How Automation Can 10x Business Efficiency And Slash Costs

Yeah, the person you're describing needs to get help. They need to lower their ego and they have to get help to get them out of that rut.
And I've talked to people about that. And it's hard for them to comprehend.
It's like a mental hurdle that they have to go through, which is like, listen, I am doing this wrong. It doesn't have to be this way.
And once you get past that and you see the other end. For me, I did that for the first few years.
I spent the last three years having a midlife crisis. What am I even even doing because my business was growing and running so well without me doing anything I felt useless if anything you know and that's because I had all my systems my automations my offshore team everyone doing their work and that was a I don't know the mindset changed me because that's what I want I wanted to get out of the day-to-day as fast as I could.
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, N-O-T-E-S to 888-526-1299.
That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.
Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states.
Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.
All right. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert.
Today's going to be really cool because the biggest question I get is what are you doing with technology, Tommy? What's going on with ChatGPT? How are you integrating software? Are you using web hooks? What are you doing as far as outsourcing, what's the newest things you're working on when it comes to phones, when it comes to booking appointments. And today's going to be really fun because I've got Azhar Ahmed, and he's an expert in automation, operations, technology, and entrepreneurship.
He's based out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and he's a solutions consultant at Cottonwood Automation. He's also the president of Instamec.
Uzar is a solutions consultant at Cottonwood Automation, a home service business process automation and outsourcing firm, mainly for plumbing and HVAC, but I'm sure that's going to change after this. After graduating a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Alberta, he started a career in a hybrid sales and technical role at Baker Hughes.
Now he works with clients to reduce their costs by up to 60% by automating workflows and building them to an offshore team. This is like my brother-in-law was just in town.
He's aio a ge he's got 700 people that report up to him in india i'm working with a company right now actually through service titan in um what the heck's the name where was service titan made armenia and then i'm working on a bunch of stuff in nicaragua so i'm excited to have you on today glad to here. And you said you listened to the podcast five, six years ago, huh? I feel like I was one of the OG listeners and the OG guys who bought the book because I realized that with my business, I wasn't running an auto repair business.
So with Instamec, we have mobile mechanics that go to people's houses and fix their car on site. And there's a host of challenges with that business, which forced me to become the entrepreneur that I am today.
But when it clicked in my head that I'm actually running a home service business, a plumbing company, an HVAC company, and I discovered your podcast and your book, that honestly, I've almost tripled my business since then. And I kid you not.
I was at a plateau where I grew really quickly at the start, but I couldn't figure out how to grow next. And then since I read the book, I bought in so many different changes to it.
And it really helped me a lot with my business. I love it.
You know, I have a guy that just started from Armenia that speaks English. And, you know, the great thing about Nicaragua is they're on central time.
The great thing about Armenia is they can work on their day, which is our night, and have reports ready for the morning the next day because real-time reports matter.

I hate lagging indicators that I can't change, so I want real-time data.

But let's talk a little bit about yourself, and you talked a little bit about mobile mechanics.

But what are you doing in HVAC and plumbing?

Give me some examples of automations that you just – because, you know, up to 60% reduction of costs. That's crazy.
Yeah. So I'm going to talk about some of the automations that I've, so with my business in particular, some of my favorite automations have been around inventory and parts ordering.
So in the past, this is how it was. Okay.
So when we would go on a job site, a mechanic would tell us what's wrong with the car. We would have someone go in the back end, and he would call up the head office, and they'd say, this is what's wrong with the car, I need this part.
So someone in the back end would go through the parts websites, the labor guides, and give a quote, and then tell the mechanic, hey, this is how much it's going to cost. And that process would take like 10 to 15, if it's 20 minutes, right? Depending on how busy and backed up they were.
So what we did was we built a automation where instead of having that back and forth conversation, our mechanic would be able to search at the part right on his app that we build a custom CRM. So right on his app, he could search at the part for the vehicle, and then he could select the nearest parts store and click one-click order in the part and everything will be taken care of in the back end.
The POs, the job invoicing, everything. And the next thing I'm trying to work on too is a integration with Uber where when he picks the part and he sells a job right on site, he can ask the part to be delivered right away.
Interesting. So how does this apply towards plumbing and HVAC? What are you doing in that realm? I mean, I know there's custom parts, but usually you're not going to have an Uber pick up a five ton unit.
You're not going to have them. How does this apply to home service? The mechanic, listen, my dad's a mechanic.
He owns transmission shops. He ran Amco Transmissions.
I get that. And I'm 100%.
That's badass. Yeah.
So with home services, I think the biggest struggle that I'm having with dealing with HVAC and parts suppliers, most of the ones that I've dealt with don't have a strong online presence. You literally have to email someone at the office and be like, hey, can I get this part here? Can I get an update for this number over here? One of my clients that I'm helping out is building out a full inventory database.

So the problem with that, they don't have Service Titan.

I've tried to get them on Service Titan,

but they're happy paying $60 a month for their CRM

and they don't want to spend the cost of a Service Titan CRM.

So I'm using Airtable.

Right.

I'm building a process where they have, you know, a master inventory sheet and they have individual inventories per van and then a transaction so what i'm doing that's a bit unique is they're using slack i tell all my clients to get on slack and with slack automations in there so what they're going to do is after every job they're going to click backslash job and then they're going to have a post job checklist so in that post job checklist they're going to do is after every job, they're going to click backslash job, and then they're going to have a post-job checklist. So in that post-job checklist, they're going to put all the stuff that they used, and then it gets pushed to the database at the end.
And now we have our transactions. And then on top of that, every week they do a inventory check on each other's vans, and they just do everything through Slack, pushes it in the back to our databases.
And then we can tell by the end of the month, like what was the parts used? What was the expected number of parts to be used? What's missing and how much did we spend? And then you can do all the calculations that way. Yeah.
Inventory management is there's literally, I've not met a company. There's two problems.
They always have call center issues. And secondly, they've always got inventory problems.
Yeah. Call center issues is a big one.
Well, call center, I just realized last week that it was taking a while to transfer calls for companies that we've partnered with. And then you say this stupid thing, this call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.
Well, I got rid of that because we're doing that over to the phone now. But I wanted to connect to a human being because if I call a company and they got that recording and I just got a broken garbage disposal, it's like, I don't want to deal with corporate America.
I just want a guy that's local to come out and fix it. Yeah.
I think that was a big thing that I was pushing for at the start. I never wanted to have a pre-recording.
It's just you call a local number. And even when people have like, you know, those tracking numbers, they put a one triple eight number.
I was never about that. You have to have a local number.
When you call it's ring, ring, ring. Hello.
Thanks for calling a one. How can I help you today? Or how can I make your day better? You know, there are certain States that say you got to, the both parties need to know, and we.
So I say I literally wrote the script last week and said, hey, my boss might listen to this call because I kick butt for you. So just make you aware.
But listen, my name's Tommy. You reached a one garage for a service here to make your day great because that's so personable.
And then it's like, wow, this person, the owner cares. It does everything I want by saying stuff like that.
We're just deploying that right now. But there's a million things that I think you could get so much more automations.
Like right now we use Intact and we've got Service Type, but you got to make them talk to one another perfectly. And there's all kinds of things that software does.
Service Titan, they love me when they hate me because I'm always pushing Anmol, the CTO, that we need more stuff when he's like, well, you guys are the only guys asking us for more. Most people don't even know what we have.
100%. No, I've always, even with this AI stuff, people have come up to me and they're like, how do I integrate AI with my chat box? And how can I get a way that AI picks up the phone calls? And I always say, please do not use automation and AI for customer facing roles.
You are not in that business. I'll give you an example of where it pays off.
So Google or local service ads actually monitor how quick you respond. And the only way they alert you is through your email.
So if they could start that conversation off and it could alert you via text and via like an alert system, then they automatically know you're responding quickly. And people don't know that their algorithm works off of messaging as well.
Most people have that turned off. So there's certain advantages.
And plus, right now, not only ChatG GBT, but you can program through Amazon's learning system of AI. I mean, literally my guy that does the podcast said, listen, if someone wants a consultation with you right now, we're feeding every one of your podcasts and every one of your videos.
Right now, this is happening with guys like Zuckerberg. If you want to meet with Mark Zuckerberg in like six months, you can have a consultation with him for a few hundred bucks and he'll answer it based on all of his public knowledge.
They'll talk like you, they'll walk. I'm a little concerned with it personally, but my guys are like, listen, if somebody wants a consultation with you, it'll literally sound like you, it'll be your decisions.
It'll talk with everything. It'll talk about the latest thoughts you you have it's freaking crazy when you could actually teach it to respond based on thousands and thousands of chats that have gone well that have not gone well so i think i'm not there yet and i don't want to be in the ai business but i want to make sure i've got every leg up for our company yeah no i've got a personal trainer client as well and that exactly what we're working on.
I'm just like, listen, just write down everything. And that's also what I tell people as well too, especially when it comes to training and onboarding.
If you're a business owner or a manager, you want to write down everything about your business and an effective, like an automation for that is you can use your voice recording system on your iPhone. And at the end of the day, just like talk about your day, talk about the challenges, talk about new learnings and talk about all that stuff.
And then use an integration, which will transcribe that and then use chat GPT to get the learnings from it, add it to a knowledge base. And then you'll have this knowledge base that's going to grow into something huge over time.
And then you create a chat bot that helps with onboarding, right? So when you have new employees that come in and they have questions and your guys are busy working on, you know, whatever they're working on and they don't have time for stupid questions, which is a cultural thing, but it's reality, right? But the chat bot can answer everything you want to answer. So if I like buy companies and they wonder how does PTO work for managers? As long as we had that in the knowledge base, they want to answer those questions.
You just feed it to it. Exactly.
And it can take unstructured data as well. So you don't have to have like a database where everything is relational.
It can be completely unstructured. And it's just, it's extremely exciting and powerful times right now.
You know, we were talking about this the other night about, you know, autonomous cars and the fact that I'll say something right now, and then an ad will pop up on Facebook or a video pop up on Instagram or TikTok's listening. And TikTok could, you know, they're listening because they know where I travel.
They know everything I do. And the future world, if I was going to attack a country, first of all, they're already doing it in politics.
But there's so many great things and there's so many scary things like disruptors. But tell me a little bit about workflow automation.
If I'm just a small garage door or HVAC company, I got 10 employees. What should I be thinking about as far as workflow automations? That's a decent sized business, but at the end of the day, you have to worry about what are all the repetitive tasks that you're doing every day? Invoicing, job costing, accounts with steel, making sure you're getting paid, even looking at dashboards, onboarding, training, quality control, even optimizing schedules, right? There's so many small tasks that you have to do, which are effectively low leverage work that a robot could do.
Yeah, but it's interesting because I don't like some of the stuff. Service type of or smart dispatching, but it doesn't really load in what I think about.
So we've done all kinds of testing, A-B testing. What are the factors? And we ran all this analysis on what makes a great job.
Is it credit score? Is it male or female? Is it zip code? Is it the number of doors? Is it how much they paid off? Because all this data is available regression testing basically. And, you know, is there a way to load all this data into against like another database that takes all this things in square feet of house because square feet matters for air conditioning.
Cause if it's a certain size, you know, it's got three or four units. Is there something that you could take with AI and mix the data sets and actually take really strong assumptions? Yeah, I think there's a whole field behind that called data engineering and data analysis, right? So even with something like Power BI, I've done this in the past as well, where I put in all this information.
I'm like, make sense of it. Tell me, like, what am I missing? Because I think that is the basis of machine learning is because the other thing is that you can use like a regression analysis and what is the relationship between X and Y.
But if you have lots of data, you don't know what the relationship could be. AI and machine learning does really help with that.
The question is, like, can you get the data in a cleaned up way or not? And I think it's going to take some time, but I think we should be working on this today. I'm always thinking about who's the best virtual product specialist to take the turnover? Who's the best guy to send this job? Who's the best dispatcher to rearrange the schedule? But what if I didn't need a dispatcher? What if the AI automatically text messaged the client and they rearranged the job based on our dispatch board? And because we've got capacity planning, capacity planning is the hardest thing to figure out in home service.
Right. We need more jobs.
We need to reschedule this. We need to move this.
This is a priority one. This is going to be more money.
Do you think that we're going to a spot where AI will be able to handle this and win? I think the hardest part is going to be the consumer accepting the schedule change. That's where we struggle the most.
Two things, really, with this change of schedule. Does the customer get back to you in time to be okay with that change? And number two, especially dealing with parts.
So the other technician has those parts. Yeah, so a lot of the times you got to know what parts are in the truck and if it's a tube.
But for me, if I got a text message saying from a plumber, hey, I've got Mrs. Grace.

She's 83 years old. She's stuck with a broken water pipe.

If I give you a free deco hardware kit, would you be OK to reschedule for the morning so we could take care of this wonderful woman?

I would be like, sure. And then give me the schedule engine link to pick my best

time. And then I'd put in a rule that you could never rearrange a customer twice.
And the machine

learned this stuff. I mean, I like this conversation because it's putting me outside of the box.
And

I think eventually AI, if it's exponentially growing and learning, it's kind of scary too,

because they had to turn out Facebook's AI because it started to write its own language. You know what though? Some things don't actually need to have an AI behind it because with offshoring and building a remote team, which is something that we did with our business, the cost of talent is a lot less, right? So you can have real humans looking at this stuff and it still could be a better option than using ai for it yeah that's interesting i still think human beings do a better job to this day i still think like the worst thing in the world is calling like your gas company and they say press one through five and then they try to say did you try unplugging it and it's like yes i've tried this easy shit it's so annoying and i never sound that.
There's so many companies that went overseas with their call center. And then two years later, they brought them back just because it was a failure.
And then you try to build this knowledge base. They just want to call, get it fixed.
They don't want to go through and have to find their own answer. They go to YouTube.
Talking to a human being is important. Yeah.
Speaking of people that have gone overseas with a call center and come back, I've heard those stories a lot. And this is my theory.
I think it's when you try to expand that market too much and try to go for low-cost labor as a cost-saving thing versus finding high-quality talent that's not that much cheaper, but a little bit cheaper. And using the ability to find high-quality talent there, too.
Like for our business, my general manager is based out of Columbia. He manages the entire thing.
He's responsible for P&L. He gets bonuses based on everything.
And this is high quality talent that I'd be paying six figures for locally, but I've got him for what's a lot of money to him in Columbia, but nothing here. And that's the kind of like quality of people that we're looking for.
Well, I think as we've had globalization going on and people are learning, you know, it's crazy. You go to Asia, like Japan, they know four languages.
The kids come out of high school and they speak fluent. I think there's a real opportunity now.
It used to be so bad. And now I talked to someone in another country and I was like man you sound better than i do better on the phone and you meet you sound excited and honestly yeah so we had no choice with our business the way the economics work we had to go offshore to run the business and we had to have all this but there's very talented people you're not going to get them for there's people that think you know when i get an offshore guy i want to pay them six hundred dollars a month but if you pay two three thousand dollars a month you get extremely talented people and here's a secret it's only two to three thousand dollars a month there's no they're 1099 so there's no sexual harassment there's no p2 there's no care.
There's not all these hidden costs.

There's no FICA.

There's no Medicare.

One of the things I got to tell people in advance is a lot of people will call me after

this podcast comes out and they're going to say, hey, listen, I heard you're doing some

offshore stuff.

How do I do that?

And I'm going to tell them, you don't even answer your phones on weekends.

You don't even train your guys yet.

You don't even have wrapped vehicles.

And there's got to be an order of operation.

Where does your client go?

What can we sell first?

But you got to get down to the basics.

People, they ask me, they're like, how do I sell service agreements?

I'm like, well, why do you care about that right now?

You don't sell the job at hand.

Your conversion rate isn't what it should be.

Why would you want to add all these things to the mix?

There's a priority of assignments. And you should use the Eisenhower matrix, which says this needs to be done today.
Now, what you're talking about, the craziest thing in the world is not hiring a personal or an executive assistant, which you could get a great one that understands everything you're trying to do to book your appointments, to go through your email, to even look at payroll errors, to whatever you have on your schedule. I don't understand people that are still doing things that booking flights like, and the problem is they don't know how to delegate.
They don't understand. They're so bad at explaining things.
They're like, you're never going to do it right. Well, they don't understand.
They're the bad teacher. They're the ones that can't delegate't delegate.
They're the ones that don't take the time to explain things. Each and every person, when you do a task, all you should do is hire somebody that writes SOPs.
Record how you do it. Really go slow and talk about what you're doing and explain things as you go.
You could hire a VA. You could hire someone on Upwork or Fiverr or a million other places, a professional that does Six Sigma, or they do things like lean manufacturing, like the Toyota way.
And they'll build all this stuff too. And they'll train other people.
Yeah. Because how much time gets wasted in an entrepreneur's day where you go, man, I was busy all freaking day.
I worked 12 hours today. I'm still on the phone, but I didn't get anything done.
Yeah. And you know what? That's the most painful realization that I came through because when I was building my business, I felt like I was working so hard and I was exhausted every day because I was in the business, building it up, handling phone calls, dealing with fires and all that stuff.
Right. And once I figured out a way to stop doing that and I had my teams and systems in place, place, it was shocking how much free time I had.
And I realized how little time I spent actually working on the business, working on high leverage activities. And I'm still at that point where I'm like, wow, I've done nothing today.
But it's shocking to me. I'm like, I should only be focused on high leverage activities.
Well, your network is your net worth. So I'm never going to get away from podcasting and meeting people and speaking at events and hearing new ideas.
I think what people do is they put their head down. And by the time they've implemented what they learned six months ago, they still need to make time to write down ideas, put them on a list, whether that's a Trello board or a Monday board or an Asana board, or there's so many base camp, There's so many different places that, and then prioritize it, but you don't need to do that.
Hire somebody that's great. Tell them your ideas and say, I'll help you hit the finish line on this one.
Let me take it from here. And you've got a laundry list of things, you know, you need to get done, but the big things get pushed to the back because they're the most difficult ones that'll make the most impact.
100%. Yeah.
There's a CEO friend of mine and he said, as a CEO, a business owner, you only have four things that you need to be doing. Number one, setting the vision and make sure everyone knows about it.
Number two, making sure you have the right people and processes in place and you're recruiting. Number three, strategic partnerships.
And number four, making sure there's money in the bank. Yeah, those are all pretty important.
I put number four as number one. They were not in order.
There's like those four things equally weighted that you need to be working on. That's the only thing that you should be worried about as the owner of the business.
Yeah, and I do think that hire for your weaknesses. First thing you should delegate is the things you hate the most.
If you hate payroll, then delegate that. If you hate dealing with the call center, hire that.
If you really, really enjoy doing something in your business and it brings you great happiness, then keep doing it. But you need to identify your weaknesses and find out what you hate the most first.
And then you hire that person. I've got so many people that are better than me, almost everything in this company.
But that's what I also love about automation too, right? Automation is getting rid of the things that you hate. We don't want to be doing, but instead of dealing with a human being that gets sick, that has feelings, that has emotions, that, you know, is a human being, you have code that does the work for you.
And, you know, sometimes a code does break, but generally it makes less mistakes and it works nights and weekends. It's just always doing stuff.
So you can focus on higher leverage activities, right? Yeah. And, you know, at the end of the day, I've seen stuff like I would never want to talk to AI two years ago because it would say, how could I help you? Sorry, I didn't understand that.
I, I didn't understand that. Please repeat that again.
Please say something different. Would you like to talk to an operator? But now I think you can actually handle a lot more.
So those pre-notions of what it used to be is like, you got to get... That's why I love the opportunity.
Right now, 2,000 baby boomers a day are retiring. 12% of them have businesses and they don't want anything to do with the technology changing.
They don't want to go through this. They're just like, look, I was happy the way it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the yellow book.
And that's why there's such an opportunity. This is the golden years, the next five years, more opportunities as you're seeing the largest generation that we've had in the United States start to retire.
Yeah. And then taking these principles, these all work for any home service company, really.
I mean, it goes from answering the phones, dispatching properly, parts on the truck, making sure you got a truck that's running correctly, the right trained technician. I think, you know, what's going to be obsolete is developers eventually, because AI is going to develop whichever you want.
They already started writing code. I'm saying that I have more time that I'll be fixing garage doors than I think there will be advanced developers out there.
You know, I thought the exact same thing and I'm not so sure because the way I always thought about developers where they were like, it's like Harry Potter, right? They're a bunch of wizards, but their wands are their computers. And some of them are way better than others.
But now they just have a brand new superpower, which is AI. How can you leverage it? I'm looking at these AI agents, which are, it's AI that can actually do work for you and book that flight for you and find the cheapest flight for you and actually go through all the steps of booking it.
But the process of using it right now is a bit cumbersome. You have to use a terminal.
It's not an easy process to really understand, right? But if you understand computers really well, you understand software, you have all these different models which can connect together, which an average person might not be able to. Now, having said that, you could use AI to teach you how to do it.
And that's where prompting is going to become so, so important. And that's going to be the real skill.
How do you talk to the AI to get it to do what you want? And that's where I've actually invested a lot of my money just to learn everything that I can about prompting. And then for listeners, this podcast, I can share the documents that I have where I've just paid for all the stuff out there and understood what is the best best way to use chat GPT because if you don't use it properly it can honestly get quite frustrating and then you know how do we get those documents we send me an email it was there at cottonwood automation.com and I'll send it to you and um that's um u-z-a-i-R at CottonwoodAutomation.com.

Yep.

And let me ask you this.

So you want to automate things in your business.

What is, like for me, it's the step one is whiteboarding

and basically just go into a think tank

and come up with like an idea board.

But can you run down some steps of what you would do

when you're going to go into automated process?

So yeah, the first thing I do is I whiteboard it. I whiteboard the process that they have right now that they're doing manually or not doing manually.
And I try to find out where like the bottlenecks are. Where are the bottlenecks? Where are the repetitive tasks that are occurring? And then I figure out, okay, so we've got the problem here.
We know where the bottlenecks are. What software can we use to automate this? I'm completely software agnostic.
I can use anything that's out there, even make my own Python custom scripts. It doesn't really matter.
Or even use browser automation if there's no API, right? Then I like to break down the different automation tasks and be like, hey, what's the highest leverage one? What one task can we remove and save the most hours from? And then I go down the list that way or make more money from, like for example, automated customer follow-ups. You gotta have that.
Make it one step further. Make it based on how they interacted with your brand or your company.
How much money did they spend? Are there an existing customer or a new customer? And you can put them into different subcategories. So that's kind of what I do for automation.
Love it. Love it.
And how many companies are you working with right now? Right now, I'm working with five. Okay.
And so you've got a mobile mechanic that goes out and fixes things. Is that right? how many markets are you operating in we operate in western canada in 22 different cities and what's holding you back from expanding that i'm just curious okay so that's a great question that my business partner and i have thought about so there's a bunch of tailwinds i mean headwinds for our business where I'm not very bullish on.
Number one is electric cars. They don't need as much maintenance.
They just don't, right? There's going to be more infrequent repairs. They're going to be higher value, but they're going to be more infrequent.
Number two is HVAC and plumbing and home services. They have the crown jewel, which they have big jobs.
You get a new furnace or a new heat pump, you can make a lot of money on one job, right? We don't have any of that. I have to hire skilled labor, put them in conditions they don't need to be in, and making 300 bucks at a job at a time.
So it's a difficult to scale business with headwinds that are coming in the future. And with all our automations and everything, we decided like it's a good business right now.
It makes us a good living. But we asked ourselves, do you want to take the steps to make it an even bigger business? Why or why not? And right now we're leaning on like we like it the way that it is.
So with autonomous cars coming, being electric, do you think in the future you're going to even need to own a car? I mean, if they could give me the closest car to me, they could bring me to where I want to be. And at that point, why would you need a garage? Why not make that livable space? The cars could drive themselves to a garage because garages have efficiency.
The one thing that the mobile mechanic does not have is efficiency. We're a quarter as efficient as a typical so when you go to a garage you have like 20 cars at once and they go I know what you're saying I was just saying for my business the garage you're saying the mechanic the way I see a mobile mechanic working for you is saying I'm going to go work out a deal with Intel or Honeywell they're both in Phoenix yeah and I will do all the oil changes.
We come to you. We will also check everything up and we will change all your filters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that way you're at one spot doing a bunch of work and you know everything they need. You know, they need synthetic oil.
You know, this guy needs this. This guy wants this.
This guy wants this. These people need break jobs.
And I would just stick to like six or seven categories. I know there's not a lot of money in oil changes, but if it's convenient, I'd pay double, especially if I was making a good living, because how much is your time worth? Set an appointment, go there, wait for my car to be.
Most of these people are making six figures. How much does it cost to waste three hours out of your day? So I would look at it more of how do I go to a place with a bunch of work and work out a price and a communication system that I'm doing all their work once a month.
Yeah, no, we have fleets like that and office spaces. So, you know, when people back in the day used to go to an office building, they're all the same place, right? So we had like office days.
We would come by. They know we were coming by every Tuesday and they would fill out a form and take care of their car that day, leave their keys to the front desk.
And it's super easy. No, I like that.
I think that, that sounds like it has a lot of legs. You know, you volunteer for a lot of organizations.
You've served as a former VP of Toastmasters International and a child, a wish foundation, I believe. What does that do? I mean, obviously it's important to you to volunteer, but I don't think enough business owners get involved in the community and volunteer and find a cause.
Let's talk about that for a minute. I think that the Make a Wish Foundation is incredible.
To be a big brother, big sister, you spend time with children that they might not have anyone in their life that is inspirational to them. And as business owners, we want to encourage more entrepreneurship.
We want to show them what life can be like as a community leader. And you do that when you're spending one-on-one time with them on a daily, on a weekly basis.
And it's just, it's giving back in a way that I like. You spend an hour really making them feel special.
Listen to them. You're there just for them.
And you know, I feel that way with cell phones. I feel like a lot of people are distracted on their phones all the time now, right? But in this time, you're giving a child like pure one-on-one attention.
And they need that. They're not getting that.
In this world of distractions and turn off your cell phone and listen to what they're going through. Adolescence is a tough time.
Yeah. But Toastmasters, I did that because I think public speaking is an incredibly important skill to have.
And even though I love talking in public and never felt like I was shy, it was a skill that I just want to continuously work on. And that's why I signed up for that.
You know, I did a Toastmasters. I did a couple of them.
And the only thing I didn't like is if I know my subject matter, like my master's degree, I could go talk about it.

They ask me what I do for a living, what's important to me.

I could kill it. But when you say talk to me about I want you to include a vegetable and Easter, it's like more improv to me.

I'm like, that's more creative.

That's not going to make me a better public speaker.

When you say, I'm, you know, like, if you say, I, um, you know, like that means you haven't prepared for your speech and you don't have a story to tell and you're not focused on what you know the best and you're not prepared. And if you're going to work on improv speaking, I think Toastmasters is great.
But for me, I'd like to talk about subjects that I know that I'm a specialist at. And I feel like I do the best with that.
Yeah. Well, actually, after Toastmasters, I started taking improv classes.
Table topics was my favorite part. And in table topics, you don't know is that they give you a minute and a half to talk about something that's completely given to you right there on the spot.
I hated it. And then I started doing improv.
But improv was just like an extreme version of it, right? You not not only had to make stuff up you also had to be funny and play a character so i did that for a while and i noticed that everything went up for me really fast but i couldn't get a bit of the nervousness that i felt before every class i had three old people and a blind person in the first toast masters and i was nervous but i'll get in front of 500 people if I'm talking about home service and not think twice. So it's just interesting because I'm like, it's the weirdest feeling, but somebody wants to get ahold of you.
Is the best way to do that the email? Well, yeah, you can go email me at Uzair at cottonwoodautomation.com or visit my website, cottonwoodautomation.com, and then you can click connect with me and schedule a call. I think a lot of people should at least email you get those forms and schedule a call if they've got something whether they're looking to outsource or automate a sequence.
Yeah I think it's going to do amazing things. Is there three books that really stood out to you in the last five years for business that really made an impact? Well, your book, first of all, I was like, I'm not even kidding.
So with your book, I realized I'm like, you know, I should be paying my technicians the most. They're the killers of my business.
They're the revenue generators. So I was like, I'm going to cut costs everywhere mercilessly.
And especially on outsourcing everything and automating everything and making sure I hired the best technicians, pay them the most, get them incentivized, right? And give them all the tools they need to win. And that's been my mindset completely.
The other book was- Well, I think it's important that the audience understands that you want a guy that is pretty respectable looking because you want grandma to be able to trust him. You them to have a clean background check a clean drug test and a good driver's dmv record you want them to be technically advanced you want them to be good at sales you need to be technologically savvy you need to show up with a smile and you need to smell good and you have good breath and you need to be pretty articulate you need to be a good conversation to be able to tell a story i do believe that one a player in the home service industry could run circles around three b players and one a will run 10 circles around three c players so they get the nail on the head and people just like they're just a technician well they're harder to come by and everything i just said is hard to come by it's not easy and so if you can make it so they not only get a lot of money, but they feel valued and they get to own a home and they get to participate and their ideas are valued, what happens is you attract the best and it's so much easier to make lots of money in your company.
And you don't have all the problems of a guy didn't show up or he's hung over or he's taking the truck out tonight, driving and using gas. The problems that a bad person that just, you don't want to pay a lot to

creates without getting the right incentive program far outweighs paying somebody more

and having no headaches of business that runs when you're not there. And I think

book or not, that's just real life knowledge that you dropped that I think is so important.

Yeah. And it always baffles me when people are like, I can't find good techs.
And I say, how much are you paying these guys? And they're saying they're paying like, I don't know, 30 bucks an hour, a very low rate. And I'm like, why don't you pay them more? But like, I'm only charging 90 bucks an hour or something small like that.
And I'm like, listen, first thing you got to do is increase your hourly rate, increase your prices so you can hire the best technicians and keep them happy, keep them motivated and just build a good company, right? No, number one, there's no turnover with great techs that you pay, right? Number two, it's so much more expensive to rehire, retrain, put the ad out there, wait for them to come. The opportunity cost is significant.
Number two, that I would tell you is most guys are afraid to have to train a guy from scratch. And I think that's one of our biggest assets at A1 Garage Service is we take a guy that smiles all the time.
He's happy. He looks you in the eye.
He's got the right tone. He's just really sympathetic to your situation.
Then we can train them the skills. Now, I know mechanics, you can't just take a guy that's a busboy and train them the skills, but a lot of businesses you can, and they're just so afraid to train.
They're so afraid. What if I train them and they leave? Because it's an investment into someone.
And I get it for like, you need a license to do the work, like a master plumber. But for most home service businesses, you should be hiring the people and training them on attitude.
Yeah. Because what if they don't leave and you don't train them? That's going to kill your brand.
Absolutely. The other book that I liked a lot is Millionaire Fastlane by Andrew DeMarco.
That book was the reason why I got into business in the first place. I was just a typical engineer working my nine to five, being all happy with that.
And I read this book and the concept of scalability really hit with me because when you work for someone else and you want to make more money, you have to ask for more money or work more hours, right? And you're going to be limited by how much you can work and you're going to be limited by how much they're willing to pay you. But when you have a business and you want to make more money, you have so many more levers, sell new products, increase your prices, increase your locations.

You know, there's so much more you can do. Scale up, hire more staff, spend more money on marketing, invest in yourself.
So that concept of business was really nailed into me with that book. So those two books.
You know, I want to pull something up real quick because I take a lot of notes on different social medias and i took this it's um this little ad out uh or this listen to this listen to this after a decade who is the last person to get paid when you own a business right because you only get paid if what if there's profit well that's fucking risky because as an that isn't the case. Did you know that even if a business files bankruptcy, they can't write off their debt to their employees? They have to pay them.
So I guess that's risk, which is why it makes me laugh when people get angry at business owners. Like, I don't see you signing up to fucking go take that risk.
It was worth billions of dollars, yeah, because he worked his ass off for the last 20 years. I didn't see you taking that risk.
Same dudes ever. Well, it's funny because a lot of people, you've got a mindset that I believe in, but a lot of people say, I want to start a business.
Well, are you good at payroll? Are you good at recruiting? Are you good at taking risks? Are you willing to put your house on the line? Because there's a lot of entrepreneurs, but there's a lot of entrepreneurs that can make a great living, have security, put their work jacket up at home, not take the risk. We take a lot take a lot of risk and most businesses fail.
That's, that's period. So I just, I agree with business, but I think there's a lot of business owners out there.
It's something like 95% of them have three or less employees. And those odds aren't good that you're going to make it because everybody went into business saying I'm going to own a big business.
No one said, I hope my business is me and two other people. You know, I can challenge that.
I don't think it's either or. You don't have to have a big business, too, because being a solopreneur is also a fantastic business because you get the benefits of no boss or multiple bosses.
So you don't rely on one person and the benefits of no employees. And you're really, really de-risked in yourself because when employees try to find a job, it is, I think, equally hard to find a job as it is to find consulting gigs and finding multiple employers, right? That are going to help you with, that you can help with a specific skillset.
Or another thing too is get a job with good working hours and then work on your business on the side. There can be in between things like that, right? Well, here's the problem.
Is I ran a business with a couple of employees and I burned relationships that were 24 seven. And I literally, if I didn't read books, podcasts and educate myself throughout the process and go to networking, like a lot of people go, I own my own business.
And I'm like, but they don't take vacations. Their marriage is on the fritz.
They're not a good parent. So when you own a business, you're responsible for everything.
If inventory gets stolen, if somebody gets in a car crash, you are responsible. You better stay insured.
You better stamp the license codes. You better make sure you're doing SEO.
You better make sure you're checking your GMB. You better make sure you're getting great reviews.
You better make sure that you're, all I would say is a business should function without you after five years. Then is that really a business or is it a job? Because people are making a hundred grand working 80 hours a week, literally, not taking any vacations.
And if that sounds like somebody that you know or somebody out there, all I would say is unless you can get down to 30 hours and make a few hundred grand, what the advantages if you don't have light at the end of the tunnel but you take all the risk you work all the time you're working all the jobs you deal with every customer complaint you can make great money and maybe it's just you're on easy street you're good at what you do you are a specialist at what you do and you charge such a great premium you're Yeah. Then I'd say go for it because you can't replace an artist.
They're special. You know what I mean? Yeah.
The person you're describing needs to get help. They need to lower their ego and they have to get help to get them out of that rut.
And I've, I've talked to people about that and it's, it's hard for them to comprehend. It's like a mental hurdle that they have to go through, which is like, listen, I am doing this wrong.
It doesn't have to be this way. And once you get past that and you see the other end, for me, I did that for the first few years.
I spent the last three years having like a midlife crisis. What am I even doing? Because my business was growing and running so well without me doing anything.
I felt useless, if anything, you know, and that's because I had all my systems, my automations, my offshore team, everyone doing their work. And that was a, I don't know, the mindset changed me because that's what I wanted.
I wanted to get out of the day-to-day as fast as I could. Some people love the firefighting.
Some people feel like without me, I solved the problem. I solved 10 issues today.
But Alibi taught me that the business is supposed to be vanilla.'s not supposed to be a lot of issues whenever I get vanilla I start to grow extremely fast and then new challenges present themselves then we got to re-delegate reprioritize things and that's why I kind of pause and gross I've got peaks and valleys yeah when we're going real fast valleys are when we're just trying to keep up with what we just built. Yeah, that's exactly it, right? The plateau.
But then on top of that, too, having a job and having a side business is probably the safest place to be. Because you can get fired overnight.
Like you're describing, if you don't keep everything up in your business, you lose your business. But if you don't work hard at your job and your boss thinks you're lazy or your boss looked at you the wrong way, they can take your livelihood away livelihood away in a minute and what do you get two weeks severance well let me ask you this if someone came to me and they said i'm thinking about starting a business i said what for they're like i want to make extra money and i said hey listen i'll tell you what if you go to a b9 meeting and you start recruiting two guys a month i'll give you an extra 70 grand a year that's more than a side business probably your first year and if you want more I'll give you more.
If you figure out a way to do this, this, and this, because I need people inside. You know, Jeff Bathos said, we've got so many entrepreneurs that work for us to invent new ideas.
Like Jeff Bathos didn't come up with Prime. It was one of his engineers that came up with the Prime concept.
And a lot of them that they came up with failed. And that's the thing that i could use people that want to be the entrepreneurial mindset and i'll come up with a million things for them to do but a lot of these guys are like if i could just make an extra 500 bucks a month but yet they're spending 20 hours and if they put that 20 hours towards and trust me now if you've got equity programs and you're giving out things for people that are figuring out stuff, you know, I think we're both right.
And I'm not arguing with you. I'm just going to say the great point you brought up.
I thought you brought up a great point there, finding people that want to do entrepreneurship, but they want to make more money on the side. So, Hey, help me grow my business.
I'll pay you more, but the risk is still there. You could wake up one day and be like, I don't like your attitude.
I don't like the way you look tonight and fire that person. You could, you know, you got to get to know who's the leadership staff and if that's what they got.
And if that's who they are, if you're working with the wrong owner, the wrong entrepreneur, the wrong management team, yes. But I can tell you that we, most companies that are more than 20 employees, the attitude is not, that's like saying you could go to the military, but you can get kicked out any day.
Well, yeah, but you got to, you know, when you become a large company, it's hard to fire people just because you feel like it, especially in certain markets. Facebook, Google, Amazon, big companies, talented people, hard to get into.
They just showed that job security is not a real thing. Well, what happens with them is they've got stocks, they've got the public they're reporting to.
So no matter what, you might have to downsize. Look, if we hit World War III, you know, job securities, listen, the owner is the last person to get paid.
If there's money in the bank when the monthly bills are paid, if there's no money, guess what? You're taking out a loan. So I see a lot of people going into a business.
You should know that you've got a great probability that it's going to fail and you're going to come out with more debt than when you started with. You might borrow 10 grand from your mother-in-law.
You might borrow 10 grand from your best friend. Now you've got debt.
I just think business owner has unlimited potential, but it's also got the highest probability of loss. And And going and saying you're a risk taker is the first step, taking calculated risks when you're going into business.
Yeah. But honestly, like, I don't want to also downplay the support structure that I have.
My parents have been extremely supportive of all my entrepreneurship goals. My spouse, everyone is just like, they just like keep doing this entrepreneurship thing forever.
So I wish I could say that I had like a really a story of, you know, when you hear stories, people that had like a real struggle and they had no choice and they started their business, even sort of like your story. I can't say that.
I feel like I had a really supportive environment. I think that's also the norm when it comes to business owners too.
They have to have support. We like the stories of the person that had overcome all the odds.
But I think if you look at it, like you did a proper study, you would find that most entrepreneurs probably had a very strong support system. I agree with that.
I mean, some people build out of this for, you know, cause they're desperate, but some people do it because they have to, they have no other choice. They've got kids and they got to make it work.
And it's figuring out your why. I think people have to have a strong why, why they're doing it.
Because if you're getting into business just for money, it's the wrong reason. You've got to have a bigger why, because if you hate Mondays, you're going to walk it.
You're not going to be a happy person. You're going to hate your life.
You're going to hate everybody around you. It's hard to be a good person when you hate what you do.
So you're going to do it. It's something that you're passionate about, that you enjoy, and that you get self-fulfillment out of because that way you have an abundant mindset.
But a lot of people go into work and they're like, F this, it's freaking Monday. Now I got to go deal with all these nincompoops that are never going to be as smart as me because you never have the money to hire people smarter than you or you feel inferior to them if you do.
And a lot of people know what I'm talking about. Interesting.
Yeah. My friend told me, he's like, you want to be a small business owner? Just don't do it for the money.
Do it for the lifestyle. And I think that was it because that's what I think I have with this.
The money's not bad, but the lifestyle is the best part. I'll tell you what, we were at a Thursday morning meeting and there's a brotherhood here of people that pull you off.
And it feels good to be in a community of people striving to be the best version of themselves every day. And I think people need that.
That's why I didn't do as good at internet school. I like to be in a classroom.
I like to make friends. I like to socialize.
I like to have new ideas. I like to talk to the teacher in person.
And you lose a lot of those things. It could be a lonely, lonely world.
Victor Rancor, I talked to him. He went to work for a different company because they got a much higher percentage.
Then he realized I lost all the infrastructure, all my friends. I didn't know what I was making because there was no transparency.
There was no systems in place. And he said he hated it.
And so once again, we're both right. You know, I love debate and we're not debating, but I love because I could argue either way.
It sounds like you could too. I think it's just identifying what you want out of life.
Do you want true friends? Most people say they stay at a company because they built a best friend outside of work. And that's why they won't leave because they love what they do and they love when they get to hang out with their friends and socialize and go fishing and spend time inside and outside of work.
And I got to say, working with friends is amazing. Yeah, that's exactly what I did in my business when I first started.
I hired my friends. So every day going to work was a blast.
But since then, I've learned that that's not the best way of running a business. So now I don't really have friends that...
They can ruin relationships. Yeah.
But here's the thing, though. You brought up a great point.
I actually wanted to get a job just so I could have friends that they can ruin relationships yeah but here's the thing though you brought up a great point i actually wanted to get a job just so i could have friends again like at work and have that combinerieship that you miss out on as a business owner because you can't be friends with your employees it doesn't work but if anyone's listening to this they have like a group of entrepreneurs that get together please reach out to me i'm looking for someone like that there you go if you're in canada. The hard part is I'm in Edmonton, Canada, right? It's not as easy here.
So I got to wrap up here. I got another call, but I love this podcast.
I want to give you an opportunity. We know how to reach out to you.
Got to read the millionaire fast lane. Got to email you to get those notes.
Anything else we haven't talked about that you wanted to share with the audience? I think we hit the nail on the head on a lot of things. I think that for a lot of business owners, they just have to see, like go up the mental hurdle to see how offshoring and how automation can make a huge difference to their business.
And I think that people think that the simple things can be automated. Like, oh, I got to, you know, it sends the CRM sends a code to my customer, follows up with them.
But the world of automation can get really, really deep. And it can be really, really interesting too.
For example, I saw you talked about your podcast too, running different ads based on the weather and humidity. The rabbit hole goes pretty deep.
So if you're ever thinking about my CRM does all this for me, like it's worth exploring and digging deeper on it. It can make a big difference to your business.
After this podcast, I've got a lot of notes, literally later on, I'm going to make a bunch of emails because I want to discover what else I could automate. So I've got this, what I figured out I'm going to do is I'm going to take each and every employee.
And if they've got more of a monotonous, repetitive job, do an hour, record an hour of what they do and tell them if they come up with a solution, I'll still have a place for them. They're still going to have a great job here.
I'm not going to cancel people. But what I'd like to do is make their life easier because if they build a way to scale their position, it allows me to give them rewards and pay them a lot more.
So I'm going to work on a lot of these things. And I really love this podcast.
And we've got to get together. Next time you're in Phoenix, make sure you call me.
100%. It was great finally meeting you.
Yeah, no, thank you so much. It really means a lot to me.
So have a great day, my friend. I'll email you right now because I want those notes anyway.
And I'll get your cell phone. Okay, sounds good.
All right. Thanks, brother.
See you later. Bye.
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 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.