Developing Top-Notch Training To Build A Strong Team of A-Players

And that's a cool thing in my business. I would say 95% of my employees now never worked anywhere else.
So they've all been through my training class. We all communicate the same way.
In the beginning, I was just hiring anybody and everybody. If you had a fucking pulse, I was bringing you in if you had any experience.
And now when I flipped the script and said, okay, well, no, we're only going to bring up guys from our ranks, right? Or we're going to teach these guys. We'll create sales guys.
We'll create technicians. It's made a big difference on the communication side, You don't have to teach an old dog new tricks.

Hey, this guy only knows the tricks that you taught him. And I think that's been a big difference.
So I know you do that same thing. You've got to do a lot of the training in-house where you can level on the guys and they can know exactly what you want them to say at any time.
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.
Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I've got Victor Ranker here.
This dude is changing the game. You guys probably know who he is.
There's very few people that are coming into an industry and doing what Victor's been able to do. Got to meet him in person here at this last event for Joe Cresara.
He's an expert in HVAC entrepreneurship, marketing, recruiting. He's based out of Orange County, Absolute Airflow.

He's the president from 2018 to present.

And he's also the CEO of Service Hero Academy.

Victor Rinker is the owner of Absolute Airflow Plumbing,

Heating, and Air Conditioning based out of California.

He's also the owner of Service Hero Academy,

which provides powerful training resources

for beginners and intermediates in the industry,

as well as weathered pros who are struggling to increase their sales tickets and become top-selling techs. 2021, he became a Topps and Trucks Fleet Design Contest winner.
Victor, why don't you tell everybody about yourself? This is going to be huge, I think. I'm really looking forward to it.
My mentor, Al Levy, said he's watching, so we've got to impressive here. Yeah, man.
I mean, a little about me. I'm just an average guy, right? And I tell people all the time.
And somebody works his ass off. But he's just a normal guy, just like you guys and just like me.
And the big thing is, I'm a normal guy that just worked his ass off. And I always tell people my beginnings.
I mean, nine years ago, I was doing oil changes for $6

an hour. I live in Cleveland, Ohio.
Had no future. Didn't know what I was going to do.

I moved back to California and I just had my little girl and I got an opportunity to

go apply to a company that's going to teach me how to do HVAC. I had no idea what HVAC

was for six and a half years ago. And since then, it's changed my life.
The whole home service business or industry has changed my life. I've been able to become an Airtime 500 top selling tech.
I got recruited, paid a lot of money to go work at another business. And then I decided to have an entrepreneurial seizure in 2018 and start Absolute Airflow.
Clued on that. We've done over $30 million in revenue in three years.
And now, about a year ago, I started a marketing company called Service Hero.

And that grew to a million-dollar marketing agency in a couple months.

And then this year, I decided...

And in March, I decided to start getting into sales training, which is more my passion.

That's my lifestyle business, I guess.

That's my passion business.

So I've been doing sales training for HBC and plumbing contractors all over the country.

They fly out to my location in California and I'm training with them. So's kind of what i got going on in a nutshell kind of the short story so you got something special coming up here uh shoot next week already isn't it about yeah 16 days away yeah so you know i get two weeks yeah two weeks away i got a uh you know about six months ago i don't know if some of you guys might know Brent Buckley or not.
Me and Brent just started talking in messenger and saying, Hey, look, you know, he knew what I was doing sales training. And I, and you know, he was thinking about getting into the sales training industry.
Yeah. You know, he's been $7 million HVAC tech.
And I said, okay, let's throw this event. And they're like, okay, let's throw into Vegas.
And then I got a hair on my ass and said, Hey, how about I go get Grant Cardone for this event? So I called back Grant Cardone. I don't know if you guys know how much it costs to get that dude there, but that was about a quarter million dollars drop to get Grant Cardone there.
And then everything kind of snowballed from there. I mean, a lot of people just wanted to be parts of it.
So I got Weldon Long, I got Jason Walker, Ishmael Valdez, Tommy Mello is going to be there. I mean, just to name a few, Brandon Dawson,

just an eclectic group of just entrepreneurs

that want to help people get to the next level.

So I'm pretty excited about it.

I've been working my ass off on that event for six months.

So, yeah.

So let me ask you, and this might be a tough question,

but obviously you want to grow your training.

You're trying to create a name for yourself,

which you've done a great job of,

but in a perfect outcome,

Thank you. might be a tough question, but obviously you want to grow your training.
You're trying to create a name for yourself, which you've done a great job of, but in a perfect outcome, I know you're pushing a new CRM and we don't need to go into too many details here, but feel free to tell whatever you want. What is the perfect outcome of this event for you? I mean, perfect outcome for me.
If you guys have been following my story, I'm a man of the little guy, man. I hope that the guys that do come get to see, you know, because I got blessed, right? So I got to work at one of the best heating and air conditioning organizations in the country.
They're going to sell for a billion dollars, service champion. They're just a phenomenal company, right? I got the opportunity to work there.
Most guys in the country, throughout the country have never got an opportunity, first off, to be around toplevel sales guys, be around a top-level company, top-level owner. They've never got to see that kind of stuff.
So if you know me, that's truly what I care about. I hope that when everybody leaves there, they're going to leave like, holy shit, I can go take my business to the next level.
Other than that, obviously, I'm a business man. I'm there to make money.
I have an app that comes out sometime this week if the developers can finish it. So I have a sales training app.
It's gonna literally take anybody off the street, teach them how to repair an air conditioner, how to communicate to a customer why they need to do repairs and also communicate to the customer on why they need to replace it and why they need to replace it now. So it's got objection handling, urgency building, all these different things that are built inside the app that we've been shooting videos on for six months, seven months.
So I mean, it's a one of a kind, no one else has ever really had anything like this. So I was pretty excited about that.
I'm hoping I can sell a bunch of that. I did create a new partnership and I just got, I just got off with attitude.
I was talking to him about it, but that's what this one is here is carrot. It's a KPI tracking software.
So each one of your technicians in the field, say you have your iPad on you, you set you as the owner, you set the KPI you wanted to hit. And then it stack ranks them all month long.
It gives them, Hey, you're tracking for this, you're tracking for this. And if they hit their goal, then they win prizes that you get to curate.
So you get, so like we partnered with Nike, Adidas, Home Depot, all these, and pretty much Southwest, Ticketmaster, everybody. We partnered with them and we were able to say, if Tommy went to go buy these gifts, it would cost you $500.
Well, we're only going to charge you $250, Tommy. So you guys are getting $500 worth of stuff.
You're paying $250 and then you have to be happy and they get your KPIs that you want. It could be anything from custom A1 garage door shirts.
It could be a bunch of different stuff. But I think it's going to change the way that people operate, especially if you have a business with a bunch of young employees that are hungry.
It's going to be like a Peloton thing, right? Or like how, what's the other company, Vivint Solar? They create things that guys are chasing all day, like a carrot. That's why it's called Carrot.
And hopefully a business grows with it. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I was checking out your stuff this weekend and I saw Carrot.
I did a little bit of research. I kind of clicked and studied it.
And it makes a lot of sense. I didn't understand that they get the deals at half price.
We've created two different stores for employees and none of them have gone amazingly. I guess the big deal for me is choosing products.
I'll never buy a cheap t-shirt again. I'll never buy a cheap shirt again.
I mean, these shirts are not expensive, but they breathe. They don't shrink.
They don't get lightened out. So I have a rule, I guess, that from now on, I like funny things that people want to wear that and things that, you know, don't even say one on them.
It's really understanding that it's not all about the company at all the time. Really? You can do a lot more and And carrots are great.
We're bringing on a sales manager here pretty soon. And their whole job is to help them hit their goals.
And then we're bringing on a dream manager. You kind of heard me probably talk about it up on stage.
But it's important to understand a lot of these guys want a new iPad and whatnot. But some of these guys want to own a home.
They want to maybe speak second language they want to be able to get their kids in a private school especially with don't get me started the crap going on right now i would say i'm gonna make a homeschooling app so you can learn everything because i don't know what a bad idea how many kids do you have i got three man and none of them are getting that goddamn shot i can tell you that much so how old are they i got a seven-year-old bailey i got a four-year-old bryce and i got a one-year-old brayden so how many employees do you have right now i currently i have between all businesses a little over 100 but my main business in california is about 40 employees so you don't have to worry about the mandate which is no no no so you got you got all these guys coming to this event how many attendees do you have so far there'll be about 300 give or take somewhere around there yeah you know joe's a really nice guy i enjoyed everything joe's a giver you know joe just got a big heart really wants the best to attend understands how to take people from here to here. And sales is interesting.
What I find is right now, we're very, very good at sales. Could we be better? Everybody could always be better.
There's nobody that can't say, I reached the top of my sales career. I can't be better.
Because now you start going into other sales. That's why HVAC and plumbing do so well, because you can do both.
But I feel like a lot of people, when they get into business, they become so good as a technician, so good at sales, and sales kind of hides everything. Sales masks everything and helps you get by.
People always say, what's the first thing you would have done differently? And there's a lot of things. I would have cared more about the employees, but I say, understanding the controller role, understanding that revenue is for vanity and profits for sanity, that goes missed a lot.
And I'm just curious in your business, and listen, I don't need to go into numbers, but did you, like I did, make a lot of mistakes and really go after the revenue rather than really trying to keep a bunch of the money? A hundred percent. So from day one, I wanted to have anybody that was there said, I told them I wanted to have the biggest home service company in the country.
And that was my goal. But I didn't know what that meant or what it entailed or where to get capital or where to...
I didn't know how to run a business. I was a sales guy.
I was a technician. And I just, like I said before, I had an entrepreneurial seizure.
As the business grew, the first 12 months, we did $5 million in revenue from nothing from scratch. And obviously, when you start getting all the revenue, my ego got in the way.
But I never really blew a bunch of money on myself or anything else. I always just kept putting it back into the business.
But I didn't understand the correlation as as you get bigger, that overhead number starts skyrocketing, right? And the correlation between the two. And that's kind of what eventually caught up to me.
So eventually, overhead always catches up if you don't monitor or you don't adjust to that overhead. So, you know, year one, you did 5 million.
Last year, we did like about $10 million in revenue. And we had doubled the revenue in the second year.
So we're like, okay, cool. And then this year, I started running into the problems because as you get bigger, I got up to...
At one point, we had 96 employees. 96 employees, multiple locations.
And I never... I wasn't paying attention to it.
I didn't know the numbers like I should, like I do now. So I almost went bankrupt.
And that was about April or May of this year, I realized like, holy shit, I'm way in over my head. And that's when I started getting some help and trying to change how I operate.
And I started thinking the opposite way. I started thinking about profits first rather than before.
I was thinking about revenue all the time. I said, okay, how do I can sell shit? How do I cut the fat to get me to where I need to be as a revenue wise? So at one point we were losing $200,000 a month.
I got us back to break even. I was like, cool, that's cool.
Now how do I get us to a 25% net? So like now in October, when everybody else is not making money, I'm going to hit probably 26% to 30% net this month off a million dollars. So I'll be able to hit almost $300,000 profit because I started focusing on the other way and reverse engineering it.
So I was a revenue guy and now I don't talk revenue i talk ebitda and that's it so one of the guys asked is it commercial or residential or both all residential i don't do commercial okay so you answered my next question about the challenges you had i've been there man i've been there to where man, that guy's on top of the world. And really, it looks like that from a distance.
But I just got in this building two years ago today was our big brand opening. So a few years ago, I personally had good money and I was able to stack some cash, but the business just was not feeding what it should have been.
And right before I started this meeting with you, Victor, I was in another room. I have a big green room that we shoot videos and I've got three guys that work out of there.
And one of the guys in there said, Hey, listen, dude, I want to hire a full-time writer. And I said, well, I got a couple of questions for you.
I'm totally down to hire as many people, but I need to know tomorrow, give me your 10 biggest things you're working on projects. And I want to know which are increasing of the morale and the unknowns, but I want to know, how are we tracking that back to revenue? He said, well, Tommy, just on our newsletter alone, I'm spending 40 hours a month.
And I said, that doesn't fly with me. We need to get that down to 10 a month i said we need to start delegating more he goes but the quality might not be there i say well show me how the employee morale is increasing enough to make the bottom line increase to make people not leave you know i gotta have analytics because if you come to me victor and you show me something and you say dude i'm gonna give you a 10 times return on this writer i'll hire three of them if you give me that kind of return.
Okay. A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
But just going off a whim, I can't do that anymore. I used to say, shit, get it to everybody you want.
We're a big enough company. We can afford it.
So I said, well, what are we doing to track the engagement of the newsletter? That was the next question. And he goes, what do you mean? I said, are we putting it on the back of the website on the HubSpot and seeing who's opening it and how they're interacting with it? He goes, well, no.
And I said, so you don't have any idea the ROI on this newsletter. I said, that to me is kind of scary.
And I want to help you out, dude. So give me two weeks to work with you.
Let's whiteboard a little bit. Let's figure out exactly what needs to happen to be able to hire a writer.
Or why are you so afraid to get a 1099 to get a specialist maybe in another country i'd rather than be united states based for a writer but a videographer i don't really care as long as the videos come out good he said well it's a lot more work you're tracking people down i said so you're telling me because other people aren't doing their job that we're gonna hire somebody to chase them yeah and he's like well i didn't really

think about that and i could do better i said no dude this isn't a make you feel bad this is just talk about reality let's go to the facts and i feel like facts are sometimes scary even for me you know when i look at certain things and i go oh my god we're in 26 markets victor yeah and when i look at them right next to each other is i circle things and i go what is this why is this so much higher what is this what is this what is this and it always tells a story and what is so exciting about you is until you get that feeling deep in your stomach and you look at your kids in the eye and you say, we almost lost it.

You don't know what life is.

You don't know what business is.

And the fact that you stood on,

on literally the edge and you felt that there was no cushion.

Daddy wasn't there to save you.

Mom wasn't coming in with a billion bucks to bail you out.

And I've been there.

And when you have a check bounce or an employee that quits last minute,

that's when you know what business is all about. So you can't get to the top until you've been to the bottom and i'm glad you're on your way up because not a lot of people know those stories of all the things i love that there's this picture of uh you know the mountain of success and it's an iceberg this one there you go yeah all the shit that happens and and you know the pitfalls that happen in a business or that you think it's just this way in the way at top but you you fall down all these little holes well what the one thing that bugs me the most tommy and you've been one that's talked about it right is a lot of these guys are the talking heads and these guys are on social media and everything's great and all that stuff and nobody talks about the losses right so imagine being imagine being a small time guy in the state that doesn't have the know-how, but he sees, oh shit, like these guys are always doing good.
I'm doing bad. He's going to give up because he thinks that it's not normal to do bad at one point, you know? And that kind of stuff kind of bugs me, right? So like one of the things I always try to get at, I'm like, I hope that people in the industry can be more honest, right? Talk about that.
Don't just talk about the shit, talk about the bad shit that happened, right? Because that bad stuff you've already been through, someone else's might be going through it right now and it might help them get past that point. It's like the girl on Instagram that's always posting hot pictures, you know, she was an ugly girl at one point, probably, you know, I don't know that you see these teenagers though, this change in their life is like more suicide and everything.
It's like, literally they don't feed themselves. It's bad.
And they're like, literally for me is the one thing that I feel like that I've been able to do very, very well is contain my spending is, yeah. I have a Titan.
It's not an old Titan. Somebody told me one day when I brag about my 2012 Titan, they go, why don't you buy a new truck? Now it's getting a little old, dude.
You can afford a new one. Get's fine.
Fair. Fair.
And I've moved in a really nice house. It's under contract.
It's been inspected. It's a million dollars more than I paid for it a year ago.
It's a good investment. So I moved back into the apartment.
I'm building a house for less, but it's everything I want. And I talk real.
I'm like, look, the one thing that I think most business owners have a hard time with is delayed gratification. And when you got in there, I'm sure you weren't just buying diamond rings all day, but you really wanted to grow super fast.
And someone had said here, how did the change to reduce the growth you were going for affect the company morale? Did you have people leaving or were you able to communicate that change and keep people on board? As a business, right? So everybody wants to be on top of the train that's moving fast and moving up. So there was casualties, right? But I communicated it, right? So there's one way to go about it.
You start cutting people, don't communicate, don't let everybody know what's going on. And I said, hey, look, I'm going to be an open book.
That's where we're at financially. That's what I have to do with these moves.
I need you guys to be here. And I said, if I do this, this, and this, and you stay with me, we're going to go to the next fucking different level.
And I'm going to remember who was there with me when we made these moves. And I lost a couple of guys, but most of her, I didn't really lose any salespeople.
I didn't lose any technicians. I lost a couple of installers.
So I didn't lose the people that made me money. I lost along the way.
I lost a lot of the fat, the accounting, the counting the operation side at one point i had four people doing the same damn fucking job well now i got one guy doing that job and he's doing it better than all four of those idiots were doing so it was a lot of the stuff for the people that that are gone if you actually ask my other employees are like why the fuck was that guy here right because he's he was actually they were kind of mad that that person is even here doing nothing all day so now i can tell you my my company morale is in the three years it's never been better than it is right now everybody's happy everybody loves to be here everybody's excited about the future the first couple weeks month two months or whatever it took about two and a half months to go from the 90 something down to 40 and there's like a death by a thousand cuts almost but we got to the point now where we, cool. This is the squad.
And everybody here knows where they belong. They all want to be part of it as we grow.
They know that now they even see it in me. Because I was an absentee owner.
I was just, you know, I was so focused on other things. And I just didn't focus.
Like, now they see me like, no, I know my fucking numbers all the time. I know where we're going.
I know exactly where we're going for the month. I know we're going to end for the day.
And they see that I'm doing that, that I put the work in. Now they want to follow me wherever I want to go.
So it sucks in the beginning, but I can tell you right now, that's the person that you're worried about hiring is it will quit on you in a second and it won't give a shit. Yeah.
You know, in the book, the sales boss, Jonathan Wissman talks a lot about. Usually your top guys, they want to be taken care of.
They expect more because they know how much they earn you. The one thing that no one tells top guys is how hard business is.
And some of the guys are going to try to start it on their own. You succeeded.
But when you're really, really good at your job, I think business owners, they become business owners and they forget the fact that they got to be leader. They got to build a really good morale around the company and they got to have a really good culture.
They also have to be good at training. They also have to be good at accounting.
They have to be good at financing. They got to understand payroll.
They got to understand how to work with marketing. They got to understand agencies and they got to understand how to get vehicles.
And then, you know, you, you had something happen. That's very interesting.
Yours is about as bad as mine. Everybody would brag to me about how awesome my old vans were, but you rebranded.
The old one was so bad, man. The old one was so bad.
You know, we both had Dan take care of it for us. I wonder if I have an old one.
I do. Oh God.
I got the old logo here logo here so it's a i got it at fiber.com and that was not horrible it looks a lot better on the hat than the other i look better on a hat than it does on a truck but you know that's the same thing when you talk to dan it's like okay you can get a logo that looks good on a shirt but doesn't look bad on a truck on billboard on these other things but yeah so you know i went through the same thing with when you did you know everybody's Like, why are you changing? You know, I had just come off a over $5 million a year, right?

And. these other things.
But yeah, so I went through the same thing with you, everybody's like, why are you changing? I had just come off a over $5 million a year, right? And all of a sudden, I was in Vegas. And I remember I was walking through Vegas and I said, this short, old guy looks really small, older dude.
No, I'm just kidding. If Dan's watching, I love you.
I'm just fucking with you. But he's walking through there and he sees it.
He's like, dude, that's a terrible logo. And I'm like, what? And I'm like, I like i got defensive right i'm like what do you mean i'm like there's not everybody likes it we're doing good blah blah blah and it stuck with me and sure enough like a month or two months later i'm on the phone with dan like hey dude i gotta fix this thing let's let's get it done you know al levy kept bugging me he's still got a van out there and he goes dude is your logo you don't want to insult somebody but you don't want to also let them feel good about it so he said what you got to do is take a picture of your logo in black and white so literally just print it out on black and white paper and see if anything jumps out at you so you know i've got the yelp the angie's list the bb i got everything in the brother their phone number'm like, license, bought, and insured.
Here's what we do. And now I drive by and I'm

like, I'm very critical now of other

people. It's like, what do you even

do? My buddy sent me a

billboard and he's an amazing guy and he says,

Tommy, you know, here's my

billboard and it's got, we

buy houses. Here's what kind of houses

we buy. Here's the phone number.

Here's other ways to get a hold of us. And I'm like,

dude, you're driving by this thing.

This is all you got.

Thank you. We buy houses.
Here's the kind of houses we buy. Here's the phone number.
Here's other ways to get a hold of us. And I'm like, dude, you're driving by this thing.
This is all you got. This is it.
It's a drive-by. They're not like, oh, let me go around again the freeway and get the phone number.
Oh, let's go read that. No, dude, you got to make...
What I learned is the billboards, the TV, the radio, really what they do is they build something in the subconscious. And what happens is it clicks through right over time.
You know, when I was at this big event that Cristiano had, amazing guy, by the way, and I know you know him, one of the things that Gary Vaynerchuk talked about was the toll booth. And I've told the story a lot, but he said, you guys realize every time you do TV, radio, billboards, you're paying the toll booth.
And everybody's like, who's the toll booth? And they're like, Google. Google's the toll booth.
Every time someone goes to Google and searches your name, they click on you. Hopefully they clicked on you.
If they do a search for Garage Door Repair Phoenix or Air Conditioning Repair Orange County, you're paying 80, 90, 100 bucks. And then hopefully you get that conversion.
And, you know, it's interesting, though. You mentioned something earlier.
And I'm going to do a complete 180 here because you really, you made me think here. And I don't know if I should say this.
Might get in a lot of trouble, so I'm not even going to name names. But there's a guy I know who worked really closely with Michael Gerber, who's one of my heroes.
Michael Gerber is amazing. You know, he said, Tommy, you wouldn't believe this.
And don't even guess because you'll guess. It's easy.
But don't guess. and he said Michael Gerber is amazing.
You know, he said, Tommy, you wouldn't believe this. And don't even guess because you'll guess it's easy, but don't guess.
And he said, Michael Gerber is not that organized. He said he didn't get back to me when he said he would.
He said his business was not a whole system. He said, my lifelong dream to become this guy and get to meet him and understand his book was kind of let me down.
And isn't that interesting that some of our mentors some of the people and listen i've had people come visit me that said i expected more you know this is a funny story that josh kelly shared with me but he said ishmael came into his office one day and said you know this is it parker and sons and he said yeah this is this is a place of business we didn't build the taj mahal for people to come visit and and love the business we go visit customers houses so yeah you're absolutely right that listen even the best of us have hard times no it's true man you know Ishmael obviously he's in my market so we go back to those billboards right and you know before talking to Ishmael in Vegas I already knew where the the power in that billboard was and it's the pill so he's got 250 billboards or some shit in southern california right and when you see them at first i'm like dude what is this idiot doing he's got two right he's got billboards back to back to back to back to back like you put it on the freeway you see 10 of them in one drive and you're like dude what the hell well first off i didn't realize that billboard at that time were super cheap because of covid so he was able to apprehend a bunch of billboards for less money right but subconsciously in his head imagine who's driving down that freeway so you not only you're paying a tax that booth for google but also how hard is it for you to recruit right well if you're driving down the freeway all day and you're a technician and you see 10 billboards in a row from one company and your company's giving shitty calls you think you're going to go probably go see what the hell's going on with that company that could afford fucking 10 billboards in a row and that was probably the most genius thing i've seen him do was it was that so obviously it's going to help with google but the recruiting aspect you can't go down the freeway without seeing a next-gen billboard anywhere in orange county and obviously more power to them that you know to have the forethought to do that i don't know if that's what he was planning in the beginning but that's what i see i like and that's fucking genius and now we've got you know hundreds and hundreds of people that come work for him and people lining up and calling him every day well a good quick question came in are you spending the same amount of marketing or did you reduce your marketing reduced and i was trying to find you figure out where that sweet spot was and tommy said it's seven percent so i'm paying seven percent that's what i'm at well six this month that's 6.2 is what my budget is for marketing in october okay well here's what i'll tell you is start with the end in mind because i would tell you the seven percent eight percent nine percent ten percent are all good 15 is good it depends on one Am I planning on selling it or am I taking market share? You see, when I work out, I have a plan. Am I balking up or am I cutting up? There's only two things that happen, right? But it's really hard to gain a lot of muscle and get chiseled at the same time.
So I think business is the same. I say, look, am I taking on a lot of calories? Do I know I'm going to gain a little bit of fat? Yes.
But for six months, I'm going to go into the balking phase. I'm going to eat a lot of red meat.
I'm going to do a lot of calories. I know I'm not going to look great, but I know when I get cut up, I'll gain the muscle.
So that's how I look at business. And there is a magic number, but the deal is there's a lot of things that don't pay today.
Like SEO, building links, don't pay today. If you do Billboard's TV radio and you think, i was a little bit different than this smell my guy calls me up and he goes dude tv is like a fifth of the cost i go yeah let's run the shit out actually mike bailey in milwaukee said hey dude i'm gonna run some ads on tv we're a little slow this is just when code came out i looked at the price i'm I'm like, is it really this price? He goes, yeah.
So I go,

wait a minute. You're paying a fifth of the price and there's five times more people at home?

And I think a lot of people miss that.

Everybody was running for the hills saying, we're screwed.

We're going out of business. Who knows? COVID's going to

kill everybody. With what's happened,

how old are you, Victor? I'm 32.

32? I'm 38.

They said everything that happened

so far is once in a lifetime. 2000, crash once in a lifetime covid worst pandemic in 100 years once in a lifetime i'm like man i know a lot of once in a lifetime crap but now i'm like a lot of times it's knowing your own business i know one thing that if someone else is struggling and i was beating them before like when they can't get supplies and we can't get supplies they're struggling just as much like like that's what's nice is i got buying power and people are willing to do me favors now and i see all these small businesses calling me up they want me to buy them and i'm like dude this is a good thing because i could help these people and help their families and i'll tell you what if it's tough on you you know leland dude that guy is a business freak he knows his shit like the back of his hand and you got to work around that i mean when i went there and did a tour and hung out with him it's pretty freaking impressive and you got to feel fortunate like you said to get trained by the best and see what see what that looks like yeah i mean obviously leland you know i've got to work at service that i went to go work at another.
And the second I walked in, I'm like, this isn't the same. Like, because I had only worked at one place and then I got to go walk into another one.
I'm like, this guy doesn't, they don't operate and they don't think the same way. Like Leland gets it.
Right. And Leland, there's a, there's a reason why he is who he is and why he's been able to grow that business.
But like I said, I, I'm forever grateful. Like if I never got to work there, I'd never be mad.
I would never have accomplished what I've accomplished. So I think that if anybody gets a chance to go check out what they're doing there, it's phenomenal.
And now he's just, he's in super buy mode. I have friends that, you know, that work there still, and I see them, they're on jets all over the place because they're going to check out these other businesses to help buy them for, I believe, and try to acquire these businesses or onboard all these businesses and stuff.
So it's pretty cool to see not only that business grow up but like all those people that were with him he's taking care of them and allowing them to move into better positions too so it's pretty cool i'll tell you my favorite thing i i think that i took away is his team is dispatch team amazing there's a guy um i'm trying to get a hold of him named wyatt why yeah why it's a good friend of mine i was actually just he's the one that's been flying around all over the place i've been talking talking to him every day so wyatt's a great guy and he goes tommy he goes here's what my team does so we're in his office he's eating chipotle and what happened is they were reaching out to the technician while they were there with the customer so they were checking in saying hey wanted to make sure he had his booties on when he walked in, wanted to make sure you're happy getting a five out of five. It was like the complete accountability.
So if you guys aren't mentioning this or mentioning financing or doing this, that completely eliminates it. It creates the ultimate accountability.
And I'm like, Oh my God, like we need that. And it's just so many things I took away

is they took me around

and they showed me how they were training

and they get all these guys at 15 bucks an hour,

but those guys only run the memberships.

And recently I had a great buddy in town, Keegan,

and he goes, Tommy, here's a little secret.

He goes, never put commission people

on maintenance agreements, never.

He goes, yeah, give them a small piece. They should get hourly plus a little bit.
But their goal is not to sell. Their goal is to create relationships.
So, you know, I've been doing a lot of this stuff wrong. And the funny thing is I don't get any of the answers from garage door guys.
I get them all from HVAC plumbing electrical guys. Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's a business. Obviously, garage doors, you're trying to bring it into a whole new level.

Going forward, there's probably going to be another 100 Tommies over the next 25 years or people that want to be like you.

That's going to change that industry going forward.

I'm in a lot of groups and all of a sudden, a lot of people are like, well, I do garage doors. I do garage doors.

All of a sudden, I'm like, oh, there's a lot of people that do garage doors.

I've never seen it before. A lot of the guys that I see, they're doing pretty well, but most of them are probably following what you do or doing a whole different level from 10, even five years ago, probably what was going on there.
So it is pretty cool. Like, so you guys probably, do you guys have a call by call manager in your business? No, no explain that.
And I know what that is, but I don't do that. Right now I have one.
I'm trying to add a second call by call manager and his job, he communicates with a technician on the way to call. He's talking about where the call came from.
Are they homeowners? He already looked up on Zillow. It's how many square feet they are and all these things.
And so he's communicating, okay, this call, it's a 10-year-old call. We're going to go after assistant replacement here.
We're going to go after this. So he already gets them motivated.
When they get there within the first 20 minutes, they give them a rundown of what's going on there. Okay, cool.
So he kind of gives them an idea of what to recommend, what to do, how to get there. And as they get to the table, they don't feel comfortable communicating.
They call them, he'll actually communicate to the customer for them. So he'll be like, Hey, you know, Brad's not the best communicator, but let me kind of explain to you why he's recommending this stuff.
And he sent me photos and I looked at it, but we both agree that we should probably look at doing this so he's actually helping coaching these guys especially because i hire all the guys from scratch so he's coaching these guys through it he also follows up you know after the calls following up asking for reviews so you know that's his day is constantly doing something right and as we scale we'll have a couple more of those guys and he's making sure we're making those getting the average ticket up offering stuff on every call. He looks through every call to make sure we have our photos.

We have our option sheets done,

all that stuff.

So it's a pretty hard job,

but he enjoys it.

And the numbers have gone up dramatically since he's been doing it.

So Sean Stevens created that program that used to do the poet page program.

So basically you can get a manager out there that run a job or teach you how to do turnovers.

One thing that I've learned this past two years, Victor, this is the honest to God swear Bible. Put more time up front into the guys.
Teach them exactly how to sound, what to do. Have them run through 100 scenarios.
You see, too often I think we cut guys loose and say, we'll help you out as you go. Now, if you could do it 100 times in front of me perfectly.
now the only only thing that scares me about the call-by-call manager is, for me, I run 11,000 jobs a month. How many jobs do you run a month, honestly? I run about 1,000 a month in the slow times.
I don't know what it is during busy times. So 1,000 jobs.
So I would need 11 of those. And we tried this.
We called it our virtual field supervisor program. And supervisor program and what we learned was man you know that there's this talented person that needs to do that and be able to work with these guys but what happens is you call that line and you go hey i'm on my way to a job dude i'm working with another guy and so what i learned for me for garage doors is you got to spend a lot of time up front and train these guys, everything like the back of their hand.

And no,

but,

but,

but I love the concept of it,

dude.

You know,

what's nice is when you get to a certain size,

one of the gals I met that does the dispatching,

the tough dispatching,

like she's got her own office.

She's like,

man,

I got to sit with these guys every day and I got to figure everything out

of the top guys going,

we're doing this.

I forget.

I got a picture of her card,

but she's like, yeah, I've been here 24 years. Yeah.
Yeah. Yep.
And it's so cool because

to find those people and build that process, it just can't happen overnight. You could rebuild it,

but where are you going to find those people? Cause it takes time for them to learn this stuff.

Well, and that's a cool thing in my business. I would say 95% of my employees now never worked anywhere else.
So they've all been through my training class. We all communicate the same way.
In the beginning, I was just hiring anybody and everybody. If you had a fucking pulse, I was bringing you in if you had any experience.
And now when I flipped the script and kind of said, okay, well, no, we're only going to bring up guys from our ranks, right? Or we're going to teach these guys. We'll create sales guys.
We'll create technicians. It's made a big difference on the communication side, right? You don't have to teach an old dog new tricks.
Hey, this guy only knows the tricks that you taught him. And I think that's been a big difference.
So I know you do that same thing. You've got to do a lot of the training in-house where you can, you can love on the guys and they can know exactly what you want them to say at any time.
You know what? I thought I had good training and I've never seen anything like ours, but I feel like I'm half it's gonna be i mean dude i'm learning about certain things let me just tell you certain things like smell this is called a boom stick there's somebody just said boo yeah you hit me with that shit in vegas yeah so the deal is dude it's sent it's hearing so right now i'm trying to get my guys to record conversations and i'm trying to get the turnovers that are done virtually. I want all that shit because here's the deal.
When you come here, I'm going to play 100 perfect calls and I'm going to hear you replicate it. I'm going to say, let's say the same objection.
Let's get over this. No, no, no.
You messed up eye contact. Dude, why are you pulling your arms? That looks like shit.
No, no, no. Watch your shoes.
Watch where they're pointed. Watch the way you stand next to her look all these things i watched this guy um rodney rodney he's the one of the really he's a rodney webb and uh adam actually the guy he just talked to got on stage with him at this clope convention and and man he had to repeat oh really what makes you say that and he had to say all these things perfectly and adam's really smart dude and the guy kept like no no you seem angry when you say you've seen this, you've seen that, you've seen that.
And he had to say all these things perfectly. And Adam was really smart, dude.
And the guy kept like, no, no, no. You seem angry when you say, you seem this, you seem that, you seem that.
And the employees, their mood, their attitude, the way you make them feel, along with great training and continued training is probably the most important thing in the company. It's easy for me to say that when I have these trainers and recruiters and stuff, but dude, it's taking your personal time and making a phone call.
And I got to say, and there's one thing I regret is not being there for my guys enough. You know, I'd call my guys every day and I only have certain time of the day.
Believe it or not, it makes my day calling the guys. The guy has a big day.
He calls me. I just had a guy text me a hundred or made a million dollars so far this year, which not made, he didn't make that personally, but he just hit a million dollars in revenue.
And I've been getting these messages all month. One of them's at 2 million.
And I got to tell you, that makes me feel there's guys listening to this right now that go a million dollars in garage doors. I mean, you guys, I don't know what you did in a year, probably four or five million, you know, something crazy, but we're not selling stuff for the same price.

It's all relative, right?

And the pricing and, you know, I got a good friend of mine, Daniel, you met him at Joe's

thing.

I think he works for Ishmael.

Now that guy, that guy was selling $7 million a year in Southern California and HVAC, dude.

There ain't no freaking weather in Southern California, dude.

And when you hear stuff like that, it's just, it's kind of crazy to even try to wrap your head around what's possible.

I mean,

you know,

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you know, you know, you know, you, there ain't no freaking weather in Southern California, dude. And when you hear stuff like that, it's just, it's kind of crazy to even try to wrap your head around what's possible.
I mean, but I think one of the cool things, like, you know, for me, I have a good friend of mine. I consider him one of my best friends, right? And we went to junior high together and the kid, we didn't really hang out too much after junior high, went to high school together, but we weren't really like good friends.
And I still remember when I first got into HVAC and like I said,

I knew nothing about HVAC.

I went from doing construction to all of a sudden I'm an HVAC tech and

training and I went through Leland's program that he had at the time,

which isn't as robust.

It's not like it is now where it's like intense training or whatever.

It's more of a, it was more communication stuff.

And I'm like, cool, I can sell stuff.

I'm good at that.

But I remember I got out of training and I started doing really good.

And a buddy of mine, he started,

he was following me on Facebook or on social media and I haven't talked to him in a long time. He reached out to me.
He's like, Hey dude, what the hell are you doing now? You're starting to make, you know, I see you make money. We both have our daughter the same age.
And I said, well, I'm doing HVAC. Well, he's like, well, I'm actually going to school for HVAC at OCC or it was like a junior college.
I'm like, well, how about you quit that shit and come over and apply where I'm at. They'll train you.
I'm like, you don't need all that shit. And he kept pushing me off, pushing me off.
Finally, he's like, okay, I'm done. He was a line cook.
He was a line cook at a restaurant. I said, just come on and apply.
I'll get you the job. And I told him exactly what to say.
I told him how to dress. I told him exactly what they're looking for.
And he got the job and he went through service champions. He did really good.
And then he started working for me two years ago. Now, last month, he almost had $500,000 in revenue in sales, right? And he was being a line cook, you know, a couple of years back.
He made it close to $50,000 last month selling air conditioning. It's a lot of money, man.
I'll tell you what, there's a lot of money in the trades. And by the way, if you guys go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash Victor dash ranker, R-A-N-C-O-R, you'll hear a summary of all the key takeaways that we put in the notes because Victor's going to drop some bombs here.
He already has. It's crazy what guys can make in this industry.
And what really bugs me is my whole mentality now, and I've been writing these things down is what else could we give our employees? And I really am. I'm trying to do the whole carrot thing on top of a lot more.
In my opinion, I want these guys to be homeowners. I want them to have the vehicle they want for them and their wives.
You know, like I said, a private school if they choose to be able to go on really, really all-inclusive trips to wherever it might be, Tahiti or Hawaii or Florida. And I keep writing more and more down.
And I've got a pretty big list going.

And I'm like, someone's got to pay for this stuff.

And so my prices keep going up.

But it's really, you know, I'm comfortable at a certain margin.

I'm comfortable between 15 and 20%. There are guys that say 25, 30%.

That's fine.

But at some point, I think either you start gouging the customer

or you stop paying your people enough money.

But what's crazy is the more I think about if I was in their shoes, truly believe that you're in their shoes and really try to put yourself there and say, would I work for this person? And yeah, I would work for me, but I still think it could be so much better. And I'll tell you what, it's going to become a melting pot of amazing people.
And it doesn't need to be garage or text. I want to take people in from everywhere.
And your secret sauce, if you guys are listening out there, should be, how do I create a melting pot? Where would I want to work? Would I want to work on call five nights a week? Would I want to work as a warranty of the first two jobs that I run, warranty calls? There's all these things. Let me ask you this, Victor, who would you want to work for? I'm sure you're becoming that person, but you're not.
You've been doing this a couple of years, but really, who would you want to work for i'm sure you're becoming that person but you're not you've been doing this a couple years but really who would you want to work for what was important to you in leela like what did you love when you walked in that other shop and you said it's missing structure it's missing communication it's missing probably an orange chart but what else what bothered you that that other place didn't have the owner didn't give a shit and you know back to what you're just saying so that it was an absentee owner he was living in hawaii and he had a business in southern california so i was working you know six days a week running crazy hours i was the service manager sales manager i was helping with dispatch i was the top sales guy so i was doing everything for this guy and he lived in in hawaii i never saw him i didn't get a pad on back i didn't get, there's just nothing there, right? Well, then there's service champions who's got layers of managers and people that look up to and there's goal tracking. So I went from the big leagues down to the minor leagues where I went from at service champions.
I was a big fish in a big pond over at this place. I was a big fish in a tiny pond and people didn't, you know, it was just the culture that they had built in service champions where people actually wanted to be really good at their job over here.
It was like, well, this guy is not here. He doesn't, I don't give a shit.
I'm not going to work those extra hours. I'm not going to finish that install today.
I'll finish it tomorrow. Stuff like that is a mentality thing.
And, and I think that's, that's what I'm trying to build here is that like, no, like we go fuck shit up here and it's a lot of fun. We go do fun things.
I took my guys, you know, to, you know, the Monday night football game the other night,

we put them in a company suite, like just cool shit.

Like, and that's kind of what I want to make it.

I want to make this place fun because for a while it wasn't fun anymore.

It was, we were so worried about growing, growing, growing.

I wasn't paying attention to the people I had that really wanted to be here and really cared about me.

I got a phone call last week.

I was on a call with all my managers in every single market and this guy goes dude he goes all the guys are 10 times happier he goes all i do is grill he goes i've been grilling and he goes i even have other garage work companies come by he goes all they do they just shoot the shit he goes i don't try to recruit them because it's straight across from the manufacturer like right in the same. And I'm like, good.
And when that happened, I text Crystal. I go, when are these grills coming? And she goes, I got grills coming to every single market and making pancakes.
You know, it's not about so many people think it's about this expensive shit. Football, bringing you guys to Vegas, taking them on planes, doing this, doing that.
I'm like, dude, how about thank you every now and then? How about a a trophy for kicking ass how about world's best mom if they're raising five kids at home and you tell him to bring that home to their mom they fight over this every month I gave this fucking custom custom fucking belt it was online it was a website that makes custom belts and I got that thing made and these guys were battling over it so I got that if you weren't able to see that because you're listening uh he's got this big wwf or wcw belt and they get to wear the belt i love that dude i'm getting a big freaking wrestling belt dude that's that's so cool you know yeah they're pretty just still other people's good ideas no i mean that's it's uh it's a little r&d rob and duplicate

you know what i mean oh yeah you know yeah that's what we do someone asked about the training programs i'll tell you a little bit about mine is it's it's an eight-week process ldb kind of gave me everything he's got and then i kind of made it into garage drawers but he gave me all the manuals someone asked about manuals like the first 10 i got from And then we started making more cool. Once we got the outline of how it's done.
And so now we have something like 47 manuals or something crazy. But the way I do it is you start out as an apprentice for four weeks and we get you in to Phoenix, but you got to learn shit.
You got to go through. And the more shit I can teach you in that four weeks and make sure you're on time and good.
When you come to Phoenixenix dude now you're going to leave a million dollar producer i mean it's very rare or you're going to fall off within the first 60 days so there's only one of two answers million dollar producer or fall off and yes everything we do we go through first you're going to learn every single thing to be a ninja on the garage door because if you don't know but then you learn how to sell financing and learn your way around the ipad there's so many things you got to learn but here's the deal i got guys that come in on the weekend and teach now i got guys that come in at nights if you need extra help they'll come in at four in the morning for you and so you got to want it so i get in front of the class tomorrow i'm talking for three hours and trust me me talking three hours is easy i don't even have to go pee like i just get up there we we talk for 90 don't know. Yours was shorter.
I had to talk for 90 minutes and I go like, like people like who the hell's going to go up there and talk for 90 minutes. That was like a fart in the wind for me.
I was like, 90 minutes is already done guys. I'm sorry.
I guess I gotta be done here. But orientation, that's one of the things Al talks about telling you guys why they're here, helping them understand the vision and the mission.
And what's the purpose? What is the purpose of being here right now? And this time I literally went up there for 10 minutes and ended up being 45 minutes. And I go, guys, everybody's watching you.
You won't even realize it. When I watch you walk by a piece of paper in the parking lot, I'm mentioning it to the trainers.
When I see you pick it up, I mention it to the trainers. When I watch the smallest things, like if I see you yawning and falling asleep in the morning, I'm like, it's okay every once in a while.
All of us make mistakes. All of us get drunk.
Some of you guys don't drink, whatever you guys do. But the deal is, is we make mistakes, but come on, dude.
Every morning you come in and these little things we notice, and my goal is to send them home sooner than later. What's your goal? As far as what's your trick about training? Because not a lot of people have this figured out.
So obviously, you know, if I'm, if I have a training program and I learned this from Leland, right? The main thing I want to focus on the first couple of days, are they on time? If they're late, they're fired, period. If they, like for my guys, they have to shave every day.
If you're not shaving, you can't fucking follow the rule and shave your face every day. You can't be, you can't work for me.
But main thing I'm always looking for, attendedness. If they're falling asleep in a class, you know, if they're yawning, falling asleep, whatever it is, they're not going to make it.
So, you know, you probably do the same thing. So what I'll try to do, and I got this from Liam, is you go get 20 dudes or you might get a hundred, right? A hundred guys to start.
And your goal through that eight weeks is to weed those people out. Cause those eight weeks, yeah, it costs you money to train them, but it costs you more money to keep the guys that aren't really meant to be there.
So Leland will weed them down. So like, I remember I was in a class of 20 people.
And when I left that class after eight weeks, like three people left, right? It was only me and two other people that made it through that decided this is the career we're going to have. And I think that's a really key factor in it is you have to make it to where, you know, these guys, when they're done there, they feel like they earned something.
They should get an award when they finish. They should feel like, dude, I made it through because those are going to create more loyal employees, right? So I think for me, the main thing I want to do is make sure that I not just train them, but culture them to where like, I'm sure when they're done that I want to invest the 30 grand.
It takes a stock, a truck and the gas and the call and since one of my calls, it costs a lot of money, you know? Well, you have the nail on the head. And our goal is kind of like you got Navy SEALs and then you got SEAL Team 6.
So first of all, becoming a Navy SEAL is almost impossible to make it to becoming in the Navy's tough. Navy SEALs, and then you got SEAL Team 6.
So, first of all, becoming a Navy SEAL is almost impossible. To make it to becoming in the Navy is tough.
Navy SEALs is almost impossible. SEAL Team 6 is like the best of the best of the best of the best.
So, I consider this like SEAL Team 6. And I'll tell you, I walked up upstairs one time, Victor, and I look and there's like nine dudes.
And man, I'm trying to get to 50. Because because 50 will give me 30 but i'm seeing 50 that fly out to phoenix and i gotta tell you my heart kind of dropped a little bit because my trainers tell me if a class isn't 20 or more it's not as effective there's not as much participation that there's not as much engagement.
It's just not what it needs to be.

So, you know, that's the day I told you that up on stage is Jody's wife, Vanessa, called

me up and said, hey, dude, we got a program.

And it's worked out great because I'll tell you this.

We're interviewing now probably 50 people a day.

And the cool thing that I love about this whole program and what we were already were

doing.

But when I was able to quadruple the amount of people we went through.

Yeah, the class is less than 25.

It's right around there.

But man, I had every single eyeball when I walked in.

They're like, hoorah, A1 from day one.

And they started.

And I was like, boom.

And all of a sudden, they're just energy.

And they're like, you could drop a pin and they're taking notes.

And I was like, write this down.

I was like, how many of you guys have ever wanted this?

And every hand went up. How many of you guys have done this? Boom.
And I'm like, you guys competitive? Who here wants to be number one? Every freaking hand. Boom.
I'm going to be number one. And I'm like, this is freaking like steroids, dude.
Like these guys, look at this. If I take 20 guys, look at this.
Let's just add this up. 20 guys do a million.
Okay. The next month, 20, do a million, 20, do a million, 22.
You can't go 20 times 12 because, but you got to understand, I love this because it's going to be a little bit of math and it's going to be a little bit off. So you got 20 million the next month.
You might have 18 the next month. You might have 16 the next month.
It's probably like more like 19, 18, 17 million. When you add it all up, it comes out to hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
But here's the deal. Once again, I go back to this thing.
How many lives are you changing? How many wives, kids, husbands, whatever it might be? How much are you giving back at that point? And that's what's crazy to me is at this point, I've got a fiduciary responsibility to grow this business to the biggest and best anybody's ever freaking seen and i'm not look the problem is i don't need the money the scariest thing about me is i don't fucking care if i lose i don't care because i'm going to come back 10 times stronger and i'm a scary competitor because i've already got the money so anybody that wants to go head to, I don't have to do dirty things. I will not do dirty things.
I don't need to lie, cheater, steal. But I will tell you this, people are going to know who we are and they're going to come work for the better company.
And I love what you just said, Victor, more than anything is you went to, you were a big fish in a big pond, but you went to a company that had people come here and they go, man, you got more meetings than anybody I've ever met. You've got a Thursday meeting.
You got more training. You got to ride along.
You've got, you keep track. You've got competitions.
And I'm like, if you don't like that, if you're like a lone survivor, this is not for you, buddy. I remember being in a meeting and one of the guys skipped up and it's a hundred and something people in his meeting.
And Leland's like, oh, there's anything you guys want to say, blah, blah, blah. and he's like, heips up and there's a hundred and something people in his meeting and Leland's like

oh there's anything you guys want to say blah blah

blah and he's like he gets up and he says

I think this place is like a fucking cult

and Leland says yeah it is a fucking

cult it's a money cult so why don't you sit your

ass down

it's a money cult

we're fucking make money here

so why don't you sit your ass down and everybody's like

oh shit

so you know

Leland is a special type of person, and anybody that knows him that's worked with him, and I know a couple people just say you're not going to find anybody that operates at that level. He's done it for so long, and you know what he told me when I said that with him? He gave me a book.
He told me to read this a while ago. You're going to know it.
It's somewhere off here,

but it's called,

uh,

double your province of six months or less by Bob Pfeiffer.

I don't know where it is,

but he said,

you read that book time.

It'll change your life.

But also,

and he's got a COO that's just next to him.

Real nice guy.

Uh,

Tony,

is it?

Yeah.

I can't remember his name after I left.

It was Frank DeMarco.

Frank,

Frank.

Yeah.

Frank.

And then,

you know, he's got a CMO and he's got, he's this really skinny uh cfo that's a cool dude really nice guy anyway they're all sitting for next to me and they all start talking they go you want to know leland's secret is he's here all day friday saturday sunday you could catch him there he goes he's got a passion for working and i gotta tell you this he might have sacrificed a lot you know i know he's got kids but for working. And I got to tell you this.
He might've sacrificed a lot. You know, I know he's got kids, but I got to tell you, when you love what you do now, listen, there's no sacrifice for not making it into a soccer game of your kids or seeing them play the violin for the first time or me.
But when you love what you do, it's not work. And sometimes you got to pinch yourself and say, you got to leave.
You got you got kids you got a relationship but if you love it that much and victor one thing you said to me and i don't mean to put you on the spot but i'm going to because that's what i do is you said um you love to teach more than you love to run the business and i don't know exactly i know some of your employees might watch and i know you absolutely love taking care of them and giving them as much but But you also said and you don't look, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, like the little secret you told me. But you said I love helping more at a time because you made so many mistakes and you get more out of it.
And see, I don't like training as much of people. I like telling them my story, but I'd rather be working in the business on the business.
But in the business, I share these stories that I love the people that want to listen and come through for tours, but you have a passion to teach. I've got a passion, a different type of passion.
Explain that to me. Maybe it could be misconstrued.
So I love my business, right? I love growing the business. I don't feel like the, you know, the day to day, the beating down every number and not like, you know, yes, like at this point, like I have to know that I know that stuff.
But what gets me excited, like I and I communicate with people all over the country and I have partners that were in other states. And when I give them an idea, right, and they go run it and I watch to take off for them.
But it's like an idea of I've already been using. I mean, I was saying go try this.
Right. And I watch and they come back to like, dude, it's double my revenue or it's done this or that i'm like i just get excited i've always been like that my whole life they're like i'm a giving person and i try to help as many people as i can but to say i want to be part of the business as long as it's it's talking about growing but if it's like the day-to-day mundane stuff like i have to hire people for that i just i have bad adds i don't like that little stuff like, I do love my business and growing it.
But if I came down to it, I said, Hey, I can never go help anybody again. Or I can have this, this giant, I can have this billion dollar business, but I can never help anybody again.
Then I wouldn't take the billion dollar business. If that makes sense.
It does make sense because you think I like to run an Excel sheet and say, Ooh, look at this. But I think, no, no,.
I got things that I'm working on here when I get in in the morning. I'm working on rehash for sales and service, upsells on the way to the house, internal text messages to remind my employees about recruiting, getting an appointment scheduled because we're having a hard time with that, yearly updates for their tune-up.
And then I'm also working on geofencing, all the supply houses and tiktok for recruiting and i get to whiteboard and create a whole process and then go over with my team cross things out erase stuff fix them and then a b test it and then see the results that to me is that that's fun that's fun but i get to do this all day every day and then i get to talk to people and say how to work they go dude it was great but here's what i would switch okay awesome i'm gonna give that out to

three guys dude it worked but i'm gonna do this boom i'm gonna give that out to 10 guys then all of a sudden you say we just moved the needle 30 in one month like that shit just makes me go it's just it's so much fun and people are like dude you like to whiteboard i like to whiteboard everything like to me it's like look i got a freaking marker here i whiteboard all the time because you know i'm always working on processes i'm always working on the pieces and mixing them up and saying let's figure this out and i gotta tell you the exponential growth you know when we sat down for dinner yeah and joe was nice enough to take us out and um i think i got bitted the most, by the way, I don't know, but he did a charity raffle and maybe I got the most, who knows. But what's so fun about this business is the math equation of acquisitions.
That to me is like, it starts to get really, really fun when you can see that if there's businesses out there right now, Victor, they can't get supplies. They can't get human beings to show up to work.
They can't figure out if they're profitable. They've got 25 calls coming in a day, but they can't book them because they don't have the employees and the employees they do have, they're working to death.
And I'm like, man, imagine if we work together because I got things that you don't and you get 25 calls a day without even marketing. And the things that I showing you i feel like it's taken me years to to kind of figure out but dude you gotta understand man the only other thing i know that that's worth more than what we're doing is software could be worth 20 to 25 times revenue but it takes long and i'll tell you this not the one thing I do know, well, I know this, my thing's recession proof and software that I know it takes, look, you got Apple that was able to grow.
You got Microsoft, you got some software companies that have done pretty well. And to have like FinTech and to have those things, yes, they're great, but there's such an opportunity cost.
I mean, look, you're going after something right now and service time is a 12 billion dollar company but what happens is when they start buying out companies and become the leader you know that you're always going to get challenged when you're at the top you know that no matter what facebook's got challenged before it's interesting what is your thought about software just overall whatever you want to talk about with i mean obviously there there's always going to be somebody new and better right and someone's going to figure out the i think it's in the next couple years that the ai is what's going to dominate our industry right because everybody's coming in private equity is coming in they don't know the business they want the business to run itself right and they want to run it with as little amount of people and make as much profit as possible so So someone is going to create the software that's going to fill that hole for these private equity companies.

And it's going to be able to eliminate overhead with human beings, right?

Because eventually, at some point, they're going to try to cut out as many humans as possible.

That's how you make money.

So I think that's going to happen.

And it might be service tight.

It might be another software.

It might be something we've never even heard of, right?

But somewhere right now, I know that Fixify has got a great product they're coming out with. And I've seen these other ones and there's like someone eventually is going to figure out that thing where they can obviously bring a competitive cost to the owner of the business or whatever the equity firm and also going to figure out the AI part where they don't need as many people.
Because if you can cut out the amount of humans that you need to operate a business, and if you only had to focus on the sales guys, the service guys, and the installers, and you didn't have to have office staff, okay, well, now we have something that matters, right? Well, just think about this. That's Amazon.
Do you not think, okay, right now, every time Google Guarantee gets a phone call, they're measuring the time it takes you to get to that job. They're all geofencing your phone.
Amazon, all these things, they're collecting data. Okay.
All they're trying to do is when you collect a lot of data, you start to build what's called significant intervals on a bell curve. And they'll figure out, see, they're always going to need us.
But the problem is it's going to become more commoditized. The multipliers and the profitability are going to go down.
And I know that sounds scary to a lot of people, especially the Ken Haynes, the Ken Goodrichs, the Leland's. But they're going to commoditize this industry and they're going to make a lot of money doing it.
They're going to always need us and they're going to understand the true cost. You see, for 90% of the guys out there, it's going to be a great thing because they're actually going to get paid more money.
But the big companies, we're going to take a little bit of a haircut because now they're going to be able to automate. They're going to know who the best guy is, how long they take to do this job, and how to get it done.
And guess what? Their plan has always been to Uberize the industry. And if you guys don't think they're collecting a ton of data right now, you don't think that garage doors, okay, just so you know, Lyftmaster, which means nothing to you, but it's like the mother of all for garage door openers, they got bought by Blackstone.
That's one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. Now, what do you think they bought? Technology.
Now, what do you think they know? Lyftmaster knows every time your garage door has an issue, they own the data. They could send that easily to Amazon.
They pay them for it. They are coupled together.
Do you not think that builders are starting to build houses without browsers because of autonomous cars and you could use that house, that area of square feet? So I want to just tell you, we're going to be changing a lot. And those people that are listening right now that think they got it all figured out and nothing's going to happen and nothing's going to change.
Right now, Google two years ago could book a job for you for a hair salon and change the date. And it sounds better than a normal human.
So I don't even want to hear it. What happens is they can't because the government will have to subsidize right now because so many jobs would be lost.
So right now it's going to slowly evolutionize into different industries. I think it happens a lot quicker in HVAC than garage doors because there's so many, if you know, you've got a five ton unit, you're already starting to see them for sale everywhere.
Right. You could see it in HVAC, but you still need to know how to keep that other room cold.
You still got to know how to fix it. You still got to know how to heat pump.
I don't know anything about HVAC, but, but I do know that it's happening right now, right before our eyes. And if it doesn't scare you, then you're an idiot.
Oh, a hundred percent. This is the conversation.
So, you know, I talked to you when we were in Vegas about me partnering with these other HVAC businesses, different States and stuff. And it's the same conversation I have with them.
I said, look at, and some of these guys, they, you know, they're thinking, Oh, I'm going to go hang around for the next 20 years. And I'm going to get paid in 20 years.
I'm like, well, you probably don't have 20 years to get paid. If you don't figure it out now, you're going to probably pass on your opportunity, right? Because that little, your little $3 million shop might be worth money now, but a couple of years, it's not going to be worth that much.
They're not going to need that, that little guy. They're going to look for only for the big guys.
Right. It's the same thing.
So we have this time right now. Like if you're going to go, you need to go right you need to go blow your damn thing up here's my best tips and i said this in the beginning of my um and i want to hear i want to do i know we went over we're going a little bit over so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna go speed round so first i want to start with this i'll give you my tips to you give me yours number one you get on accrual accounting number two you get audited by one of the big four number three you find out every freaking hole a consultant to come in and find every single hole.
Number four, you make sure you got executives that could do well in front of a private equity company. Number five, you get all your KPIs dialed in and you get contracts for every one of your employees and you create an equity incentive program.
And what I would do that is it would hold everybody in for the next turn. Those are some quick, simple little things you can do.
And I hopefully talked over a lot of people's heads. I just gave you my whole playbook, but Victor.
Just systemize your business. I mean, you pretty much said it all, right? But the main thing is just systemizing everything, making it to where when someone comes in, they feel like they can run it without you, right? And if they can't run it without you, you don't have a business to sell in the beginning, right? So the guy wants to be able to come in and duplicate you without you having to be there so systemize everything right and then obviously make sure you have the right financial controls in place and obviously make it and pay attention to that bottom line because that company when someone comes around and they don't give a shit that you spend all this money this year on training and all that stuff so you got to make sure ebit is always right so always make sure you have those profits before anything else and if you do just simple comment on that, if you are putting money into greenfield growth or anything else is make sure you catalog it, right? Make sure you got a controller that knows how to put those as ad backs and say, we decided to invest this much in consulting and this and that.
Those are called ad backs and that still comes to profit. All right.
Next speed round. You blew up fast, man.
Tell me, what did you do for marketing to get that big that quick? What seemed to be the big ROI? How did you freaking create that many jobs overnight? For me, it was social media. So for us, I found out I can get leads on Facebook for about $20 a lead.
And the big thing was figuring out how to bridge the gap from getting that lead actually to getting it converted. And that's what we were able to figure out.
I automated my Facebook ads.

I took my booking rate from about 30% up to 80%.

So I was getting in front of more people

and then figuring out a way to get them qualified.

So that's how I grew my business so fast with social media.

That's crazy.

Just Facebook?

Just Facebook, yeah.

So Facebook was our number one ROI on everything

for the first years of business.

You don't know a guy named Peter, do you?

Peter was. He was a competitor of mine for my marketing agency, but he didn't.
Peter Lewis? Yeah, I know Peter. Yeah.
Okay. I know he used to get a ton of HVAC leads.
All right. What about recruiting? What's the best way to recruit? You got to be the recruiter.
So if you're the business owner, you have to recruit. So the first thing you got to do is make sure that people have heard about you, right? You want to get your name out there.
And then if you're a business owner, you want to go through people you already, like you go through your employees, but don't say, Hey, reach out to your friend, ask them for your friend's number. Let me call him because if the owner calls, it's a far more powerful thing.
You know, one of my competitors, Ishmael, right? He's the most famous competitor or recruiter I know. He'll text people 24 hours a day, seven days a week to try to recruit them.

And it's just super powerful coming from the owner.

So obviously I'm using your friend that we met and I met in Vegas to be using him to do some recruiting,

but if you want to recruit guys,

you better get your ass maker.

You should be smiling and dialing and making it happen.

Yeah.

Jody,

I think he's got a website now,

rapid hire.info.

He's helping me on so many fronts,

dude. The guy understands software.
Anyways, so you got recruiting. You got that.
You got that. Let's go.
This is the last few questions. If someone wants to get a hold of you, they want to reach out.
I know you got your Facebook group. Tell me, how do they get a hold of you? How do they get training? How do they get part of your Facebook group? What's the lowdown on that? My biggest one I'm on on is facebook so you can look at my name victor rancor uh i have a web run a facebook group for home service owners so it's called home service heroes and if you go on home service heroes that's there's about 2500 of us in there that are like-minded people uh if you guys are looking for sales training or to try to figure out where you can buy my app it comes out it's a call servicehero.com.
The app launches in a couple of days. And I think it's going to change the way that people do business.
What are three books you recommend? Is there three killer books that just changed your life? This was not the best book, but it was one of my books I read when I was, when I was finally ready to jump on my own. So I liked who moved my cheese.
You guys probably read it. It's a quick amazing book.
Yeah. Quick read, right? It's not, the e-myth e-myth was good and then my buddy judge he's gonna get the band he wrote a book called scale with speed and it's all about how to scale your business at fucking light speed so he uses a lot of culture building stuff like that so if you guys do come to my bag today he's the opener then he runs a business growth training called burn the ships in texas this guy knows how to build a fucking culture he's actually the one that created carrots so he's my partner there the guy knows how to create a winning culture and get people want to come forth there yeah he scaled a marketing agency to 140 million and exited but he's also scaled i think five different hundred million dollars this is just took one public recently too his name is judge Graham.
Judge like judge yeah like judge judy j-u-d-g-e and then graham g-r-a-h-a-m judge okay yeah no i got it okay and then um last thing that i do here and i appreciate you coming on by the way if anybody wants to come to service hero 10 times event i know it's coming up here in a couple weeks how do they do that uh if you'd like to come to the event you can you can dm me i'll actually give a discount to anybody that's listening to tommy's podcast i got a couple of general admission tickets left so if you guys reach out i will get you guys a discounted ticket let's say fuck it i'll do i only have that many left but if you guys want to come i'll do a ticket a general admission for 1500 bucks if you guys want to come i think i have about ticket, a general admission for $1,500. If you guys want to come, I think I have about 20 tickets left.
So Grant Cardone, he's an amazing guy. I can't wait to see him.
You know, the deal is, as I really respect the guy over time, you hear a lot of Gary V's and Grant Cardone. Those are two of the guys in Tony Robbins that I respect.
And I love what he says. And I'm actually, I read the 10X rule because my sister told me to read it like five, whenever it first came out, I just think it's great, man.
And last thing I do is, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, it's not even as bad, just the everybody that's there, man, you being there, right? So I was just in a room with you a couple of weeks ago.
And the first time I finally met you and I've been following you for a while, man. And then you get to, and you can be around people that are are hungry entrepreneurs and they just start talking right like when we start communicating it's different and when you guys are you guys never been around that and you get to see how these guys think and and how they have to and how much they would like my help i think it's just powerful being in a room with that many fucking millionaires i think in that room will be probably close to 300 people that are millionaires all of them so there's everybody there's got money or you get the kind of rub shoulders of people that have been there done that and and pick their brain you know it's interesting because part of this mastermind i pay a hundred thousand dollars a year for everybody there does a hundred million or more and i found a couple people that i latched on to that are teaching me shit dude that literally is going to grow me exponentially and i'm like studying and they don't know this, but in the background, I'm basically stalking them.
And I think it's important because I'm finding new ways to get to the top that no one else is doing in the home service space. So it's pretty cool.
Last thing I do, Victor, is I want to give you a chance. We talked about a lot of great things, really hit a lot of things on this podcast.
I want to give you a chance to give us some really, really good takeaways, maybe some take action today, but whatever it is, I'll give you a few minutes. If it's a story, if it's something to go do today, if it's just whatever you think that we might've not touched upon or talked enough about, I'll give you the floor.
And I can't stress this enough. If you guys are young, you guys coming up is build your personal brand.
And I tell people this all the time and how powerful it is, right? I was a guy doing oil changes nine years ago for $6 a fucking hour. And quickly over the last nine years, pretty much over the last three years, I've been able to build a personal brand.
So if you guys are going to go start a business, use social media, use that stuff and bring people along for the ride. Post a lot on your social media, post about your business, talk about your business, have pride in your business, give back to your community and post about it.
Because what happens is you're going to get this community of people that follow you and watch you grow. And then they want to be part of you.
They want to refer your friends. So it's the most free market you can do with social media.
So I think that was big with my business. In my first two years of business, I gave away 28 free systems, right? And I came

out of my own pocket and nobody helped me. I just, anytime I ran into a situation where someone

really needs them, I gave it away for free. And I started talking about it and bringing it up.

And magically, all of a sudden, everybody wants to do business with me because that's the kind

of person I am. And I think that obviously I'm not telling you to give away 28 free systems,

that takes a lot of money, but I'm just telling you, just build your personal brand and take

everybody along for the ride. And you'll be surprised how much your business grows as opposed

So the other day I saw somebody post and he's like,

Thank you. that takes a lot of money, but I'm just telling you, just build your personal brand and take everybody along for the ride.
And you'll be surprised how much your business grows as opposed to the, you know, the other day I saw somebody post and he's like, I really need you guys help. My sales training company is going out of business and in there.
He's never, I looked on his social media. There's nothing about his, on his social media, about his sales training business or that he does sales training or any of that shit.
Even in the post, he doesn't talk about it. I'm like, dude, no one's getting that shit you've never even talked about.
So talk about it all the time, and magically you'll watch your business grow. You know what's funny is this podcast right now, I guarantee you half the people watching, when this comes out, it'll get 30,000 listeners for the month.
But right now, there's 26 people on lot right now, and probably quite a few of them I know, that might not even be in the home service space, but they're getting something out of it. And I second that.
If you guys are not thinking about getting more involved in the community, telling people what you do, telling them how you could help, but also, you know, little things like, Victor, what's your favorite restaurant around you, a local one? I love Mastro's. So there's a Mastro's, right? So Mastro's does does pretty well already but maybe you find a little bit more mom and pop one and you still listen here's what we're gonna do give me a local one so there's a there's a pizza shop so it's called magic mike's pizza magic mike you can dress up like magic mike out there so you go to magic mike and you get the owner and you say dude how are times and he's gonna go man we're barely holding on or whatever and you say here's the deal hopefully magic mike's has done a good job doing that and you say listen i want to buy the next hundred pizzas i want to do a story and i'm gonna do a podcast we're gonna do a giveaway and you go on and you say listen i want a big billboard on here that says what we're doing and i want the reason I'm telling you to make this famous is because I want other people to act like me.
So here at A1 Garage, this is what we believe. We believe everybody should be contributing to their local shops and you give away a hundred pizzas and you say, dude, give them to me for 15 bucks instead of 22.
Cause you know, I'm going to get this thing as social. Everybody's going to share it.
We're going to have a contest. So many little ideas by helping the people you love the most and the competition and listen we are so slammed right now i can't even take on jobs i mean it's crazy i love it and we're hiring as fast as we can i love it but listen dude you got the world by the balls man and i gotta say dude you you came up quick and i really appreciate it you coming on and listen if you need anything i appreciate you letting me speak at your event i'm'm going to kill it for 45 minutes.
I'm going to come with nunchucks and spears. And we're going to be cashing checks and breaking necks.
But I got to tell you, dude, I've never seen anybody come up like you did. And, you know, the thing is you listened.
You appreciate it. You tell people that you love Leland.
You tell them where you came from. You don't lie.
You said April, May, you were dying, and now you're killing it. I appreciate honesty and you're going places and I'm going to watch you succeed left and right in the middle, man.
So keep up the great work. And I mean this, I really appreciate you coming on and dropping some, some great advice and bombs on here.
So thank you. I'll see you at the top, big dog.
And I'll see you in a couple of weeks, man. Tommy, thanks for having me come on.
And like I said, everybody that's listening out there, like I said, me and Tommy ain't nobody special. We just worked our ass off to get what we got.
So if you're out there, put in the work and it's paid off in the long run. So don't give up.
Yeah. Don't give up.
Thanks guys. I'll see you.
Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast.
Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe.
You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on.
And do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review.
It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences.
Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership.
It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company.
And we're just we're telling everybody our secrets, basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them.
So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out.
It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap.
It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich

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I really appreciate it.