Don’t Go Broke Trying to Get Rich with Ryan Pineda

don't go broke trying to get rich. And so going broke is not just financially.
It's like, bro,

if you get a divorce, you lose your kids, you lose your health, you lose your faith. Those are all ways you go broke.
I mean, in life, if you just go broke in one area of life, it screws you. Right? If your health sucks, I mean, dude, you're jacked.
If you get fat and out of shape and you go get diabetes, dude, it's going to screw up the rest of everything you do. If you got marriage problems, it's going to screw up the rest of your life and business.
If you got problems with faith and you're not feeling purposeful and you feel void and empty, guess what? That affects everything. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.
Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you.
First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview.
So I ask the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES 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.
Welcome back to the home service expert. Today I have a very random guest, an amazing guest.
His name is Ryan Panetta. He wrote a cool book called The Wealthy Way.
Don't go broke trying to get rich. That's such a badass title.
And I think most people do. They go broke trying to act

rich. They live at their grandma's house, but they rent the most expensive apartment they could find for about a month.
And then they drive a badass Beamer and they never save money. But Ryan is a real estate mongrel.
Got invested over $100 million in real estate since 2010. He's founded over seven different businesses that generate lots and lots of money.
He's got an amazing podcast. He speaks at a lot of different events.
I spoke at his event. He's got a great event.
He's got a wife, Mindy, and three children, James, Olivia, and Judah. I think I heard all of them last night on the phone.
You did hear them all. And plays a lot of golf.
You big baseball player. Yeah.
What else? Tell us all about you. Dude, I think you covered it, man.
Love Jesus. I think that was the only thing not in the bio, but everything else is there, man.
And you're you're based out of Vegas. What brought you to Vegas? Born and raised.
No. Yeah.
Born there, you know, went to high school. When I played baseball, I got to travel the world.
So I've lived here in Phoenix when we were in spring training. I lived in Canada.
I've lived in Dallas. I've lived in the Northeast.
So I've kind of lived everywhere. And after experiencing it all, it's kind of like nothing like home.
So I like Vegas. And what do you, you know, Vegas is a lot like Phoenix.

Yeah, it is.

You think you're in Vegas forever?

Yes.

You just love it.

I love it.

What exactly do you love about Vegas?

I'm just curious.

Probably all the same reasons you like Phoenix, right?

I mean, it's great for business.

You know, I like the weather.

I like the desert.

Yeah.

It's convenient, you know, flights, lots to do lots of great food, no income tax. The affordability is good.
People are always in Vegas. So for business, like podcast events, like nobody has a problem coming to Vegas.
It's super good for that. What do you think the market's going to do here going into the next year? I mean, you study real estate more than I do.
I was talking to my guy at Goldman and he sees next year being great, but you never know. What do you see? I think next year, obviously everything's localized market-wise, but overall I think it's going to be better than this year.
I don't think it's going to be crazy. I wouldn't call it great in terms of like, if I think of great, I'm thinking like 2020, 2021, early 22 where things were like crazy.
Yeah. Right.
So I don't see that, but I see definitely better. What do you think about real estate? It's getting expensive, man.
I mean, it's getting really expensive. And you know, prices are, I've heard some prices are coming down, but interest rates are coming down.
I just, I don't know. It's even a dual-income family to afford a house these days.
It's going to be interesting to see how people play out because I see it only playing out one of two ways. One is people move and work remote.
You can go move to the Midwest and it's cheap, right? Right. The second option is, man, technology kind of changes the game.
And you would know more about this than anyone with all your guys' businesses. But it's like, I think at some point they find a more efficient way to build homes, a way to do it way cheaper.
You know, Phoenix, it's not like there's a lack of land in Phoenix, right? You could just keep building on the outskirts and keep expanding. So I think somebody's going to start as time goes on, figure out 3D printing or whatever.
I saw this 3D thing that kind of swivels around and goes on top. Yeah.
Builds the walls up. Yeah.
You know what I'm talking about? That kind of do the cement. I think that that's the only way it starts to go down.
Yeah, because if it's more expensive to build a house, I always tell people like, hey, you can buy a house. The land always goes up, it seems like.
But the house, sometimes you got to remodel. You got to redo the pipes.
You got to get the tankless. Yeah.
And what would end up happening is all these, you know, right. I mean, like the city is built.
So all those properties that are already done the way they are, they're going to retain the value. Right.
But then there's going to be all these houses on the outskirts that are new, cheap, different kinds of builds. And I think that that's how they solve it.
Okay. Interesting.
So we were talking a little bit last night, you've got a lot of mentors or people you look up to. And a lot of people look up to you.
We were talking about Ed Milet. Yep.
And Martel, we were talking about Dan Martel. Yeah.
And the heck's his name? The other guy that was big insurance. Oh, PBD.
Yeah, PBD. Yep.
You know, I've heard a lot. I think Ed Milet is one of the best speakers I've seen.
He's very, very good on stage. He tells great stories.
He gets very emotional when he's talking. Out of everybody you've kind of been around and got to know, who's your favorite mentor? Oh, man, this is a good question.
Let me add before I answer that about something you just said about, you know, you spoke at my event, Ed has spoken at my event. I've had a lot of these guys.
One thing people probably don't know about you that I would know because I've had everyone is that you're bigger as far as business and everything goes than almost all of these guys. And you know, they may have the social media following everything else, but as far as business and acumen and everything goes, you've done way more than pretty much everyone.
And that actually was apparent to me at the last WealthCon you spoke at because you had no ego about how your speaking slot was. So there are a lot of guys who have extreme ego with when they speak, how many minutes they speak, you know, their topic, who they're speaking before and after, like, dude, you deal with kind of like a lot of divas.
Yeah. Right.
We were running late on time because one guy was going way over. If you remember.
Yeah. I think he went over like, he said, Hey, give me another five minutes and I want another 20.
Yeah. And we were like, no, that ain't happening.
Right. And you were speaking next.
Right. And this guy hasn't done anything you've done or anything else.
And you were like, hey, you know what? I'll just speak for like 15. It's all good.
You're like, I don't care. Yeah.
And you know, you're over here running a, you know, multi nine figure business and you're coming out to speak just for this event. And you're still like, Hey, whatever's best for the event.
I'll cut my time short. It's all good.
Very few people do that. Like very few.
And so I just want people to know that like that type of stuff that I see behind the scenes, like always reminds me why someone is so successful. Cause whenever I get the guys who are like ego driven, I'm like, this guy doesn't get it.
Yeah. Like that's a little, it's like to talk with a bunch of different types of speakers and how they can be prima donnas and how it's, everything's gotta be perfect.
And especially when they get paid to speak and that's all they do. Yeah.
And I can't figure out mathematically how it would ever make sense for me to speak. Mathematically, I don't care if you paid me a million dollars to be somewhere.
The hourly rate that I'm kind of, but you know what I do? I get in the right rooms and meet the right people. You can't put a price tag on that.
No, no. So it's really the socialization of different topics and just the network.
I work with a lot of different coaches that we pay a lot of money for. And one of the coaches, you got to teach your employees a few things.
And one of them is how to make connections. I've learned how to make a lot of connections.
And now my job is to make sure my leadership team makes the right connections and gets in the right rooms. Because I always put the time and energy into me going to meet these people, getting on the right podcast, talking on podcasts podcast, listening to podcasts, going to the right seminars, doing the right shop tours, reading the right books, hiring the right mentors.
And now I'm starting to do it for all my team. Yeah.
Because there's a law of the lid that they're only going to grow as far as their ceiling goes. John Maxwell, right? That's exactly who it's from.
He was, um, so like speaking of speakers, he was at my office a month ago and he was doing a workshop. And he talked about that law.
I'd never heard him talk about it. I'd heard of the idea, but I never heard it law of the lid.
And yeah, he was just talking about that. Like, man, dude, people are only going to go to the level that you are as a leader.
You ain't going to attract somebody better than you. Why would they work for you? And it's like, well, how do you get better? You just get mentors.
You go see what everyone else is doing. And that was one reason, like, I brought, you know, all these guys with me.
I'm like, bro, we got to see what Tommy's doing. Like, how did he build this thing that he's built? And like, what does it look like? What is this? That's why I'm always asking questions.
I'm like, so why are those people there? What's their benefit? Like, why are you doing it? You know, your time's value. Like, I want yeah, I love it.
I'm playing the long game too. No one on my team has got the vision 10 years down the road like me.
I want them to stay in less than three years, mostly in the next year. And I want them to have some ideas of what's happening in 2026.
But I'm not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but I think of it like I'd rather slow growth and steady, but hitting this crazy evaluation. I literally do this math every day.
Now, $20,000 ticket average, 50,000 jobs a month. Listen, it gets kind of crazy.
We're running 20,000 jobs a month. So that's two and a half times, $20,000 ticket average is massive compared to where we're at, but it's bringing on different industries.
It's 12 months out of the year, obviously 30% of the bottom line, which I'm not far off and it's getting a 30 X the public market. Yeah.
And the company's worth 108 billion. Yep.
But when I think like this, it's like I told you last night, even if i shit even if i don't make that yeah if i shit the bed yeah oh no it's only worth 30 billion it's like it's okay so like people are like well how do i get to how do you get past a million and i'm like how do i get past 100 billion it's just a different way of thinking it's thinking bigger yeah and it's mathematically driven yeah it's not like i'm thinking about customers recruiting training like how would i get into these different sectors like licensing the hard things that nobody wants to talk about yep so you had john maxwell how do you get a guy like john maxwell just to come into your shop and just have put on a dude it was relationships so you know i've had like all these guys on my podcast and and at my events and It's the same way we all, you know, you and I have connected. I mean, you've been on the show, you've been at the events.
Now I'm here at your shop. Like if you treat people right, they're in turn going to want to do more with you.
Right. You know, that's literally what you said with why those people are there.
Right. Show them a good time, man.
If they want to use stuff, great. If not, they still had a great experience.
They're going to tell people about us. Right.
And that's what we've always done with the podcast, with the events, with everything else. And, you know, like even with John, they came from a guy, Michael Francis, who's a big mob guy.
And he spoke at one of my events, great Christian dude. And he was like, Hey, my friend, John Maxwell needs a place to hold his event.
I think your office would be great for it. And I was like, okay, like let's do it.
I ain't going to charge him anything. Let's roll.
And he's like, great. So, you know, we opened up the office for them on a Saturday, John came, I got to meet him, talk to him.
I spoke at the event to help them out and it was great. So, you know, and whatever door that leads to, it leads to, you know,

I never met John before.

So it's a first impression.

Yeah.

So did you just say, go ahead and use it?

Yeah.

That's nice.

Yeah.

I hate that.

You know, some people are like trying to make money off everything.

Heck no.

You know, those guys though, you know, those guys are like trying to get on the action on every little thing. Yeah.
Like, Hey dude, remember that guy I told you about it? I know you did a deal with him. Where's my, where's my cat? Where's my referral? It's like, there's a few people I know that are just, it's like, they won't do anything unless there's some type of affiliate deal connected to it.
Yeah. I don't even do affiliates.
Like I just am like, you do, I say some um it's pretty cool clothes on facebook you do yeah dude we got some dope gear we got the make america wealthy like i thought you'd do oh yeah my my suit pants yeah my suit and pants yeah suits yeah yeah well that's not even affiliate they came to me and they're like bro like i was already a fan of their clothes yeah and they're like well what if we did a line for you i was like i'm down what does it look like? And they're like, bro, like I was already a fan of their clothes. And they're like, well, what if we did a line for you? I was like, I'm down.
What does it look like? And they're like, well, we'll pump the ads. We'll get you all your custom line, all this stuff.
And I was like, I don't even care. Like, I don't even need to make money on it.
Let's do it. And so, yeah, I haven't even ever made money on that.
For me, it's just about, I love the product. I still wear it.
And it's free advertising for me. Like you just said, I didn't put two and two together when you said that you've seen those ads, but there you go.
And I didn't pay for them. That was great.
I love that, man. So you, when I walked through your office, you had about 80 cameras set up.
It was like everybody in there, you're teaching how to be an influencer. It seemed like every single person, not just you, but your whole team.
What is the theory behind that? Because I love it. And I wish I had more time that all my technicians and installers could become influencers.
They're just out working with their hands every day. They've already got maxed out schedules.
Yeah. I think there is ways you can incorporate content into what you do that would really scale it.
I do too. Yeah.
Especially like in the garage, talking to clients. Oh, for sure.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think you absolutely could. My guy right now has glasses on.
They're Ray-Bans. Yep.
It's recording. Yeah.
So that'd be an easy one for them to do, right? That's just right off the bat. But no, I just think that attention is the most valuable currency there is right now because it's really the only limited currency.
When you think about attention overall, it's like, okay, we know there's unlimited money. They're just going to keep printing.
With attention, there's only so many humans. We all have 24 hours.
It's capped. And when you actually think about discretionary attention,, that's not really changing with people.
Because if we all work, you know, just call it nine to five, right? The average human has about four hours of discretionary time per day. That's remained pretty fixed.
And so what are they doing with it? Well, it's literally competing for everything. Books, podcasts, Netflix, social media, YouTube.
Working out, everything. Everything.
It's discretionary. So the competition for those four hours is growing more and more fierce as time goes on.
And it's getting more expensive. That's why marketing...
I mean, dude, you know marketing and ads. They're going to just keep going up.
They're not getting any cheaper. Yeah.
I mean, they're not getting any cheaper, but there's better ways to do them. Right.
Micro influencers. It's crazy.
Like a man of trust. Yeah.
You're going to have to like find the inefficiencies in the marketing. Right.
But like the generic Facebook ad for the cost per impression is just going to keep rising. Oh, it will.
A hundred percent. Everything.
And TV is going to get more expensive and radio will get more expensive. It keeps up with inflation for sure.
And there's less eyeballs on it. That's the problem.
Yeah. And so if all the eyeballs are leaving one thing, I've spent millions on TV.
And then where are they going? Are they going to, especially for your business, if they're going to social media and all of a sudden your guys are now doing these home virtual reality with the glasses. They're like, dude,

A1's legit. I see how they treat people.

I love that.

I like those. The thing I

didn't like about the glasses because I bought a bunch of them

is they don't hold a lot of data.

I felt like it goes, what, like

10 minutes or how long do they

record? 60-second clips.

As many as I want.

Yes. Fucking cool.
Man, I've got some cool technology stuff we're working on. So how do you balance CEO, content creator, family man, man of God? It's not easy.
I think it comes back to, that's what the book is about, Wealthy Way, right? Yeah. Talk to me about the book too.
Yeah. So I mean, it's like, don't go broke trying to get rich.
And so going broke is not just financially. It's like, bro, if you get a divorce, you lose your kids, you lose your health, you lose your faith.
Like those are all ways you go broke. I mean, in life, if you just go broke in one area of life, it screws you, right? Like if your health sucks, I mean, dude, you're jacked.
Like if you get fat and out of shape and you go get diabetes and like, dude, it's going to screw up the rest of everything you do. If you got marriage problems, it's going to screw up the rest of your life and business.
If you got problems with faith and you're not feeling purposeful and you feel void and empty, guess what? That affects everything. So for me, it's like, all right, if I know that a lot of things in business, so business is the only thing that can actually be delegated, right? We would agree that your health can't be delegated.
I got to put in the work. Family, faith, faith and family can't be delegated.
You have to do it. Fitness can't be delegated.
Finance. That can be delegated.
And then there's the fifth one. I had a future self, your education is your self.
That can't be developed. Yeah, you have to do it.
You have to do it, yeah. Right? So four of the five, yet we spend all our time on the one that can be outsourced and invested in everything.
It doesn't make sense. That's true.
Yeah, you know, I believe there's 162 hours in a week. And you spend 50 working, 50 sleeping.
So you got 62 hours, which means you can watch your favorite show. You can read a book a week.
You you spend 50 working 50 sleeping still got 62 hours which means you can watch your favorite show you'll read a book a week you can spend an hour with each important person in your family take your wife out for two date nights yep it's incredible when people say i don't have the time they're dumb it's literally like and i get it because some of us want to relax some of us just need to unwind and some of us got anxiety. But this idea of Dan Martel's buyback your time, like it was, he had to make me look out of a different lens.
Cause I'm like, dude, I'm pretty humble. Like the only chef I ever had was chef Boyardee.
And so he's like, you need to hire a chef. We did this little exercise that we figured out my hourly rate of what I bring in.
And he's like, so you're going to hire a chef. You're going to get two people cleaning your house.
You're going to hire a driver. And he goes, Tommy, it's selfish not to do that.
And I'm like, no, that kind of seems selfish to do it. And he's like, well, how much more can you do for the people? You said you care a lot about the people that I want, right? Yeah.
Yes, I do. How much more can you communicate with them and help them? And we talk about how often do you think you tell your wife you love her? You know, it's funny about that.
So part of wealthy ways, I have an app that I made. Okay.
And you can track three habits on the app that you check every day. Yes or no.
I did them. So I do this every morning, three habits, right? And you can pick whatever habits you want, right? Hey, I want to read for 20 minutes a day.
Hey, I want to pray every day. Hey, I want to like, but one of my habits is to tell my wife I love her.
Okay. So I look at it every morning and like literally every morning, the moment I look at it, I'm like, I love you.
Like I just send the text right now. Right.
She's sleeping, but I do it every morning and she wakes up to it. I would forget every day if I didn't have the reminder.
So I tell her at least once a day that I'm aware of. Yeah.
You know, probably on the phone when you're hanging up, stuff like that. But I know for sure once a day.
And you know, what's funny is I took it off my habits. This is a good story about habits.
So every year I've changed my habits, like what was important to me. So like right now, another habit is a prey as a family, as an entire family.
So we do that at night. And then my third habit is, did I practice golf? Cause I want to practice literally, I want to practice every day.
So the first two seem really noble. And then the last one is like, yo, I just want to be a savage golfer.
So one year I did it with like, Hey,, hey, tell Mindy I love her.

The next year, I was like, oh, well, I've built that habit.

I'm going to build three new habits.

And so, I've done like cold shower or whatever, right?

Well, that year that I took it off, I stopped doing it.

And one day, she reminded me, this was months later, she goes, you know, you used to send

me these texts every morning that I'd wake up to saying how much you love me and stuff like that. Why don't you do that anymore? And I was just like, dang, dude, like I am like, you just forget like how bad of a human am I that I can't even remember to do that if I'm not just reminded.
That's interesting. But it's a good lesson that every human needs to be reminded of their task every day.
Your sales team, your employees, you. There are.
So if you figure out protocols, like when I get into the shower, it's all right there. I floss.
I brush my teeth. Yeah.
I shave. I've got like this whole protocol.
I do as much as I possibly can in the shower. You floss and brush your teeth.
Yes. Everything, everything I possibly can do.
And so those are easy to do. And it's a lot easier when you have help around the house.
I'll tell you that. But the reason I asked you how often when you get in an argument and you guys, I'm sure, bicker about stuff, you and Mindy, does she know that you love her still no matter what? Yeah.
And you're allowed to communicate with her and tell her, you can look her in the eyes and say, I completely disagree. Whether it's about the way you're raising your kids or anything.
It could be anything. It could be what she left out.
Wear your shoes in the house, whatever. You see, when we have our internal clients, which are employees or I call them my coworkers, we need to tell our people we love them, we care about them, and they're doing great.
Ten times more. So when we do have a problem with their performance, I'm starting to realize that my full-time job is like I'm an inspiration officer.
I need to continue to send 25 handwritten cards, video text messages, not just text messages, because that could be my assistant, but stuff from me. They know it's you.
And it's stuff that they know it's me. I'm not saying I'm going to have AI telling me who did amazing that day.
Like literally the power BI dashboards that could actually find out who's an outlier of their normal patterns and recognize that because we want more of that behavior. Yeah.
Birthdays, anniversaries. Here's the big one.
Calling their significant other and telling them how awesome they are oh wow that's a good one yeah how do you do that though with so many employees so i created an app like you were talking about i want to talk more about your app too but it basically talks to ukg or paylossity it talks to your payroll software okay and so i got birthdays i've got anniversary dates of when you started to work here and then this isn't beta right now but I'm going to send them a questionnaire and they tell me all their kids birthdays they upload photos they tell me what they like to do and then it's pretty simple all it is is that I've got it in one dashboard where I can send out as many videos with two full--time executive assistants, it makes it a lot easier.

Yeah.

I can knock 20 videos out in less than a half an hour.

And people are just like,

how the hell would this guy find the time?

And the handwritten letters are automated

in a way I got it all set up.

And, you know, birthdays, anniversaries,

sending out just,

I don't need to send videos out for everything.

Yeah.

I'd rather do the videos for when you go above and beyond.

Yeah.

Like they're really special.

Thank you. anniversaries, sending out just...
I don't need to send videos out for everything. I'd rather do the videos for when you go above and beyond.

Yeah. They're really special.

I know CEOs that spend

a day out of the week just handwriting

letters, and I'm like...

It's not probably the best thing.

They end up on Forbes or something.

Yeah, I've heard about those guys

too. They're on a plane.
They'll write

these long-ass letters. Well, I think too, even for you heard about those guys too.
They got a plane. They'll write these long ass letters.

Well, I think too, even for you,

like to spend 30 minutes a day, right?

I mean, that's so much money out of your time to go write letters.

Yeah.

And like, clearly you're saying it's worth it.

Not only letters, but the videos,

the text messages and the reinforcement.

And then there's also a side of it saying I'm watching.

And it's, who needs a little nudge? Yeah. Hey, what's

going on, man? Maybe I'll give you a week off.

Let me give you a gift card for you and your wife to

go to dinner tonight. Let me know if you need some time.

I just realized your conversion

rate's going to shit. We're not entering

the customer's business. I'm not mad at you.

But there's obviously

something going on. Can I help you with anything?

Do you need to talk about something.

Is everything good with the family?

Yeah.

But to know that I'm watching just is like the main goal.

What do you think about?

So,

you know, part of my thing,

especially with wealthy way is like,

you know,

my office is open nine to five on the weekdays.

It's not open on the weekends.

And so there's no expectation that people need to work on the weekends.

They can,

if they want, you know, for our business, right? I mean, you guys are installing garage doors,

you know, all the time, but you know, part of that is I'm not expecting anyone to do something

I'm not willing to do. Right.
Right. That's one thing.
But the second thing is like back to

what you're saying that, Hey, if their personal life is good and you know, their family's good and everything else is good, their work performance should probably be pretty good too. Because so many sales guys, they're super emotional.
And it's like, dude, if this person has a problem at home and you're wondering why they're not closing, odds are something's going on in their personal life and that's why they're not closing. They didn't just forget how to close.
Yep. But one of the things I always do is twice a year, I'll tell them, Hey, send me a receipt, go spend $30 to buy your wife or girlfriend flowers.
Yeah. The next day is always a record.
It's always a record. The best 30 bucks spent.
Let's say like, if I offer it to a hundred technicians, 30 of them will do it. And some of them don't even send me the receipt.
They're just like, thanks for reminding me. They don't really care.
But I'll tell you, here's a little piece of advice. You just nailed it on the head.
If they're not good, if they're not having reassurance when they go home from work and their wife or husband's not behind them, their family's not behind them. A great way to tell this, and Dave Ramsey talks about it, is you take your person out to dinner and say, listen, invite your wife, invite your girlfriend, invite your husband, whoever it is.
And you can totally tell when you're at dinner with two couples, who's opening the door, who's ordering, just you could totally tell if there's tension. Yeah.
And if there's tension, how do you expect somebody to get rid of, like if they've got a hard life at home yeah how do you have them zip it up every day and perform at work and that you know people go through divorces shit happens people die you know parents and grandparents and stuff it happens all the time but you want to kind of you'd rather find these things out beforehand before and you're allowed to do that you're like let's get to know each other a little bit more before I give you an offer. Yeah, 100%.

And that's a great way to see if they're happy at home. Yeah.
And I think it goes back to, like for us, we're doing a couple of things. So we're taking a company trip to Cancun in a couple of weeks.
So that's going to be fun. A lot of our employees go to church together or they're in Bible studies together.
And so, you know, and part of it is not even with the attempt to make it better for the business. It's just, that's what we do, right? That's what we want.
That's the culture, you know, that's why people want to work for us. Like they're attracted to that.
They're already maybe doing something like that. Right.
And I mean, if you can get everybody bought into the mission beyond just doing garage doors or flipping houses or whatever else, the mission of, man, how do we really value everyone's life, not just their job? People will buy into that. And one thing I always tell people too is you're going to pay with either the financial paycheck or the emotional paycheck.
And it's like, people value both. It's not just people work because they're going to make so much money.
They work because, man, what kind of fulfillment and purpose does this give me? And man, if you're not working on the emotional side, it's going to be hard to keep people. I agree.
That's why we hired a dream manager. Originally, it was Kelly.
Now it's Travis. Her full-time job is to find out people's dreams.
And then we reverse engineer their dreams. How many weird jobs do you have? You're the chief inspiration guy.
And then you have the dream officer. Dream manager.
I'm a CEO, but I just tell you, we do have a lot of weird jobs. I mean, as the company grows, there's jobs that aren't even invented yet.
I mean, we've got virtual product specialists. So one of the things that we do differently at A1 is none of my technicians are a lot of self-new garage door.
You got to call it into the product specialist. And so I got 15 badass experts that have three computers in front of their face.
They can actually build actually build the door on your home and give you the options. They understand our finance partners and they, you know, truth be told, they're better at closing.
Yeah. So I teach 450 guys how to everything there is to know about doors when I get trained 15.
And then I can have the perfect turnover. Yeah.
And so we got five green lights to the perfect turnover and you'll feel good about it. You're not going to feel like somebody took advantage of you because if we're giving you options, then it's not an ultimatum.
You know, there's no way you should ever sit down with somebody who says, here's the offer. Here's our price.
Yes or no. I say, Ryan, here's a few options.
You can pick one you like. Which one really makes sense for you? You want to go with the more economical one, the builder grade,

or do you want something that's going to last forever?

Yeah. And usually, you'll

probably pick something in between. And for Doors,

we've got six options.

And it's awesome because we can take

this into every other industry. That's why

I see this company just going up,

up, up, up, up.

And I like liquidity events,

although I'm pretty, like, I try to roll more equity than they will allow me to roll. But I still think it's good to save for a rainy day.
Can you explain in your book, The Wealthy Way describes the guide to helping you get the freedom you've always wanted and the purpose that you've longed for? Can you explain what it means to build true wealth? Yeah. I mean, there's once again, different aspects of life, right? You named them faith, family, fitness, finance, all those things.
So like the way that most people perceive wealth is financial. And for me, it's not, I mean, it's a piece, it's not the only piece, right? Like I want to have a great marriage.
I want to have great faith. I want to be in great shape.
I want to make a lot of money.

I want to do all those things, right?

Well-rounded.

Yeah.

I don't want to be deficient in any of them.

And whenever I see people who are deficient,

and even just one of them,

you can tell.

You just can.

It's like, dude, you know,

you go meet these rich guys who are out of shape,

and it's like, bro, this ain't it.

I wouldn't trade places with you.

I don't care that you got $100 million more. It doesn't matter to me.
I wouldn't want that. So I think it's just this re-shift in people's minds of like, well, like let's first

prioritize what's the most important. Like how much money do you actually need at the end of the day?

Right. And you know, not for you, you're going to keep doing you, but like for the normal person,

like, yo, like what's the number? It's usually people always over five to $10 million not for you. You're going to keep doing you.
But for the normal person, like, yo, what's the number? It's usually people always over $5 to $10 million could set people up forever, ever, ever, ever, ever. I mean, the number could be a lot smaller than that.
It could be bigger to some. But what do you think the number is? Well, the normal everyday person, I think, is probably could live a great life in most places for like $20,000 a month, right? Yeah, no, it's true.
If you're just talking about reoccurring income, yeah. Yeah, for sure.
If you're bringing in 20 grand a month, you can pretty much have most decent things in life, right? 50 grand a month, I mean, it's hard to spend 50 grand a month and truly live that way. So you start to reverse engineer it and you're like, okay, well, how do I make 20 grand a month? Right.
How can I make it actively first? Okay. Then from there, how do I start making it passively? Right.
And it's like, you just reverse engineer that. So like people don't even know what their number is.
They just keep going. And then it's like, okay, cool.
You hit the number. You don't have to stop making money.
That's not the whole point. It's just like, okay, are there other priorities now that you would rather have, right? Would you rather trade

instead of growing to make 50 into 100? Would you rather now start spending more time with

your family? Would you rather start taking Fridays off to golf? Would you rather start

vacationing more? Because now you have options. And I think everyone's default thing is because

we're always working so hard as entrepreneurs is, oh, grow. We got to keep making more money.

Thank you. more.
Because now you have options. And I think everyone's default thing is because we're always working so hard as entrepreneurs is, oh, grow.
We got to keep making more money. But it's like, for me, that's not my default thing of like, let's spend every hour optimizing my time to make money.
It's, all right, let's spend every hour doing the things that I feel like I'm supposed to do in my life. That's smart.
I mean, that's true wealth. I mean, I think it's a healthy person of all five of those things.
Without one, you're losing a lot. I mean, I agree wholeheartedly.
Well, and the truth is too, the reason we work on finance first is because you do need it for most of the other things to even work, right? Like you got to pay rent or have a mortgage or whatever, right? You got to listen, you got to make money. It's hard to spend time with family.
What are we going to do? We're just going to sit in this broke ass apartment. Exactly.
Where can we go? We can't even go see a movie. We don't have the money.
We can't do anything, right? So like money definitely is a huge piece of it, but it's like, you know, most entrepreneurs, they don't adapt as they grow. They just kind of like, like Dan Martel brought it up even with you.
He's like, why don't you have a chef? This doesn't make sense. And it's like, well, this is how I've always done it.
This is what got me to this point. And he's like, well, you want to get to the next point? This is what it is.
I've learned a lot. I've looked through a different lens.
And the way that he explains things is he's like, I don't think you're looking at it like I look at it. He's like, have you ever thought about this? And he's not really pushy either.
Yeah. So it's nice.
It's nice for me. And I feel like I take a lot of consultants on extract as much as I could in 18 months.
Yeah. And then I get so much more of the first three months of any consulting.
I mean, that's just what happens because that first few months, think about if you're a consultant charging six figures a year, you want to make sure you're front loading the investment back to the to the person you're coaching. You're like, listen, I want to make sure you get 10 times value of what you're paying me.
So they're kind of front-loading. It's a great thing.
I mean, listen, that's why I always have a lot of coaches. There's a great book called Who, Not How by Dr.
Benjamin Hardy. Dan Sullivan.
Yeah, Dan Sullivan. And they wrote a lot of good books.
They wrote like a trilogy of books. 10X is better than 2X and The Gap and the Gain.
But when I think about business, I think about how could I walk into my org chart is sitting at a conference table. All my top leaders.
And I look at each one of them and I'm like, I't keep up with you you're better at everything that you do than i am can't keep up with you you're better at this piece than i'll ever be okay that's the dream that i have yeah when i walk in i still know i'll have valid concerns and thoughts and my vision is massive and i'm a people person and i'm a connection guy and I'm really big into marketing. But the goal is to help people either hire that person or help them develop into that person that I can't keep up.
Right. Because then, what's the point? Then you get all the time.
You get the vacations, the company's growing like crazy. You know, mistakes happen, shit happens.
I think sometimes when we hire an EA or we hire somebody that was going to work underneath us, we start seeing them make a lot of mistakes, but we forget about all the mistakes we made

to get to where we're at.

They never went through those mistakes.

Just like your kids.

Yep.

Like, what do you mean?

Why the hell didn't you?

You don't know any better.

I actually don't because I didn't live your life.

Yeah.

So I got to make some of you got to let your kids and I'm not a, I'm not a dad, but I'm

just, I'm a son.

Yeah. So I know some of the things you got to make mistakes on your own.
Yeah. And you got to let your people make those mistakes.
Yeah. Yeah.
I have a saying too. It's kind of a bad saying, but it's true.
It's like, assume everyone is stupid. Like, yeah, it's true.
I don't mean it in a derogatory way, but if you do that with your marketing, you'll always keep it simple. You always make sure they know the main point of what you're making.
And then when you're doing it with employees or anyone else, you're just not letting anything be assumed that they would understand what you know. It's like, no, dude, let's explain this from the ground level.
This is the shirt you wear. This is how you would talk to a fifth grader, but you have to do it.
And the same thing with your kids. You would never assume they know that because you just know they don't.
I was talking to the leader of our nonprofit with Wealthy Kingdom, and I was telling Justin this on the way here on the flight, but we were just talking about budgets. And he's like, yeah, I just didn't realize how much money we have to raise to do the things we want to do.
I'm like, where did you think this thing was getting funded from? Like, how did you think we were throwing these events and like hiring these people and doing like, where else is the money coming from? And he's like, yeah, I just never knew. I'm like, well, yeah, cause I've been funding it the whole time, but we need to replace what I do.
And we need to get millions of dollars in donations to really hit all of our goals. And we can't just rely on me to be the guy.
We got to get other people to buy in because it'll only go so far if it's just me. He's like, yeah, it makes sense now.
But it just shocked me that I'm like, dude, you haven't raised any money.

Do you even think like where your salary came from and how it's happening? It's crazy. No, it's, it's absolutely crazy.
I met a guy, Al Levy, the seven power contractor. He's a 72 years old now.
Yeah. And he taught me, he walked in my office and he goes, Tommy, show me the whole building.
He goes, show me your manuals. And I grabbed this old dusty book.
I'm like, this is like, no, no, no. Each position should have a manual SOPs checklist.
What are they allowed to wear? How did they take PTO? Are you allowed to have facial hair? Can you cuss in the building? Like everything. What's your primary project management tool?

You know, now it's Monday.

It used to be Basecamp and Asana and all that other shit.

So I said, I don't have manuals.

He goes, show me your org chart.

Really bad org chart.

He goes, show me your depth chart.

No depth chart.

It just means people can do jobs.

And he said, do you mind if I take a look at your warehouse? He looks at my warehouse. He goes, I could have stolen all your parts.
Your garage was open. Your forklift's sitting there.
There's no camera systems. He goes, if you want me to work with you, it's not going to be cheap.
But we're going to develop manual, standard operating procedures, checklists for everything in the business. So he wrote along with my technicians.
They all did something different. I know.
They did the same stuff, but they got the same result, but it was different. It was like, so we built, I think our tech manuals, 57 pages.
And it just shows even how we use the right tools. And now I started buying all the technicians, the same exact tools.
I said that the vans were the exact same vehicle, exact same everything. You can swap them out in any single state you're in.
Yep. And they'll feel the exact same way.
Same tools, same price book, same everything. Yeah.
And that mentor I had about getting everything to this process oriented, every single thing's a process. So when you build, if you hire a executive assistant, which I think is the most important thing for people, especially with a small business, is

start recording

yourself booking a ticket.

Here's what's going through my mind. If I'm

going to Vegas, I'll do Southwest. I don't really

give a shit. It's 45 minutes.
If I'm

going to Idaho, it needs to be private

because there's a private airport. If I'm

going to Atlanta, it's a little bit further away.

I need to be first class. I prefer

United or Delta. An aisle guy only.
I hate the windows. And I go, make sure you get my pre-check number right.
This is always messed up. And I start just talking out loud.
Yeah. And so I'm setting up.
So this is how to book the flights. 10 minute video.
Boom. Now, listen, I'm going to go through my email one by one and say, here's this guy.
Look him up on LinkedIn. Let them learn.
Do 10 emails an hour, record it all. Then they learn the names of each person and say, here's how my meeting notes set up.
I'm going to go through it. And I got a little camera over my shoulder.
That's the first thing everybody should be doing. And if you're still in the field doing something, whether you're selling real estate, hire a videographer.
If you're fixing garage, we're doing gutters, doing landscaping, start to build the playbook, start to put together a learning management system. Say, listen, when I'm cutting the lawn, the main thing is you got to make sure you check the water because sometimes we actually hit a line and we don't even realize it.
So you turn the water on, you check for any leaks before we leave. And you're just thinking that you're making checklists the whole time.
And this makes it a lot easier to run a business when you get an expected result. You can scale it a lot quicker.
Yeah. I literally was yelling at our sales team yesterday because I randomly went and looked at all their CRMs.
And I'm like, so tell me, what do you think is the most important smart view you have or pipeline? I got five different answers. And I'm like, why do you guys all have these custom views that mean nothing? Like, well, I thought this would be a good way to prospect leads.
I'm like, we give you the leads. You're not even prospecting.
There's new leads coming in every day. And we just start going through it all And their notifications are all different on their phones and their tasks.
They're everything is different. And I'm just like, so none of you guys can tell me what's the highest priority lead.
Nobody can tell me, you know, like how they look at like their leads and day to day. And I go, all right, here's what we're going to do.
I'm going to explain what views I want everyone to

have. And we're going to child lock them.
You can't even create a view anymore. You can't even

create like, these are what you're going to work out of because clearly you guys just don't even

know. Right.
And it was like, as you know, this seems common sense, but it's not to most people.

So, you know, to me, the most important lead you can get is right now, somebody that you're

assigned to, it's your lead that sends you a text. Right now, they want to talk to you right this second.
Let's hit those people. They're texting you right now a question or they're ready.
They want to buy. That's my first lead.
My second would be, okay, people that you're working, you're following up with, whatever the case is. Actually, I take that back.
That would be the third. The second is your brand new leads that just came in that day.
Like, let's hit the leads as they come in. Right.
Right. So, you know, you got people that have text you.
You got new leads that you haven't made contact with, but they've been assigned to you. Then you got your follow ups.
Then you have, you know, we call up for grabs, just like anyone can hit these leads. You know, that's pretty streamlined of how it should go down.

Nobody had that.

We have people hitting up for grabs first.

It's like, oh, well, you know,

I figured like I come in for the day, I'd go hit, you know, some leads,

try and get some new.

I'm like, but dude,

you have new leads sitting there

that have been assigned to you.

You got to get it.

So you got to get into lead scoring.

Yeah.

And we do a really good job of lead scoring.

There's software you can pull in. You can look up with Credit Karma.
We're getting an API in Credit Karma. Yep.
And Zillow. And how much you have paid off of your home.
Like all these factors. Now, what we do is it's called regression testing.
So when you've got the right tools to regression test, you can look for outliers. Which means we ran through the last 20,000 leads.
You could do this historically. Yep.
And you can kind of figure out which ones you closed, how you closed, what was worth what. And all of a sudden you can make these parallels.
And it's only the outliers. You study the outliers.
You say, well, this one factor could be male versus female. Yep.
I mean, it could be ethnicity wise. When we match up the veterans to someone that was in the military, they close.
So understanding that, and you could go down a weird, weird, weird, and you could, you know, data science is sometimes a science, sometimes not, unless it's truly a really big outlier. But these are the things I get fascinated with because, you know, what do you think the number one thing is that we look at to know it's going to be a big job? Let's just guess age of the home.
It's number of garages. That makes sense.
Yep. So if you've got a second door, but if you've got like, if you're a Paradise Valley.
You got 10 car garage, you're going to be a huge job. Well, even if it's a tune up on one door.
Yeah. Like let us look at all the doors.
Let's make sure everything's running right. People are like, yeah.
And by the way, I never judge a book by its cover. I make sure to tell my technicians don't go to like a broke.
You go to these broke areas like they say this, but Levine is not a wealthy area. And there's a lot of people that have overgrown landscaping.
I've pulled a lot of money out of there as people will go grab cash. Like, oh yeah, I don't want to put it on a credit card.
I'm like, okay, it's fine. But we really need to take care of this stuff to make it safe.
You take cash. We stopped taking cash.
Okay. Years ago, because the guys used to loan themselves money.
But hey, I got to start wrapping up here, but I got some final questions. By the way, what do you think? I feel like the new age, the new careers, I want to be an influencer.
I want to be an e-commerce. I want to do some type of Amazon arbitrage or TikTok arbitrage.
Do you think those are good things? And tell me how to become an influencer. Give me the basics if I want to do it because you're obviously massive.
People know who you are. Yeah.
As far as the influencer stuff goes, you got to actually do something worthwhile for people to listen to you. So like most people haven't done anything yet to, you know, like, why would I listen to you? Like, what's your track record? What have you done? Right.
So I think people are trying to like jump the cart before the horse on that front. So for me, it's like, I had flipped hundreds and hundreds of homes before I ever got on social media.
And it was like, all right, I'm gonna start talking about the thing I actually know about. And that's what I'm gonna talk about.
And then as time went on, I talked about other things and this and that. And it's just like, I can only talk to what I actually know.
And even with my team, they're like, man, how do we grow your following more? What's the next thing? And I'm like, honestly, the next thing is just getting better at business. There's no other way around it.
There's a certain amount of people who will listen to me based on my current success. But to get to the next level requires me to have...
I'm not going to all of a sudden just talk about smarter things because I just theorize them out of thin air. I got to actually go cut my teeth doing the next thing.
So anyways, they got to get better at first, especially if they're going to be in business influencers, which I would assume we're talking about. And then the second part is what thing to do, whether it's e-com or wholesale or any of these things.
There's lots of different side hustles and things that people are doing online. There's always going to be things that are trending at the time.

Every time I've ever done a trend, it always burned me.

So I wouldn't go for trendy things that don't...

Real estate's been around forever.

Garage doors and service businesses have been around forever.

Do things that have longevity.

Yeah.

And not fidget spinners.

Yeah.

Don't get me wrong. You can make a bunch of money, but it's like, what do you do after that? It's quick.
Yeah. It's in and out.
So are there any books that have blown your mind and completely changed the way that you thought about business life relationships? I mean, obviously as a Christian, the Bible, one book I've been reading a lot lately, it's called Driven by Eternity a guy named John Bevere. Really? I've heard it driven by eternity.
Yep. Driven by eternity.
So that's a really good faith-based book. As far as let's just say business books go, man, I was just with Jeremy minor who, you know, and he was, he was telling the statistic about books.
He was like, yeah, you know, after a week you retain 19% of the book.

And then after like 30 days,

you retain 2% of the book.

Like that's just how books are.

And then he made this analogy of,

you know, if you listen to a song,

you can recite every,

every, you know, line in the song.

Right.

I was like, that is interesting.

Cause yeah, when I think about

all the books I've read,

I've read hundreds of books.

I can't like recall too many of them really in depth, but I remember, oh, they were good. Or at that point in my life, they were really impactful for where I was at what stage.
But you had mentioned a book that I think is actually very underrated that I give to a lot of people. 10X is easier than 2X.
And your thought process with that reminded me of that, of like, well, if we get to 20K or yeah, 20K average ticket and we get to this and that, that gets us to 100 billion. And it's like, that is the thought process that that book is teaching.
And it's like, yo, if you want to... It's actually easier for you to go think that way than it is to be like, oh, how do we get from 500 million to 700 million? And another thing, you know, like me, I'm like, how do I get to 7.5% body fat? But I want to get to 260 pounds first because I want to be 235 at 7.5%.
Right. Then I'm just like cashing checks and breaking necks.
Why do you want to be so huge? What's your goal?

Like, what's the motivation?

Just be able to just, I don't know.

It's like, if I want to do something, I need to be number one.

That's what it says.

Aspire to be number one.

Are you going to do like a fitness competition?

No, I mean, I do go with, so we've got this thing called the Pinnacle Club.

And if you're elite in any position in the company, go on this trip, you get equity in the business.

I just want to be jacked. I mean, I'm treating it like it's a fitness event.
But I'm like, dude, I will say this. Like when I get on a plane now, when people talk to me, they're like, dude, wow, you must take care of you.
Like how often you work out? And I like that. I tell people when I was 20, 25 years old, dude, I can walk in a bar and just be like, let's go.
Like, whatever. Like it was easy.
Like just talking to chicks, even like hanging out with dudes. I was like, I've always felt like I'm going to win and pull.
I'm going to like, I just knew I was the man. I had this confidence, slightly cocky and it kind of went away.
I started to get out of shape. I was focused on business.
I said I was too busy. Always busy, busy, busy coming in, coming on on Saturdays, even coming in on Sundays.
And I kind of let go of that. And now I'm like, man, I kind of got that feeling.
And it's not about picking up chicks, but it's just about feeling 100% confident. right you know it's about feeling like comfortable in my own skin yeah so that's really the reason man is i'm like i always have this theory that if you're not growing if you're not continuing

to move forward you're moving backwards i don't like to just stay still in water. Yeah.
I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of comfortable. I'm not the lifestyle kind of business lifestyle, anything.
Yeah. Yeah.
I want to win. Yeah.
I want to go on. You want to be number one.
Hey, listen, I want to be the one thing I haven't made time for is golf. There we go.
And that's a dirty shame because I freaking love golf. I don't know if this, I don't know if I'm going to be the same as once in the last six months.

It's going to be tough. You can't even swing the club anymore.
Maybe we'll be able to putt

putting, putting, we'll go putt. Well, that's why I was asking like, how big do you want to be?

Cause like, uh, you know, there's just different goals for everything. Like for me, I do want lower

body fat for sure. But I, I would rather, you know, I don't want to be like, I love golf.
I can't be like massive. I don't know.
So last thing here, we talked about the books. How do people get a hold of you? Uh, they can follow me on social media, you know, Ryan Pineda everywhere for those who are interested in real estate and go to wealthyinvestor.com and you know, we can help them out.
Such a great website wealthyinvestor.com. And we talked about a lot of stuff.
I want to give you an opportunity to close us out. You tell me, we may not hit something you want the audience to hear.
It's a big audience. Last time I looked, we were getting a couple hundred thousand downloads a month.
Yeah. I mean, everybody here is in home service and everything else.
I would just say, man, everything we talked about today with building your business, at least have the goal in mind of like what you're trying to get to and don't reverse engineer it, reverse engineer it. Right.
And then once you hit it, don't be afraid to now change, you know, whatever it is you're going to do. Like, don't just keep doing the same, you know, habits and things because your life changes, you know, you have kids, you get married, you hit the goal of the money that you're trying to make.
Like, it doesn't mean like you're

a failure because you, you know, now it's just like, oh, well, I keep making more money. Like

that's not always the default option. Like for me, I look at as far as money goes, I do want to grow

in how I make money every year, but I'm looking at it more so in how do I increase what Dan was

talking about my hourly rate, right? Like if I can just make my hourly rate so much more valuable, you know, if I can work half the time and make the same, that's a win. If I could, you know, work the same amount of time, but make double, that's also a win, but it's the option to do either.
I love it, man. Well, Hey man, I'm very glad you came.
Those that don't know who you are, Ryan's a wholesome guy. He's a great guy and he's willing to help you.
And I do think there's a lot of money to be made in real estate, but give me one favor. If you're listening to this podcast, when you're in the home service and you're in the trenches and you're not going to like this ride, but don't start investing in real estate till you got tons of money.
Don't divest out of the one thing. It's a great book.
The one thing by Gary

Keller. Keep doing what you're doing and let it compound.
And when it starts to compound and you're

really ripping millions a year, then call Ryan about real estate. But if you want real estate,

go into real estate, but don't quit your day job. I actually agree with you.
So yeah, I hate on

people all the time who are like, dude, made a little bit of money. I want a rental.
I'm like, no, reinvest your money back into you. Like learn first.
You're the best investment. The second best investment is your business.
Then real estate and the passive thing, whatever else you want to invest in. So don't buy a rental, invest in your business.
Absolutely. Thanks for doing this, brother.
Appreciate you. Appreciate you.
All right. Hey, like, subscribe, whatever, follow.
And thanks for listening to this podcast. 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 to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to 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.