Adopting Performance-Based Compensation to Scale Your Business Sustainably

if you're going to be paying people money to do things for you, make sure that, especially if it's incentive-based, it's inspiring them and not manipulating them. Because if you're manipulating behavior, it might short-term work, but long-term usually blows up in your face.
If you're inspiring people to be better and actually helping them find things inside of themselves that they didn't even know was possible, then it's going to the right place. And I think money in general, and especially the more you have it, and Tommy, I'm sure you'd agree with this, money is a form of energy.
It's a form of transaction that it exemplifies what is already there. It brings out more of what already exists.
And if money is being used to manipulate people at a higher degree, then that's what you're going to get in the end. But if it's being used to inspire people and drive people past what they normally would do, then that's what you're going to get in the end.
And just be very intentional about what that money is actually used for

and your intentions behind it as well.

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 to the home service expert.
I'm Tommy. And today, we're going to be talking a lot about hiring and operations because you guys know one A player equals three B players and stacking the deck.
I just got out the phone with a private equity company.

And I said,

I'm more interested in my internal customers and my external customers

because that's where my family is.

And these guys,

they pay my bills.

So Danny lives in the most beautiful house I've ever seen,

but the most amazing view I've ever seen.

I haven't been there personally.

I'm jealous.

He's from Canada. He lives in Canada.
He's the managing partner of Breakthrough Academy, president of, well, he was a BEST, Best Mindset Group, college pro HR manager at Western Canada. He's been on the podcast a couple of times.
At 20 years old, Danny took a leadership position for a franchise company and grew sales 300% in one year. And over the next six years was managing over 150 staff in the organization.
Today, Danny has shifted his focus on helping external contracting entrepreneurs with Breakthrough Academy. In just six years, Breakthrough Academy grew from 370 active members with over a billion in revenue and 41% net profit increase per member in 2019.
It was also rated Canada's 16th fastest startup by McLean's Magazine. Danny, it's always a pleasure.
I think your podcasts are just brilliant and a lot of people get a ton out of this stuff. So I'm excited to have you on today man thanks for having me and just so everyone knows that's not a billion dollars of our revenue that is a billion dollars of our members revenue we are not there yet so been a hot minute since we spoke last we're in an economy now that getting the right people is becoming harder and harder i've got companies begging me me to buy them every day.
They can't get parts. They can't get labor.
They can't get into the job for three weeks out. It's nothing new to hear that, but it keeps getting a little bit worse.
Human capital is an issue, but let's hear what's going on with you. The last few months, we haven't spoken a whole lot.
I want to hear what's new in your life. the the flu and uh i don't even want to call it what it is but you did well it looks like you're back at it i did fine for me anyways it was no issue so yeah that was good because you know if anything i've got some antibodies now there's no wondering what this could be for me anyways for my body and good just get back at it at it.
This is a controversial topic, but I don't really care. Did you get the vaccine? No.
See, I've already had COVID and I got the antibody. I got to get tested for the antibodies, but it's like, you know, this isn't a politics show, so we'll go into home service, but.
Sure. So tell me what, what Breakthrough Academy has been up to.
What up to what's the newest latest and greatest what's the big topics going on in your world and i'm excited to get talking about this yeah we've been uh we're working on a lot i'm sure a lot of companies through you know since this pandemic started have had time to really internally look at hey how do we make improvements and what do we do we've done that with a lot of our members and we've done that a And so, you know, some of the big stuff that's just launched is we just launched something called our contractor quick tools, which is basically public domain, like, you know, free access to courses that we feel really would hit the nail on the head for a lot of people. And we design them specifically for the public.
So there's a walkthrough video instruction manuals with like step by step process on how to build out parts of your company and then example files and templates to use. So a couple of people on our team, we spent about six months building it, and it's something that we can offer to the public for free now, which is awesome.
So those are launched as of about a month and a half ago. And then in coinciding with that, we built our own public-facing brand called Contractor Evolution, which consists of a podcast, blog articles, our top-tiered webinars.
Like I said, there's free resources we're giving away. It's kind of like a freemium version of Breakthrough Academy to get people kind of some value into the public and let us have a voice so that we're not just talking to our members all day long, but we can actually talk to the public and provide some good help.
So that is what's been going on. And then, yeah, I guess the last thing, it'll be announced next week to our members.

So they'll know more details on this.

So I won't say too much right now,

but we are officially doing our winter summit,

which for most doesn't mean a ton,

but that's our annual get together.

So we should have about 300 people there

and it's all members that I've been working with for years

coming together for a good time.

So we've got a lot planned for that.

It's the first time we've done that

since this pandemic kicked off.

So we're stoked because a big part of what we do is, you know, noogies and handshakes and hugs. And I've been able to do that a lot lately.
So excited to get that. Not a lot of nowhere.
Is that waiting for next week? Yeah, it's all next week. It's all, it's all under wraps.
So all I can say is that we are doing it. Do you have to say A is like, ah ah or do you say a or i don't know if that makes sense what i can say about the event though tommy is you may want to be there and it might be quite easy for you to be there so oh good okay so california uh not quite okay i'm not given you know it's not i won't say location but i'll just say that it's in States.
Okay. So, you know, let's dive into one of the things I get all the time with hiring is really, you know, I got a book right here on my desk.
It's called 1,501 Ways to Reward Employees. And most of them don't cost money.
But money is how we pay the bills. You know, people say not everybody's after money, but I know a lot of people don't want to make minimum wage, even if you give them all kinds of cool lunches and dinners.
So let's talk real quick about performance-based pay. And what are the big advantages and disadvantages of performance-based pay? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because we've definitely grown up in a society where we feel like the more you pay somebody, the better they'll do, right?

But that's not always true. And that does hit, I'd say, a bit of like a law of diminishing returns over time.
And especially if you don't organize it well. So for those who have put in performance-based

pay, some of those maybe not, I mean, the things I've established and seen is it does give direct

accountability. So you can say, hey, like, these are the things we're paying you for to specifically achieve and you can track that with them and that becomes more meaningful which is huge i think for a lot of business owners you know especially as you're growing your business it is nice to sometimes have a bit more of control over the costs things don't run away like if you have your production team that has no care in the world how long it takes them to produce a job versus if they have some performance-based pay on how long that takes and the quality of the job, they're tied to think a little bit more like an owner, which is huge.
And you have to do this right, but I find a lot of times owners are, they're feeling like the boss all the time, just having to bark orders to get things done. And this can help align the company goals with those individuals' goals.
So you don't have to feel so much like a boss, but you can, if you do this right, and we'll talk about this today, feel a bit more like a coach that everyone's in it together and everyone scores together and everyone wins together, which is huge. A word to the wise, buy yourself a whiteboard and do not roll out performance pay until it's hard to take it back.
Just like social security. Once you give it, it very difficult levy has taught me make sure you run the numbers inside out because you will have hell to pay if you play with people's money all the time so i love performance pay but i've screwed up dozens of times on it and you know for example my managers last year were based on a pay sales list materials so sales list materials went up right take the material cost out of the revenue and the taxes out and that's the number well i didn't plan on 100 inflation on the cost which inevitably caused our numbers to go up yeah because the dollar is worth a lot less than it used to be.
And so I didn't plan on rapid inflation, which was, I guess, we're up 120% of what we were at the beginning of the year. So you know, price has been going up.
So a big mistake. And here's where actually statistics come in.
You learn a lot about finance and statistics and standard deviations and the mean and the median and how significant those numbers are. And that's what I've learned to kind of base things off of is compared to the cohort that you work with, instead of basing things on an arbitrary number that you have no control over, if prices go up, inflation happens.
I don't think we're going to hit any deflation because the plan of the Democrats is to release $5 trillion into the economy. But anyways, so would you say incentives work on every type of task, like a CFO or a linesman? Or where do you got to draw the line there? Yep.
So it's funny. And so I've seen this for many, many years.
Going back to my days doing franchising, working with middle management, now working with Breakthrough Academy, not only with our own team, but also within all the members we work with. There is this really interesting psychological study that was done.
I first saw it on TED Talks like 10 years ago, and I was like, that is so true. And we do not reference it, I think, enough.
And this is what it talks about. It says compensation and incentive-based pay works extremely well for basic tasks.
And it actually almost does the opposite for complex tasks. And what they did is a study on, and I can't remember the exact tasks they had people do, but I'm just going to make these up and give you an example of this.
One was on, let's call it ditch digging. And the other one was on like building a bridge out of popsicle sticks.
I can't remember the exact ones, but they basically had a control group and then they had an incentivized group in each one of those tasks. The ditch diggers, long and behold, when incentivized, dug that ditch faster than anybody else that was not incentivized.
Worked every time, data was very well proven. The people that were incentivized versus the people that were not, the incentivized people built bridges that broke quicker and were not as structurally sound.
And the conclusion that came out of it was that when you put incentive-based pay, especially when it's quite a bit of incentive-based pay versus their base, you blind people from the task at hand and they start to just try and get to the result to get the money. And the problem solving gets diminished.
Well, let me just ask you this. I believe in specialists.
I don't believe you should have a CSR that's a dispatcher. I believe in a salesman versus a tech versus an installer.
And if you could break apart the complexity of the role by getting a specialist, you see, when you have to build a popsicle bridge, there's someone that knows integrity of the bridge. And what I would say is I think you'd want to limit it to a few KPIs if it goes out of that.
If it says the bridge needs to do this, this, this, this, this, then we're going to judge it by the design, this, this, this, this. I think that's when you go, wow, this is tough.
And you know, there's something else I want to talk about. And I think you hit the nail on the head there.
But we got to also discuss equity incentive programs, rev share, and a couple other things when it comes to this stuff, because those complex tasks, if it's on everything overarching, that's what profit share means. And that's what an equity incentive program or what is it? It's fake equity until it the hand are you talking about profit sharing or what are you talking about there's a profit incentive program equity incentive program and then phantom phantom equity so they're the same thing so but i'm kind of getting off on a tangent here so where do we start out then so typically you have three things ldv has always taught me the triangle is CSR, dispatcher, technician.
Do you believe all those roles can be put into a performance pay situation? Yep. And to varying degrees.
So everyone in our company has some level of a bonus structure. Everybody.
So we do that for a couple of reasons. One, I think intrinsically, I want our people to feel like they can get something for doing more, for going above and beyond.

And I've always said that to my team.

And I think for a lot of the contractors we work with, I always try and help them see it too.

It's like, look, if you're giving away money beyond a salary, it should be for going above and beyond.

And that should be the perception of it.

Because if it's, hey, this is what I get paid to do my job, for the most part, unless we get into strictly just people that are commission-based,

Thank you. And that should be the perception of it.
Because if it's, hey, this is what I get paid to do my job, for the most part, unless we get into like strictly just like, you know, people that are commission based, doing your job is that's the hourly wage you're getting, or that's the salary that you're getting going above and beyond is what the incentive is for. And that also helps a lot with what you were just saying around people get entitled to like, hey, this is how much I make.
Why are you taking this from me now? It's no, this is because you went above and beyond and that's a really important thing to distinguish so yeah whether it's our administrative staff or sales staff you know production staff everybody has something they're trying to work towards that they can still live without it right their needs are still met but their wants aren't and that's where these incentive-based pays kind of kick off i know that there's certain areas like commission-based roles which we can talk about if you'd like to as well today, where it's a little bit different. But for the most part, when people are high in emotion, aka can't pay their bills this month because they didn't hit their targets, they're low in intelligence.
And when you put your people into a constant state of high and low, unless it's a basic task, it can impede on their ability to be 100% them. And they start to lose themselves a bit as a result.
That's really interesting. I do think that what I tell people to do when they're thinking about an incentive program or a performance pay, the biggest mistakes I see is a lot of the things they pick are out of their hands.
So they might say, the CSR, I'm going to give you money based on the problem is yes, if they set the call for success, but really that's really difficult to pay the CSR on the ticket total, but yet people do that. But here's what happens.
Some good things happen is they try to give the number one guy at sales all the jobs, but then the next CSR goes, well, why are they? And then it turns into this internal conflict. And then it's like, and it just doesn't make sense.
So a lot of times we pick the things that are out of their control. So how do you stop that? Yeah.
I mean, there's no, I wish in a podcast I could explain exactly how you stop it. But the best thing I could say is, is first you need job descriptions.
If you don't have job descriptions, don't even think about incentive-based pay because you're just going to create a misalignment all day long, especially for where you're heading in the future of the company. Once you have job descriptions and people have very specific things that they do and they don't do, and there's a production line of passing the buck down from lead all the way to invoice, and they know what part they do.
Now you can stare at that job description and say, what are the things that this job description does every single day that would benefit the company if they did it better or if they went above and beyond? That's the stuff that they should be focused on. So every company that's going to be different.
But if you haven't even defined what people's jobs even actually are, and you're already putting in bonuses, you've skipped a step and you're going to create animosity. You're going to create misalignment.
People are going to feel, yeah, like I couldn't hit my goal because I'm not even in charge of it because you haven't structured it properly. You know, I got a scenario for you that's actually happening right now at A1.
We came out with this program called the Pinnacle Club and it's for my technicians. And if they hit a certain customer satisfaction, conversion rate and average sales, us material ticket, they get to go.
Well, three of my top guys came up to me and they're disqualified because they were in a different role in the beginning of the year. And they switched back to tech and, Oh my God, you don't want to piss off these guys because they're amazing guys and they're great at what they do.
And you also don't want to change the rules, which the rules were never said that if you, they still hit those marks and it's like, Hmm, it's interesting. And it's these little things that you rock the boat.
It's almost like when you have incentive pay, it's great until someone feels like they were taken advantage of, and maybe they were part of the team and didn't get the credit. How do you deal with that? And I love your answers, by the way.
They're so well thought out and just very well-spoken. Yeah.
These are hard questions, Ben. Okay.
A couple of things. One is what you dealt with, I've dealt with too, right? So like you set up something, you think through it, you think you thought of all the variables and you release it and it doesn't really work out.
One of the best things I've seen with our members, even because a lot of times they'll come in with us and they don't fully know their numbers. They don't fully know what their year end averages are and stuff like that.
They get excited about bonus programs because like we told the guys we're going to start this management program. We're going to get them bonuses.
And I'm like, that actually might take you one to two years to roll it out. And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, you don't know fully all the ramifications that are going to go in place.
So why don't we for a year to maybe even two years track it, even have something small that people can get as a result of it, but make it less transactional, make it less about money, make it more about like you and have like a trip or a prize. And let's see how things roll out.
Because after probably one to two years, you're going to get all the kinks ironed out and i've tried to man like i thought through our sales team bonus structure and like the next year i changed it and the next year i changed it again because it was you know first it was an annual bonus that was too long now we've gone to the quarterly that works extremely well and then we've got like you know certain on sales and then on setups and i needed a couple years to kind of like play. That kind of makes sense.
And I would just say to a lot of entrepreneurs, because a lot of us are hyper, like just go, go, go, make things happen tomorrow. Something like this, when you're playing with people's livelihoods, take time, slow down to do it once well.
Because it's like you said, and you've experienced, I've experienced it too. It's hard to pull back once you started.
So I don't know if I have a fix for you for how to do it moving forward, other than, again, what I've done is just conflict resolution, right? Let's sit down with a guy, let's be human with them, let's figure out where my mistakes lied and where their expectations lied and find common ground. And that's a one-on-one talk that has to come out of that.
But to learn from that would be to, okay, you know what, it's going to take us a year, maybe even two to get this right. And let's not put too much weight on these incentives until we know what we don't know right now.
You know, at Christmas, we set up a really very sexy scorecard. And to my mistake, I wanted to put driver score on there.
And the other great, amazing people around me said, driving is non-negotiable. If they suck at driving, they need to get fired.
And I said, no, you're very right at that. I agree with that.
So putting some things on, like you need to be dressed well, or your truck needs to look okay, and you need to keep it clean. Those should be non-negotiables.
Those should be your duty. And I think a lot of times that i made this mistake of putting things that you're just this is your job you know you don't smoke in the van i'm not going to reward you for not smoking

or not being on your cell phone you know like yeah i'll give you an example of this on like

a management level again going back to like your base pay is to do your job like everything that's in your job job description. That's why we're paying you 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a year.
It's a lot of money. So hopefully you're doing the things that are written in there to go above and beyond is where I really want to incentivize behavior.
So like to make you better than you currently are. And so like a project manager, one of my best bonus structures I ever figured out was to help them have what we call the gross profit driver.
So it wasn't a revenue driver and it wasn't a profit driver. It was a gross profit driver.
So the profit made after labor subs and material. And what I would say to them is this, you know, use hypothetical numbers.
I want you to produce a million dollars this year at a, whatever, 40% gross profit margin. So essentially I'm saying to the person, I want you to bring the company $400,000.
And that's why I'm giving you this, it's called $70,000 salary to do that. It's fair enough.
I've got to pay for overhead. I've got to pay for all these other things.
And I want to make a profit. And part of that 400 grand is going to go straight towards your salary anyway.
Now, you want to make more money, I want to make more money. To do this together, I want to give you 10% of all the gross profit made over 400 grand.

So if you make $450,000 next year, I'm going to give you $5,000 bonus because it's 10% of what's over 400k. And you can do that by producing more.
You can do that by producing that million dollars more profitably or the combination of the two. And that gives them a baseline where it's like, you still got to produce 400k this year like that's your job but if you want to go above and beyond what i've budgeted then you can make yourself more money and me in turn as well and now we're in it together but again we're going above and beyond i'll tell you you guys listen to this this is true i've done programs like that the problem is then i say you know what you're a better closer i'm gonna get appointment centers for you then i say you know what you're better at closing high ticket items so i want to make you i break up the divisions to create specialists and then all of a sudden they're like well i have my numbers you know second quarter and you're like and you know what so that's why i think you said you got to take some time and that's as you develop a company because when you're young in a company you know there's a lot of people listening that work for me or are going to listen to this so gotta watch what i say but you know i always thought if we get a top producer just pay the trainer good money then i realized well there needs to more trainers.
Then we got to hire recruiters. Then we have to have people train them 60 days into it.
So all these things that I thought, yes. And then all of a sudden I was like, the trainer is going to make like $10 million a share about the pay.
Because all of a sudden we got recruiters and we got a great station. We brought on more trainers and we brought on more systems and we brought on more consultants that we're training to like personality profiling.
And it's the cumulative of everything that makes it better. So it's really, you do got to be very, very careful.
And you got to tell people that if I give you this, just realize that there could be changes and I need you to sign something saying you understand that your base pay is not going to change. You'll always get paid what we agreed upon.
But if we got to make this thing a little more robust to get you some other people involved, you realize that this might not be the same. And it sucks when it happens because you see top producers that are kicking butt getting paid induction, their life becomes a little easier, but it's still aggravating for them.
What you're describing is a company that is growing quickly. So the rules of the game are changing quickly.
And that's true for a lot of us, right? So like the overhead changes, the marketplace changes. And I think for a lot of us, especially now you're not in this position, but I think a lot of people listening probably would be when you're a smaller company, it is kind of like in the beginning, almost like, yeah, I could give them a percentage of this and then a percentage of this and then i'll have my percentage and then it's safe it's good but they're not looking three years out or four years out and how that all changes and i've realized too it's like it might might feel a little bit more like a high risk thing in the beginning but to provide people with good stable salaries that they don't need the bonuses they're just an added little piece of benefit And then as your company matures and you really start to lock in and know your net metrics and know your actuals and know your overhead, now you can start to kind of expand out and provide bigger incentives for people.
But in the beginning, it's just like, let me take care of you. Let me pay you what you're worth and let me go figure out what we actually have here.
Once I figure that out, let me come back back and provide something that's a little bit more like incentive-based pay. But our company, I mean, every single person we work with, I would much, even on my sales team, I would much rather pay you extremely well, make sure you can live your life.
But if you want to have that extra nice house or that extra nice car or whatever, these are the things that we'll work towards through incentive-based pay. Other than that, your bills are always going to be paid working for us.
I don't want you stressed out. And like you just mentioned, the rules change every year.
Things change. And I don't want to get stuck in a weird spot where I got to pull back on something I promised.
Well, I'd rather work somewhere that I get paid a lot less, but I'm not a 1099 and I get insurance and I get PTO and I get a 401k valued. And sometimes lunch is bought and somebody cares about my kids and somebody cares about my wife.
And those are the things. And it's a family rather than a 1099 contract that gets shit on all the time.
And I think those guys that come in here and say, I make more as a 1099, blah, blah, blah, blah. I go, go pay for your own gas, pay for your own truck, pay for your truck insurance, go get an insurance plan, pay for Aflac.
We cover Aflac, at least a portion of it. We pay for the Dave Ramsey program.
You add all these things up, you're making way more money as a W-2 for me. And you don't do your taxes, so you think you're making a lot of money because you're all Uncle Sam for the last 10 years, because you never paid taxes.
There's pros and cons. I see in the roofing industry, it's very 1099 driven.
And I also see that there's models that are pretty well proven now. People kind of know generally when you're in Texas or when you're in Colorado, there's a certain amount that a decent sales guy can book in a year and a really good sales guy can book in a year.
And the industry has become more and more standardized every year we go by. And I think it's getting to be a little bit easier to understand how to pay a 1099 in that realm.
i would say it's 10 15 years of running 1099s not just for one company but for all these companies combined i see them at conferences sharing what they're doing and it's starting to come down to a bit more of a common denominator but yeah it takes time and nobody's going to be able to like just year one of production be able to figure out what the best bonus package is going to be because you have no idea so be careful not to go too far with it anyways we've talked a lot about that but well you know here's the thing i just decided to buy grills barbecue grills for every single market and one of my managers was like dude i got the grill we grill up every day the guys love it we're attracting so many people because they're close to the distribution center sometimes they even grill for other browser companies. And I'm like, I love that because it means a lot to me to be able to have lunch.
And if you add it up, there's so many things you could be doing to create a better culture. And I'm obsessed with culture these days.
I mean, I think I told you this, Danny, but I used to hate the word culture because I was putting out so many fires. I'm like, what the hell is culture? Like, this is crap.
But I realized I was the problem because I was a firefighter and it's compassion. It's understanding, it's communication.
How important is that versus their pay grade? Again, going back to my background in franchising and just working with hundreds and hundreds of people, I did notice that pay was the number one importance to people up until the point where they could pay for their bills and save, say, 10 to 15%. After that, pay became quite a bit less important.
And where I saw a lot of my franchisees sticking around, our painters sticking around, was because what you just talked about with culture, we had a performance culture. So we felt more like a high-level sports team than a painting company.
And we were all trying to track goals and see what we could hit and achieve and award people for that. And it wasn't always money.
Sometimes it was just like, you literally get an award at the end of the year. And it was like the sought-after thing to get.
And that gamification of our business really changed people's mentalities from being transactional with me, right? You pay me this, I'll do this for you, to being a cohesive team, right? You think about the sports teams you were a part of when you were a kid and think about how much you like sweat, blood, tears, like put it all out there for what? So that you could win the championship. What did you, did you get paid for that? Nope, but you cared about it a lot.
And it's tapping into that same primal nature within the company. The competitiveness.
That's why I hire only competitive people because they like to win and they've been in competition. I don't care if you played in the symphony, you understand what it's like to practice.
You understand what it's like to want to be better at something. Totally.
And you can have fun with it. And people from there can get a lot more value than just money.
Now, is money important?

Definitely.

And if you're trying to find ways to pay people less, you're already thinking the wrong way.

Right?

Like, I constantly, every year, I'm like, how can I make my people more money?

It's so fun for me to be able to have them make tons of money because in return, they bring that value right back to our organization.

And I tell my team that one thing they know in working with me is I'm not like, hey, like, you missed your goals too like no you're about to miss your goals i want to make sure you hit year end or hit quarter end i will figure out with you how to make sure this happens and it's my job as their coach versus their boss to get all my players to be like top stats well let's go beyond that because for me every once in a while every quarter i go up there and i go Who here is a harley who wears a boat who here those are all and i hate to say this depreciating assets your snowmobile your jet ski and i go through this and i say look if you can't save money at 40 000 you'll never be able to save money at 100 000 unless we work together because for some reason like me and like a lot of people were think we're owed something we worked hard we should deserve it and we should go spend it but the fact is that what if you invested in yourself and in your future and i think it takes a lot it takes constant management it's like when i had my my weight loss i was such a horrible leader when it came to this contest i spent five grand thirty,500, 1,500. We didn't get accountability partners.
We'd never talked about short-term success. We didn't celebrate the little wins, like not eating any fries for a week.
I could have done such a better job. And I think there's a lot of things that go into leadership.
That's more than just the money. It's teaching people.
We weren't taught in high school how to not bounce checks or get an 800 credit score. No one teaches that.
So I feel like it's kind of our responsibility as business owners and half the business owners I know, they're in debt. And so it's a tough thing to do.
But when you can do that and you can change lives, it means a lot. Yeah.
We actually, our own company, we have a podcast coming up on just how to create essentially just like company brand to your people. Like how do you create a brand to the world that your employees are drawn towards, right? And a lot of it has to do with that.
I keep going back to this one way of thinking. Am I every day reinstilling transactional relationships with my people? Or am I instilling more of like a unified team mentality? And the words that are coming out of my mouth, the words that are written down in their job description, the meetings that we have, the way I support them, the way I spend my time, what am I portraying in all of these areas? Am I portraying a transactional, I paid you, so shut up and do your job? Or am I portraying a unified, we're in this together, right?

And there's subtle things, right?

Like the simple use of the word employee versus team, right?

And if you're usually used to like, ah, they're my employees.

As soon as you say that in today's world, they feel less than you.

But you're like, yeah, it's my team.

They're like, they feel on board with you.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this conversation. I just want to let you know that we have a special offer from Breakthrough Academy for you today.
So stick with us to the end and I'll reveal how you can take advantage of it. But if you're in a rush, just go to btacademy.com forward slash home service expert and check out our exclusive offer that we put together for our listeners today.
Okay. Now let's get back and continue our chat with Danny.
You know, I tend to say my coworkers, and sometimes I catch myself saying, you know, my employees, and I'm like, they pay my paycheck. I would not get paid my paycheck, or when we have really good years, our profit.
And there have been a lot of good years. So, you know, I really respect the fact no one knows what these CSRs do.
Without the CSRs, they call us all good books. No one knows what the dispatchers do.
No one knows what the managers and the lead techs do. No one knows what those techs are doing at 130 degrees in the garage.
And yet, I think what happens with me sometimes is out of sight, out of mind. And I look at some people and all I want to do is go, dude, especially out of state, what do you do all day? Show me your calendar.
Because it seems like to me, well, here's the worst answer, Danny. And I think everybody, what I've been here many times is I'm like, and this is so funny because I always ask to see their calendar.
What did you do today that you needed to get done that's going to help your life get easier towards a better system or hiring a better person to make your life easier? Because to me, a lot of times I talk to my managers and they say, well, I had to fix the dispatch board. Well, I got an answer for that.
I'm just going to call a fake guy, Steven. Steven, how about I fly you to Arizona to teach the dispatchers to focus on the dispatch board the way you want it? And then they say, well, I had to fix a fire with the supply chain.
Well, why don't we go to our supply chain specialists that work here in the main hub and tell them how to handle that? Because I need you doing a few things right. You're either growing the market revenue, figuring out ways to make more profit, or you're working on getting a great team together.

Those are really the three main things.

You're growing the market and you're growing the people.

You're growing those relationships.

And I know I'm going off on a little tangent here.

I was starting to talk about how everything applies, but I think sometimes we take for granted what our guys do.

But it's our job not to let them firefight.

Because if you're a firefighter, they always follow the leader. leader if my desk is messy every desk is messy in this place yeah and you're also just talking about like what kind of mentality are you creating in people because what you're describing is people going from like a i do my job taskmaster mentality to like a problem solver kind of more like independent thinker mentality and you create reality around you every single day, right? I even think about with my team, I'm like, I can say to them messages of, you know, you're a part of this and you couldn't exist without us.
Or I could send a message of you're incredible and look what you're creating around you and look at the opportunity that you're doing. I didn't even think I could do it that well.
And just that simple line of communication changes their mindset. I had one guy on my sales team for years.
He makes calls. That's what he does.
He makes calls. He calls people, 50 to 100 people a day.
And that was all he did for like two years. And that was all he ever asked to do.
And he had kind of an okay mindset around it. But there was times I could tell he just was like losing it because he was just burning out because he wouldn't after making that many phone calls.
And I remember reaching into him one day and just being like, bro, I know you're more capable than this. And I know you have so much more locked up inside of you and you're not using it.
And we need to address that because you have a better potential to be a better person and I'm not allowing it and you're not talking about it. And we need to level you up and the first thing I said to him is I trust you I trust you with some of the decisions that

I'm making right now and I'm going to give them to you and I want you to see how you do with them

I knew he was his capacity was there I knew his ability was there so that was step one for me

once I knew that like really laying into him I trust you a year later like everything changed

like he's now actually leading up our entire like follow-up team and he's like reinventing our CRM for us right now

and he's doing all kinds

of cool stuff

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and he's doing and he's doing and he's doing and he's doing and he changed. Like he's now actually leading up our entire like follow up team.
And he's like reinventing our CRM for us right now. And he's doing all kinds of cool stuff.
That's like optimizing our flow. And then he came back to me.
He said, I'm like, like, what's changed? He's like, you told me that you trust me. I never thought you trusted me just the way you were acting prior.
I was like, right. He's like, you're always tracking like how many calls I was making every week and like wondering why some weeks were lower and some weeks were higher.
and then finally you just told me you trusted me like right he's like you're always tracking like how many calls i was making every week and like wondering why some weeks were lower and some weeks were higher and then finally you just told me you trusted me like right pretty profound that's a good story you know part of them is knowing that you believe the other day i had a tech company i was in florida this was a few weeks ago and he said dude i feel so bad i'm letting you down i know when you were talking about conversion rate everybody I get a million calls from all my technicians after a meeting. If I address something, they're like, dude, I know you were talking to me.
I was like, no, I wasn't. I didn't.
They're like, he must be talking about. Yeah.
And they call and he goes, dude, my conversion rate hasn't been to my average tickets, not where it should be. And I said, do me a favor.
Let's say this together. I'm a winner.
Pull your

shoulders back, put your head up, be a little louder and smile. And here's what I want you to

do. When you knock on that door and you offer a coffee before you get there, I want you to play

with the dog. I want you to say yes, sir, no, sir.
And I want you to have fun. He called me back.

We called a couple of technicians in between that. And he goes, I had so much fun.
I was

smiling the whole time. I just walked out with a $7,000 job.
And we rejoiced. We were excited.

I don't know what's going on at home. And that's why one of the things I try to do is go out with a significant other that they're part of the business too.
And you got to see how that relationship is because something could be happening at home or with your kids or anything else and a lot of times you bring work home and a lot of times you bring home to work so it was a profound having this talk with him and like you said believe in yourself you are amazing and it's what's hard about interviewing people because i'm like dude direct eye contact. I need tonality.
I need to know that you believe in yourself because I can't, I don't have the time like Starbucks has to fix people, to make them believe in themselves. Not with the way I'm trying to go.
I need somebody that could look me in the eye and say, look, I'm a good person. I love myself.
And sometimes I just got to remind them. A really good environment for that.
What you're kind of describing is just like you're coaching people. So you're coaching them more just on their numbers and skill.
You're actually coaching them on their mindset. So we, and I still do this with my staff.
We do this with all of our members. We institute something called GSNR.
And I think you might do something kind of like this goal setting and review. And it sounds very like, we're going to set goals.
We're going to review them. We're going to look at numbers, but it's surprising how many of those meetings turn into, how's things going at home? How's your workload? Where are you at right now? Always starting with that personal side.
And being somebody who... I did GSNR since I was 18 years old at College Pro Painters and moved through the ranks of doing it for franchisees.
And now I do it for my staff. And now we teach to all these members.
I'd say 30% of those conversations have nothing to do with numbers. We actually don't talk about it for the week because it's not relevant because trying to

figure out how to get two more leads this week or get four more hours produced, or it's going to

ring on deaf ears because there's something else going on. And if you have that regular cadence of

meetings, like ours is every Monday, half an hour per report, right? So you might not do it with your

whole team, but you'll do it with your direct reports. Your direct reports will do it with

their direct reports and so on. It catches a lot of that stuff early before it becomes systemic.
I love that. And you know, we're hiring a dream manager right now.
And I want to know, Danny, your dreams, because your dream is not for me to become a billionaire, I don't think. Maybe it might be, but I don't.
So what are your dreams? Because if we can help you accomplish your dreams, I just love the notion of becoming a person that's trying to help others accomplish their dreams. And, you know, I love the idea of just giving.
Because for some reason, when God's been good and plentiful to us, I feel like we want to give it back. And everybody that I've ever went to and visited their shop, they opened their doors to me and gave me everything.
And they've been very successful and they pay it forward. And now I told my guys yesterday at our Thursday morning meeting, I said, guys, not to sound condescending or cocky, but God has been good as far as financially to me.
I don't need to work anymore. I don't need to be here Monday through Friday.
I'm coming in Saturday. I'll be here Sunday.
I don't have kids and I'm not married. But I want you guys to know that my goal and my dream is for you guys to hit your dreams.
And that means we're going to celebrate the homeownership. We're going to do these fun things.
We're going to make sure your life is set up and I'm not going to give you,

you know,

job versus a career.

I'm going to give you a better life.

You guys are going to run with me.

Come with me.

If you guys hate me,

then you can go work for a competitor,

but I promise you your life will change when you work here.

And that's,

it's exciting because I really,

really want that.

Yeah.

It's important for you to know too.

And to even express this to them, there's no such

thing as altruism.

There's no such thing as a selfless act.

And it's not just money that is always going to be the beneficial thing for you.

You're like, I actually personally get a lot out of seeing you guys succeed.

You're getting a lot from that.

Oh no.

Yeah.

We're selfish that we cry because I believe they're in heaven.

So you're right. I'm selfish that I want them we cry because I believe they're in heaven.
So you're right.

I'm selfish that I want them to succeed because I could say I was involved with it.

You love it, man.

You love seeing people grind and pound and make something out of themselves and know that you had a little bit to do with that.

Exactly.

That's why you're doing this podcast.

That's why you do a lot of these things.

And it's important just to realize that for yourself and let other people know that too and be like, look, I am greedy.

I'm greedy because I really like seeing what happens and know that I had a part of that. But the best part is you're going to benefit know that too and be like look i am greedy i'm greedy because i really like

seeing what happens and know that i had a part of that but the best part is you're going to benefit from that too i'll tell you what you know part of being an influencer is what what started to have with the podcast and speaking on stage quite a bit is i realized this thing called affiliates and what happens is

I genuinely believe in somebody

and they say let me pay you my marketing fee. And then what I say is I'll take that money instead of having all these sponsors on these podcasts and I'll promote the podcast to get more listeners because it costs money to pay Facebook.
It costs money to pay Instagram. And I'm not going to pay, take money out of a one.
Cause that's not fair to my employees. So somebody is willing to, if I love them and I cherish a company and they say, hey, Tommy, what I'd like to do is throw you a few bucks because you've helped me succeed and your outlet has.
Then what's so cool about it as an influencer is I can take that money and get the message to more people. So all around it all becomes this equilibrium that feeds the beast.
And I don't feel bad doing it. And the people I work around don't feel bad doing it.
And I love it because it's genuinely things that I care about. Take, for instance, for example, if I had a guy that was just amazing at Google or something, what's so cool is I will never stand behind somebody.
And I know 100,000 people probably that got screwed over by a google guy so if i could promote it and say this is a good guy and he's like dude you changed my life because i do a good job look this thing is is definitely changed i owe everything to the podcast because al levy came on the podcast and decided to go to lunch with me and teach me about manuals then i had dan antonelli teach me about brand then i had ken getters come on and teach me about buying company and literally they wouldn't come on unless it was entertaining and we were helping people so people say what's the catalyst in your business and i'm like it was the podcast because people now want to talk to me they don't want to talk to this firefighter tommy mellow before the podcast here's the interesting concept actually our events coming up in in january one of the things i say at almost all of our events as i'm like look you guys are all here you guys all have you know needs and wants and business interests and and hope for what you'll get from this seminar or the thing we're doing approach it like this everywhere you go figure out how can i help? How can I give? And if you all do that,

all 300 of you here this weekend, watch us 300 people do the exact same thing to you.

Now, instead of just one person trying to draw as much as they can and pull out and

whatever, get what they can get, everyone's focused on each other. And it's a very small

tweak to how the conversation goes with people. But I do feel, and I see it even in business right now, more and more business owners need to understand that because we all know so much.
But we have to be willing to work together. Because as big as your businesses or my businesses and other people's maybe, we're all still pretty small fish in a pretty massive pond.
There are organizations that are just eclipsing anything we could ever even dream of. And if we're all going to work against each other and all of that, then we're never going to get anywhere.
But things like this podcast and these programs and some of these guys you're working with, we can work together and actually pool resources and do something much greater than even just one individual company, which is cool, which is exactly what you're experiencing. I've seen it time and time again with our membership.
And we're getting out of the competition center of things, but just the message I always say is like, try to find ways to develop non-transactional relationships. And you'll find way more comes out of that, both with your employees, your customers, your competitors, everything around you.
And that's, if there's one like thing that I've really focused on and even building Breakthrough Academy is like, I don't need to make this the most profitable thing on the world. And I don't need to be the guy who's like, I've invented all this because the truth is I haven't, my team has.
And it's like, if I can just figure out how to bring people together and how people kind of almost like hold the space for everything to kind of become more productive, then I've done my job. It'll grow infinitely.
It'll grow exponentially if you do that. Yeah.
And it's less effort, which is interesting, right? You don't have to pull the rock uphill all by yourself the whole way through. Everyone will do their strengths and do their part.
It's true in your company. It's true in your working relationships.
It's true in your family. You know, just because look, I'd rather have a podcast like this.
Yes. I like to stay focused, but if it goes somewhere, this one is going everywhere and i love it because you know for me i was on this podcast yesterday for this pest control company cool dude and he shows me he sends out these letters to every single pest control company in his markets to buy them and there's this amazing book right here by chet holmes called the ultimate sales machine and then there was a student of this guy who wrote this book called The Dream 100.
It's a $100 book. And in the book, he says, learn how to identify your perfect 100.
Me, I got clients that spend over a million dollars a year with me. If I find 100 of those, that's $100 million.
It's very easy. Now, what can I do to get a hundred people? Well, you know, all these gifts came.
There's these gifts, these cups. They've got my name and Bree's name written on them.
We just got those cups. We have our own brand on that.
Those are good cups. Tommy, the Mellow family.
So this is a company that sends these things out. This is a shirtishery, whatever they're called, board.
But yeah, I'm not good at that. Recruiter-y.
Recruiter. I'm not a cheese man.
But this company sends out gifts and they make itemized things. And imagine if you found 100 companies you wanted to buy or partner with.
And you worked with a VA and you worked with them diligently and you went to town and you find out their favorite metallic they love metallica so you superimpose them in a picture and you get a fake signature and you tell them it's fake but it's kind of cool and then you put we love that you're four and a half stars on yelp and you write about how the company was founded and you sent a nice gift and a nice a truly nice gift that they they're interested in. Do you think they'd take your phone call and want to do business with you versus this thing that comes to everybody that's generic? And the generic ways works.
Your guy made 200 calls a day and he accidentally got lucky a lot. But if you go with a purpose, and that's what I'm learning is I'm trying to identify my dream 100.
But more importantly, here's the next game. I'm identifying my next dream 100 employees.
And then even on top of that, dream 100 companies, dream 100 employees, and dream 100 customers, which are clients because they spend a lot of money with us. So when you start thinking with purpose, the world becomes a lot easier.
And you know, the world doesn't change. Your attitude changes.
And I got to tell you, I hate the people that say this and now I'm saying it, I'm 38. I hate this.
But if I do then what I know now, and I'm not even, I'm not old, but damn, who would have thought 40 years old is right around the corner. But this is i think just identifying 100 100 100 and working on what those people are and how to get them because i could send a free book listen if i get somebody that spends a million dollars and i spend 10% in marketing do you realize i could spend a hundred thousand dollars to acquire that customer a hundred thousand dollars if i'm willing to spend ten percent i could buy them tickets to hawaii for two weeks and still make a ton of money so the thing is is it just changes your whole paradigm doesn't it one thing i've noticed is uh how we do like you're saying you're 38 how we reach different stages in our life so like when we're in our 20s we're in our like warrior phase we got to conquer we got to we've got to achieve, we've got to win, we've got to own, we've got to make money.
And I'd say it's a pretty important phase. A lot of people need to establish themselves on this planet and find out who they are.
In their 30s, you're continuing that and you are now physically establishing yourself. You're gaining that wealth, you're gaining that recognition.
And then by the time you hit your late 40s and 50 50s you get to what you're talking about right now is where you do really want us to give back and you feel that and you see that in older people right left right and center not everybody but a lot of us yeah and it's pretty natural for the human experience i think for people to go through that and i think it's important to recognize that like one thing i've done in my life is i'm like hey like working hard and conquering and owning is important but i can see that like there's another phase here it's not always going to feel like that and the reason i know that is because tommy think about when you were in high school how much you cared about being cool or getting by or getting good grades or think about how much anxiety you had around like somebody picking on you or the teacher gave you an f or whatever it was and how much that didn't matter now in your life the same same is true in this business thing we're doing right now. This whole thing of I got to build a business and conquer and grow.
And it's really important for now. But when we're 50, 60 years old, we're going to look back at it and be like, that was a cool game.
It taught me some cool stuff. But what I was so emotional about wasn't nearly as important as the relationships I built along the way.
Yeah. The deal is, is I know a lot of billionaires that want to kill themselves.
Right. Look at my buddy.
He's a very brilliant guy. He got paid a ton of money.
And he says, Tommy, do me a favor. Don't ever sell.
He goes, I lost my purpose. He goes, the money, the couple hundred million dollars I got is great.
And I'm yeah pretty nice house kind of cool car i like the boat but at the same time there's not as much purpose waking up and the reason i'm here is i got a bunch of phone calls after a meeting yesterday and they said dude that was an amazing meeting and i was so excited i was so excited energetic and to not be in this role i've worked hard to be able to give back to

these guys and gals and i'm not perfect i'm far from look i'm a six out of ten on a good day

no i'm actually make it three out of five

but i'll tell you i've joined this club it's called 100 million mastermind

Thank you. Make it three out of five.
But I'll tell you, I joined this club. It's called 100 Million Mastermind.
And these guys are going, I know rich people every day that commit suicide. The money is a tool.
And when people understand, yeah, it's easy to say that when you have it. But the deal is, is I guarantee you, if I went dead broke, I'd have the money back within two years because I know how to get it now.
It's so crazy. You see these people, they live extra.
Sometimes they go broke. They lose all their money in real estate.
Within three years, it's all back. And it's actually the relationships, the relationships.
I could get money back, but the relationships, my integrity, the fact when I shake your hand, I mean it. There's so many rich people I know that they're scumbags, and they're scummy, and I hate them.
There's other guys that would give the shirt off their back, and the reason they drive a normal truck to work, and I love those guys because there's so many flashy guys. We used to call them $30,000 millionaires because they'd rent a Beamer.
They'd lease a Beamer and live at their mom's house, you know, Scottsdale. But this is fun stuff, man.
I know you had something very important drill you wanted the audience to listen to. And I don't want to take that away because I do think performance pay, I'm bringing it back.
One of the best things about our company is top performers can make what i love the most about performance pay is i got csrs making 26 28 bucks an hour and then i could advertise that and three of them could come on and say yeah i make this consistently but they're a players they're drivers so one of the things that my call center manager taught me angela she's brilliant she said don't give an hourly rate plus bonus give an hourly rate or bonus so that way they're making minimum wage or their bonus number because if you pay minimum wage plus a bonus then you get see players that stay right so we encourage people are like what's your turnover i'm like super high for the first 90 days but it's really really low after the first 90 days yeah i would say net on everything we're talking about going into like both topics if you're going to be paying people money to do things for you make sure that especially if it's incentive based it's inspiring them and not manipulating them. Because if you're going to be paying people money to do things for you, make sure that, especially if it's incentive-based, it's inspiring them and not manipulating them.
Because if you're manipulating behavior, it might short-term work, but long-term usually blows up in your face. If you're inspiring people to be better and actually helping them find things inside of themselves that they didn't even know was possible, then it's going to the right place.
And I think money in general, and especially the more you have it, and Tommy, I'm sure you'd agree with this, money is a form of energy. It's a form of transaction that it exemplifies what is already there.
It brings out more of what already exists. And if money is being used to manipulate people at a higher degree, then that's what you're going to get in the end.
But if it's being used to inspire people and drive people past what they normally would do, then that's what you're going to get in the end. And just be very intentional about what that money is actually used for and your intentions behind it as well.
You know what I love about talking to you and other business owners is I've been an employee. I've been a dishwasher.
I've been a busboy. I've worked at a lot of jobs.
I worked at women's shoes. Dillers selling women's shoes.
That was a funny job. But I liked it that I could always look at how much I hated certain things like being on call.
And so a guy came up to me this week and said, I hate being on call if I get no action. So I said, that's not fair to you.
And I wouldn't want to work for somebody that had on call shifts that I stayed home all day, stressed up, waiting for a call. I couldn't live my life, even if it's only one day a month or one day every other week.
So I'm talking to my dispatch manager saying, listen, we can pull today, Friday, we can pull from Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and work very hard to make sure this on-call at least gets one job. And then if he gets another one, he's fine.
So I love thinking as as an employee, but what I don't like, Danny, is I don't like employees thinking that they know what it's like to be an owner if they've never done it. I appreciate employees that don't use to own their own businesses because they actually know what it's like.
You know what I mean? Yep. It's something I saw every single day.
So back in the day, I was a franchisee. When I was 18 years old, I started my own business.
I remember thinking I knew what it was going to be like to start my own business. And it's just like having a kid.
You just cannot describe it. And it's 10 times crazier than you ever thought it would be.
Then I got into a position where I was hiring and training young franchisees. There was 18, 19, 20-year-old kids to go start their own business for the first time.
And I got to experience that shift in their mindset going from like, I'm due this, aren't I? I'm like, I'm owed this. I'm like, you're owed nothing.
This is your business. Everything is on you.
And the 80-hour work weeks that you're going to go work, no one's going to thank you for it or say anything. You're just going to do it because it's the right thing to do.
And when you can learn that way of being, it changes somebody internally for the rest of their life, I think. And it gives them a level of freedom and a level of, I'd say, discipline that most people don't get to experience.
And until you've experienced being off on your own, you're right, Tommy, like you can't know, you can't read it in a book. You can't be told by a friend who's doing it.
It's an experiential. And yeah, I would agree with that in a big way.
And I would say on top of that is you put sweat equity into the business business you did not have a bunch of cash so all of a sudden for some reason our wife and i or your husband and you you say we deserve this beautiful second home we deserve to put our kids through private education well private education is one thing but we deserve all these things because we work so hard for the business. No, you don't.
Put that money back into it and receive 10 times the gifts. But it's called delayed gratification.
I talk about it in the Home Service Millionaire book is people don't have enough delayed gratification. They want it now.
And Bill Gates said, quit thinking what you could do this year. Think about what you could do in 10 years.
It's a little bit of a longer game, but 10 years from now, you can get a lot done if you look at things in the long way. But we want to be overnight.
The websites tell us we could be this e-commerce site. We could be billionaires.
No, dude, it's a pipe dream. Literally get your shit together.
Go to work. Don't put your money into real estate.
I was a house slipper. I was going to own a bar.
I was going to do all these things out of the garage, your business. And now I got rid of everything.
I'm so focused now because I think that this business has given me the gift that keeps giving him. Don't get me wrong.
I've invested in a lot of real estate. I buy the building next to mine, but we're using it, you know, and I believe in it.
But what's your perspective on that? Because I think people want to take it out and flourish and you don't deserve it yet. You got to take your head outside of just North America, right? Because there's a lot of parts of the world that having more money, it doesn't take precedent over having a better family life or having better kids or having more time.
Like there are cultures and people on this planet that look at North America and think we're psychotic and think that we are giving up what life is really all about to make more money. And they wouldn't be wrong.
And I'm not saying they're 100% right, but I'm saying what we have here in North America is just one perspective. And we live on a giant island separated by a massive ocean.
And we don't really get to see what the human experience is like in many other areas because to be human and to live on this planet i'm a christian just like you know probably some listeners and probably you too tell me it's not about just this life and there's more to it than that and it's easier to say when you have the basics met for you i think the basics would be you know. You can do those things.
You're in good shape, right? If you don't have those things, yes, I get it. That's the fight or flight response takes control.
And you are unfortunately subject to that a little bit. But for a lot of us, if not most of us in North America, we've already gotten those taken care of at birth.
And now it's about inspiring to do something more. And money is just one component.
It's not the whole thing. That's well said.
I was in Brazil and these kids are piled into this car and they're all singing and they got their heads out the window and they're high-fiving and they're loving their life. They're actually so at peace and harmony and family.
And to have that happiness and that you watch these people around the world that smile yeah it's hard to do when you don't have clean water and i understand that something's changed about you know i feel like my grandpa he's born in 1910 he worked in the coal mines in pennsylvania scram pennsylvania and life was different then you know he had an out of house think about the people that like came on a ship arrived in like the americas built a log cabin before the winter hit survived that think about the people that came west that went through the woods and just like trekked over here and that was only like a couple hundred years ago 150 200 years ago some of it not even i mean you know what i love the most about this podcast too is usually i stay on topic and stick to the questions, but I feel like this is a little more Joe Rogan-y. And I feel like a lot of people say they're liking it and it was profound and stuff.
I really enjoy just, because you're a deep guy and we can have a deep conversation. And we both have done a lot in the home service industry.
So we can talk about these things and you've got a different perspective on a lot of things. And it's just fun to have a conversation.
And normally, we don't get to do this kind of stuff. I think we understand performance-based great.
What's your exercise? Because we're really excited to give the exercise. And I don't want to take that away from the audience.
Yeah, so we made a bunch of quick tools for everybody. There's 10 of them.
One of them is on how to build incentives and performance-based pay for your staff. So we'll give that away to everybody.
There's a little video that goes with it.

There's a step-by-step exercise to help you decide what types of incentive-based pay to

pay certain roles in your company.

And then there's a little thing for you to kind of build out for yourself so you can

build your own incentives.

So I'll put the link in here.

You guys probably will have it in the show notes, I imagine, for those who are listening.

Yeah, so they go to the home service expert to find this podcast.

This will be in the notes.

And you get these free links. This stuff'll tell you is very powerful what you guys do there is it's so hard for me to teach i've just i know when i have kids and i'm gonna have kids hopefully i'm gonna be so patient and i'm gonna have so much understanding and what my daughter my son's going to go, daddy, what's three plus three.
And I'm going to go son or daughter, one, two, three, four, five, six. And I'm going to be patient for one day.
They're going to be smarter than me. But for some reason, when I teach, I'm like, it's six and I don't have a lot of patience.
And sometimes I forget where I've been, because it's so hard to remember. It's so hard to remember what I was.
Because let me tell you, there was a time I was a four handicap in golf. And I always wanted to go with somebody that was even.
If I golf with somebody that was 10 under, I'd be like, dude, I can't take a divot and get backspin on the ball. It's just not where I'm at right now.
So right now I'm going and visiting two, $300 million companies. But before I used to visit $6 million companies and $10 million companies because I wanted to be that.
And I'll tell you, I think part of my problem with teaching is I understand the formula, but sometimes like you're just not ready for it. And you've got to grow this way instead of like this.
And I want to have everybody listen to the podcast, skip the steps that I failed at. But sometimes my mom and dad told me this, son, you're going to make your own mistakes.
And I wish I could take the mistakes and tell you, but you're going to make them. And I wish I could do this for you, but it'll make you stronger.
And I wish I could take all the business owners listening to this and say, listen, I want to give you the best life and the best marriage and the best father, motherhood, whatever. I just, certain people are hearing this and it's the perfect podcast for them that they needed to hear today.
Other people might say the other one last week or two weeks from now, but it's very, very interesting. And I'm hoping that they just understand that i'm just getting started 100 million used to be a goal then it'll be a billion but the deal is is that just means more lives i can help so i would say this too from getting to know you like you're very good at inspiring people but you're not the gifted teacher and that's okay i come from a family of teachers so that's like kind of like was grained in my DNA.
I'm not as inspiring as you, but I teach and that's what I'm good at. And I've got some good thoughts, but you have an ability to inspire beyond most people.
And teaching is something I think you have around you. You have people that help do that.
So just do what you do best, man. You know, I'm like this, we went over that three weeks in a row.
It's so funny. I tell my guys, guys they're like i remember adam my gm he goes tommy you talk about the same shit every week you talk about conversion rate average ticket how to get eye contact and i'm like when i'm talking to 200 guys all i need to do is get through to one and every week i promise you i get a phone call dude and they're like i'm like what is there to talk about we have a mojo call every single day except for saturday and sunday but what i like to do is hear somebody's success story we say oh my god it finally clicked when it clicks these guys start giggling you were right and we go you know tell us about it we get excited about it and we got this new fancy checklist that you got to take a picture of every single part before and every single part after there's 16 pictures you have to take.
And all my veterans were like, dude, you're crazy. What's wrong with you? And all these new guys are like, Oh my God, this is fricking awesome.
I can show the customer everything. And now all my fires, like the one lady said, we didn't replace her Springs.
It it was broken so we have the before and afters right and then when i go to this job in two years i could see exactly what the stuff looked like and know what i'm walking into and so we turn it into a positive i love what i do man i gotta tell you this i wouldn't want to change it for the world but there will be a day that i say my job here is done and you know i'm not elon musk or richard branson but i'm obsessed with space and i think one day i might not be going to space i don't i just said i love nine states theory of relativity i love wormholes i love the cosmos and i think there's going to be something else that comes up i don't know if i'm going to start another podcast about it but i love home service too much but you but you know, what do you think you're going to be doing? You think this is your life? I'm 30. I'm 34.
I mean, until I'm 40, this is me. This is me.
I'm here. I'm in.
And I'm like fully, like I've got some stuff to create here that I'm super stoked about. I can feel it inside of me.
Like I need to build things. Like I have to create something from nothing.
And it's so like, even on my house that I just bought, like I'm just constantly, you know, my creative juice are going into building an infrastructure that is stable

and is beautiful and is unique and is whatever comes out of this thing.

So it will probably be in building something.

And if BTA continues to,

you know,

provide that runway,

cool.

Like we're building some software right now.

We're putting about a million bucks into a custom application for our

members that will eventually become public.

And we'll,

we'll see where that leads.

Right.

But one thing I've noticed my entire life is nothing has ever been

I'm going to go be a police officer. I flew helicopters for a little bit randomly.
Then I started doing management consulting. Then I built this BTA thing.
But if you asked me when I was 18, did you plan to do that? I like dude i i was just building stuff and i was passionate about it and i was learning and life will probably do that so by the time i'm 40 we'll see i'm open i've got some ideas but i'm not too tied to anything so well danny you are one of the smartest guys i've ever spoken with i love what you're doing i've told you before i swear i think canadians have different water or something you are all smart and awesome and nice. I think you guys got a lot of values too.
It's not as populated. It's not sales signs everywhere you look.
It's genuinely great people. I always learn a lot from you and I really appreciate today.
It meant a lot to me and I had a blast. Me too, buddy.
Yeah, it's a good job. So hopefully everyone enjoyed it.
Well, there's three things that I always got to do that I forgot about. How do people reach out to you if they want to get involved with your teachings? Breakthrough Academy.
So btacademy.com. B as in Bravo, T as in Tango.
Academy, A-C-A-D-E-M-Y.com is our main website. If you just want to check out our content brand that we just launched, it's contractorevolution.com.
Check that out. And then the second question is, are there any books that you read recently that are must reads for the listeners that you really enjoyed? So you, yeah, you always ask me this.
So it's funny. And I think I told you the last time too, I don't read books.
Yeah, that's right. I watch a lot of documentaries.
I have had an unhealthy, I'm sure a lot of people listening have had an unhealthy obsession with what's going on in the world right now. So I've spent a lot of time understanding the background of this, the history, the future.
Yeah, whatever it is. The history, the future, the science, the hearsay, the political side of it, my faith side and the religious side of this.
And just trying to come to terms with where i stand on this and what to do about it for me and my family and the most important thing i could say about all this is right now is do not let us be divided i get that people are going to think differently and people are going to be emotional about that for lots of very good reasons we cannot allow ourselves to become divided that is more dangerous than anything. So, well, I'll add two cents and I hope I don't lose any listeners because of this, but I just, it's hard for me when my dad almost passed away from this.
So I'm very sympathetic and I can tell you this, he pulled through and I'm very lucky. This is not good, but I also know that the mortality rate has not changed.
And typically, there's healthy people that have passed. I believe they're in a better spot, too.
I do believe, I'm a Christian. And I just don't believe in big government.
I don't. I don't believe in redistribution.
I believe that I'm going to become the best, one of the biggest philanthropists of all time and i'm better than putting it through this system of diseased republicans democrats whatever you are i just don't believe in big government i believe that us people could make a better choice in our own communities now that's i'm probably pissing a lot of people off and i'm sorry and those are my own views and this And this is not a political show, but sometimes I just got to throw it out there. And this isn't the forum to do it either.
This is just me telling you as a friend. And you've obviously probably studied a lot more than I have.
So you've probably seen me. I line, man.
And I think a lot of us feel very similar about a lot of things and very different about a few things. And if we can focus more on where we feel aligned,

I think that's what will keep us from being divided.

So I just got back from Florida and I was near the equator.

That's why I'm like purple right now.

I apologize.

And this is the last question,

Danny and so much good information here.

Why don't you leave the audience with one last great thought,

one go to one thing they could do right now to change their lives for the better, whether that's business or personal. I don't know if I've said this on your show yet or not, but one thing I've always lived by is just like, how can I? So I think people go to motivational seminars and they're always just like, you can, you can do it.
If you say you could do it, you can believe it. The words that come out of your mouth create reality.
And there's a place for that. But I think a lot of people also bullshit themselves and then know they're saying bullshit and then nothing happens out of it.
On the opposite side, people are negative, right? Like that can't be done. That's impossible.
I've never done that before. Won't work.
Well, that doesn't cause any kind of action, right? Just causes you to sit in the place you're at. So I've always just been like, well, how can I? Like if I had to, like what would I do? And how would I figure that out? And I don't claim to have the answer or know 100% what I'm doing is right or wrong, but I'm willing to kind of go in that direction and see what happens.
And so from like just a pure way of just living my life, just be open and just like, how can I should be the language you are always pursuing life with and be in the process of, you don't have to have something done or figured out or complete.

No, I'm in the process of figuring out how I can do it and constantly be problem solving.

And it's weird what comes out of that two years later of an idea that could never have happened had you not spent that year thinking through how can I versus I can or I cannot.

That's so good. People say, how do you get to a billion? And I wrote a billion on the same

whiteboard. It's at a different shop before.
And I said, I wrote a line, just a slant, slanted line. And I put a billion at the top.
And then I put there 500,000 protect 2000 technicians. And then I wrote five lines for five years.
And I said, what would need to happen at the bottom here? I need recruiters. I would need trainers.
I wrote down all these things I would need. I would need a huge training center.
I need to figure out how I'm going to get the trucks, how I'm going to get the trucks outfitted, how to have the iPads monitored. And I wrote all these things.
And I said, this is the beginning. Then how do I scale up every year to do that? And all of a sudden it was a map.
And then everybody came in and looked at my map that said it was impossible and said holy shit you're serious aren't you let's get to work it's history from there but it's fun man and i love that piece of advice uh this has been a really fun podcast for me brother and uh it's a friday i don't know do you drink beer i used to i probably drink more just rum and cokes and whatever i don. I don't drink a lot of beer.
I'm not going to break out the beers. I got another three hours here of meetings, but appreciate you very much, man.
I know you guys learned a lot about performance pay and maybe a little bit more about a lot of other things. And thanks for listening, everybody.
Awesome. I'll see you later, Danny.
Thanks, Tommy. Thank you.
Hey, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast with Danny Kerr. A lot of people always ask me if I could coach them or provide them training to grow their business.
The fact is you guys probably know this, but I'm really, really busy with a one garage service, making it the biggest and largest home service company in the country. But I got to tell you, when I discovered what Danny Kerr was doing with Breakthrough Academy, I realized that this would be a perfect program that I'm proud to vouch for.

What I truly love about their program is they combine the done-for-you systems with coaching

and accountability to make sure you make huge progress fast in your business.

So if you're making a million dollars or more and you want to build a solid structure for your

business to generate more profits and grow, check out the link btacademy.com forward slash

home service expert to learn more about the Breakthrough Academy. the link btacademy.com forward slash home service expert

to learn more about the Breakthrough Academy.

You're gonna thank me for it.