Scaling to $29 Million with Clear Performance Metrics

And you're like, man, what's the secret sauce?

And all of a sudden it begins to kind of, it takes all your excuses away to going and looking at better shops.

But for me, it was probably just more of getting middle management in place.

So kind of moving to the COO position really was getting a GM because when I was in a GM position, I was at the ground floor of the company dealing with customer issues, dealing with tech issues, dealing with install issues, callback issues, personnel issues, and still running and scaling the business, looking at the financial side to add a layer there to where I had someone that dealt with a day-to-day and I really focused on tomorrow.

So the best way for me to say what's the difference between a COO and a GM was GM's focused on day-to-day operations.

COO's focused on tomorrow.

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. My man, Trey, you came to visit.
When was the time you came out here to visit? Probably been six or so months ago, but it's been a while back. It feels like an eternity because we went to the Cristiano event.
Yeah. I saw you there, too.
So Trey McWilliams. Trey is an expert in business operations, repairs, and installation customer service as well.
He's based in Lufkin, Texas. His business is McWilliams and Son Heating and Air Conditioning.
He's a COO, Chief Operating Officer, and before that, he was the GM for the last 22 years, I guess. So, Trayv McWilliams is the Chief Operating Officer at McWilliams and Sun Air Conditioning, a major player in the heating and repair business.
For more than 45 years, as a trusted company for the people's HVAC needs, McWilliams & Sons backs every repair and installation they do with 100% guarantee.

The company is also committed to giving back to the communities through supporting organizations such as the American Cancer Society.

Trade has also been named the ACHR News in 2018 as one of the top 40 under 40 in the HVAC space. He's recognized as a dynamic professional in the home service industry.
You are the man, my friend. I always get a lot out when I talk to you.
I think you're like a hidden gem. You know what's going on everywhere, but you're not out there talking on stage or podcasting very much.
So it's really an honor to have you on here. No, I, you know, are a big student of yours and just always looking for opportunities to align myself with like-minded people.
And, you know, when I stumbled upon the opportunity to come to your office, I learned a ton. I thought I had a lot of energy and I don't have nothing on energy compared to you.
So, well, you know, it's interesting because just recently, everybody's been asking me for shop tours shop tours i probably had 100 people through here in the last six months but i'm doing this event in may 12th and i decided to open this up to all home service and i'll just show you it's verticaltrack.com we're having breakout sessions with our head trainer we're literally just we're gonna murder it i'm is going to be unlike any other show, Michael Michalowicz, Jonathan Wissman, who's actually hiring 12 people right now in Kansas. We do this personality predict he gives, he's going to be talking all about it.
Our average ticket from the guys he's hiring will be over a thousand dollars in service and over 5,000 in sales. And to have that with a guy like him, that going to be speaking i mean tom howard our man's going to be here so we're really stacking the deck megan likes it's just it's al levy it's just an amazing crew of people lenny gray the door-to-door millionaire is going to be explaining how we kill it in door-to-door there's really no industry that shouldn't be here and i just verticaltrack.com.
But anyways, let's talk about you for a minute. I mean, you've been in this industry a long time.
So tell me a little bit about Trey, your family, what your goals are here in the next coming years. Yeah.
So I kind of fixed some dates a little bit as I graduated high school in 2004. And I, young years of 10 years old I had the privilege of working with my grandfather which retired from the Navy decided to start an air conditioning company back in East Texas so I grew up coming to work with my dad but my grandfather had worked so many years in the Navy having to push so much paperwork he says I'll never do that again leave me in the.
Let me work on my hands and let me be responsible for myself. And I don't want responsibility for no one else.
So I had the great opportunity to work on my grandfather from about the age of 10 and just getting a ride alongside him, learning the trade of HVAC. And he was a guy that was super mechanically inclined.
So I grew up doing that and graduated high school in 2004. And my grandfather had retired already.
And I kind of stepped into service technician role with my dad. Like most people, I think that enter the trades in a family business, it's kind of stumbled.
That's what I felt like I was supposed to do. So I entered the trades and always had a drive about myself.
I wanted to be, you know, I didn't want just a job. I wanted a career.
And I saw from a young age, a lot of opportunity. But at the same time, I saw a dad that worked very hard and never turned the phone off and dealt with a lot of issues, but didn't just have a lot of financial freedom and was kind of held hostage by his business.
And so as I went through that journey, I was looking at that kind of like, how do I change this trajectory? And I worked hard, brand service, brand sales. 2010 was kind of a pivotal point, was really some, I think, you get frustrated enough or you're kind of getting burned out and you're like, something's got to change.

And, you know, I had a conversation with my dad in 2010. It's like, I'll put in the work, but our culture is not what I want it to be.
We're held hostage by employees because we can't replace the technicians. We can't replace installers because we can't find them.
So therefore, we're just having to adapt to that culture. So we kind of set out on a journey there.

And I was very fortunate to have a dad that was willing to kind of get behind me. He's like, if you got the energy, then I'll dedicate the resources.
And because we knew there was going to be some pain points, like most people in the home service business, you realize, or you know, if you're maxed out with capacity now and you fire someone, where does that burden fall? It falls on the leadership team or the owner of the company. So I knew I had that coming if I was going to change the culture, but it was something I was committed to.
So 2010, we kind of started that journey. 2012, I moved into overall operations of our company.
And really from there, the identity of the company moving forwards was mine. My vision allowed me to fail, allowed me to make decisions and kind of stepped out of the way.
I think he did that mainly because he trusted me and also put into work and proved that I didn't ask for anything. I never got a title change.
I just took over duties and began to put the company on the trajectory of some great growth. He was a great marketer.
He has a knack for that. He kind of got behind me on the marketing side.
And then in 2018, I purchased the business from my dad, but he was pretty much an absentee owner probably four years prior to that and purchased it in 2018 and continued to grow it and be able to build a great leadership team around me. A lot of success goes to those people that we've been able to recruit and build internally.
Well, how big is the company now? So we're on pace to do $29 million this year in sales, and we're primary residential service replacement, no new construction, no plant and spec. And we bought a plumbing company, a small plumbing company, in one of our markets in the South in December 2021.

You know, there's a lot of money.

I see HVAC guys going to plumbing advice versus just getting there's a lot of money in the industry right now.

What is your predictions going forward here?

Sounds like a recession is imminent here in the next 18 months.

And a lot of people get scared when they hear recession because it just means negative GDP.

Right. It doesn't mean the housing crisis of 2007 necessarily and all of us have been through doomsday so what's going to happen i mean i don't think these multipliers are going to last i really i know guys that got 22 23 times it's crazy amounts of money where do you think the market's going i mean, I think the first responsibility of the leadership and ownership of the company is to position it in a way that it's an asset that's making money and it's not banking on the sale.
So if it's doing what it's supposed to do and it's creating the profit that you're claiming, then you should be in great shape as far as being able to hold the business. If you're looking for an, you know, I don't know.
I think there's a couple of things to that. I think there's going to be a lot of contraction in the overall scheme of the economy.
But I think historically, every time we've had a downturn, we've continued to grow and we've continued to be successful. And I think the home services in general has done that.
So the question is, does more people gravitate to the industry because it's proven that it's also recession proof? Right. So do I think as interest rates go up and doubt sets in people's mind, do I think that limits the available capital and the expense of the capital these P companies are using?

Yes. To what degree? I don't know, because it's still pretty dang competitive.

People's moving into space still and some smart people that understand how to leverage capital, and they're still, you know, every day it seems like there's another PE company entering the home service space. Well, there has to be, because that's still cheap.
The debt's at 3-4%. So, what's going to happen is the only way that private equity and VC money and everything else is coming in is because they know you can grow organically.
And if you double organically, then they cut your payment in half. I know guys that have been in the business, Trey, a few years ago where the max you could get is eight, nine, ten times.
You ever heard of the line, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered? What does that mean to you you it's going back to what i started off with is you still got to be a disciplined builder of your company right you still got to be disciplined because i think there's ways to create short-term gains your company there's ways to create you can get lean and mean you can go to market and be very aggressive but the question is is is there anything left to go to the market and get after that one year when you thought you're going to be bought now, all of a sudden you're not going to be bought. How do you recover from that? So for me, it's just being disciplined and doing what got us here and not get so focused on what we could sell for.
I think that's always something you need to be looking at. But I think we got to build something that's sustainable through the downturn.
And then, you know, where we are in my particular business and my age, there's going to be some upside for people that are not disciplined for our company to be able to purchase and acquire. So, you know, at the same time, it's kind of like there's just been a lot of opportunity out there for us too.
So it comes down to having a game plan that works, having a model that can weather the storm. And if you can weather the storm, you can come out the other side with a lot more, you know, your asset being worth a lot more.
So it's hard to predict that for me, you know, and I think there's a lot of guys that are the PE groups that they're still acquiring fast and you haven't seen them really change their pattern yet. So I don't know the answers to that question as far as, you know, I wish I did.
Trust me, I wish I had a crystal ball that said today, this is the apex of the multiple and they will never return again. And I think then you got to, you really start to, okay, this is my last window of opportunity, but it's hard to say.
You know, yeah, that's an interesting, I'm just talking about it because it's a big buzz out there right now. It's a huge distraction, honestly, for me, you know, it's like this pie in the skies out there and you're like, I'm missing something.
Do I stay disciplined and build? You know, what do you do? Well, you know, I, I always tell people the best thing you do is go visit companies make it to some of these seminars go to pantheon by the way i'm speaking come to my breakout session but you know i just think it's really really important you came out here i try to travel you know i was in philadelphia at my buddies one seo and then we went to a company um horizon with David Geiger. And just the red carpet treated us with a bunch of respect, gave us all the everything we could ever want.
And you know, it's so crazy is the biggest and best aren't worried about people coming and emulating. They're like, great, go ahead.
We can be friendly competitors, just charge enough money because don't come in here and spoil it for all of us. Try to be the cheap guy because that never lasts.
What was the transition like from general manager to COO? I mean, what's the difference in your company? So, kind of highlight what you said there. You know, I think visiting companies' exposure is like super important because I think that begins to shape your vision for what you want your company to look like.
It allows you to start taking ownership of certain things that you want your company to be. And then also it kind of, it changes your limitations.
So you go and you look at a company that you thought, oh, it's so hard to find two employees. And then all of a sudden you go to a company that's onboarding a hundred a year and you're like, man, what's the secret sauce? And all of a sudden it begins to kind of, it takes all your excuses away to going and looking at better shops.
But for me, it was probably just more of getting middle management in place. So kind of moving to the COO position really was getting a GM.
Because when I was in a GM position, I was at the ground floor of the company dealing with customer issues, dealing with tech issues, dealing with install issues, callback issues, personnel issues, and still running and scaling the business, looking at the financial side to add a layer there to where I had someone that dealt with it day to day and I really focused on tomorrow. So the best way for me to say what's the difference between a COO and a GM was GM's focused on day-to-day operations, COO's focused on tomorrow.
Have you ever shared the expression, revenue is for vanity and profit is for sanity? I've heard it. And we always say P&L is for direction, not reflection.
So it's always about your profit loss statement should be giving you direction, not something you reflect on, which basically is grow with numbers, right? Grow with the facts of making sure you're profitable, making sure your margins are where they need to be. Where would you guys like to be in 2022? Bottom line, net.
So we'd like to be at 20% net. So for us, it's always the balance of, and when I say this, you know, different people do it different ways to make numbers look whatever.
And that's the hardest part with numbers is you can manipulate numbers to look like what you want. But we put 15 trucks on the road four weeks ago.
So eight new HVAC technicians and seven plumbers. And we got eight more plumbers to go.
The reason I say that is a lot of times you're not 100% efficient day one. So we're taking some hit for some of our large revenue growth to short term.
Now, should we pick that up? Should it drop overhead? Yes. But a lot of times you got to build the back office.
We got to build the training, all that prior to the growth or it's chaotic when you're onboarding 12 technicians or an investment. I tell people all the time, I took a lot of creatine in high school and I would get bulky for football, but come summer, I'd want to be

ripped. You can't get bulky and put on weight and get ripped at the same time unless it takes a lot

longer to gain a pound of muscle and stay ripped. It's like three months or I could gain 15 pounds

in two months and then shred five of it and be 10 pounds more of muscle. So I kind of look at it

like business is the same way. You guys went from 2.3 million to 29 million in about 10 years.
If you could talk to yourself back in 2012, what would you say to young Trey? Well, I think keep your confidence up. I think that's a challenging thing because you really don't have any confidence because you've never seen it materialized.
So everything's just this vision. But the problem is, it's like the more you know, the more you know, right? So it's like, now I'm looking at bigger companies than me.
And I'm like, that's where we're going. But I haven't been there.
So you still have a confidence issue. So it's like, I've never been satisfied.
So even looking back, I don't like, well, look what we've done. Here's where we still got to go.
But I would say stay disciplined on understanding the evolution of that growth, what it's going to be. I wish I could tell myself kind of some of the pain points that we could overcome, some of the kind of the plateaus that we're going to hit maybe with personnel, that there was certain people that are on my team then that I wish from a friendship standpoint, they were still here, but I probably wouldn't have invested quite as much in some of that if I knew what I know now as far as they can't go to that next level.
So would I change any of it? No. I think that's what's going to continue to make me a good operator is you got to go through those things because that's when you find out and that's stuff that you don't ever forget.
And I think if my dad was to hand me a $29 million business versus me having to grow it through the pain, I wouldn't be near the operator I am today. Oh no.
And by going through the mistakes, they're all lessons. They're all stories that I could tell you.
And I got to tell you, I'm the king of mistakes, the king of failure, but I don't fall down. I get back up and I don't make those same mistakes.
You know, leadership, investing in leadership. I was just on the phone with Jonathan Wissman earlier, and he said, we got to work on how your guys give interviews.
We got to make this a place that people beg to work. That's the atmosphere.
That's keeping it clean. That's creating the core values in the systems.
How do you get people energized? How do you get them excited in a meeting? How do you learn how to delegate? How do you learn how to read? And one day, Ken Goodrich told my whole team, he said, guys, you know what my best advice for Tommy is? He goes, unless you start growing and reading like he does, it's to fire you guys. He goes, I hate to be this blunt, but my best advice I could ever give him is to fire you because you're not growing.
And if you're going to stay here and he keeps going like this and reading and going to visiting shops, but it's up to me too to invest in them. I will say if they were all like me, then they'd be my boss or I'd have a bunch of competitors.
And I'm glad that they work side by side, but I want them to want this hunger for growth and learning. And it's really hard to instill that in people.
What have you found that gets people going? Like they're with them. What's in it for me? I think everybody wants to be part of a successful business.
So I think we got to have early wins and regular wins to keep them energized. I think empowering your team that a lot of the ownership of things that's going on in your business is them.
Not always look what Trey did or look what Tommy did. It's them.
Did we give them, did we, yeah, recognition, but also just like internal accomplishment of like, I built that, like that's mine and I built it and look how successful it is to where we just work as a team. And I think for me, I truly care for the people.
Like, so it's not something I had to work hard at, to want my team to be successful, to want them to be better moms and better dads, to want them to be able to coach their kids baseball. I want those type things.
I want them to have financial freedom. So we work really hard.
I think the culture of our business really shines through on that to saying, hey, they want what's best for me. I love that.
You're a big fan of metrics, right? KPIs and having very clear metrics. Talk to me a little bit about that.
Yeah. So, I mean, I think the KPIs allows people some things to focus on that maybe they don't comprehend the full picture of what needs to take place.
But if they would take care of these things, then success will happen. And why do I do that? So my job is always in a business that to me is to remove the variable.
So if I can remove the variable, so if labor is a variable for your business, labor is all over the place. Well, if I can create performance pay that will lock in what labor is, then that's a variable I can remove.
So that's a KPI. It's more monitoring to make sure performance pay is doing what it's supposed to.
If my material is a KPI or it's a variable, if I can lock in pricing with availability with vendors, then I can pretty much lock in my material as long as I have control over what my selling price is. So we build the KPIs, you know, average ticket, you name it, of age equipment, all these different things.
But we have to be careful for my team. They get overwhelmed.
And so what ends up happening is they get lethargic because they have so much to look at. They don't look at anything.
So we were actually just having this conversation this morning with Shay, my ops guy. It's like, hey, Shay, I want each one of your GMs to have three initiatives for the next 30 days.
Just three of them. I want them to hyper-focus on these three things.
Will they look at all the other stuff? I think they will. But these three things are what's super priority in our business right now.
It's our biggest pain points. But I think KPIs and all that creates, from an ownership standpoint, it forces you to have transparency, a clear vision, and a clear expectation for your team.
This is considered winning and this is losing. So if it's above this, great.
If it's below it, you lost. So that they're not always just wondering, well, I wonder what they're going to think of that.
Is that number good? We're very clear on that. You know, a lot of your suppliers have what's called an escalation clause set up.
They don't have them, but like Home Depot and Lowe's does. I think right now is the hardest time ever to negotiate with vendors because there's so much demand.
It's interesting. You know, you're a big family, man.
You got some pictures in the background. How many kids do you have? Three.
Three kids. How long have you been married? Almost 17 years.
17 years. Tell me a little bit about that balance.
Congratulations, by the way. Sucks.
Yeah uh yeah no it's great there the balance is horrible so so for one thing when i say balance is horrible i love business so yeah it's a game it's not something that i dread coming to work for i wake up every morning i'm competitive so my challenge is it's a true and it's fun, is balancing that with a wife and three kids. And so how do I balance it? I'm fortunate enough to have a wife that's very understanding, patient with me, not wired the same way I am, supports me.
And so it took me a long time to get my business to a point where I felt confident enough that I could walk away from certain things. Like if I wasn't here in the morning, no one gets out of the office till nine o'clock.
And so we got all these trucks just sitting here, to not being here at seven o'clock every morning saying, go, go, go, go, go. Because I have a 14-year-old daughter, Presley, which is my oldest.
And this is the first year I've ever taken her to school. And it was really more reality kind of set in.
She's just been able to drive. She's entering high school.
I only have four more years left with her under my roof, hopefully. So I was like, I need to start taking her school kind of be a good

opportunity for me to start instilling just life skills and and having grown-up conversations

without the other two so i have 11 year old son saw your 10 year old daughter brinley and uh so

i would say that balance has gotten a lot better over the last couple years because we've gotten to

i think to a size where i'm doing a better job at delegating roles within my company

I'll see you next week. It's just gotten a lot better over the last couple of years because we've gotten to, I think, to a size where I'm doing a better job at delegating roles within my company.
But for the first man till. So I'm 36 now, but first 11, 10 years of my wife's marriage, you probably wouldn't have seen a picture of me at a kid's birthday or any type of family event that I wasn't in a uniform in a work truck because that's what I did to get it to where it's at today to being able now to go on more vacations like last year was probably the first time I overtook vacations in summer and that's a tough one for an HVAC shop yeah but it's taken more probably more getting a little wiser to start to weight those, really say I need to be in my family life a lot more than what I was.
So the balance still is still a struggle. It's still a struggle going home and, you know, whatever time I get off and mentally checking out from what's going on today and switching gears to being a dad and a husband.
I wish I had the answer to that question, but I'm not a good one to talk about the balance. It's hard to let things go.
I'm in the middle of trying to let go of a lot of the marketing and I've done it before. And it's such a hard thing because a lot of the stuff are relationships with like the people that maximize our Google My Business or local service ads and the PPC.
And it's, I will say there's people that can do a lot of things better than me, but it's hard to let go because, oh man, marketing is one of those things. Just like I need to know the financials every week.
I need to know what's in the bank. But you've seen me.
I mean, literally almost 500 employees now with our latest acquisition. So you got to let go, but it's figuring out which things to let go of.
And it's not easy, but it gets easier with time. And that's how you see a guy like Elon Musk, they hire the right people that, and they teach them the operations and how to be project managers.
And you could have 80 things going on at the same time and all of them are getting done. And there's, there's trinkets out get things done and they're helping the employees and the leadership team hit goals and it just goes to show you man i think visiting some other shops but i'm wondering now what the next shop to go visit i almost guarantee you it's not going to be home service it's going to be shoot i might go to tesla who knows they're're in Texas now, right? The question is, how do you start that process? Because a lot of times what we see is a little different story with you saying, hey, I understand marketing.
But a lot of times what people want to do, they want to hire for something they don't enjoy. And then expect that person from outside the industry or from within the street to come in there and design it the way they would.
Right the question is like, how do you create those where you can hand off that position to those people? And that's really what I've kind of done through my business is every position I've worked and I've built the process and I handed the process off. Now, as the guys that's taken over that, done a better job with it? Yes, they're a lot better at it.
But they had a really good foundation and well direction that I wanted that to go. And it meshes with all every other process that I've ever built.
Because I hear a lot of times people say, well, I'm going to hire me a service manager and he'll solve that problem. You need to solve that problem and build a process and hand it off to the service manager that you're hiring.
But how do you start handing off those? And we call it giving them a seat at the table. And it's really just starting to identify like, hey, this might be the next person that we want within our leadership team or we want to do this project.
Really, let's let them start getting kind of a, you know, be a fly on the wall in our meetings of like, hey, here's the way we think. Here's the way Trey thinks.
Here's the way this group thinks. So they start getting trained on the way we go about things.
And if they got a great skill set, they quickly learn how to apply their skill set so that we all continue in the same direction, but they're bringing their skill set that's better than us from a different place than we are, brings that to us and makes us better. But my hardest thing is I'll let you fail a lot in our business, but if you don't have urgency, I will go crazy.

Right now, I've got literally more projects that are amazing than we know what to do with. we're in the process of getting a lot more project managers and i gotta tell you these projects don't make a dime until they're incorporated into the business and it's really a task in itself to prioritize projects and you know i got a cool little chart here that if you put, if you were to put an arrow,

you know, straight down and build it into four quadrants, you got to put these in this order. You put right at the top left, high impact, bottom left, low impact, and underneath low effort, high effort.
And so you've got high impact, low effort. Those things need to get done first.
and I saw something like this before

the low impact high effort you get rid of. The low effort, low impact you get rid of.
The high impact, high effort you try to delegate. And the high impact, low effort you really rush on those things.
So I think it's important to understand that when really trying to do project management because I'm telling you, I'm working on some things that will literally, do you know if every single person, me and you have talked about this, but if every single person in my company recruited one person, we double each month. So I'm teaching them how to be internal promoters.
Believe it or not, every person has a skill that they might be part of a church. Their husband or wife might be part of a huge organization.
They might be the best soccer coach for their kids ever. They're all piped into something.
Maybe they're introverts, but they're huge on LinkedIn or Twitter or TikTok. Whatever it is, there's always something that they could be doing to recruit.
And that's the mentality we're trying to grow. So the only way that works though, right, is that Tommy Mello is willing to say, I'll hire off personality.
I'll hire off these things because I have something that teaches how to be a great garage door, right? So I don't care about garage door attacks. What my point of it is, but that's the only way that works.
And, and that's a part, a lot of the issue in our space when we talk about shortage is everybody's trying to go grab this person that really don't exist. So if you will take that model right there and say, hey, I got a great guy that works for me.
He's got five buddies. They're not in our industry, but we got the resources to teach them our industry.
Let's go get them. I'd rather teach them than have an experience.
And then I reward them with $1,500 and I got great attribution. You know what's funny is we were sitting in the group together, right, at Chris's place, and you came up with this great idea that I've really, I thought about it, but I forgot to do it.
And you said, listen, what we do is we get a lot of the technicians' wives to say, listen, I'm working for this company, McWilliams, or my husband's working here. And I just think the testimonial from the wife of he's a better father, he's a better husband, he feels rewarded, he feels recognized.
It's changed our lives. We own a house.
We have two cars. We put our kids in private school.
The money's great, but more importantly, the time we spend together is better, the better father. And really, where do you think the wives are? They're all over social media.
They're all in these groups. They're doing all these mommy blog stuff.
And, and I think it's amazing because they'll get the word out there better than anybody, especially when you reward them. And the person we're after that guy, like, I don't want to complain or I want the guy that goes to work and just handles it.
So that guy typically isn't looking for a job, but his wife knows, man, he's undervalued where he is. So if I can speak to the wife, then the wife's going to be the one saying, hey, Johnny, well, my job pays the bills.
Well, Johnny, this company will pay the bills and treat you right. So we knew that I wasn't looking for the guy out there that's got a poor attitude about where he's working at today and looking for a job.
I'm looking for the guy that says, this is what I signed up to do and I'm going to do it hell or high water. That's what I'm going to do.
So I had to go speak to the wife to be able to get that guy that he's just a hard nose and wants to work hard. I love that.
That's so amazing. What are some of your other hiring tips that you'd recommend for people? So we do what you do from a standpoint of after 90 days that they work for us, but then we also do $1,500 a year to the original guy that brought them to us as long as they continue to stay employed with us.
So if you brought 10 people to us, we owe you $15,000 a year, which what we found is, is a huge retainage tool because whenever you have that new technician or whatever, that's frustrated or that advocates out there saying, wait a minute, come talk to me. Cause they got money on the line.
So they're in the guy's ear like, Hey, suck it up. You know, they're treating you right.
And not, they don't get caught up in that cancer when they got money on the line you know i've heard that before but most of my guys they can't see past their weekly pay like i tell them sell doors when those doors get installed in six weeks you know how many of them tell me if it's not i needed this week and i hate to say that because we're trying to get them to think about their future and retirement you know all these things these things we're working on. But and I don't want to belittle them.
I get it. I've lived check to check in my early 20s, man.
And I've lived I've had some hard times, you know, other times than that. But I feel like sometimes as a leader, we don't train our guys in compound interest and how to not go in debt and not how to don't buy that Harley.
We know you deserve it, but your future self deserves more. Don't buy that second home that you're barely going to use a second home.
I'd be happy with, at least you're making equity into the home, but it's like, I have a hard time getting to see past the next couple of weeks. And that's always been my challenge of, yeah, we'll have this great retention tool, but then they're like, Oh, another $1,500 a year later.
That's awesome. I forgot that I even did that.
I'm just wondering for that piece, how much it affects it. And apparently you've seen a big change.
So the people that understand it and that's recruiting the hardest are the people that can see five years down the road, which typically means the people they're bringing on board are a lot of times like-minded like them. So if I can reward the people that's thinking the way I want them to think, there's a good chance the people that they hang with also have that same mindset.
So they're talking about rental property and that's what's going on after hours. They're talking about if that's the type of guy already, it's looking at his future.
So a lot of times his friends are wired the same way. But I'm not going to tell you, you're right to a lot of degrees.
They're very, what's in it for me right now. And I have a hard time seeing past that.
And it's came across my mind to reevaluate that a couple of times because I do think it's just like with performance pay. I always question myself when a guy really don't know what I owe him.
So he don't really know what his paycheck is going to be. Is performance pay really motivating him? Or is he just working for a paycheck and whatever it is on Fridays, what it is.
And my goal is I want you to understand performance pay of what you can do to impact it week over week. And if you don't understand how to impact performance pay, is it really doing what I want to do? Because my goal is to make you more money in return.
We'll make more money and be more efficient as a company. That's a great question.
You always wonder when you say, listen, why wouldn't you want to work one extra shift? It's just more money for you. But here's the facts.
Everybody's got a number in their mind. For some reason, they know this number at $1,400 a week gets all my bills paid and it still puts a couple hundred bucks away a month.
And it's allowing me to, so we need to really get them to figure out you want more than this. Think about more dreams, figure out what you really want.
Think about this. And you got to bring it up all the time and say, you told me you wanted this.
I dare you to think outside of the box. I pushed you hard to want this.
And now I, my job is to help you and not let you be the bare minimum, go through life as the bare minimum. So this year, we always challenge them to set some goals and to set some things they want to accomplish.
But one of the things we did, we created, it was like six different classes, but it was finance 101, which was basically you create a budget and we start fixing your credit score. So that was a commitment you had to make.
That commitment was basically it's once a month and it's after work and we brought in people. So we brought in a team of bankers that was free.
They built up a portal for them. They started helping them look through and through their finances, look through their credit score.
They contested all the different old bills for them that was set up for collection. Then we had finance 201 was investment.
So we brought a banker in, talks about how you leverage capital for rental property here's ways to get around the big to pop down payments all these different things my whole goal though was just to teach them like your job is to get what you want out of your life it's not your life so start treating your this as a financial tool for your family and how do i reinvest my capital that I'm working so hard here so that one day when I'm ready to retire, I have all this other income coming in, whether that's rental property or whatever that may be. Rental property is easy for my guys to comprehend because they understand the home.
No, it's a great spot. I agree with you.
I always talk about two, three, four houses. Plus, I got a guy with five in Milwaukee.
Makes great money, and he's a great case study. Actually, so far that we've been talking, I got a few things to do here.
So I got a buddy of mine that's just started out not that long ago. He's really getting good.
He's hiring a couple of employees. What do you say to someone new in the game? What's the best few things, maybe some marketing, maybe some hiring tips? I love the wife thing, but just a smaller company.
They still haven't figured out how to let go yet, but when you're small like that, you can't. You got to put in the sweat equity, right? So what would you tell my buddy that's kind of new at this? I would say never hire a helper.
Always hire someone that can go to the next level. So don't just hire install helper.
Hire your next technician. He may start off as an install helper, but hire your next technician.
You know, don't hire that cheap $14 an hour person. Yeah, really forget full.
And hey, you get them cheap for the next year and maybe that'll be your best guy. No, that guy doesn't really think very hard.
He's not quick on his feet. He's not really adaptive.
adaptive yeah so i want someone who can go to the next level because it does a couple things obviously it's got someone in the pipeline for the for the next leadership or next opening i have second thing it does if they're driven the guy that they're working with he will up his game to keep up with the new guy right so it makes him a better guy because he starts looking like crap i thought they couldn't replace me and they just hired a guy and within three weeks, this guy knows half what I know, right? So it checks that. I think one of the hardest things for most people are, and I saw this today on some different Facebook groups, is like, I can't find anybody to work for me or what are y'all paying starting off? And the problem is, is'm not looking for the guy that's making $9 an hour right now that's going to magically say, you know what? I want a career and I want to go make $70,000 this year.
That guy doesn't really exist. He may have some want, but he don't have the drive to do it, or he wouldn't be making $9 an hour right now.
So what we're really looking for is how do I go recruit the guy that he maybe is a school teacher and he's burned out, or maybe he's in the automotive repair business making good money, but he's ready for a change of pace. Like I need to be able to take a guy that's making $70,000 a year and transition into my business to make $70,000 the first year he works for us.
So how do you do that? And I think that's what you got to, if you want to recruit and build your business quickly, you got to be bringing in pretty high level skilled people, like people that can perform at a high level, which means your pay and your compensation has to be built in a way that when they win, they're compensated as fast as they can win. I like that a lot.
Lots of great tips. So what do you think the best marketing source out there is? I know, obviously, word of mouth and service agreements, but what else is really effective that a lot of people aren't talking about for you? As far as hiring? I'm forgetting to get clients.
No, just more like Google or Valdez. So every market's different for me, as far as what I would say, I guess it's just the best of the best because in a small rural market, which is what Lufkin and some other markets is, we own the radio station.
But the benefit is the radio station only serves the market we serve. So there's no loss.
Whereas the Metroplex in Dallas, we only serve 5% of the radio spend, right? So it's hard to get that out there. But it's direct mail works.
We have a lot of success with direct mail and it's all about the promotion or the offer that you have going on. But I think with anything with marketing, it's about timing and it's about maintaining capacity when there's a ton of opportunity.
So when's the best time to go get clients?

It's when everybody else is busy.

When's the hardest time to go get clients?

When everybody's slow.

Why?

Because they're all freaking good.

They're all showing up when they're supposed to.

They're all answering the phones when they're supposed to.

So we grab the biggest market share

when everybody else is busy.

And we're busy too, but we've done a good job of,

we work really hard at moving revenue that would have hit us in certain months and move it to the off season by just being proactive. So I would say the marketing tips I have is focus really hard on your customer base during your off season to move them out of into the slow season that creates capacity or grab market share when everybody else is busy if that makes any sense yeah no no no i get it okay somebody wants to reach out to you what's the best way to do that trey just email me trey at mcwilliamson.com trey's a you can probably just google that it's pretty easy and then what what was your three books that you really liked that you'd recommend?

Yeah.

So let me pull some up real quick because I'm in the middle one right now called Finish Big.

Good Leaders Ask Great Questions by John Maxwell.

And the Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell.

Interesting.

Okay. So what's Finish Big about? So it's really about positioning your business, great exiting on top.
But through there, you're going to learn a lot of lessons. Because anytime you're trying to position your business to exit, I think it really shows you just by the time you're ready to exit, you're like, man, I've got to my business in such shape.
I might just want to keep it because it's just killing it.

But that's really, it's about the exit strategy.

And it's about all the emotions that goes with it.

And some of it's not just about selling your business, maybe handing it off to a kid.

Maybe you can even apply it to handing off the marketing.

Like, how do I exit that marketing?

It really goes into good detail of just the mindset and the things you need to do to be able to build a successful team to replace yourself. So we talked about lots and lots of great things today.
I'm sure we left out some really, really strong key bullets. I want you to talk about something maybe you could get into action today.
Maybe we didn't talk about, maybe something that's been hot and heavy on your mind, but whatever it is, I'm going to let you kind of talk straight to the audience here and just maybe one last final thought. I mean, I think I'd probably just highlight one of the things I said earlier was I work every day in my business to remove variables.
And if I'm able to do that, then I can continue to scale a business. So again, removing variables is where is a pain point.
So if labor is a pain point of yours, then find a solution that it no longer is the pain point. If it's hiring people, then what do I need to build in place to be able to attract great people, to be able to train them and be able to retain them? And if you have an issue with retaining or recruiting the right people, then maybe it's my pay structure.
So I got to be able to go look at that pay structure. So just finding those things in your business that need to be fixed and kind of back to the analogy Tommy used earlier about high impact versus high energy, low energy, low impact is what's the thing in your business right now that's going to move the needle the most? Go focus on that and solve it and get it across the finish line.
I think really what separates a lot of people and what thing I learned from Tommy too is the most successful people I see in the home service trade or in business in general are unbelievable implementers. So even though that's not a fun part for me, building the processes, because you can't just go implement it by watch me.
When you force yourself to put it in writing and you force yourself to put it in a process, first off, you truly got to understand it. And secondly, though, more than anything, they can grasp it and they really know what your intentions are.

So that's probably what I would tell you is like work every day at removing a variable.

And to me, the variable is the biggest pain point in your business.

So Failure to Implement is a great book by Howard Partridge.

I just want to tell you the biggest thing is own your calendar, prioritize daily and get the one big thing done and learn how to, if you want to elevate, you need to learn to delegate.

Boom.

Trey, you are wonderful, my man.

I got a lot out of this.

Seriously, probably 40 things here of different notes, but appreciate you jumping on here

right now.

I appreciate it, Tommy, and best of luck.

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