Q&A with Tommy - Crafting Smarter Business Moves with Data and Analytics
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An account manager wants to discount something because an existing customer is considering a lower price competitor. All right. So I'm not afraid of discounting, but it's one of the things we track in our monthly analysis. I would say, sir, we have the exact same option. If you don't have options, you're kind of screwed. So we've got that option. That's a builder grade option. It's a 10,000 cycle spring or a 10,000 cycle roller option.

We've got that option for that price. What I always try to do is build the opportunity by giving more. There's a reason why call centers and alarm companies and everyone like at the auto, if you go to like a dealership, they all bundle stuff.

So you bundle it in a way that's super profitable. And if you've got to take something out, you're not losing. What I try to do, let me get back to the core of my message. I add things that are a little cost for us, but a great value to the client. Rather than discounting this job $100, I'm going to give you Deco Hardware and a surge protector. It's $140 value, but we don't pay a lot. And it helps us to convert those leads into sold customers.

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 podcast.

Let's see here. It is November and Thanksgiving is upon us. Reminder to the audience, I'm just reading along here. If you haven't got my book, Home Service Millionaire, I don't know where you've been. It's a fantastic book, homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. I do have a Home Service Millionaire course. Took a lot of time to build that original course. It's course.homeservicemillionaire.com.

And as always, join my group, The Home Service Expert, on Facebook. And, you know, I just found out today that this podcast is number 17 in the country for business. So really appreciate you guys listening. And I appreciate you guys listening to it live. And then the other book is called Elevate, Build a Business Where Everybody Wins.

You know, it's kind of funny. I had my buddy in Orlando, Dr. Ben Hardy, and he wrote this book, 10X is Easier Than 2X. It's an amazing book. And what he says in the book is really Dan Sullivan and Dr. Ben Hardy, they explained that do what your superpower is. Focus on what you do the best and hire others to handle the other stuff.

And I didn't know that made sense until I realized there are a lot of smarter people than me in financing and accounting. There's somebody that's way better than me at HR. I'm not good at dealing with lawyers. I don't want to pretend to be. So I hate doing that. That's why I have Dan Miller, the president of the company.

we're going to be doing a lot more shop tours we're going to be creating a lot of structure to shop tours where we talk about everybody's been asking a lot about like performance pay and drilling into your numbers and scorecards and that's all good and dandy but the deeper i get into it the deeper i start explaining it to people the more i realize that i need to build it out a little bit more for other companies because last thing i want to do is give you information and you go make changes

and you don't get the outcome you're looking for. And it's not a one size fits all. It's very specific to the company you're set up in. Not as much the industry, but hopefully you have W2 employees and you're going after what's going to help you guys win. A little under the weather. I mean, I've worked all weekend from like dusk till dawn and I woke up today just feeling groggy. So sorry about that. I'll try to bring some fire here.

So I'm getting back to shop tours, performance pay, take people around, tell them what's working for us. Tell them about things like Chirp that we're making a lot of money with and we're building on so much campaigns on top of what they offer. Make a lot of money with stuff like that. Working on Dispatch Pro, really dialing in how to get the dispatch done.

how to alleviate some stuff off of them and they get economies of scale where I don't need to hire more dispatchers. Hopefully we'll be able to retool the dispatchers as DispatchPro gets built out more, especially for the garage door industry. So it's machine learning, right? Lots of great things are going on. We just set a record week last week, set a record quarters. This is a record year.

So, interesting thing happened last, when was this? Last Monday, Tuesday, Tom Howard came out, did a budget meeting with about 60 companies. And we spoke a lot about budgeting. And a lot of people walked out of there on Monday and we went bowling. And they said, we're going to triple next year. We're going to double next year.

And it really, like, every single person I talk to is super optimistic and they're dreaming. And that's what I love. And I think that's super important. The hard part for me was I went home and I started thinking about it. And I said, this is going to be a pretty tough year. Like, a lot of you guys know, I talked to Ishmael and Tom Howard and Aaron Gaynor and a lot of people every day. And there's a lot of struggles going on right now. And, you know, what I would tell you is,

Look at your company now and make sure you're leaned out. Make sure you've got all-stars in every division. If you've got a technician that's not really making you money, you can work with him for the next two years or you could do the right thing, which is probably find an opportunity to release him from working with you or her and get lean. A lot of people are ordering all their trucks right now. They're trying to do all this stuff. And what I would tell you is do not...

hire and buy all these trucks for where you're going to be in six months. Try to stay super, super lean. Last thing you want to do is go out of your way, hire a ton of people, and then realize you're not getting the call volume you need because that's where we're really struggling. That's where home service is struggling. There's just not a lot of volume. Demand service is way down. And I see it. I see it out there every day. I got a lot of people I'm connected with.

So just be very, very careful out there. I'm not a doom and gloom guy. The stock market's rebounding. Next year's an election year. I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm hoping everything goes great. I'm hoping you've hit huge goals and accomplished a ton. But this is one of the years where you're just seeing to be careful based on what I hear out there. And I see a lot of companies doing so. Just know that.

I was thinking earlier a little bit, taking notes for this meeting that we're doing right now. And you guys know I did pretty well at A1 here recently in the last year. And there's a math equation that says that 10% of your money doubles every seven years. Because I love math. I try to figure out how to triple the money every three to four years.

And that works when you're small talking about small dollars, but how do you do it with lots of money? And there's no better investment than home service. Not, not for me, at least technology is a good investment, but I tend to really love finding companies that are not as mature as they want. I've been doing this a couple of decades. And what I mean is just as old and that have opportunities. And I see them all the time. So the next year,

My main job at A1 is going to be finding the right people to come on the bus. Jim Collins talks about that. Number two, it's going to be really focusing on acquisitions. And the more I kind of search out there for acquisitions, the more I've realized there's not a lot of great ones. So our job is to go into decent companies and kind of mold them to where we're at. And hopefully a lot of the people stay on for the ride.

and try to get them to the a1 kpis and a lot of that goes back to culture so people are like why would you have to be the guy on the road to do that well i get along with people i've been in their shoes and i don't talk really fancy when it comes to numbers i talk about some basic stuff and so i'm going to build all the sops the checklists and really try to get it dialed in because i'm not where i'd like to be we've exceeded our goal as organic growth this year so we're doing well there

And I'm pretty happy with my team. I got to say, we went over the budget on Friday and not where I'd like to see it go next year. But with acquisitions, we set a pretty low bar. And then we've got the Tommy goal, which is much higher. And the Tommy goal gives double bonus. So if you hit the Tommy goal, you get 200 percent bonus of whatever your salary is. So if you make 100, you get an extra 200 grand and we pay that out quarterly.

And it's a pretty cool model. And you know, I'm not deep in that every day. I'm not the guy that's building all this stuff out every day. I've got a great team. It's what I described before. I don't have all the answers, but I have the team to get the answers from. Another thing I was just thinking about earlier is I was at a party about a decade ago and there were a couple of doctors there and they were doing drugs, like pretty bad drugs that I seen. And I,

what made me think about that story is i was on another podcast these guys made a joke and i don't know why but it just crossed my mind about this story doctors know everything about drugs like you go to medical school you learn all the problems like you see people doing bad things od dying and what it made me think about was if two doctors are going to do this and they know it's this bad what do we know about we know that eating unhealthy is bad for us we know not exercising is bad we know we're supposed to drink more water

But I started thinking about why don't we do it? Like, we know what we're supposed to do. Like, you don't look at somebody and like you walk in, someone walks in the room, you're like, they work out, they take care of themselves, they eat right. Like, it's not a hidden thing. But a lot of us don't do it. So maybe start thinking about why don't we do it? Well, we know what we should be doing in our company, too. We know what we should be as parents. We know what we should be as lovers or marriage. So why don't we do it?

I think sometimes we just need to reflect and think about a bigger why. We need to focus on changing habits, changing Netflix to doing cardio, like whatever it is, certain things. I remember my mom, she would say, I smoke because it's my, like, I'm not going to quit smoking. Like, I enjoy it. Like, I'm not quitting for anybody. And that's okay. Look, she's doing great. And, you know, I think she switched to, you know,

a nicotine pen or something, but ultimately that was like her thing. So that's fine. But I'm just wondering if you know what you need to fix within your business and you know what you need to fix in your health, why do we ignore the little voice in our head? I mean, I've done it and I do it. So I'm just wondering, it's just something to kind of think about. We know what we're supposed to be doing. You know what you're supposed to be doing in your business. You know, you need to show up. I was like thinking about it today as I'm literally meetings from morning to night today.

All Saturday morning to night, Sunday morning to night. I mean, all weekend. All weekend. Dust to dust. But I'm still here. It's Monday. I still have my one on ones. Like some of you guys don't even show up to work. And, you know, you're nowhere near the size that I wanted. I'm not saying you're doing anything bad. Maybe that's the business you want to build for yourself. But I promise you this.

You compare two people in a business, one guy's going in, one gal's going in, one's not. One's showing up with their team for face-to-face. One's trying to make an effort to be there. You're going to do a lot better. Got a lot of questions. I'm going to read some questions here. Let's see what we got. Would love to meet up one day. Absolutely. These tours...

I'm basically going to have my top managers record the most amazing videos, have my amazing video editors edit them up. I don't want to disrupt day one on these tours. So we're going to come in at like three and then we're going to go until everybody leaves and we'll see kind of the training center. It's going to be like world class, which you guys experienced. And I'm at little areas throughout the building that we watch videos.

And then I'm going to have an area at the end and I'm going to have these things where I'm giving you my resources, stuff I learned, where to find videos on certain stuff. Whether that's performance pay or setting a culture or what marketing companies to use. I'm basically taking the top 20 questions and answering all the questions and just trying to help people. That's what the point of the shop tours are. So let's see here. Hi, Tommy. We are looking for an A player area manager. Where do you start looking to recruit this person?

Best place to recruit is through employees and you out visiting and telling people, get on social media, go to a BNI meeting. You know, the fact is relationships, your network is your net worth. So first of all, what does an area manager, you know, what does it entail? Did you write the job down? Everything it entails, how they get paid. And like I've always said, don't make it look like a death sentence. Put down the collaboration they're going to do. Put down the control they're going to get, uh,

Put down as many great things about the company as you can. It shouldn't feel like a home service company. It should feel just like an amazing place to work. It entails being in charge of people, opportunities to make their own decisions. This is what you're going to be

grade it on, you know, whether the conversion rate, what is it going to be recruiting and training? So build out the ad and figure out the best place to get it. And I think it's going to be letting everybody know that, you know, your circle posted on LinkedIn, posted on Facebook, posted on Instagram, get it on as many places as you can. That's where I'd start. What's your best marketing recommendation for a newer business that is in a super saturated area and getting it isn't getting a lot of demand calls.

Well, I was just on the phone with a company and they've not optimized their Google My Business page. The hours are not right. They're not getting as many reviews as they should be getting. And they're not doing anything on local services, LSA, Google Guarantee. Those who have heard me for a long time understand Google is God when it comes to demand services. And if you're not spending a lot of time

There's a lot that goes into SEO, metadata, schema data, H1 tags, load speed, content, backlinks. It's a long-term play. You need to start there. What I would say, if you don't have the right brand yet and you're spending all this time, effort, and energy on the wrong branding, it's probably a mistake because your brand doesn't stick out. No one's going to remember why I spent a lot of money. But if I was smaller, I'd go back to what is important, relationships, meeting new people all the time.

I've got a client that spends a million and a half dollars a year. If I was smaller, I'd go find 10 of those and I'd have a $15 million business. Chet Holmes in the Ultimate Sales Machine talks about being top of mind all the time. He used to send out Rubik's cubes and in the letter he put, I'm still puzzled why we haven't worked together yet. Give me a chance. And then he'd send a tape measure and say, are you measuring the results of your current provider? I promise we'll measure up better than the rest.

And it was these thoughtful little gifts. You know, some people just invite them to a concert, get to know them a little bit. I'd say instead of going after every client, go after the clients that you know will pay the bills and allow you to make a profit. If I was at a smaller size, that's where all my attention would go is going after the right clients. So if anybody wants to reach out to me, the best thing to do is hit up Allison.

or hit me up on social media, typically Facebook. But Allison, if they want to get a hold of me, A-M-O-O-R-E at tmvholdings.com. So A-M-O-R-E at tmvholdings.com. I'm going to go ahead and put this in the comments. So that's the best way to get a hold of me. Have you personally implemented the KPIs you recommend in your own company?

Could you share some insights into the template or structure you use and how to automate the KPI tracking? Considering your recommendation for ServiceTitan in running a business, how did you build and automate everything within ServiceTitan? Or are there additional programs or strategies you have found effective in managing KPIs across various aspects of your business? Oh, this is a great question. Let's talk about this for a minute. I need ServiceTitan. And for me, I use Intact for my financial modeling. Most people use QuickBooks.

So you've got ServiceTitan, QuickBooks, or Intact. And then you've got Paylocity. Those all, and then we use HubSpot on top of that. And right now we're building some really, really advanced BI tools, which is business intelligence. And we're using Power BI. There's a lot of other ones. There's Grow.com. There's several other ones. I can't think of them right now. Like I said, I've congested, so my brain's not working right.

But what I realized this last 10 months or so that my team spends a lot of time doing data analysis. Like my COO spends a lot of time, my CFO. We got an FP&A person, look up FP&A. That's our full-time job is to just crunch numbers and pull the data to make it useful to us. But we're automating all this using BI tools. So we're making the investments into the infrastructure always.

I mean, I can tell you this in a year and a half, we won't even look or recognize who we are today. And we're moving at an incredible rate. A lot of times when I'm in a meeting with my team, I say, who do we need? It's who, not how. Who do we need that's done this before they can come in and just bring us to back where they know success looks like. So yes, we look at all this data. In fact, I've got a lot of it sitting right over here. These are some reports.

This is October's reports. Those of you that can't see me, this is a light month, 86 pages. And then this is another report to support it. And this is, let's say about 20 pages.

And it's just got weekly trends, revenue trends, the gross close rate, opportunity average, booking rates, abandonment rates, call center overview, marketing update, marketing spends, West results. So this is West, Scott's responsible central results, which is Mike. And then we actually have East results, which is Travis.

And then we've got every company we've partnered with and their results. We've got people in operations, workers' compensation claims. We've got an appendix here. We've got year-to-date results, all kinds of amazing things. So this is just – and then here we've got –

Torch metrics, opportunity job average, median mode by market, operational updates, marketing updates, year-to-date budget. We've got a breakdown on every market broken out by market out of 30 so on markets. So, you know, it doesn't really mean anything if you don't know how to interpret the data and implement certain things based on the data.

If you would have asked me five years ago if I was watching this, this would have been me going through data. And I'm not the guy making all the changes. That's why we have a COO and a CFO and directors and VPs. But we built a really strong team. And now it's my job to continue to build a team and maintain the vision and make sure I'm getting them the support they need. So going back to your question, I think that answers it. Yes, we've taken a lot of the data and we're doing it a little bit primitively.

And then we're building it all into Power BI, and then it'll just spit out the computations. When we started this process, we got a guy internally that's working for me that actually is helping us at A1. So he's working for Tommy Mello Ventures. And we've got a whole team of data analysis and analysts. And what we're building is we had to first get all the definitions right. What do these words mean? What is gross close? What is the torch team?

What do we consider profit? Because when I walk into a business, everybody talks about these things, gross margin, gross close, all these different things. They're different definitions. So we needed to sit there. It took about 30 days of just understanding what the data terms are and how we interpret the data.

And so these guys are really smart. They came in and they said, we're going to build this whole ecosystem out like an ERP. And it's going to be able to you'll have every basic thing you need by the end of Q1. And then we can start taking the data and chopping it up way differently and making really strong insights. We can pull in what we call regression testing where we can pull in what happens when the weather changes. You can pull in weather patterns. You could say marketing analysis trends. You could use consumer data. You could use building trends.

And it's kind of the ultimate advantage. I mean, not a lot of graduate companies even understand what I'm even talking about. But when we're using these scientific approaches to taking data and making decisions and actually running the company with data, it just changes everything. And I'll give it up. Cortex has been a great partner and we're learning a ton of stuff.

Man, I am a business for five years on my own second generation tree service and moved to Atlanta and started on my own. The competition is ridiculous. I'm struggling with marketing. What's the best strategy? So Josh,

There's nothing better than I said earlier. It's going to meet the people. Getting yourself out there to meet people. A B&I meeting can do a lot of damage, but I'd hit a different B&I meeting every week. So you find one you love. If you're a younger guy, find a younger one that I actually enjoy hanging out with. And everybody's looking for these secret bullets and the magic in a bottle, but they don't understand what SEO really is.

And they don't know how much getting a great review is and asking about who's the HOA president. Do you guys have an HOA newsletter we can get into? You know, we did something crazy. We're sponsoring the Vegas Knights. And I'll tell you this, we're testing it in Vegas. And if it takes up, we'll probably have five more sponsorships. And it will work. It's just a matter of figuring it out. This is one thing I've taken a lot from private equity.

is they test things. They don't just say, we're gonna do something. We're a large company, we're in a lot of markets. We don't just have this, we're gonna go do this in every market. We'll try a new social media campaign in one market, or we'll try a TV commercial or a different type of mailer. And when we figure it out and fine tune it, that's when we scale it. But marketing, it starts with the relationships. And it's what I had to do. I mean, literally I'd walk in with donuts or bagels to real estate offices,

I was out there passing out flyers. I used to, I shouldn't even admit this, but I used to go rollerblading and go door to door and leave flyers. Are you doing door hangers? Are you leaving yard signs? There's so many easy things. Are you branded correctly? And marketing and financials is two things the owner and founders should keep really, really close because, again,

The owner's just got to get great at those things. If you don't understand the finances of your company and you don't understand the marketing, which I know so many companies and most owners don't have a good grasp of this stuff, especially the marketing.

They don't understand attribution called tracking numbers. They don't understand like call rail. They don't understand UTM parameters. UTM parameters, Google My Business, they don't even know what that means. And what it does is allow attribution to find out what people are searching in the Google Council. And so if you don't know what UTM parameters are, you should probably look that up and try to get that set up on all your campaigns. What is the best way about networking?

Seems these business associations are just looking for referrals. Yeah, they all do look for referrals. You're out there representing your own company and trying to help one another. So the best way to get referrals is to try to give referrals. You find a florist, go get some flowers. There's a massage therapist. You buy a house, use the one in your network. You're built there to give. The more you give, the better you'll receive. Trust me. You go out of your way to help people, you can do really, really well.

but it's it's hard because everybody's selling right everybody's selling themselves and their business so how do you stand out or cry like that you actually help people listen to them and give a i mean why do you think i'm doing shop tours i mean i want to help people then it comes back full circle i mean it really does and a lot of people say that it's a line it's cliche yeah help other people we know we know uh you know good samaritan and karma

but no it's real i mean people remember when i do things and i don't ask them to to pay me back i just know it comes back and i don't know exactly how it works but i just know that opportunities find me all the time and as long as i continue to double down on helping others it'll come back so remember you have two ears and one mouth keith mercurio was in orlando and he said tommy i've been coaching i've coached thousands of people because you know the one thing

nobody's ever asked me, is how do I become a better listener? And in the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, that's a lot what he talks about. And so think about the title of that book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And it's mostly about listening. You should really think about that. How to Win Friends and Influence People is mostly about listening. Robert Ciarini talks about influence.

And we could do most of it by actively listening. A lot of people I see that are in a conversation, they're not really tuned into what the person's saying. They're hearing, but they're not listening. They're not trying to understand. They're worried about what they're going to say next. So some advice is be a really good listener. And don't be everything for everyone. Find out the right people to get to know. A little bit of research goes a long way.

Tommy, super excited to be in your home service freedom private group. I was planning on expanding into Charlotte, North Carolina next year. However, I budgeted and the startup cost is 550. Would you recommend waiting to go into a market lean and conservative? Yeah, I'll tell you what. Hindsight's 20-20, right? If I could go back in time, I would have taken as much market share in my current market.

And a lot of people are like, man, I'm already big in my market. But I mean, I want you to be massive. You think you're helping yourself by going into a new market like it's just new opportunities. But there's so much shit that happens when you go to a new market. Like you can't be there quick. You can't be there to fix up the stuff when it breaks. What ends up happening is you end up getting on a plane or driving to this market all the time. And then your core business where your core market is suffers. Right.

So you got to have this bucket filled so big in a market that you could afford to go to the next market because you got the infrastructure built. And I hope that hits a lot of people hard. I hope they say, man, I was going to do all this expansion, but

Are you huge in your market where you're making millions and millions? I don't care if you do power washing or you lay bricks or you do tile floors or you do concrete work or you do fencing or landscaping. Take market share, lots of it before you expand. You don't want a bunch of problems in a bunch of markets.

I really do look up to Parker and Sons. Paul, Kelly, amazing guy. Going to do almost $300 million in just Phoenix. Think about that. Hopefully that answers of what I would do. Not saying I'm right. You mentioned your goal, booking rates are really high. When you acquire, what steps did you take to get those companies' booking rates up? Well, first, none of them really know their booking rate.

So first, they don't have a number there. They're not really paying attention. So the other thing I track is how quick is the call coming and is there a delay? Try to get rid of the delays because if it's transferred from one VoIP service to another VoIP service, there's delays and you lose customers fall off. The other thing is I get rid of 800 numbers. I like local numbers. They work better than 800 numbers. 800.junk is the exception if you can get a great

800 number, just 800, not 844 or 833 or 866. The old 800s work the best and it's a national company, otherwise local numbers. The other thing I do is we do a complete study and we do a lot of research into how much a call costs. And let's just say it's six o'clock and I send my CSRs home and between six and eight, there's two calls. Let's say the call costs $120 to get, so I spent $240. Okay.

And the average ticket, let's say it's a 10% campaign. So that'd be $2,800 I'm losing. So a lot of people don't even know this math. They don't understand that keeping a CSR for two extra hours pays for itself in dividends. A lot of people don't know like Housecall Pro has a service you can pay for by the minute to answer those calls, but they're at like a 60% booking rate or less. So you might want to have in-house. Every time I've tried to go out and try to get a call center to work with us,

They don't do near as good as we do internally because we get coached more. We have more control. Another thing we did is we went nationwide with our call center. So there's great people in the Midwest. We get hired at a great rate and they're great, wholesome people. And so being able to have flex on where we hire Phoenix is the Mecca for call center. So it's hard to hire here. It's very competitive and I don't mind competitive rates because we pay competitive, but it's,

It's nice when you can do, you're on a VoIP service, so you can work anywhere in the world. I will say this. Try to keep it in the United States or in Canada. I can always tell when someone is in another country. Their name's not Michael. Their name is something crazy, and they say, my name is Michael. But we all know they're not. And it's hard to communicate. It's another thing that's hard to book. So booking rates are where I see the biggest opportunity for every business I look at.

Young Home Service Company, exterior cleaning. We have quickly scaled using a lot of tactics out of your book. Would you focus on going deep into one service offering or offer a handful in order to reach a broader market? Thanks for all that you do. So I think a lot of people, they take on too much. They're not a great plumber, but then they bring on HVAC and then they bring on, then they're an electrician. Personally, it's kind of like staying in one market, stay in one thing and do it great. It's hard, man. Some people...

When you get as big as Paul with Parker and Sons, for that example, he got so big, he's got an infrastructure that they could go into other home services. And I got other people that tell me like, well, if I paid for the client, why not just sell him a bunch of stuff? Well, what are you good at? Because I've taken on personally jobs that I suck at. I did a gate with a solar system keypad.

And that was the biggest mistake of my life. 20 warranty calls. It was a shit show. I lost money on it, but I said yes. And I think a lot of business owners are like, yeah, I can do that. Just because you could doesn't mean you should, right? Like you're not a master at that trade. You don't have the KPIs, the training, the systems, the recruiting tactics to get the right people yet. So I'd say, you know, just look at marketing, for example.

If you focused on one thing, you'd get so much better at marketing to that client. So many people, they take on too much. They got a side hustle. They're trying to sell solar, roofing, gutters, chimneys, siding, windows. And it's like, you're not good at any of them. Like, you look at their, like, I just was at a company and, you know, I won't say who it is, but it was in Chicago. And I walk in the guy's shop, massive shop. I said, how much inventory do you got here? He goes, probably 4 million.

i go what exactly do you guys do he goes well we sell garage doors and parts so we're a distributor we're huge in commercial we do new construction we do retrofit residential and i was like cool where do you make the most money because i'm not really sure not cool he goes i go what's the hardest thing he goes yeah i don't really know i go what crm are you on he goes quickbooks online and i'm like well how do you dispatch he goes very archaically

And he said, the reason I'm not on a CRM is because a lot of the guys that go over to these bigger companies on CRMs come back to me because they don't want to learn it. So you're staying in the stone ages. It didn't make sense to me, the logic. But in my first book, The Home Service Millionaire, I call it creative justification. Justify your way. Why do you eat like crap? Because I'm busy and I don't have time to cook. Why don't you exercise? Because I've slammed and I got kids.

Why do you drive so fast? Because I'm always late. Why don't you wear your seatbelt? Because it's not comfortable. And I just don't have time to put it on. Like, it's all creative justification. It really is. And we're human beings. It's going to happen. But I just don't understand. You're in four separate industries. Distribution is way different than commercial. Commercial is way different than resi. They can both work. And there are people that are doing it successful. But what you got to find is what's right for you. So I start there. I guess I'll end there.

Let me go to some of the questions I have in my document here. Stacy said, we are an HVAC company. Who answers all your leads that come in after hours? LSA, CHATS, et cetera. Well, we're using CHIRP right now to send that to a lead form. And then our CSRs are, you know, I'm in East Coast all the way over to West Coast. So I've got way more hours.

And a couple of call centers, like I've used Nationwide Inbound in the past. They did okay. But I'll tell you what I did my whole life is I had a white and black flip phone on T-Mobile and I was the after hours. And that's why we grew. Because I booked every damn phone call because I'd fight. And I'll tell you this, Stacey, depending on the volume, why wouldn't you just take your best CSR that wants to earn some extra money and say, listen, if you're willing to take this kind of an on-call,

I'll give you $25 for every call you book. I did that with HomeAdvisor back in the day. And the gal that still works for me, Anna, she used to book 10 calls a night and I'd pay her per call. And before I'd hire a call center, I'd go, you're my top three CSRs. Some of you might just say, I want time with family and I don't want to do it. But if you can book seven calls at 25 bucks, it's $175. If you're booking seven calls at night,

You'd be better off having them work later and just paying. But I'm fine at $25 a phone call. They book seven calls. And they're my best performers. So just realize that's an option, Stacey. That's what I would do. Adrian said, do you utilize branded bandit signs? If so, how do you deal with local enforcement? Well, one day I went to Fountain Hills and I put up 100 signs. I got a phone call later that night that I was going to get a $50 fine for every single one.

So I took my ass back out there and took them all down late at night. But banded signs work. It's just like the yellow book still works in certain areas. I just think if you could get them in the front yards of happy clients and have some type of competition you run that they get a free something or a $500, you know, get them to leave it out. It's easier. You don't have to leave them out in every corner. I don't think that's the best use of marketing personally.

John Bolton said, our company has acquisitions in several states. We're trying to plan some type of Christmas party, but travel for that many places and people's impractical. How do you guys do it? So, man, my allergies are kicking my ass. I'm sorry. The way that we do it is we set up an amount that we're going to spend on every employee. And then we've got market managers, market leads. Typically, it's around $120, right?

So Bree gets with the whole team and plans an event in every market. It's pretty simple. Sometimes it's Topgolf. Sometimes it's a nice restaurant because you can do a lot for $100 a person. So I don't think bringing everybody into one spot. Matt Malone with Groundworks figured out a way to do it. And it's super expensive. And I don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze because then people need off work quite a bit. And then the company, that Christmas party costs a lot more than just a party. There's an opportunity cost.

So I say you pick a number you guys are comfortable with and that's the way I would do it. That's the way we do it here at A1. I just bought a couple of businesses. I have two partners that aren't active in the day-to-day in the business. They help manage the business from a different location. Our software is called Foundation and it's not very user-friendly and very labor intensive. How do I convince them to change to a new and more advanced system so I can focus on selling and managing crews?

And that's from IG. Well, in 2016, Adam, we were on this old arcade software called Emptora. We were on a company called Pro Business Tools. And we were on another company called ESC Mobile. And I had to convince Adam to get off of Emptora. And if I were you, here's what I would do.

There's all kinds of case studies, right? Like if I'm your partner, I want to know what is this going to do? So you've heard of a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I set up a big SWOT analysis and I try to show them how it's going to make us more money. And it's an investment into the company. It's going to give me back my time, allow me to manage better and allow us to have more scalability and make sure you pick the right partner because you want to, I mean the right software company, CRM, but you,

Yeah, if you're using something archaic, it's time. Like think about ServiceTet, for example. It does auto reconciliation. That saved us three extra people in the finance department. So I would talk to the CRM. You're going to think about using and see what kind of case studies they have. And I'd get the white papers on that. And I try to have a compelling case. And I say, guys, get behind me on this one, but just make sure you've got a plan is what I would say.

BD said, I would love to know how you approach what I would love to know your approach to when an account manager wants to discount something because an existing customer is considering a lower price competitor. All right. So I'm not afraid of discounting, but it's one of the things we track in our monthly analysis. I would say, sir, we have the exact same option.

If you don't have options, you're kind of screwed. So we've got that option. That's a builder grade option. It's a 10,000 cycle spring or a 10,000 cycle roller. We've got that option for that price. What I always try to do is build the opportunity by giving more. There's a reason why call centers and alarm companies and everyone like at the auto, if you go to like a dealership, they all bundle stuff.

So you bundle it in a way that's super profitable. And if you've got to take something out, you're not losing. What I try to do, let me get back to the core of my message. I add things that are a little cost for us, but a great value to the client. Rather than discounting this job $100, I'm going to give you Deco Hardware and a surge protector. It's $140 value, but we don't pay a lot. And it helps us to convert those leads into sold customers.

Jen said in your home service company was going to if your home service company was going to expand into a new market where nobody knew of your brand, what would your marketing strategy be for two to three thousand a month? Two to three thousand dollars a month. I find out where my avatars live. I go talk to realtors. I go talk to HOA presidents. I try to get in front of like.

big clients I knew that would really get the word out there. And I'd come up with some type of an affiliate deal where I'd have a marketing fee. I'd kick them back $100 for every call I book. And I'd bring them all. I'd want to get in front of them. And I'd go after relationships. And you call them promoters. You find a bunch of promoters. And on social media, they're called influencers. And you find these people because you can't really do TV, radio. You can't do billboards.

The best advice I could tell you, Jen, is don't go after a full market. Go after a small area. If you're in Houston, go after like cut it into like eight sections and own an eighth of it. Because for two to three thousand dollars a month in real estate, they say own a neighborhood. If you own a neighborhood, you'll do well.

I know everything about the houses that are sold in that area. Like, like no, every little detail about the average house, you know, price per square foot. I know how many pools there are in the area and what makes sense to solar, get an extra value and every FISBO out there. Like I would tell you to own a section of that market for that kind of campaign. Laney Taylor said, one of your videos, you talked about affiliate marketing. How would you implement this?

We're actually doing a huge project where we're building out. I bet you we'll be the number one company in the world for affiliate marketing and home service. And it's very complex because you got to have attribution and you got to schedule through some type of widget, like a schedule engine, because you don't want to have call tracking numbers out there for a million people, because quite frankly, you're probably paying for call tracking numbers. So people say, well, what if, what do you do if they want to make a phone call? You say, just call me and I'll book it through my scheduler.

And if you look up affiliate marketing tools, there's a million of them out there. But there's a learning management system behind it. So you want to get these people to get trained on your systems of how to be a promoter for your company. And you want to make sure you pay out the same day you receive the money. A lot of people, and I've seen this now for the last decade, you work out an affiliate agreement, you don't pay. I'll tell you this. I can speak to this very, very detailed.

Like somebody says they're going to give me a marketing fee and I get them a deal and they don't pay. I'll never do it again. I just lose trust. Like you are paying a marketing fee. So why not just pay it out when you get the money? So I wish I affiliate marketing is complex. There's a lot that goes into a lot of training, a lot of learning management system, a lot of videos, a lot of tutoring in different forms. And you need the right software. Chris Bullock said, what's the difference between conversion rate and booking rate?

And what are good targets for each? Well, conversion rate. So let's just run through here. Somebody found my mailer, right? So the mailer came in the mail. I make a phone call. I'm on the phone with somebody at A1 Garage Door Service. That's my booking rate.

If I go on Nextdoor, if I go on Yelp, if I go on Angie and I submit a lead and someone gets back to me via form fill, that's a booking rate. Booking is anything that comes in to book the customer out to the home. Conversion rate is now I knock on the door.

And a lot of people brag how they can sell over the phone, which is complete bullshit because your conversion rate goes down dramatically if you don't just come look at my stuff. Imagine, before I look at your car, I'm going to give you a price. It just seems like a bait and switch. And I probably wouldn't do it. I want you to take a look at it and give me all my options. So you show up to the home. You give options. You do a great job. You present yourself well. You smile. You find common terms like Joe Corsaro says, your magic moment.

And you treat them with a lot of respect and dignity and empathy. You sit down at their kitchen table, you give them options. They say we want to do the work. That's a conversion. So booking rate should be good company, 75 and above, great company, 85 and above. Conversion rate on service should be above 90%. Conversion rate on new equipment should be around 60 or more.

And then you got service to sales where you started the work and convert that into sales. That should be 100% of the conversion because you've already converted it to service call. Service to sales is a different conversion rate. We call that our gross close rate. And now I'm confusing everybody. So you might have to rewind this. But we call it our gross close rate, service to sales. So we made money on the service call and we sold a new door. Lattice Hetler.

I run a million dollar plumbing and HVAC business. I need help and insight on Facebook marketing and marketing in general via Google. Can you point me towards a book that can help with that? I also read Alex Ramosi's books on sales and leads as well. Alex is a great guy. Lots of great information. You know what? I'm not going to give you anything right now. I'm going to do some research. One of my buddies has a good book. His name is Kasim Sat. Let me look it up real quick.

on Google and it talks a lot about paid. And I know I have some books on it, but it's been so long and they're outdated. I just kind of keep up with this stuff now. And there's different forums. I mean, Reddit, there's a lot of stuff. You could go to a million places, but let me just tell you, Qasim Aslam, A-S-L-A-M wrote a book about Google. I'm going to get back about the books. I don't feel like I've got great books off the top of my head for that.

I currently work as a garage door tech. Is it worth it to jump ship and try to start something on your own? The current market isn't huge, but there are a few companies here, a couple guys who are on their own. Just want to gain some perspective on it. You know, I have a lot of technicians that try to go out on their own. I'll give you the best answer I could. There's opportunities to go out on your own. I'd ask if you've got a wife and if you've got kids.

And I'd ask if you're willing to give five years of living well below your means to reinvest in the business. And are you willing to sacrifice relationships, work on Thanksgiving and Christmas and work a lot of weekends? Because if that's the case and you're willing to invest in your education, work five, 10 hour days and then educate yourself three hours every night, seven days a week. So 50 hours on top of 21 hours. I say absolutely do it.

You got five years to commit. You're willing to work 50 hour weeks and learn 21 hours on top of that. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Absolutely. But relationships are going to suffer. Now, if you got a bunch of money saved and your credit score is perfect and you're willing to invest in quick things for education, like do a shop tour, which I don't charge for, but I think you would kind of make that quicker than five years, but

you know there's a lot of people that jump into business because they say i want freedom and i want to make my own schedule and that's just there's no freedom when you own a business everything relies on you if you don't know how to deal with stress and anxiety it's not for the fainted heart i'll tell you that man there's a lot more questions uh let me read some of these questions these are all great questions there's just so many of them trying to help everybody let's see i'm in columbus ohio

Look up A1 GarageBars. It's only a few guys. We're going to really focus on that market next year. Jordan Peterson recently did an interview with Frank, economic character of rights-promoted profits sharing. Any thoughts on his ideas? I haven't heard that interview, but there's a book called Stake in the Outcome, and it explains this stuff. I think performance pay and

uh profit sharing is a great thing i'd rather do it with equity incentive programs and bonuses than profit sharing there's a profit sharing mechanism oh my gosh i got the worst headache nasally it's called an esop and esops do very very well but if you talk to most pe guys they don't love buying esops because it's a lot to unwind uh but it could be a great business

My small landscape business went through 12 employees this year. I feel like I'm doing everything right. They were all W2 employees. A week after I buy the $250 pair of boots, I do my best to give them a positive reassurance throughout the day and remind them that when the company continues to grow, so does their wage. I cannot, for the life of me, get them to stay. I just hired two more people and I'm praying

And I'm paying them each $30 an hour in the hopes that a high starting wage will get them to stay. Anthony, here's what I can tell you, man. It's not just what you pay. It's not the work boots. Do you have conversations with them? Do you work alongside of them? Do they got great leadership? Do they have the potential to move up the company? Do you show them that potential? Do you go out to eat with them? Do their families know who you are?

I think a lot of people want to work for A1 because they're like, I can move up in the company. As big as you are, I still feel small compared to what it's going to be. You guys offer great benefits. I can learn a lot at this company. You know, you don't hear because I get $30 an hour, I work here. You hear because of the potential. So I'm advertising the potential for someone to be able to move up in the company. Everything they say has a purpose behind the way I wanted them to see it.

You know, I wouldn't want to work anywhere. I did landscaping for a long time and $30 an hour. There's so many other opportunities that, you know, it's going to be hard to get great people unless you give them. I work on a bonus performance structure pay. I show them where they can move up to very quickly, potentially run their own crew or their more responsibility, which is way higher pay. And I probably pay landscaping on gross profit.

It's how I structure all the pay structures. And obviously there's a lot to do with windshield time, knocking on the doors around the house you're at because it's right next door. You can knock it out quickly. And a CFO's job is to give you how much you can charge for those and tell you how much it means. Well, we're spending an average of, I'll show you what a CFO would do.

They'd say, right now our average distance between jobs is 22 minutes. We got four guys on the truck. We're paying $25 too. So four guys on the truck, $25 equals $100. The 22 minutes is almost a half an hour. That costs about 50 bucks. So right there, I found 50. You added the gas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We could actually give each customer on that street $30 less and still be making a profit. Those are the analysis that a CFO does.

I know that wasn't your question, but I'm just trying to give you some insights. I'm a random person on the internet just to say hi. Well, that's nice. How was your KPI automated? Are you using service type? I'm trying to use template just shared. When you build this table, right, you can actually build service site and pull out. It's got an open API. So what I would tell you is you want to get with a BI tool, depending on the size of your company.

and automate all this stuff this is more of a software thing but you get a good developer and you can find them on upwork you can find some stuff off fiverr but upwork and you say i just need to get a bi tool you tell them what the data sets looks like where they find the data in the fields and they'll look at the api they might use some web hooks and they'll build it for you they might take maybe they're 90 bucks an hour and they say it's a 30 hour job you're at 30 hours you're at 2700 bucks

Maybe it's a little bit more complicated. This is where you need to say, how much work am I doing here? Do I have the right reports to make the right decisions? And there's something along the lines here of data integrity. Like if you're not closing out your invoices right and there's not a great standard operating procedure behind what you're doing, you're going to spend a lot more time, energy, and effort to get the data because it's not scrub data. It's dirty data. And that means the stuff you're looking at doesn't really have a big purpose anyway. So it starts off with manuals, SOPs.

To get good KPIs, it's got to be good data in. Man, guys, I really appreciate these questions. I've got people here waiting for me. If you want all these questions, I will answer on my next. I'll try to get through some of them. Let's do one in two weeks. Let's have a mid one we do.

And I will get to these questions the next two weeks. The more thought out they are, the better we're going to be. If you got questions, go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions. You want to order my new book, it's elevateandwin.com. And I give a lot of freebies. And if you want to see the key podcast takeaways, go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash bonus. Another thing, I hope you're still here. Don't go away yet. Go to tommymellow.com forward slash news.

Those of you that don't have my newsletter, I'm doing some free ones because I want everybody to see what they are. I'm going to lose my ass on this because I'm basically giving away... It cost me...

about 20 bucks an issue, but it's hard to explain because I've got the writers that help me put it all together. So it goes through a bunch of interviews. Then I got to pay for the mail fee and then I got to pay for the print fee, but they're expensive. But if you guys want, you'll get three free issues. It's called secret of the trades and there's no marketing in it. It's just all pure Tommy Mello. A lot of these questions you guys have are answered in this newsletter and

And even though I posted this in the Home Service Freedom or Home Service Expert page, if you've got an Apple phone or even listen to podcasts, obviously you're listening to this. Go to Home Service Expert. I'm trying to move up in the search engines on the podcasts because my goal is that I deliver better guests.

And as I get better rankings, I get better guests. It's just kind of how it works. I can get very amazing people like Tony Robbins to come on easily if he gets in front of enough people. That's how this works. So if you leave a review and then write four sentences about what you love about the podcast, it makes a big difference to me on who I get to help you get the right guests to come in. It's crazy how that works.

So I don't make any money on the podcast. I don't have any advertising. I literally want to get great guests. I want to help change your life for the best. So reviews go a long way. If you could do that and you got a wife or a husband and they benefited from the business or maybe some kids, maybe you could give me...

the whole household that listens to it on their way to church leaves a review. But I appreciate you guys listening. I'm really here to deliver value. I would go longer, but I do have a lot of people waiting for me. So appreciate you guys. Absolutely phenomenal. This was great. Lots of people are on. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you're going to kill it. Show up, give all you got. Your people come before you to remember that. Put them first and you'll be successful. Thanks for listening, guys.

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.