it is. But I want to be able to see for every lead that came in, how many came from what lead source and at what cost per lead? One metric.

Okay. Second piece is, is that how did your team perform on it? Because you have accountability as well as the customer, right? Like you can't just blame us. I mean, you fired customers because you had to. I have to because I, you know, like if I can only work with so many people in one market, I certainly want to work with those who can keep going and who are fixing the problems because, because we're listening to every phone call, we're doing CSR assessments every month anyhow, because I also want to know, is it a us problem? Is it a you problem? Is it a we problem? Is there no problem?

You can solve that by a couple of things. One, are we doing our job bringing in good quality leads or legit bookable leads?

And how are you performing on them? This is the other piece of it. So most agencies will do lead generation. They give you some sort of call report. It's not a call. It's not CSR assessments, you know, and coaching. We see a booking problem. We have internal coaches. You know, some people have them, but we have them and we can put them in house to go fix your code, you know, fix your CSRs. I want you to book the leads too. It makes me a better partner if you're booking leads because you start to grow and make more, you spend more money. Right.

It's perfect. The last piece of this was, you know, I brought in Aura this year to Rhino X to talk about our new, like more integrated relationship with ServiceTitan. And the point of that was whether you're using ServiceTitan, you're using Housecall Pro, you're using whatever CRM that you're using. If I could attach every dollar that was sold

to every lead source, then we should have the perfect picture of exactly what to spend. We should know what our return is. If I got to spend one, every dollar I spend, I'm getting eight in return. We keep spending more dollars. But if I take all that work off of the plate of the customer, the contractor, and just automate it, do it for them, it should give them a clear picture on what's working and what's not. And that's broken down by, you know, if it's garage door service, if it's install, if it's AC installation, AC service, if it's

drain cleaning leads, whatever. If you break it down by service and by lead source, like, shouldn't you have a crystal clear picture and what the formula is to scale the business? I'll just say this. I'm glad I'm not you because I have a hard enough time. A1s in 40 markets.

I have a hard enough time with capacity planning, recruiting technicians. I'm short installer, so I got to fly my top installer to this market. And then pulling that data out of service time, which is, I believe, the best CRM, but it's still a bitch. Yeah, it is. To pull it all out. Plus, you've got all the different marketing types. Plus, you've got now...

All these tracking and different things. And it's not just phone numbers. There's so much to it. Lead attribution issues. And the price books are all set up differently. Yeah. Well, the good news about on my end is thankfully with the API integrations, it's just pulling the end result of the sale to and attaching it to the lead by customer name. Right. Customer name address. The piece that's been missing is

I wanted to be able to attach pending revenue, like proposed revenue that didn't close should also be something that you're giving credit to your marketing company for. So that's revenue. That's sales versus revenue. That's sales. And if you're on accrual accounting, that's going to come in. Sometimes if it's six weeks for a door to get ordered, that should come in. If they don't cancel, they got our three day rights are canceled, but we let people still cancel a lot of the time because

I don't want that one-star review if we screwed up. We misordered something, something went wrong. Sure. But is that a marketing? It's nothing to do with you. That's right. Or is it now with this new era of digital marketing? Like, and yes, I can't, I'm not responsible for making your sales for you, but I should be responsible for helping. You're a little bit more sophisticated. There's some that aren't sophisticated or have as many people to go and pull that data. I know that. That's why we've been doing it for a lot of the contractors is marketing.

If I could help give them that info, hey, of all this, the book stuff that came in, yes, you only closed X, but you still have Y that's impending proposals. If you attach that in, like, what would we look like as a marketing company for you? Will we look better to you? Because...

That's how you maintain this trust with everyone is I'll bring in the lead. I'll track the lead. I'll listen to your CSRs and then I'll track it all the way through your CRM to see like how are you actually performing on it too. It's hard, man, because like I kind of am envious of like a food chain that you can just, they have four walls and everything that goes on are within those four walls. Like we can get an accident. We can get a speeding ticket. We can get in a traffic jam. I mean, there's a lot more to it.

And then plus recognizing the correct avatar in that market. It's not always the same. I think about Dale still a lot. And you know, Dale really well. Dale told me the day that they signed up with the right logo and they got the right story brand behind it. Dude, it was like lay down customers. He's like, dude, I couldn't believe it. We bring our little Sadie dog in a flashlight with us. And all of a sudden, like the leads love the story, but it was like, they were more bought into the story brand than they were. It was emotional connection to it. It was, it was like, yeah, we're, we're using you guys.

And that's a piece that most people don't want to talk about as well. They're like, dude, I'm not getting leads. And you're like, well, look at the leads you are getting. You're not doing anything with them. And it's hard. And now I told you this in Vegas. I think I look at marketing is 50% of how do I get the right people on the bus? How do I get the right technicians that want to win, that aspire to be number one, that are always improving, that are focused. They want to win so bad. They're competitive. Everything I do is in relation to sports.

And if you look at the back of a baseball card, a hockey card, a football card, it tells you all their KPIs and they keep track of them. I golf with really good golfers sometimes very rarely. Unless you're with me. You're good. We have fun, but they count. I hit this many greens, this many fairways, this many putts per green. They know those numbers. And then they say like their golf coach would say, well, how do I get better? Well, if you just shave 10 strokes off your putting, we got to get you better at putting and you literally will save 10 strokes.

but they gotta know what to look at. And I don't know how you do it because personally, I mean, I'd probably, if I were you, I'd be like, dude, how do I make, I think what ServiceTag went into this with is they said, how do we get the biggest, biggest, biggest companies that are gonna grow the fastest and just make sure we help them.

And then all of a sudden, a waterfall down to everyone else. Listen, if you want to scale your business to any size and you're in that home services, home improvement space, like that is the platform that I believe you should be on or some if you're smaller, you got to be on something. But the best thing that I love about just this phase of marketing that we're in in general and the conversations that you and I get to have are it's forced me to think about

things as I've grown this business over the years from a much larger perspective. Like if I can serve a private equity group who has multiple brands or a company that has multiple locations, and I could offer that same service to somebody if they're 5 million, $3 million, and it's all automated for them. Well, that's a pretty good partner, you know, because if I can bring in the lead and track it and do all the hard work for them, which I've had to do forever, and I'm tracking everything for them, they just have to perform. You know what FP&A means?

financial planning and analysis. We hired this gal, Leanne, from American Express under Adrian, my CFO.

And she's FP&A. That's all she does is analyze numbers. And then we realized the data was so useful that we had another one. Now we have three full-time people. You know what the latest one was that was on my desk last week, right before we left? Start times in every market after their first job. It's the only job you can get to on time, right? So your start time, I'm 56% of the time I'm late to my first job as a company.

Yeah, that's a big number. Well, it's pretty significant. Now you can get buried in data, but that's a pretty good one because that's the only job I can guarantee I'll be on time with. And there's so much to be thinking about. And I think the really good companies, you give them the info and they're like, okay, great. Listen, we know companies out there that if they lost one person on their team, they'd be scrambling. I don't care what data you gave them. How many people do you think you're handing over this data?

And you're going here, here's your business in a box, in a couple of pages. That they actually are looking at it going, you're dealing with sophisticated companies. But a lot of them are probably still like, I don't even have time to look at them. Yeah, man, they're going through the motions. Yeah, and that's still a big problem. Like even though we have some good sophisticated companies, we also have a lot of small companies too. You know, like anybody in that three to 10 million range, we have a lot.

of customers in that space. And so they're still wearing probably multiple hats if you're on the lower end of that, figuring things out. So yeah, man, a lot of people just go through the motions and we tell them you gotta make the monthly meetings. The biggest difference now is where we've really elevated our game is reporting come Pantheon, which we'll have maybe making a massive announcement of Pantheon, which I'm really excited about is, when I'm working with PrivateEcho, I need information now.

Like now I need to know like a perfect conversation was talking with Frank DiMarco and he's like, I don't care. I'll make a business. You bring me the leads. Let me worry about the cost. I'll make a business decision. It's a capacity game for them, right? That's what I'm just trying to fill the board, fill the board, fill the board, fill the board. Well, if I have access to your three day board and I can fill the board, as long as there's opportunity there. Yeah. So I can go fill the board. I wanted to be able to deliver real time results.

So that's where this thing is headed. Not only can I generate the lead, I can track it all the way through and everything's real time. Whether you've even went and run the job yet, I can still capture all the front end data, cost per lead, how many leads, booking rate, right then real time, boom. And you can log in. You can log in every day, look to see how your different locations were performing. So to anybody who's listening, this sounds overly complicated. It is overly complicated. You have to build a lot of these things out, but that's

The point is we've done it for you. Being part of an elite digital marketing company is creating all this stuff and doing it for the customer. So now they can log into one pretty little reporting metric dashboard, whatever you want to call it, and see exactly how things are performing for me. We do that, we're having real conversations because let's face it, like when it comes to digital marketing, you know, we know a lot of the different companies. I've always played nice in the sandbox with any of the competitors because no decisions that they make are going to impact me anyway. Like I'm still running my own race. But...

Regardless of who you choose, there's a lot of smart digital marketing companies that are out there. And there's even more home services, I use air quotes, you know, specific companies now. We're like the OG in that space. Us and Blue Corona. Two of the oldest companies who've been doing, working with the trades.

But find the one that you trust, the numbers, right? Like you can legit trust the numbers and please own your website, please. And when I say own it, I don't just mean the content and the pictures in it. Own the site. Whereas if you want to take your ball and go home, you could take that website,

And you'll have to rebuild it and put your content back on it, which, by the way, is still a big misunderstanding with two major players in this space. I think they have great leaders at these businesses. I know them. I think they have some great services. I still completely disagree with the customer not owning their website. Well, it's tough. As far as marketing agencies, not owning the website, not owning the GMB placement, not owning...

even the PBC campaigns in certain aspects, because like you work for years and I kind of feel trapped in those situations. I'm not saying if you got proprietary algorithms that you invested millions of dollars in as an agency, I know you just don't want to give that stuff to the competitor, right? If they choose to leave. So that makes a little bit of sense. It's just hard because there's a lot of accountability there. We got to do both of us, the business owner and the agency need to do the work.

And if you're doing the work, it's just like the agency has the keys to the city. Yeah. And but again, this is where I think it's important that transparency really matters. And that word gets thrown around a lot. What I look about it is a lead isn't just a lead. Like a lot of leads come through for A1 that aren't leads that your marketing company generated for you. They're just leads because you have a good brand. You've got good, great customer service and people come back and use you or there's been referrals, right?

So new clients. New clients is the game. Like that's the game for your digital marketing company. If, yeah, you're in business for 17 years, in our case, 17 years, and we have all these ads that we know run and convert into an install, why would I want to share that with my competition? But you still have to maintain trust, right? Because people will lose trust if they think that your numbers are wrong or they think that you're charging a different management fee than you are. If you just make it clear, this is my management fee I charge every month.

And do you have to run a percentage in perpetuity for no matter what your spend is? No, because at some point in time, it doesn't take any extra work. Like you have to cap your management fee at some point. Otherwise, you're just taking advantage of the client.

I believe. And plus it impacts your cost per anyway. So why the hell would you want to run the number clear up? If somebody's been, you know, have like have a customer spends a half a million dollars a month with us. Like I couldn't charge them a 20% management. If you want a half a million dollars, that doesn't make sense. I wasn't doing that much extra work, you know, that would make up. I don't even know where, where we would find that. So you gotta be fair. That's how you make it long time in this business is that you have to, you gotta be fair. You know, I, you just kind of stepped into this other world and,

And I don't know how often you've done this. I never really asked you, but you're doing some roofing stuff. Yeah.

And so now you're actually seeing a whole new side of things, even though you've been involved in operations for a long time. What's the difference now just being straight marketing? And now you're actually on the fulfillment side. You're dealing with vendors that buying actual like shingles. Yeah, that part's been different because I've invested in plenty of other home services companies. I've had like ownership here and there. I'm not doing anything right. I'll give marketing advice. Maybe we're running marketing for some of them.

Some have sold, but the roofing one. Yeah. Like I am the marketing guy for it. And I'm the one like, so thankfully I've got a great partner in Chad Peterman. So he's able to help on the operational side and we're in a market where he's at. So that's helpful. But the key thing was, this is going to be no shocker to you. Like the only way this was going to work when we, when we launched this new roofing company was you had to have a good GM. You had to have the right guy running it.

And thankfully, we were able to leverage our friend Chad's business because they have a massive brand to get some good talent. And we got a good ops guy. We had a good GM. And then we found the right salesperson to make it work. But this person knew how to work with the suppliers. This person knew how to work in the roofing CRM. I didn't know those things. The only thing that made me comfortable was I knew what I could generate for customers.

business for the company as long as this has always been the fear I've had because I've had lots of opportunities to go in business in an HVAC company. The thing that always gave me heartburn was it's the operational side. Yeah. Because my side becomes, it feels like the easier part. It's how are we going to execute on that? Well, there's so many variables I don't know, like the suppliers. What are we spending? What's wages? Like,

Are we making sure that we're OSHA compliant? Like the guys are tied off on the roofs. Like some of it I'm learning while we're in it. It's been a little bit different because, you know, I think it's easier to start a roofing business. There's not much, there's not a whole lot of upfront expense. I say that even though we've dropped...

a million bucks in this thing already. It's just different, man, looking at it from that side of the coin versus the marketing side. I've learned like, yep, my side is the easier part. Yeah, no, that's interesting. That's interesting because I'll tell you this, there's, I'd say more people

would say, give me the leads. You're saying the leads are easier because you've done that your whole life. Well, that's my background, right? So if I was, you know, that's what, but this is why it worked because, you know, Chad certainly has that with his hundred and whatever million dollar, you know, company. I trust him, right? And if I could trust somebody, it's him, but he's not in it every day either. Like we're just, you know, in weekly calls. That's what's nice about you took some chips off the table.

And now you can hire a top down instead of having to hire bottom up. And that's such a big difference. If you look at Richard Branson, what he does is he goes and hires a really, he builds his org chart, hires the right people, gets the right people on the bus, and then they build their team.

And now the business just needs money to grow. I don't think I'll ever, I might do something like you with a big brand in a market that's adding on something maybe, but I don't think I'll ever not go in and buy a company ever again. Software is a little bit different because SaaS products are completely different. But I will say that an existing home service company, you look at this,

And you see, well, you're not open nights or weekends. Your booking rate is 62%. Your average ticket's not that good. And you guys are still making 15%. That's exciting. That's like, whoa, how much are you spending on marketing? I love it when they tell me 3% or less. Or they tell me they tried the Google thing before. I tried the Google thing.

But that's one of the questions I have is how much does traditional... I remember Ishmael was saying, dude, everyone's doing digital. These guys have more to spend, these PE-backed companies than most. What's the right mixture of digital and traditional? Listen, I get asked this question all the time because I don't play in the traditional space. As a marketing company, I do buy it now for Redbird Roofing. And I'm a fan of doing all of it, a variation of all of it. But I think it also depends on like, what do you... Are you looking for direct leads now? Or can you brand like...

we could at Redbird, we could afford to brand first. Right. So we spent, you know, we spent a lot of money. I would say we probably spent 6%. Let's look at 10% marketing, all in marketing budget. I probably spent 6% on traditional and the other four on digital. And I owned the digital company that does it because I was trying to brand build as quickly as I could. And that's hard. So we kind of did the five mile famous play hammer, these three locations, OTT ads, radio ads, TV ads,

kind of followed the Peterman Brothers playbook a little bit. The Olympics helped out big time for us because we were able to tag on the Olympics and that was good for us. But I don't know that anytime someone says, well, Chris, what should we be spending on digital marketing? 7% is the number I always feel really great about because it's aggressive, but that could change if you need to go build some brands too. 3% is definitely not what you want to spend in that space. But

it's not a creative product it's a demand product so like we are going to bet we're going looking for people actively looking for a service with no business in mind roofing is always and garage doors is one of those weird ones too it could fall into home improvement or home service yes it could be and i'm strictly on the home service i think it's home service i mean i think garage door i think more home service and improvements i think roofing falls into the home improvement side of it and i i feel like there's a whole untapped market on the home improvement side where someone moves in and they say just want something nicer yeah

I feel like I just want to beautify my home. And that's a whole different relationship type of marketing with ASID, with those are the designers and the landscape architects and the people that are like, those are the clients that want the red carpet, the white glove service, the champagne toast, and they want to feel, and we're not, it's hard to do both of those segments. It's a whole different avatar.

It's almost like they'll spend an ungodly amount of money. They just want it to be perfect. It's a different type of client. Yeah, different type of client. I thought that, you know, it's been interesting with the roofing business because the thing I didn't take into consideration was the insurance. Like the insurance business was not really what we were going to focus on. We're just going to focus on the traditional service and install of residential roofs. So not really commercial play at all. Then one storm hits.

And next thing you know, you're in the insurance game. Yep. Like it or not, because people are reaching out and calling you and you're going to an estimate. So critical error we made was not having an insurance specialist in-house. We have that person now, thank God, because there's a whole claims process you got to work through.

The sales cycle is different. And a salesperson who's traditionally going out and selling something does not want to get caught up in the minutiae of the insurance work. Like they're not trying to go and do paperwork in the back. They just want to keep going and selling. Yeah. Critical error that we had made. But rare is a person who just says, you know what? Like, I want to go ahead and get a new roof on this house because this one, I don't love as much. Like you're not really thinking about the roof. Garage door is different. It's a smile of your home. Yeah. No, it's a good point. And I do think...

I wrote down insurance claims because that's why I was showing up to win the storm and those other things of like, how do I get into the storm chasing? Yeah, I remember. Because garage doors...

Get ruined in the tornadoes as well. Hurricanes. Yeah. You know, one of the things that just wanted to touch upon here, and we don't do this enough parenting, being a good husband, I don't have kids, never been married, never been engaged working on that whole thing. But you know, you, you really try to dude, you're at like every event, you are running a big business. You invested in the roofing business. You're an investor of other businesses, but you guys somehow manage to balance everything.

the parenting and the relationship. That's why we were just in Vegas and more than one. I think that that's really, really hard for a lot of people. Look, it's something I never had to deal with. So I don't, I've been a son, but I've never been a parent. So how do you do it? Yeah. You, well, you're also on a, like your travel schedule, like mine was bad for the longest time and yours was equally as bad. And then I took a little break from it on purpose.

But, you know, you have to have non-negotiables. That's what it boils down to. And I learned this probably, I would say, after we did our rebrand from Brickyard Marketing back in the day to Rhino, I had a good mentor who was like, hey, your kids are only young when they're young. Like they're going to grow fast. Don't miss a bunch of things. It's unrealistic to say you're not going to miss some things when you're building a business because you have to miss some things.

but I really wanted to minimize the things I missed. So I just came up with my own non-negotiables. And sometimes, you know this, but to the listeners, that meant I was having to miss things or say no to things I would have normally not said no to.

because I, it was, who do I put first? You know, the business is going to be fine, but in our brain, it's like, oh, you don't want to miss any opportunity. And like this speaking event, you know, it can be really great for us. And I'm like, then I'll leave the speaking event. There's one in particular meeting you went to that I, we would, neither one probably would have wasted the time on, but,

I had to make a decision. And I'm like, you know what? That's one I'd like to have had back. Yep. Because I missed a game that I wish I didn't miss when we did that thing. So you just got to give yourself non-negotiables and then stick to them. Yeah. Jimmy Hiller was on your stage, Rhino X. And he said, although there are times I've missed, we also would have not been able to take care of our grandchildren. I think he was the only one on that stage ever.

of the legends that actually was kind of true and said, look, we missed some stuff. And you just said I missed some stuff. But you know what? We also have been able to change the direction of the family curse, which you and I both started out broke. And

And it's so easy to look back and say, I wish I didn't miss any of that stuff. But it's a lot better to say, now we go first class. We cut all the lines. Now we go, we actually like, we live better than we did. And there had to be a sacrifice. And I don't think it's hard because you can't have your cake and eat it too all the time. You can try to create balance. Yeah, I think that it feels good to be able to do that for your family, especially coming where we come from. I think it would feel good to do that for your family in general. But the few things that I missed...

aren't what the kids focus on. They focus on, I've been there for every major thing that I've been through. I have four kids, by the way. So like, this is not an easy task. So yes, I was taking red eyes back, but these kids are humble. They understand what we've built. They understand how we've built it. So they, you know, by all means,

They live a very privileged life that I didn't grow up. Like I felt like I had a great childhood. It just was different. Right. We didn't have money, but we had a lot of things we could go do. And they respect. And maybe it helps because Anna and I both work in the business because I've seen this kind of, you know, both have

to work at it and the time and effort we put in. But me making a decision to not go on one trip and then show up at their game, they knew that I gave up that trip for that game. And that was important because then, you know, my son is nine, you know, like he's smart enough to get like, okay, cool. Dad gave up a trip and he's staying for my game. I love that. That stuff is what's like, you know, ingrained in their brain is like, okay, like it's not just about business.

I asked the kids the other day, I said, Hey, what's one thing that we're always working on ourselves? What's one thing that about me that you know would change? That's a hard question to ask your kids, by the way. My nine year old basically was like, yeah, I wish you'd take me to go get ice cream more. Okay. That one, we're going, that one doesn't, it counts, but don't count. We took her to get ice cream yesterday, by the way. But my oldest daughter was like, I wish you would stop talking about business so much. I was like, damn it. Like,

I didn't realize I had to talk about business. Well, it's because my wife and I are in business together. So we have business conversations while the kids are around. So we shifted, we shifted that and kind of give ourselves a rule. We won't talk about any business while we're at a family dinner or anything like that again with the kids. So that was a hard like pivot. I mean, it's hard. Especially with everything you guys got going on.

right now. This is like, you guys are almost going into a whole new opportunity. That's right. And there's a lot there that you guys got to be thinking about to do the best decisions for the kids too. We have a massive, like a massive announcement, you know, at Pantheon that we're rolling out. And by the way, you don't make those without doing all the footwork ahead of it, right? The hard work is what we've been in. So yes, we're talking about it often because we have leadership roles in the business. Pantheon. Yeah.

Pantheon's gonna be, you're not the first person to tell me there's huge announcements coming. - Although I'm sure there's gonna be quite a few. - It's not even in the marketing, I just feel like, man, this industry is on, it's fast and furious right now. It's like, I look around the corner and there's like APE, like, I'm not allowed to be on a board just because I'm the CEO of a company.

So that's something I put into my contract. I can't be on a board. I don't want to waste time on for 1% of a company. Right. I just cannot believe how quick things are going. And I feel like I literally think out every day that, that I got to come up in this industry and watch this whole thing kind of happen. Yeah. And there's still 10,000 baby boomers that are retiring 12% of them own a business.

There's still a lot of opportunity. I love the guys that these financial engineers, the MBAs, the smartest guys in the room usually, that think home service is so simple. But they talk to guys and they treat them like shit and they talk above them like a doctor does. They have no EQ. Their IQs are through the roof. They don't even know how to talk to people. They don't know what it's like to deal with somebody that doesn't have

And that's the piece they miss. And I'll tell you this, if looking from a distance, I think we're more important than them in the home service space. I would say, yes, you need financial engineering. You need to know how to do gap accounting and understand accrual and all this stuff and how to get money to grow. But this other side of it, of like leading and leaders eat last. That's right. And it's just, I don't think that they get that. And you've seen, you've had way more experience dealing with some of these PE companies than

I deal with core tech. I don't deal with all of them. I have a bunch. And I know you can't go into like certain situational stories, but what is your viewpoint? I just think that like, you're right because it's an investment that they're making, right? It's an investment in business, right?

We are invested in our customer service. We're invested in our employees. We're invested in our clients. And so there has to be a different connection there. If you legit are like, if you like you, somebody who really, really cares about your people.

I know like this isn't like what you hear, Tom, like I'm friends with Tom. This is like a guy who genuinely cares about his people and customer experience and things like that. It's just a different focus than what the private equity is relying on you to continue. I think relying on you to continue to be that for your business while they're continued to focus on how to scale the thing and grow the thing or what's other acquisition opportunities or whatever. But for me, it's been a mixture because I have, you know, yes, I have a private equity company that, you know,

that we are now a part of. I'm also working with clients that are private equity companies, a dozen of them.

different ones and some get it i would say more those who've been in the industry get it than those who just came into it because we've had a lot of new players come into the space and that's where i start to see the differences are you letting these business owners kind of do what they've normally done to build these businesses and come behind them and support them dude it's either way at this point like there's some that i i don't care for based on what i've learned the last few years

And some that I think really get it. There's a couple of key things I'll tell you. If anybody's going to get into private equity, there's a few non-negotiables that I'll tell you. Number one, you keep the HR team small. You're going to have prima donnas in your company and you got to understand who they are and how to treat them because you get the top guys leaving. That's the death sentence. Number two, you don't go in and start cutting marketing. You know, I see people and they shift their whole marketing structure. And I think

I think if anything, come in and say, look, we're willing to double the marketing spend. We'll switch from 10% to 20% to take market share for this next year. And whether that's a little bit of greenfielding where you're expanding your service area, but don't mess with marketing and don't mess with, I hate to say prima donnas, but these guys need more love. They need to be fed good jobs. They've earned it. They've earned it the last five, 10 years. These guys have earned their place just

Just like I think, you know, Michael Jordan earned his spot on the court for years, practicing every day, working out harder than anybody. And I think sometimes people come in and they're like, they wanted everything that I wish it could be black and white, but there's so much color in how these decisions work. And then even this dispatch AI where it figures out the next dispatch, you know how much heat I'm getting for that? Yeah.

I mean, do you know how much culture that needs to be there to work through those things? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the life we live, though, right? Like we we're constantly challenged to make our businesses better, use the different tools and figure the things out. That's part of being a front runner in our businesses is you're the one willing to kind of fall on the sword if it doesn't go, if it doesn't go well. But you have to have good leadership, you know, to succeed.

it's not just you. You have to have good leaders who also... You got to develop leaders underneath you. And I will say one thing that you just said that like really kind of made me think is I never knew this until I've been going through this current process on how important an entire...

integrator is in your business. And what I mean is when you have another company coming together, somebody who's responsible for that integration is so important because there's so many things that can be miscommunicated.

or go wrong if you don't. I'm grateful we did. So I'm grateful that we did. But man, is it important if you're merging companies together because people have feelings and those feelings will come first. So you have to be able to make sure that you're sharing whatever your message is with your leadership team and on down. Like I love one thing that Peterman was doing is he said, I stopped having conversations, just regular conversations with my leadership. And I started recording videos and said, just share the video so the message doesn't get missed.

So then they would share the little video clip, 60 second clip of Chad talking about X, Y, Z, whatever is changing in the business or adding or whatever. And there was no telephone. I thought that was like such a simple little easy idea. I still had the meeting with leadership, you know, but then just said, hey, let me make it easy on you. Let's just share this video. You know, what's funny about this is I find myself more than ever waiting on technology to get built that I'm building just

Just the fact that I want to be able to send every single person in my company birthday messages. Happy anniversaries. You're having your best week ever. Something's not good. And I just want to say, hey, man, is everything... Hey, lady, whatever. Is everything okay?

Like I see this happen. One of my top guys, I said, dude, take a week off. You just you're in a funk. And I just sent him some money. I recognize that he came back better than average. Like, man, I really needed that. And this integrator role, everybody's like, I'm just going to go. I get this phone call at least probably three times a week. I'm just going to go roll some companies up. I'm like, do you have any idea? You know what a real talent is? Being able to greenfield.

You need to call your own shots because everybody and their brother, that's why multiples are going up is they all are looking to who could I buy? Who could I buy? Who could I buy? And they don't understand how to properly integrate. And it is not easy. And you'll lose some of that talent if you don't. Yep. I mean, the business, I don't look at buying a company is buying talent. Unfortunately, I think once you hit a certain threshold of like millions and millions of EBITDA, then you're buying some talent. Sure. Normally I look at it as buying a marketing tool.

Yeah, for you. For your size. Yeah, right. That makes sense. It's a different, it's a much different beast, I think, than some of the smaller ones. Well, some of the stuff that you guys are working on. Yeah, no, but I mean, I understand both sides of it. Yeah, my whole point on that was like, you know, you don't want to lose, you still don't want to lose good talent because of a lack of thoughtful integration. That's where I was like, man, it gives me heartburn to think about, to think about that. So it was like something that was really important. And by the way, I've heard this, it's not just me, I've heard this

from the different private equity groups and those that they've acquired that are either my friends or customers of mine or whatever on how like how some are great at it and some are poor at it and they lose good leadership of their businesses i've never had to buy a company that has a coo a cmo that has this whole layer of management usually it's the companies that are craving that layer that we love going with because they're like now we got a specialist in that the

Now we've got somebody that handles payroll. That's like, lead me and share with me and tell me who's been there. They love that. And to buy a company like Clopay did Cornell Cookson. And they had all these VPs and all these roles that had to intertwine. That's tough, man. And the airlines do it. You hear about some of these massive, massive, massive companies doing

is doing it. I think that one thing I hope the listeners hear in this conversation is if our markets were, if our industries weren't doing great, these wouldn't be conversations that we're having talking about some of like, it's that ours is doing fantastic. But now I think people have more options than ever before.

or they also have good places to learn from. Like podcasts like this or like ours or whatever, we want to be able to openly talk about these things so that you, the listener, if you're considering it, you know what to look for or what questions to ask if you don't have that leader in your business to do it. And listen, we've all been there, like was just having a conversation on the way here with Aiden, shout out to Aiden back there, that...

I learned business by being in business and I had to switch my friend group. We have a really, really great friend group circle with a lot of really smart guys, successful guys that I continue to learn from. Well, those circles have changed over the years. Right. But before then, I wasn't listening to podcasts. So now that the listeners have so many options to get this kind of information from, there's no excuse to be able to make good decisions on growing your business and figuring out what you want is the most important thing. What do you want to do? Find your partner. Well, I was on the phone with a guy earlier.

and I love helping young entrepreneurs out. And I'm like, you know what happens when a million or 2 million or $4 million hits your account? Like, let me just say things start to change in a good way. Why does everybody want 50 million? I'm like, I know what I did. And I know that was also two decades. And I know I did that without kids and without being married. So don't emulate your life off of me when I lived at the apartments for four years and I drove the oldest truck in the fleet for years.

And I signed, I got blood taken to get our insurance policy to get this building next door. And people have died in the company. We flipped trucks. The cops have showed up countless amount of times. Like if you want the good, you got the bad too. And why would you need that much? Like, I'm just curious, how much do you think is enough to really make life change? If you were talking to people, I don't know if there's a number in your mind. God, you know, like I don't even like the question because I,

I know some people are afraid to talk about creating wealth. And by the way, you shouldn't be afraid to talk about credit. I think how you make your money is more important than how much money you make. But I've always believed it is if I use that number as my finish line, the numbers I'm going to be running so many races, it's going to continuously change. The goal changes. But I think it's important that I share when I got into business, I didn't get into the business thinking about selling it. I was just trying to make a decent living.

But then as I got smarter in business, I thought, okay, maybe I can build something really meaningful here that I could sell someday or bring my kids into if they wanted to. None of them want to be in my business. That's okay. But then it was like, hey, I had a number in mind. I thought, man, if I can get this company to $20 million, I'm going to feel really successful. And we hit that and passed it. And by the way, that was like an empty number for me. It was just a goal. But I've

I thought, okay, I'm not doing this again. Because I typically want to say, if I say I want to be a $100 million company, Tommy, it's not because I want to be a hundred. It's not the $100 million you should focus on. It's to what I've built to get to the hundred million and the impact that we're having at a $100 million company. Because what you know, and everybody in my company knows is giving back is one of my core, like one of our core values. It means a lot to me.

So still to this day, now we have 300-ish employees with everybody combined. Still pay for everybody to go do customer service one Friday every single month. At that size, it's a big deal. Think about all the good that I've accomplished by creating, you know, not a $100 million company yet, but $5 million. Pretty decent-sized business. That's a lot of giving back at scale that we were able to accomplish. The byproduct of that was we made a lot of money doing it.

I would say, and I wish I would have done this 10 years ago, is say, look, these are the two trips that are non-negotiable. This is what a 513 I want to invest in. This is where I like to live. This is with inflation. This is setting up the kids and my niece and nephews. These are the five people at work or 10 people or 100 people that I want to make sure. Whatever that is.

is reverse engineer it and say, this is the life that I want to start living. Because some people say, man, I never want to sell. I want to do this for the next 20 years. And I'm like, well, how much money do you make right now? They're like, I just pay myself a hundred grand a year. And I'm like, okay, that's okay. If that's what you want, you just want to build something. But I'm like the real money now, the financial, if I knew five, seven years ago, the man, you build this thing up, you can take chips off the table, build it up again. And everybody makes money in the process of that finish line.

Like that was the cool part. I never going to plan on another company again, three to five years tops. Yeah. But you didn't know what you didn't know. You didn't know, but I'm sitting here telling people is life gets better going to Morgan Wallen. Those were the best seats I've ever been in a stadium. It was like amazing. And like, that was an experience. You buy experiences, the house that you bought and I bought our experiences, right? Like it,

it's fun because now we get to enjoy company. Yeah, we earned it. But again, two decades, 17 years, it was a grind to get there. I got a lot more questions, but I want to wrap this up, man. So you, how do people get ahold of you, Chris, if someone wants to reach out? Yeah, man, I'm pretty easy to find. I think you'd go on any social media platform and just search for Chris Yano. There's not many Chris Yano's out there way, you know, so you can find me there. Obviously, I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I have to the point home services podcast.com.

By the way, like I think we're probably due for another round of getting you back on there. Yeah. But you can always catch us there. Those are every week, every week of Tuesdays we launch those. I am going to be at Home Service Freedom. So I'm excited to be at the Freedom event. We just recorded a promo for it today. Me and Anna did. I'll be at Pantheon. I'm like, I'll kind of be shown up to some more shows again this year. I took a little hiatus from speaking, but kind of get back on the, I got some big plans. I got to get back on the horse a little bit and get back on stages. I actually do love being on stages. It's just harder when they're in like North Carolina.

because that for us is like two days. Yes. Yeah. It's going back to the East Coast. Northeast to me is always the worst because you get to like go so far up there.

But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it is something I really enjoyed doing, you know, getting on some stages and speaking, but I needed to take a break. Yeah. I needed that because it had been so many years of traveling so much. So I'll be back at it. So if you guys are going to be at those events, I'd love to meet any of you. I'll be there. Absolutely. We talked about a lot of things, man. I'm going to have you one final thought to close us out. One final thought? Whatever you... Okay, yeah. So let me... So this is something I've been on as of recently. You know, when I went into this next phase of...

business that we're going into, I really needed to reset my routine. And so I went to this event and I won't share the event on here, but I went to an event that was in Texas that allowed me new direction. And it gave me four simple pillars to focus on in my life. And I'm journaling every morning now, which I never did before. So that was kind of a routine, but it was these four pillars and it was your faith,

your family, your fitness and your finance, finance slash business, which is something I've focused on, you know, always anyhow at some level, but not equally. So this is a, uh,

A way for me to hold myself accountable weekly to each one of those pillars to make sure that I'm doing something to improve each one of those. You've heard me say no zero days a hundred times because that's a phrase I've lived by for a long time. But I want to be no zero days in all four of those pillars. And I missed two of them when we were in Vegas.

I beat myself up over it. I got back on the horse yesterday and went to the gym and I didn't want to go to the gym. I was feeling a little under the weather from the Vegas trip, but I got myself right back on. And you can drift for a minute, but get your ass back on board. And so those four pillars and whatever you need your four pillars to be, that's fine. Or if you have six or five or whatever, to me, it's those are the four aspects of my life that mean the most. And I hold myself accountable to moving those four every week.

I love it, man. Those are great. Four pillars, faith, family, fitness, and finance. And finance. All right, my friend, I'm looking forward to September 25th. It's going to be a blast. You and me both, man. I'm excited. I can't wait to see what comes up on the Q&A panel. Usually I'm the one Q&A-ing on the panels. I'm speaking at this event the least I've ever spoken at any event.

which is weird because it's my event dude that's how it is rhino eggs for me i'm not yeah no you're right see i enjoy these things a lot more than you do it's a lot of work but i've got a great team so thanks for doing this man great job i always appreciate you

Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper...

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