How I Built a $1.7B Business Repairing Garage Doors

How I Built a $1.7B Business Repairing Garage Doors Speaker 1: We're going to spend $4.3 million this month in marketing. And here's what I've learned. Speaker 2: Tommy Mello. Unknown Speaker: Tommy Mello. Speaker 3: Tommy Mello. Unknown Speaker: The founder of A1 Garage Door. Speaker 3: You're doing this blue collar thing, but at this really big scale. And I love that combination. Speaker 1: A1 Garage Doors, we fix, we repair, we maintain, and we replace garage doors. A1 from day one. The original valuation was $1.7B. Now the business is north of 80 million of you. Speaker 2: No shit. Speaker 1: I've read hundreds of books on sales and even more on marketing. Speaker 3: So ring ring, I pick up, what are you telling them? Speaker 1: You never say the cost, you say the investment. You never say the most expensive, you say top of the line. You never say the cheapest, you say builder grade. These words matter. Speaker 3: Tommy giving us the sauce. Speaker 2: What other businesses have you seen in the services industry that you are shocked at how big they are? Speaker 1: Most of what I've done is repeatable. It's not like this crazy thing that only works in garage doors. Don't overcomplicate it. Speaker 3: Dude, I've known you for 27 minutes, and I love this guy. Speaker 2: Tommy, what do you suck at? Where's your weakness right now? Speaker 1: I was gonna go broke. There was a stripper living in our Dallas warehouse with my manager. Speaker 3: We were doing so well, and then Tommy went to jail. Speaker 2: There it is. There's the weakness. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Speaker 2: Tommy, have you ever listened to MFM, My First Million, this podcast? Speaker 1: Yeah, I listened to a dozen. Speaker 2: What do you think? Speaker 1: I love the come up stories. I hate how every single guy is pushing entrepreneurship because it's cut out for 45% of the population. You won't be able to handle this. The rejection, the failure, the five years of taking a loan against your house, the people that quit and cheat and lie, the canceled appointments, the long drives, the The hard nights, the walking out of the movie theater to go run a job. I don't feel like everybody's cut out for it. And some people that invested in Bitcoin early, they don't know what it's like. Speaker 3: So who do you think is cut out for it? How do you know? Speaker 1: Well, there's this thing called Driven. It's a book. My buddy Gary wrote the book. And it's actually, if you're a hunter, it's in your DNA. It's literally a different chromosome. And there's so much more. Usually it's ADD. Usually you're dyslexic, some people, but it just means you have a high tolerance for failure. You're okay working a lot. You don't ever mention the words work-life balance. You're off balance on purpose and there's seasons of life and you actually have a bigger why. And by the way, you can't quit. The goalpost always moves. There's no like finish. There's no end zone. So if you're gonna start from nothing, The chance of success is less than 10%. Speaker 2: So for the audience, you started this thing called A1 Garage, which at this point I think does north of $300 million in revenue. You took some chips off the table. You sold about half or a little bit less than half of the business recently for I think north of a billion dollar valuation. Is that right? Speaker 1: The original valuation was about $540 million. We were at $27 million of EBITDA. Now the business is north of $80 million of EBITDA. So now it's worth Close to 1.7. Wow. Speaker 2: And how long ago did you start the company? Speaker 1: 2007. So the first 10 years were practice. Speaker 3: And explain, what does the company do so people understand who you are and what you do? Speaker 1: A1 Garage Doors, we fix, we repair, we maintain, and we replace garage doors. And we do this in now 23 states, 37 markets. We run On average, 25,000 jobs a month. Speaker 3: And give us the origin story. We don't usually like the origin stories because you can, you know, you can get those elsewhere. But I got to ask. I got to know. This is, I mean, the end point is so interesting. I got to know the beginning. Speaker 1: You know, when I was a kid, my mom was a real estate agent. My dad had a transmission shop. He didn't pay the IRS. So that got taken. They got a divorce. So I learned to shovel snowmow lawns in Michigan. I got a job when I was 12 washing dishes at $4.05 an hour. And I always had the entrepreneurial gene. I started a landscaping business when I moved to Arizona. And I was living at this house. $700 would be paid rent for three guys. I paid 200, my other roommate paid 200. The guy with the master paid 300. And one of the roommates was manager at a garage door company. He goes, dude, I cannot find a good painter to save my life. If you guys know anything about painters, they're pretty unreliable. And so he's like, can you paint garage doors? By the way, I'm busting tables, serving tables and bartending, and I'm flipping Bowflexes. I buy them on Craigslist, sell them on the Arizona Republic. I've sold over 300 Bowflexes. And then I did Total Gyms and I sold over a thousand cars. Buy them, fix them, clean them, sell them. And so I'm doing all these things and I mean, I am hustling. I am like the epitome of hustler at this point. And I was like, sure, how much are you gonna pay me? He's like, I can pay you $100 to paint per garage door, but you gotta pay for the paint and the tape. And the paper. So I was like, I had a G20 Infinity in 96. It had 120,000 miles on it and it was cheap on gas. And by the way, 2006, 2005, this is when the real estate market was booming. And so I hired a painter, this old man, and I paid him $300 per door to teach me. He taught me on three doors. I went to Home Depot, bought a Magnum 5 paint gun. And I was off to the races and I got good. I could paint 10 doors a day. I went through the yellow book and called every garage door company. I'd say 7 out of 10 I became their primary painter. Speaker 2: And does the garage door company mean like I install a new garage door or your garage door needs some type of service and I fix it? Speaker 1: So the garage door company does both. They fix them and they replace them. So every time they replaced one, if it's an HOA property or a house paint match, I was the guy. They'd grind out a little section. They'd give it to me. Usually the owner would meet up. I'd get 10 from one guy, three from this guy, and I'd go knock them out. And I'd literally use MapQuest to build my routes. I mean, this is back in the day before GPS. Speaker 3: You mentioned that you called all the garage companies and you became the primary for whatever, seven out of 10. So, what was the pitch? So, ring ring, I pick up. What are you telling them? What worked there? Because it sounds like just being a reliable guy who's going to do what he says he's going to do was a differentiator here. What did you say on the phone? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I mentioned the company that my roommate worked for. I said I've been painting garage doors for several months. I show up on time. I work the warranties if there's any, which is rare because I spend time with the clients. I'll pick up the samples myself. I'll pay for the paint. I'm only charging $100. That includes drive time and all I ask is that I get paid when I finish the work. I clean up after myself. I'm very reliable. And most of these guys didn't have that service to offer. So I said, it's just one more thing. You could charge 300. Give me 100 out of it. You know, this is another way to make money. It's another way to go into HOAs. And they're like, you sound hungry, kid. Yeah, let's meet up. I'll give you a couple. We'll see how you do. In Arizona, it was easier in the summer because it dries real quick. In the winter, when it's kind of wet outside and it's cool, you got to go on real slow. It takes a little longer. And you got to tape the windows. If there's windows, it could be a pain in the butt. But I got really, really fast and efficient. And so I'm meeting up with these technicians and every technician, because half the time I met up with the technicians to get the sample. And they're like, dude, I just made three grand this week. And I'm like, you made $3,000 as a technician? And like I said, the real estate market was booming. People were just like, their real estate was going up so fast, they were just like, fix it. I went out with a guy, he charged $150 per remote. And I'm like, who would pay, go to Home Depot, pick him up for 10 bucks at the time. So my other roommate got a job working for him as a technician, and he approached me, his name's Gabe, and he goes, we should start our own business. And I was like, well, dude, I'll form the LLC. I'll get the EIN number. I'll get us going. I know enough. I can handle the marketing, but you're gonna have to teach me how to be a technician. He didn't know much because their training was crap. So I went to all the manufacturers that got trained. I had the business with Gabe for three years. He also smoked about a pound of weed per month at the time. So that was like, it was like he'd be eating and by the way, he's still my best friend, but he'd be like, listen, after I finished lunch, I'll give you a call back. And I'm like, I watched him answer the phone. So every time he went out of town, I take the phones. And man, we made a lot of money when I took the phones, but I also ran all the calls. Because this is when I quit the busboy job. All I kept was a bartending job. 2010, I gave him an ultimatum. I said, dude, you're my best friend. You're my roommate and my business partner. You take the business and the debt. I'll start my own. Or you could give me the business. I'll take on all the debt. You're in the clear. He goes, I want to move to Montana. I want to be closer to my brother. I said, great. And at this point, just quick little to top it off, I had six employees full time, two 1099s. And by the way, people were still in toilet paper. I didn't have a real office, so I rented my first real office. We were working out of our house. And I was kind of like just at night, just holding my hands over my face going, what am I doing? I don't trust anybody. So what do you do when you don't trust anybody? You call mom. So I called my mom in Michigan. I said, mom, I don't know what to do. I said, I could really use your help, but I don't have enough money to pay you good money. I could afford to pay you 15 bucks an hour. I can pay my stepdad 65 grand, which by the way, my mom's best year in real estate, she sold 55 houses. So she, she's done well. She's like, Tommy, I don't know. I'm like, listen, mom, I'm your only son. I need your help. You think about it. I love you. She called back in two weeks, said, we're going to sell our house. We're going to move our lives to Arizona. Speaker 2: Oh my God. Speaker 1: Big move. Speaker 2: Hey everyone, really quick. If you're enjoying this episode on CEO stuff, so delegating, having hard conversations with your team, hiring, then I've got something for you. So the team at Hubspot, they actually went and put together a bunch of best practices that Shaan and I use in our own companies. And they've put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand. And so if you want to just save yourself 10 years of headache and heartache, then you should check it out. I wish we had this a long time ago. It would have helped me a lot, but there should be a QR code on your screen that you can scan or a link in the description. So check it out. It's totally free and totally awesome. Speaker 3: At the time, the business is doing what, roughly? Because that's a big leap of faith. Speaker 1: It's a million and a half bucks a year. And by the way, a lot of people have a tough time hitting a million, but I was the highest ticket writer for seven years. And then I finally started to delegate. Anytime we weren't going to have payroll, my mom would call and say, hey, because I'm working on marketing and hiring and training. She's like, I need you to go run two jobs today. And then in 2014, I found a good integrator. The dude was super smart and he still tells me the stories. He's not here anymore. He's kind of retired now. He's younger than me. He goes, you would pay me two grand one week and then not pay me for two weeks and then give me like 1200 bucks the next time. He's like, we didn't even have any type of payroll worked out the first year. I was like, yeah, dude. But 2017, we got on the right software. And man, all of a sudden, we were doing 17 million but keeping hardly any of it. Next year, we did $30 million. Next year, we did $50 million. And we never lost money in profit or revenue. Well, basically, since the beginning, but 2017, we were just on a rocket ship. Speaker 2: So you made a joke that the first 10 years were practice. So on your 10th year of business, what was your revenue and profit? Speaker 1: Revenue was $17 million and that was out of grit. That was just like working nights, weekends and holidays, just overworking. And I remember Al came in and said, let me tell you something, buddy. I'm looking at your P&L. I'm looking at your balance of your income statement. Revenue is for vanity and profit is for sanity. You're not making any money. You're just a squirrel running around in circles. He goes, we need to figure out how to make serious profits. So I was 17 million. Everybody's like, man, and I'd pop my chest out everywhere. And I'd say how much revenue we're making. Revenue means nothing. I don't even talk to anybody about revenue anymore. The name of the game is you got to make profit. Well, would you remember your profit on 17? I was paying myself 150 grand, taking a couple hundred grand out. There was not a lot of money left. And by the way, We didn't have a great CFO or controller at the time. It wasn't super lined up. That's one thing that changed my life is getting control of the money. Speaker 3: When you said, as you were growing, sorry, how many markets are you in to do that type of scale, to do 17 million in revenue? Speaker 1: I started in Phoenix, then I went to Tucson in 2012. 2014, we're in Wisconsin and Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Vegas. And by 2017, I was probably in seven or eight markets, but Phoenix was just, Massive. By the way, I had to close down four markets a year later. I had to close down Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Tampa. And if you want to talk about somebody having to swallow their pride. And basically say you're a failure, but I was going to go broke these. There was a stripper living in our Dallas warehouse with my manager. I mean, I just didn't have the systems in place to scale as quick as I thought we could. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: And what I tell people now, they're like, what had to change? I said, the hustler had to die for the leader to be born. And I truly mean that. Now I'm a systems guy. Now I sit down and I work on systems and processes. And if the system's broken, either there's no system, it's the wrong system or the system's not being followed. And that's like, I mean, I'm a student for life. I'm the most curious guy. I walk in, I take notes. I try to stay super humble. And I'm always learning. I've always got three to five coaches at one time. I need help all the time and I extract and then I implement. Speaker 2: I have a ton of questions on the courses and the seminars and stuff because you've talked about them a bunch, and I'll get to that in a second. But first, you mentioned four stories. So the technician who used a cold call, your integrator, your mom, and service titan, where you convinced them to do something special. Were you always convincing, or did you have to read to get good with words? The way that you're telling these stories, I'm like, this seems like a no-brainer. This also seems like this person's incredibly persuasive. Speaker 1: I don't necessarily know if I learned that. My dad, when I'm five years old, I remember this day vividly. I was in Royal Oak, Michigan and it's the longest driveway I've ever seen in my life. And there was a yard sale or a garage sale. My dad always stopped at those. And I found this CB radio and I'm picking it up and I'm playing with the antenna and I got the little, I'm like, 5050 and I'm like just talking into it and I put it back and we walked back to the car and my dad looks at me and he goes, hey, Tommy, You really wanted that, didn't you? I looked at him, I go, yeah, dad. He goes, here's $5, go get it. I go, dad, there's a scotch tape on it that says $20. He goes, I know, go get it for five. And it didn't make sense to me. He goes, just go up to her. I want you to smile. I want you to point at me and say, my dad and I were wondering if you'd take $5 for this radio. And I'm talking, this was like, I was worried. I'm looking back at my dad and he's like, keep going. And he's waving and he's like, keep going. And I look back at him every five steps. And I walk up and I mean, man, I had, it was like, I was anxious as hell. And I go, ma'am, I was just curious, would you take $5 for this radio? And I go, that's my dad over there. And he's waving and smiling. And she gets down on one knee, she pulls out the scotch tape, she takes the five and presents it to me. And I'm telling you guys, the radio was awesome, but I walked back and I learned a lesson that you'll never lose in life. Like, don't be afraid of rejection. You go up there, you ask, you just go for no. And I think that he taught me at a young age. I watched him negotiate things I never thought possible. And just, you know, he used to say, I wish I knew then what I know now. And what he told me is like, don't be afraid to ask the girl out. Worst case scenario, her loss. Don't be afraid of what people think about you. You're living in your own world. Because a lot of people are going to have contempt. They're not going to like you. You're going to be more successful. But don't worry. This is the world we live in. Continue to run. Like look, hang out with people you got a common future instead of a common past. Figure out how to get in the right circles. And so, and my mom, I would say my mom gave me more love. She said, you could do anything. I'm gonna get behind you. Like if I went to prison, she'd move next to the prison to see me every day. Like my mom loves me. If I said, mom, I got in a really bad wreck, the person's not okay, she'd grab a shovel. Be like, how do we get rid of this mess? My dad just was like, I'm gonna teach you sales. I'm gonna teach you persuasion. And so the combination is just, I think it turned me into like the belief system that I have somebody no matter what. That's why my mom and stepdad moved out. And then my dad was just like, you're gonna have the skills because you're gonna be around me. And he was good at it. Speaker 3: You said he used to negotiate things you didn't think possible. What do you mean by that? Speaker 1: We went to Mexico and there was a jacket for 250 bucks leather. He walked out of it for 20 bucks. And he's like, watch this. And he's like, They're like, Senor, no, no, no. Meet me in the middle, 100. And he's like, Tommy, we're out of here. And like, he meant it. He's like, I don't need the jacket. One day, we rebuilt a C10 truck. And I mean, I spent the whole summer sanding this down. We got it painted. Me and my dad rebuilt the engine. We put the transmission in. And I was sitting in my front yard and I said, Dad, a guy came by, offered me 10 grand. He's like, take it. He's like, you haven't driven it in two years. And I go, dad, me and you do this together. He goes, take a picture of it. Unknown Speaker: You'll remember it. Speaker 1: We could do another one. He goes, you're not driving it, sell it. And I love that because I was like, man, I was all sentimental about it. He's like, Tommy, it's just material things, dude. You can buy another one. We'll do another one. Take a picture if you want to remember it. But that's just always how he is, you know. Speaker 3: Today's episode is brought to you by Hubspot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using Hubspot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit Hubspot.com. You were telling the story and I feel like the story had like the humble origins and you're figuring things out and then it was like, zoom, we're doing 17 million a year, 13 million, it sped up real quick. So I wanna go back to that. Because you seem to me like a guy who, if you don't have the answers up front, you'll find a blueprint. You find the guy to train you to do the garages, how do you paint the garage? You find a coach. So I like this word blueprint a lot. Because I think that people underuse blueprints. They exist. You can follow them. You can build your own thing. But it's very helpful to start with a blueprint. What were blueprints you saw? Because it didn't sound like any of the people around you initially were doing $100 million garage repair. But at some point, you got that idea. At some point, you started to figure out, oh, I need to scale this thing. I need to do this and do that. What were the blueprints that made you think that? Speaker 1: I'll give you a real quick example. We're getting ready to expand into St. Louis. I'm like my good buddy Chris Hoppins, he's been in St. Louis for a long time. In fact, his parents started in like the 80s. So I said, Chris, can you jump on a call for about an hour and give me the good, bad and the ugly about the marketing? What's important in St. Louis? And by the way, worst case scenario, he says, no, but he's like, Tommy, absolutely. He goes, I'll even give you my heat map. I'll tell you what zip codes to stay out of. I'll show you. Stay out of the east part. He goes this north area. And he literally gave me the keys to the city. He saved me a year of mistakes. And so what I've always said is success leaves clues. If you want to find out how to be number one on Yelp, Go find an HVAC or roofing company, pick the phone up and you call them and you say, my name's Tommy Mello. I wanna let you know I'm super impressed by your company. I read your book. I've used your business. I wanted to buy your whole company lunch today. Might cost 400 bucks, right? You get them Chipotle. If I could get an hour of your time, I promise I'm not going into your industry. I got a lot to share with you as well. Seen a couple opportunities, but I want to understand how you dominate Yelp. Then you do that with Angie's List, Thumbtack, Google, LSA, PPC. Success leaves clues. They're right in front of you. It's right around the corner. All you got to do is ask. So my favorite three letters in the world are ASK. So I did this. I learned how to sell memberships. See, when I had the podcast, I get the best of the best. I started early 2017. This is before podcasts were a real thing. So I'd be like, man, I'm having problems with payroll. So I'd find like the top person that wrote the book on payroll. I mean, my podcast was simply selfish. It was like, man, I got a question for you. If you got a W2 versus a 1099 and they need to show up to meet and they'd be like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then I'd get like, okay, what happens cash versus accrual? I get a CPA on. And then I go, okay, what happens when you want a greenfield versus buy a company? What's your integration checklist? And I don't know why, but almost everybody was excited to just give me everything. They're like, dude, you're just in the garage door industry. They're like, sure, take it. You could have it. And I've always just been super humble with especially like the people that have been where I want to go. And I walk in and I'm like, man, I am so impressed. Like, I will do whatever it takes to like, you really are like You're not like most guys that come up. You don't think your shit doesn't stink. And I'm like, man, I come from very humble beginnings. I'm just trying to get ahead. I care a lot about my family. I'm just literally, I'll do whatever it takes. If you need money, If you need me to introduce you to somebody, if you want me to come mow your lawn, whatever you need, I want to learn from you. Speaker 2: I told Shaan a story about a buddy of mine from my high school who bought his parents' HVAC company and has since blown it up. Shaan made fun of me. He goes, you're not even the most successful person from your high school. Well, that person is Chris Hoffman, the person you just referred to, Shaan. He's done the same thing where he's like blown this up, these services businesses. But what I've noticed actually about Chris as well, Chris has this trait, and I'm inspired more so that you have this trait, Tommy, because our listeners of MFM are like Shaan and I, and we have this attitude where we're really good at starting stuff, but sometimes you stay scrappy and you stay as a hustler. And unfortunately, after some type of mark, I don't know, the $10 million in revenue range, the $5 million, the $15 million in revenue range, That hustle, that scrappiness, that like just go and get shit done, that actually kind of holds you back. And I'm going through that right now with my company of like being systems focused. And you have done a really good job of showing how a person goes from like being a hustler to systems and scaling and hiring a good team and being an executive, I would say. And you actually have this really good quote. I think you said that in order to scale, I had to kill the hustler inside of me or something like that. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the hot start of the day for the leader to be bored and I'll tell you, I delegate to elevate. People are always like, dude, I'll outwork you. I remember I had my let's say and I could work three days in one day. My day starts in six hour increments and I work three of them in 18 hours and I'm like, Dude, I don't respect anybody that works harder. I know there's people shoveling poop somewhere on a field that are working way harder than me. I look at skill way differently. There's certain people I hire that can handle the task of three people, 40-hour work weeks in 10 hours. And so I came up with paying for performance and paying for outcomes. And I will be very transparent that I am The dumbest guy on my team. I mean, when it comes to the C-suite, VPs, directors, I'm just a visionary. I dream really, really big. I love sales and I love marketing and I love relationships and culture. I am not gonna be a specialist. I live in a different planet. I don't live within the walls of this company. I'm creating a personal brand and by the way, there's 62 guys training next door. 50 of them found me on social media and said, I want to work for that guy. So building a personal brand for your business really matters. And you know, the thing I ask now is would I work for you? What I buy from you, what my grandma buy from you, and when I go have a beer with you, you tell great stories. You don't shake my hand like a limp fish. You make eye contact. You smile a lot. You're interesting. I'm gonna ask you tough questions to see how you figure things out. There's no right answer. And so I started thinking about this about five years ago. It's who, not how. Who is the right hire? Not what's my strategy, not what system. Systems are super important. But what's the next hire that I bring on the bus that'll take me to the promised land? And when you start thinking like that and you stack the deck with A plus players, your job gets easier. Like it's gotten so easy. And whenever it gets easy, we explode. The business explodes. So you go through these peaks and valleys. And I'm like, I will tell you guys, we did 315, $315 million. And I'm like, there's no reason we can't be at a billion in two and a half years. And so I got to set that vision and people are like, dude, you're crazy. And then I got to map it out and show them this is all that would need to happen. The average technician is at 700,000 now. And so what would need to happen for us to do this? We would need to have this department, this department, this department. We need to make sure we got trucks on command. We need to make sure we got a good greenfield strategy. And you start reverse engineering your goals. You create some accountability and consistency. And all of a sudden you wake up And it's there. Speaker 2: Dude, that's awesome. I love hearing you talk. Speaker 1: I get excited, guys. I love entrepreneurship and I run towards failure. I don't really care what people think. I'm not going to lie to you guys and say I really do care what a lot of people think. I care what my parents think. I care what the people I work with. I'm not the guy that just says I don't care at all what anybody thinks. I'd love to pretend that's the truth. I guess now I think I'd rather be respected than loved, but by a lot of people I choose love first. Speaker 2: Yeah, but do any of your employees actually think that you're a dick? I mean, you don't seem, you come off as like a pretty caring, empathetic person. Speaker 3: Dude, I've known you for 27 minutes and I love this guy. Speaker 2: Who thinks that you're disrespectful or rude? You might be a guy who says, look, it's not working out, unfortunately, but I think they would still have love and respect for you. Speaker 1: No, I don't fire anymore. I had to fire five people that were direct reports to me this year, this past year. But when Adam started in 2014, I said, you're going to be the bad cop because I'm not good at it. But I do have to have these fierce, hard conversations with people. And it's not easy, but it's for the best of them. Like, if you think about who changed your life, was there, like, I had a coach that literally made sure I got a warm meal. Like, I respected him. I mean, he literally told me I'm not gonna play. Like, if my grades weren't good, if I didn't show up and give it 110%, so he didn't play me two games. But he made sure, listen, three nights a week, he was going to buy me a meal with dinner because he knew my mom was working three jobs. And I found out I respected him more than I loved him, but the respect turned into love. And that was a lesson for me, is I gotta be straight up. I'm gonna tell you what you're doing great, but I'm also gonna tell you, you're not living up to your potential. I see something better in you. And it's my job to pull that out of you. And I'm either gonna pull that out of you, or I'm gonna force you to quit, or you're gonna not have a job here. I'm gonna give you the invitation to go work for one of my competitors. Speaker 2: Me and Shaan were talking about these inspirational leaders and stuff last episode. I told a story about how I had a cross-country coach that was like, this year you're going to learn how to be better men and we're going to do it via running. And that's kind of the same energy that you have, which is, you know, you young technician, you're going to learn how to be a better man this year. And I'm going to do it by teaching you how to smile when you meet a customer, how to say, yes, ma'am, no, sir, how to, you know, like, it's like more so we're going to learn how to live great lives and be great high class people. But we're going to do it via, you know, serving the customers wonderfully. Speaker 1: It's 100 percent right. I used to find fours and try to make them sevens. Now I have sevens and try to make them tens. And so now I've got a much harder way to get into the company. So I did orientation yesterday with 62 people. And I said, you should feel proud because it takes 50 interviews to even get one of you to this room. But now the hard part starts. And we got a bell you could ring if you tap out. We get about two people a class to just say this is, we don't, they got to clean after they're done. They got to show up. If you're late one day, there's a good chance for sending you home. Speaker 3: There's a bell. So during training, anybody can just go literally ring a bell and quit. Speaker 1: It's the same as the Navy SEALs. Speaker 3: Are you ex-military? You have that vibe. Speaker 1: No, I'm not in the, I never was in the military. Speaker 3: Okay. You mentioned this guy, Al, in passing, you said my mentor, Al. And I'm always curious about mentors because I think everybody wants a mentor. I think few people ever end up with that special kind of relationship with a great mentor. But one of the great things is when somebody has one, they can kind of share a story that, you know, it kind of becomes our mentor too. And so can you tell me a great owl story? What did this guy kind of make you realize or teach you about? Speaker 1: So he was the second guy in my podcast, and he wrote a book. It's on my shelf over here. It's called The Seven Power Contractor. It explains the different stages of the home service industry, and he had gone through every master class and just studied. How to build a business. And he had a business with his brothers and his father. And one day they just got fed up. And his daughter, he had his camcorder on the back of the room recording his daughter at a play. And his wife comes up to him and says, Al, you know what your daughter says she wants at school today? She says she wishes her dad was around more. And he goes, Natalie, and it gives me goosebumps, but he goes, Natalie, I'm gonna disappear for about a year. I'm not gonna be around as much, but I need to systematize this business. I need to get SOPs. I need to make sure that I can spend time with my two daughters and you. And so we're gonna go on a vacation for two weeks and one year. And I'm not even gonna look at my pager. I mean, this is back in the day. And Al, he met me for lunch and I handed him the book I was working on, The Home Service Millionaire. He flipped through it and said, this is garbage. He goes, you need to rewrite it. And I said, okay. And he goes, the thing that I wanted to work with you originally, Tommy, is you brought a notebook and you wrote down everything I said. He goes, that's the only reason I thought about working with you. He walked into my shop that day. He goes, can we go do a shop tour? I said, sure. He goes, why do you have all the calendars on the wall? Haven't you ever heard of Outlook or Google Calendar? 2017, that was around then. It was early stages of Google Calendar. He goes, I tripped on a cord that you had a microwave plugged in at. He goes, dude, this is not organized. And he goes, I could have stolen your whole warehouse. The garage was open, no cameras, your forklift was sitting there. He goes, show me your manuals. All I had was this like onboarding manual. He goes, well, how does anybody know how to win? He goes, how do they know? Are you allowed to get tattoos on your face? What happens if your truck breaks down? Like, who do you call? What happens if you lose your gas card? What happens if you need PTO for Christmas? He goes, how do people know this? He goes, it's all in your head. He goes, what I'm going to ask is you're going to pay me $150,000. And by the way, I didn't have 150 to give him. I had to take an equity line out of my house. So that's why I had to pay attention. And when I walked in there, I started talking or talked about a book. He goes, stop. You're going to listen to what I'm going to teach you or I'm going to quit. You're going to figure out exactly what I'm going to teach you and you're going to do this perfect. You're going to stop reading books. You're not going to do stuff any other way than what I teach you. You're going to turn your cell phone off when I'm in this room and you're going to get your two top guys. We're going to sit here. We're going to work through each and every scenario, every manual. And then you're going to read these manuals out loud with every employee, have them initial every single one. And then you're going to read a page out of the manual every week in your meetings. And man, I was ADHD. I still am. And he's like, you are gonna focus. You're gonna be all here. And we're gonna sit in this room for eight hours, three days a week. The dude drove a Mercedes. He'd pull back in the same spot really slow. It was always detailed. And every time he left, I'd get $43.38 was how much he paid in gas. I'd get a bill for it, like this. I mean, he was just high CTA personality dialed in, like it's my way or the highway. And that's what I needed. He was tough. And he'd bring in a consultant to get us our financing, figured out that he trusted. And she's like, I don't know if I wanna work with this guy. I said, listen, I'll be quiet. I'll do whatever you say. And he goes, trust me, he goes, he'll do whatever you say. I'll make sure of it. And that's what I needed. And it was tough love. But he set me up for a lot of success. Speaker 2: With he are you now I've never heard type C personality. But are you are you whatever that personality type is of just paying attention to the details? Are you It sounds like maybe you're a three out of 10. What are you now? Are you like really high or are you just improved? Speaker 1: Well, I was pre-dental, so I love math. I took advanced calculus and I got obsessed with geometry and calculus and algebra. So I'm a numbers guy. I've always been, but I'm still a macro guy. I still look at the big picture. I'll dive into certain areas. I always say I live on Mars. I look at Earth for volcanoes and earthquakes. But I'm still not the details guy. I don't, I love my CFO and my controller and I love my HR team, but I don't really interact with them very often. I am working on operations and marketing and culture. And always driving sales. And quite frankly, I don't wanna be good at these other things. I wanna go continue to be the best at what I'm great at and continue to hone these better skills and delegate the rest. I don't wanna be well-rounded. I never wanna be good at that stuff because it tortures me to have to do that stuff. Like for me to do payroll, which I had to do for a long time, I mean, it was like pulling teeth. So the first thing I got rid of, if you set up your org chart, And you wear a lot of the hats. First thing you do is circle what you hate. So now when I come into work, I love coming to work. I'm like, man, I'm on a podcast right now with you guys. Everything's getting handled. I just got back from Costa Rica for 10 days. You think we lost money? You think when the owner, founder, CEO left, that things didn't go right? We set records the whole time I was gone. Like, I don't need to be here. And that's what we set up is we go on the pinnacle trip, my whole C-suite, all my directors, my area managers go. My top 40 technicians and installers go on this trip. Do you think we lose revenue that week when we leave? We've never lost revenue. Speaker 3: We've talked a lot about in this systems. I think if we're playing a drinking game and somebody said, if you're taking a shot every time we said systems, they're dead now. But it strikes me that you really harp on this because that's what was hard and broken for you. And you really had to put in work to get great at that. And it's kind of like, You feel the benefits of having not everything on your shoulders. But I got to believe that in order for your company to succeed, you don't grow because you have a great operations manual per se, right? You grow because you're great at sales and marketing. You sort of survive and thrive if the operations can back that up. And I'm guessing it sounds like that the sales and marketing were things that We're more in your core competency. You did a good job early on and you haven't been as demand constrained. But I want to know more about that. So I want to know, what did you do to kick ass in sales and marketing that was different than the average service company? What were the things that you did that made you guys rock and roll in terms of demand? Speaker 2: Well, step one was naming your company A1, so you show up first in the white pages, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, that was stupid because there's 93 other A1s, even though they've got an irrevocable and contestable trademark. So that's my biggest mistake was being A1, honestly. You know, sales cure everything. And to get sales, you need good leads. And I'll tell you this, I'm not afraid. We're going to spend $4.3 million this month in marketing. Not afraid to spend a lot of money. And here's what I've learned. I was $30 million. I met a guy named Dan Antonelli that Al Levy, my coach, he referred me. He goes, Tommy, he goes, I think your wraps are garbage. Speaker 2: Wraps as in car wraps, trucks? Speaker 1: The vehicle wraps. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And he goes, the best way to do it is I took a picture of your truck. I made it black and white. And tell me what pops out of you. Because that's the best way to see like what pops out. You got Angie's List, Yelp. You got your phone number, your everything. You got springs, rollers, cables, bearings, all this crap. He goes, I want you to go to this company called Kick Charge and I want you to use Dan Antonelli to redo your brand. I called Dan Antonelli and he gives me an estimate. Guess how much it cost me to get a new logo and new brand on the trucks? $35,000. And at this time I'm going, I'm $30 million. I'm like, dude, it's working. Why would I switch? And I just, I trusted Al and I bit the bullet and I did it. And then Dan called me, this guy, and we got a caricature, like the logo's awesome. He studied every one of our markets. We don't want to look like any other thing we want to pop. We don't want our phone numbers or website on it. You don't even need any of that or Angie's list or what we do. It's just garage door service. And he goes, I want you to change all your email signatures with this. Every one of your yard signs, every one of your coupons, every single thing needs to be this brand. And I remember three weeks later, there was a line of people that wanted to work for us. Like I was like, man, this is like, you know, I'm putting everything on the line, all my time, energy, effort. But I had such a crappy brand. And now I spend a fortune on TV, radio. Yeah, that's that's that's what it was. Speaker 2: Oh yeah. Speaker 1: Look at how crappy that is. Speaker 2: What is that? I can't even see it. What is that? Above the red wall, what is that? Speaker 3: It's like the bricks of a garage. It's like the outline. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's like two garages that are carriage style with brick rock around them. Speaker 3: And then you have white on white text. Speaker 2: It's horrible. Speaker 3: And then you go to this. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I said, Dan, I want that old fashioned feeling like the Maytag in the 70s when you trust the guy to come out. And it's like it just it pops and it's trustworthy. And so if you walk in my place, Dan designed, we brought the brand inside. So we've got all the brand inside of the building to like we live and breathe the brand. And people don't talk about this stuff, but Nike is a brand. That's why they pay Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. You can buy a t-shirt the same as Nike for $20, but you're willing to pay $120 because of the brand. So what does our brand mean? It means, my dad taught me you could do three things in business. You could be the best, best warranty, best technicians, best quality. Best, you know, everything. You could be best timing. If it happens today, you bring your car in, we can fix it today. Or you could be the cheapest. He said, pick two out of the three. You'll never be all three. You can't be the cheapest, the best and on their timeline. And I got this guy in Milwaukee, best mechanic I've ever met. He's the cheapest. He does me right. Right now, he's four months out. I can't use him. He's four months out. So I called them up. I said, hey, why don't you triple your prices? I'll pay triple because you're honest and you do great work. But this is the hardest thing for people to learn. You wanna start out and be the cheapest, but then you realize you don't have enough to hire people or pay for the right software or buy new trucks or invest in great inventory. And I'm not saying like one of the things that I learned a long time ago in sales is I don't give yes or no. Like if I walked up to you, I'd say, listen, these are the three options of what we have for springs. We got the one year, the five year and the lifetime. You might say, hey, that's too much. I say, let's just pick another option. Let's make something that works for you and your family. I'm here to earn your business. And then I shut up. And I've got other options of everything we do. I don't give yes or no questions because that's stupid. Either you're going to say yes or no. I'm going to say, listen, let's just pick something that makes sense for you and your family. And I've studied, I've probably read, I've read hundreds of books on sales and even more on marketing. And that's where I go to all the Google events. I show up to different offices. I, like I speak on a lot of state, like I live and breathe marketing and sales. And honestly, I hate that word, honestly. I shouldn't have said that. I always say that's a no-no. I hate a lot of words, but you never say the cost. You say the investment. You never say the most expensive. You say top of the line. You never say the cheapest. You say builder grade. You never say that you could cancel at any time. You say you have the right of rescission. These words matter, but what matters more is the way I say it. When I'm making eye contact, Would you go to a doctor if the doctor walked in and just looked at you and said, hey, here's your medication? No, the doctor walks in, he smiles, he says, let me ask you a few questions. How's the alcohol? What's the stress level? Are you any recreational drugs? How much are you working out? I'm gonna run a few tests here. We're gonna look in your eyes. We're gonna look up your nose, your ears. We're gonna have you cough. We're gonna run a few tests. And then the doctor says, listen, what's better for you, CVS or Walgreens? All right, here's your prescription. Here's what's gonna make you better. Do you ever go, I'm gonna need a few estimates, doc. No, because they're the authority. They diagnosed the person before the problem. They spent the time. They asked the right questions. And they nurtured you along the way and you believe them. And they didn't say, um, like, you know, well, uh, but what, um, no, they said, here's exactly what we're going to do to fix you up. And we're the doctor the minute we step in that garage. And that's what I train the guys and I go over and over like, I don't believe you. I don't believe you because you don't seem confident. Either you don't believe in yourself or you don't believe in the products or you don't believe in me and the company. Which one is it? And let's work on it. I could do this all day and I love training guys because I'm like, Smile more. Offer coffee on the way. Play with the dog. Get to know the clients. If they love Bernie Sanders, talk about Bernie Sanders. If they love fishing, ask them what kind of fish they like and what kind of pole they have. But you gotta be genuinely interested. Don't fake it. If you hate babies, don't talk about babies. Find something you love and you correlate well to them with and you'll enjoy every minute of your life. Speaker 3: Dude, play with the dog is so true. I've had a couple guys come over and do some work and the ones who play with the dog, instantly I'm in on them because they're in on me and the most important thing that they saw in the house so far. I had a guy come in to do a repair and as soon as he walked in, I have a tiny dog, like an eight pound dog, and he goes, whoa, killer. And then he goes, I don't want no problems. And I just immediately loved the guy. He could have sold me anything. He was like there for the heater. He could have sold me a washer and dryer if he wanted to. Speaker 1: Now, that's great. I always say, listen, we don't ring the doorbell because strangers ring the doorbell. Friends knock. These simple little things. Listen, I'm stopping off at 7-Eleven. Can I grab you something, get you a coffee? No, no, no, no thanks. Listen, you come to my house, my fiance's gonna cook for you. Don't make me guess, you like Green Monster or should I get you a coffee? And I want to bring you something because no one that ever fixed your house brought you something. Speaker 2: Wait, so you guys order coffee for, or you have like a system for ordering drinks or whatever? Speaker 1: So they could order, I got guys that order donuts and apple cider in Michigan and Wisconsin. And all you do is expense it. You take a picture of the receipt. And it comes back on your check that next week, including the taxes. So you could buy, I mean, we try to say keep it under 30 bucks, but literally, we don't really check. My goal is that every single person gets offered something on the way. Speaker 2: Have you seen the average customer value or a customer order go up because of, so what you're saying, by the way, is like a world famous, it's The Rule of Reciprocity. It's Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, which is basically like, If I do a favor for you, so if me and Tommy are next-door neighbors, I go, hey, Tommy, can I borrow a cup of sugar? You give me a cup of sugar. The next day, Tommy comes to me, goes, hey, Sam, can I borrow your car for a day? Because of the rule of reciprocity, I feel in debt to you, and I will do something, even if those two favors are not equal, I will do something to get back so we're even, because we want to feel even. And so the idea here is if you bring a customer a coffee, even if it's a $2 coffee, they're more likely to spend an additional $500 in garage doors. And so my question is, have you seen the average order value go up just because of that simple trick? Speaker 1: It goes up dramatically. And it's not a question if you're going to use this, it's how much are you going to spend. Robert Chitty and he became a good buddy of mine, him and Bob. Speaker 2: No shit. Speaker 1: There's seven rules of influence. I got I studied him at U of A in my master's program when he's an ASU professor, their arch nemesis. I got to meet him. He comes to the house now. My COO and head of sales just went to his conference here in Tempe, Arizona. And the more we could apply those seven principles, we're always looking to apply more and more. And it's not to manipulate people. By the way, he says, you got to use these for good. And I mean, I ask him questions all the time. He needed a garage. And I'm like, dude, this one's on the house. You know, like it's going to be the Taj Mahal too. And that's just he's just one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Speaker 3: Alright, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours and I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column NA, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC. Speaker 2: One of the many interesting things about you is basically a lot of times that courses kind of get shit on. People make fun of like courses and people make fun of seminars and stuff like that and books fall in that category, but it seems like you are prolific when it comes to hiring coaches, hiring consultants, taking courses, taking seminars, things that people would say even at 17 million in revenue, they would say, but Tommy, you Why are you paying money to come to this course? What courses and books have really moved the needle for you in your life? It sounds like you've consumed a lot. Speaker 1: Well, I'll tell you that the latest one was Buy Back Your Time. Dan Martell, he goes, let's just do this. He goes, when do you think you're going to sell? So we wrote it down. He goes, how much do you think you'll make? And I wrote the number down. Then he goes, how many hours do you work a week? I go, probably 50. We did the math. He goes, do you know how much you make per hour? And it's like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he goes, you got a great business mind. He goes, tell me you got a good chef. And I'm like, a chef? I don't need a chef. Like, he goes, what do you normally eat? I'm like, Uber Eats. He's like, Tommy, you don't understand. He goes, if you want to become the best for your people, he goes, you have a driver, right? I go, what? Why would I? Me, a driver? He goes, how often do you drive a week? I go about 11 hours. He goes, what if we could buy back 11 hours for you to be productive? And he got me to look through a whole different lens. He got me. So now I got a house manager. We've got a chef. We've got a driver. Our dogs are walked twice a day. They go to doggy daycare. Huckleberry and Finn are our dogs. And these mentors, Dan Martell is a big one. I go to all the home service ones, but most people sit in this procrastination and indecision. There are softwares I've used that were crap, but you know, we just got on one. It increased our conversion rate on door sales by 18% and our average ticket by 3%. And it picked up an extra 5 million of EBITDA because it eats the dealer fees. Because I heard about it from a buddy of mine. We were on it within six weeks. But to not do these things, so many people are like, man, one day, I'm gonna get started. Right after the wedding, I'm gonna be on the diet. Right after the golf tournament. And they live in this world of like, we're just not ready for that yet. Man, I'm like, let's just fail. Who cares? Let's fall down a bunch of times. We're gonna fail a lot, but we're gonna figure it out before anybody. Speaker 3: You said you guys sold a piece of the business and you were at like, whatever, 20-something million in EBITDA and now it's 80 million. What was that big jump? Did you guys start rolling up other businesses or what happened? What went so well? Speaker 1: So it's three years. We bought 12 companies. We've grown, I think it's 78% organically. And then the 22% was by buying companies. What we did is, it's kind of funny because I call my vendors and I say, tell me how you win. How do you meet your bonuses? What is your objectives this year? For like the vendors, I'm going to spend $80 million in garage doors this year. I say, what product mix do you need us to be at? And I say, now, if I do this for you, when do I get a bigger rebate? My growth, like if I sell $100 to somebody, they're paying a different price than if they buy one door. So I work out these things. So, you know, we've got economies of scale. We've got efficiency. And you know, the crazy thing is what a great home service business is 15% of the bottom. We're almost double that. And I still see because of our efficiency, like you might have a call center rep that could book 20 calls a day. Mine could book 60. So let's say you're paying yours 20, I'm paying mine 35. They're doing three times the work. You know what I mean? So you get these economies of scale and people don't like when I say this, but if you work at A1, most people will hire you in their garage door business because we've got, we buy $6,000 of tools. We train, we train, we train. You know, when I played football, I played two a days. I practiced twice a day for six days to play one game. At home service, you say, you're gonna go with our best guy for two weeks and you're on your own forever. Training is not something we do, it's who we are. And we continue to train. It's not just in sales. It's smiling. It's making sure you're efficient. You're showing up to your first job within 15 minutes. These new one-on-one forums I'm working on, I'm more excited about that than anything this month. So one-on-ones with the technicians and installers. So they're very complex to get the data I'm looking at. But What I'm building is, if this is where you're at, it's a series of things to get good at. If you're not great at this, we gotta get you good at this before we go on to the next one. And then there's a recipe for each one. So now it's standardized. Now in any market, this is the one-on-one form you're gonna use, and you're given the exact same thing across the board. That you're gonna do ride-alongs for two days. You're gonna go back to Phoenix for a refresher for five days. You're gonna do role play for one day in the training center. Whatever that looks like, we're building all that right now. And my expectation is, It'll increase revenue by 40%. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 3: Has AI changed your business at all yet? Have you seen any impact with AI? Speaker 1: Call center and dispatch and quite a few things in marketing, but call center, obviously, it's coming to the spot where this year, right now, yesterday, my AI agents were at 87% booking rate. My real agents were at 92%. So it's a 5% variance, but the AI continues to get better. And the goal is not to get rid of people. The goal is to go on a hiring freeze and keep the best. So right now I got 68 agents. Let's say I go down to 40. They last forever, but I never need to hire another agent because now you're just blocking and tackling. Dispatching, what our dispatch software does is regression testing. So you could feed it data, credit card score, how much did they pay off in the home, how many garage doors do they have, and then it looks for outliers, and it knows what technicians do well on this type of job. And the most important thing is customer satisfaction, net promoter score, and my internal net promoter score. So I'm not just looking to sell. I'm trying to create a relationship, build, you know, get you on a membership, which we call a protection plan, and be your garage door company for life. I'm not trying to go wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. I wrote a big ticket. Let's get out of here. I'm trying to say, what's right for you? You're selling the home, Ms. Jones. Let me make sure you pass inspection. We want to work on your new home. You know, that's what's important is we need to build relationships, and that's very rare in the home service industry. Speaker 2: I never would have thought, and it makes, it's like obvious in hindsight, but I never would have thought that a garage door business could be as big as you, and you seem like you have a ton of growth ahead of you. You haven't even scratched the surface. What other businesses have you seen in the services industry that you are shocked at how big they are, or you think that most of our audience, which is largely internet or tech-based audience, would be surprised about? Speaker 1: I'll tell you my favorite one is Pest Control. Speaker 2: Tell us about it. Speaker 1: Well, the fact is Pest Control It's the only company that went public. And right now they're paying 22 to 25 X EBITDA. So if you can get your business to make $2 million, you're gonna get 50 million. And the best guys that do it, it started out the Mormon guys out of Utah would knock on doors door to door. They're very good at it. If you sell religion and they don't tell you this. So you start out by door to door, then you get good at advertising on Google and radio. You optimize for routes, but anybody could do it. You're literally there spraying. In Arizona, you're looking out for scorpions, spiders, making sure there's no pigeons, stuff like that. Speaker 2: What pest control company is public? Speaker 1: What's the big one that went public? They've bought so many companies, but Terminex went public. Speaker 2: I'm looking up Terminex. It looks like nearly a $5 billion market cap. Shockingly big. Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's the deal. And then they have subsidiaries on top of that. And when you go public, it's like how many companies can you buy because you're raising capital from the investment pool. And it's almost like you've got to eat. When you go public, you got to eat, you got to buy. I mean, that's one of the prerequisites. If you do an IPO, and there's a lot of advantages, but then you got Sarbanes-Oxley and all this other things like this is the kind of stuff I get really excited about. But You think about here's something to understand about home service, home improvement. Is it demand generated? Like if your pipe breaks, you're calling me today. You need it fixed. Windows, you know, I want new windows. Maybe a window broke. I'll get the glass fixed, but windows. So the multiple of a demand-driven industry where I need it done, and pest control is one of those that's not necessarily needed it done, but because that company went public, they're paying a lot more and it rose the market cap. But a window company might get eight to 12X, whereas HVAC, plumbing, electrical, Garage doors, there's just these must-do's are getting, you know, 15 to 20, when you get past 20 million of EBITDA. Speaker 2: I remember during like COVID, those multiples were going in, like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears as though that there was like a pre and post-COVID number, like the post-COVID numbers exploded, those multiples. Speaker 1: Here's exactly what happened is, think about it, you're a venture capitalist, you're PE, You're going, man, all of our hotels are failing. No one's going to Airbnbs. The nail salon just shut down because people are leaving their houses. The movie theaters went bankrupt. Where can we put our money? And they looked at this simple blue collar that we were like, we were like second class citizens. And they go, wait a minute. These guys have predictable income. They're needed. They've shown month after month, year after year that they can continue to grow and they're sophisticated. They use things like Power BI. They use things advanced analytics. And when they realized that, the money started shooting in like crazy. There's miracle stories. And the multiples are still really, really high. What they did learn is you got to keep the founder involved because the founder, you know, is kind of the glue. And if you pay the founder a lot of money, are they going to stay on and get happy and keep the culture? Because imagine giving a guy that worked his ass off $100 million. And having them, hey dude, I want you to stick around and be the same. I want you to work harder than you worked before. It's few and far between. So they're getting pretty sophisticated now, but there's a lot of home service industries, man, I'm telling you this. Like the future of A1, mini splits in the garage, garage flooring, EV chargers, pest control, front doors and windows. Like if I could get into those, I'm running 25,000 jobs a month. 17% is finance, so it'll be 35% this year of our revenue, which is low. It needs to continue to improve. But hey, you qualified for 20,000. Do you want me to make this garage door livable and you can set up a gym? We'll do the floors and we'll put, you know, it'll be warm in the winter, cool in the summer. And by the way, we noticed all these spiderwebs in your garage. You want us to take care of that? And by the way, the garage, probably you want it to match the front door and you qualified for it. We can make it a low payment. You know, the garage door, I got really lucky. Because Remodel Magazine eight years in a row said garage doors are the number one investment. Wall Street Journal came out with two articles last year. 268% return on investment. You put a buck in, you take 268 out. And then we trademarked the garage door with a smile of your home. So I'm going into the garage. And the plan is to create other opportunities in the garage. Speaker 3: Dude, this is fascinating. This is not at all what I thought this episode was going to be. You're this mix of a bunch of things that I really love. You're, you know, one third, just pure hustle and common sense. You're one-third self-development, personal development, learning machine, just how can I learn, grow and be better. And then one-third is basically like I'm going to play big. So you're doing this blue-collar thing but at this really big scale and I love that combination. That is a lot of fun to me to have this conversation. I'm glad you came on. Speaker 2: Check this out, Shaan. So I've been following you, Tommy, for about two years now, and you get me amped up. I'm not in your space at all, but I feel like I'm learning so much, but I also feel like I'm getting amped up. But Shaan, Google Tommy Mello Conference. So he has this conference called the Freedom Event. And whoever's listening, Google that and go to the page. The video is him with his arms out and fireworks shooting up with him on stage. It's pretty awesome. But Tommy, obviously, he has a behemoth of a business. But then it looks like you have a side hustle of being like sort of like a home services influencer. And if I had to guess, like your conference, and I think you had a course or a community, something like that. If I had to guess, that's doing all right, too. Speaker 1: Yeah, we had 1500 home service contractors at our last one. This year, we'll have 3500. And the average person that's worked with us increases by 70% their first year. And that's profitability because that's what we shoot for. And basically, most of what I've done is repeatable. It's not like this crazy thing that only works in garage doors. It's knowing the numbers. It's paying attention to the important things. You don't need to be good at 50 things or 500 things. You need to be good at five things a thousand times over. Don't overcomplicate it. It's pretty simple. Speaker 3: Can you explain how this media side of your business, forget the actual nuts and bolts of what you're doing. So you have the podcast, you have media. And so explain how this, why you do it and how the sort of like from a business perspective, why do you do this and how does it work? What is the goal of how you're doing this? For example, Are you throwing this event because you want to be the largest kind of event, trade show in your industry and that's a good business to be in? Is it because you want to have a relationship and go buy the top 1% of these companies and it's lead gen for that? Why are you doing all this and how does that work? Speaker 1: Well, first and foremost, I used to just have a garage door. We realized the industry's so crappy, the industry would have to improve. People would need to raise their prices and show their worth. So we figured out that we would have to train other garage door companies. So we invite hundreds of garage door companies. And then I looked out in the audience and it was all plumbers and roofers and pest control and even mechanics. And I'm like, this is supposed to be a garage door show. And we didn't really filter who was coming in. So I was like, look, I want to keep garage doors kind of In our realm, and then I started this other thing called Home Service Freedom. And the real reason is people opened the door to me. People gave me the time of day. People let me come into their home, their business, and they gave me the answers. And people call me up and they're like, dude, I'm getting a divorce. My kids are leaving me. My dad, I took over his business. He just died. I don't know what to do. And quite frankly, L.E.V. and all my other, you know, Dan Antonelli with branding, and we've got this formula of like the step by step. It's not for everybody. Like I said at the beginning, not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur. Some of them are meant to be entrepreneurs. But the other thing, the selfish byproduct is if I love a company and they show up and they do the work, I could date them before we get married. Because I know if I invest with them, I'll give them endless amount of money. I could personally give them what's worked in like really one-on-one, because I can't coach anybody one-on-one. I got 1,250 people depending on me here. But the idea being, I gave you guys a bunch of other industries that A1 wants to get involved in. I like, know and trust these people. They know they're going to win with me. So it helps grow the core business too. If we ended up doing a deal, I have no expectation of doing deals and I don't know if anybody wants to do a deal, but I know this, that if it came down to it and we loved each other and we worked well together and there was a win-win for both of us, A1 and this other business that You know, it just makes sense. You know me, I know you. So yeah, there is a byproduct. But the fact is, now I know everybody. And guess what happens? I'll show them everything I know. Who do you think they call when they figure something out? When they figure out Google's new algorithm, or they figure out a certain thing on meta, or they figure out a new mailer technique that I've never heard of, who's the first person they want to call? They go, Tommy, you've taught me so much. I feel indebted. I haven't come to you for three years, but I finally got something I think you're going to love. You got to try this. And I get those phone calls 10 times a week. Speaker 2: I'm on homeservicefreedom.com. It looks like a community plus like you give a playbook. The headline is really good. It says accelerate five years of growth in 12 months. How much does this cost? Speaker 1: So there's three different programs. We only got 12 companies in the top program, but, you know, we got a basic one. It's a few hundred bucks a month. The next one, It's about 50 grand a year. I mean, it's not crazy. I'll tell you, we took a roofing company that was doing $12 million, bringing home about 300 grand. Within one year, they're doing 30 million, bringing home 6 million. And a lot of these things are just turning the knobs a little bit and paying attention to some things you're not looking at. The data, the KPIs will set you free. And the fact of the matter is, I'll come to you guys and I'll say, hey, what do you think your booking rate is? You'll say, well, me and my wife answer the phones, we're probably at 90%. I'm like, you don't understand. It should be a decimal place. It needs to be exact. It should be by CSR. Like, I know every single one of my CSR's booking rate. I know exactly what we're training them on every day. I know exactly my technique. You should see my scorecards. I mean, these are world-renowned. Like, we spent millions of dollars to build this internally, and they are the baddest-ass thing you'll ever see in your life. Speaker 2: Tommy, what do you suck at? What are you bad at? What is your weakness right now? Speaker 1: You know, my fiancée might say I'm not the best communicator. I don't talk about my feelings. I don't really practice. Like I said, I don't like to piss people off too much. Fierce conversations. I'll do it because I love them, but I'm not going to have these conversations with a lot of people. I would say with my family, I like to do stuff, but my mom wants to sit there and chat. And I love my mom more than anything. But when I was a kid, we'd go to a movie, we'd go bowling. She'd take me like she's she got really involved. And I just have a hard time because sitting there and chatting, it's okay to catch up on things, but it's gotta be something optimistic for me. I have a hard time talking about, I don't go down this, never anymore am I talking, like I'll mention like what's going on in Minnesota or Ukraine or whatever, but I can't live in this negativity zone. So I'm trying to be the best son I could, the best fiance I could, the best brother I could to my sister, and the best uncle I could to my niece and nephew. And I know I got a long way to go. Like at least I could say that out loud and I recognize it. Speaker 2: Tommy Mello is Tommy dialed in. You've got it figured out, man. You're very inspirational. Speaker 1: I'm a work in progress. Speaker 3: What's the goal? You're wealthy. You did it. You pulled it off with this company. Are you trying to buy the Cardinals? What's the goal out here? Speaker 1: I was playing with ChatGPT yesterday and I would love to tell you there's a goal. We're building a beautiful house in Idaho where we're going to be doing events. And then I'm building my dream home in Paradise Valley here in Arizona. But, you know, I've got my life. I'm 42. I'll be 43 in March and I got my life at 45. On my casket, you know what I want? I don't want the best entrepreneur wealthy. I want number one, the best dad ever. And I don't have any kids yet. I'm a late bloomer. Luckily, my fiance is 27. She's worked with me for nine years. No. No, yeah. Yeah, nine years, because she was definitely 18 when I met her. Speaker 2: I was going to say, dude, no public bath, Tom. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3: We were doing so well. And then Tommy went to jail. Speaker 1: There it is. Speaker 2: There's the weakness. Speaker 1: Definitely nine years. And so I feel like for me, the next journey is like, listen, I want to be a great dad. I want to be a great husband. We're getting married next January 1st, and I want to live. I want to be where my feet are. I want to go all in. I want people to know how much I care about them. I want to communicate better. I want to make sure that it's not always about money and finance. It's not just working out. It's just becoming better every day. Better your best. I always say I'm the best I've ever been, but the worst I'll ever be, because tomorrow I need to be a little bit better. I can tell you guys, I'm generally a happy person. I say once a month I kind of get down on myself. And I'm like, why do I work this much? Or why don't I do this? Or why don't I do this? But you guys might look at people that are wealthy. I'll tell you the most billionaires, and I meet a lot of them, they're not happy. Some of them are suicidal, alcoholics, drug addicts. They got everybody chasing them because of their money. They're not really good people. So they begin to look at themselves and say, The only reason people like me is because I work my ass off and I've got money. And that's not going to be me. I want to continue to be humble. Stay the blue collar guy I've always been. Remember that I started washing dishes and mowing lawns. And just creating the best, I don't want a million friends. I want 20 friends that I wanna be lifelong soulmates with. And guys, it sounds really good and I do got a lot of great things going and I thank God and Jesus Christ every day. But I've got a lot of work on. All the listeners just know, That you might think being rich, famous, Instagram famous, an influencer is gonna solve your problems, but that's not the answer. It's looking inside and becoming your best self. Speaker 2: Have you ever seen the Savannah Banana? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they were just at an event I was at. Those guys are awesome. Speaker 2: So Jesse Cole came on maybe eight weeks ago, six weeks ago. And Shaan and I, he probably is in our top five favorite people that we've talked to. Very inspirational. And it's so interesting that you guys look very different. You have incredibly different businesses. And yet there's this spark that you both have that Shaan and I find incredibly Inspiring, contagious, like basically a conversation with you we probably leave feeling. Now I know what a 10 out of 10 in terms of operating our lives are at. We have to step it up. Speaker 3: Tommy, you said something earlier. You said, I used to hire twos and try to make them sevens. Now I hire sevens, try to make them tens. The reason we do the podcast is you find 10s to make you realize, oh, you're still a 7. Break your frame a little bit and say, oh, that's an area I could be better in. Oh, wow, he really had a certain spark or he had a certain point of view or he had a habit that I'm going to pick up here. For me, that's the biggest thing with this podcast is to It's to just kind of continually surround ourselves with people who are excellent in some area of their life, hopefully multiple areas of their life, so that we can kind of realize, oh, you know, you're actually a seven. There is actually much, there are more levels to that thing that you're trying to do. Speaker 1: I want to finish out, if you guys allow me to, just, I want you guys to think about this going into this year. And if you could, I recommend everybody write these down. First one is family and friends. That's the first F. The next one is faith. And this could be in any order you want. The next one is fitness. The next one is finance. The next one is future self. And the sixth one is fun. And I want you to set goals for all these. If you don't believe in God, you can skip faith. I highly recommend you figure out what to believe in because I do believe we're going somewhere great. And then I don't want you to set a yearly goal. I want you to get Jesse Ister's big ass calendar. I want you to start journaling. And I want you to use a blue pen. There we go, blue pen and a white piece of paper. And I want you to write your goals down. And I want you to put them in your shower, your vehicle, your refrigerator, on your desk, four spots. And I want you to sign up on the bottom. And then I want next to each one of those six, I want accountability partners that you know are gonna hold your feet to the fire. Then I want you to put your why. And it's Simon Sinek 101, but it better be a big ass why. And you better have people that are willing to tell you you're failing and you're letting yourself down and you're letting me down. And I want you to post it on social media. I want you to come out of your comfort zone. And I want you to say, this is what I'm going to do. And don't set a yearly goal, weekly or monthly steps. It could be calories. It could be body fat. You know, it could be going to church. It could be just the answers. I'm going to time block time with my family. And that's what I'm putting on here first. But these simple little tools, the accountability partners, and you better meet with those accountability partners weekly. And it better be hard conversations. And it better not just last through March and then fall off like most people do. And it's got to be a strong... Chowdhury talks about this. I got this bracelet. It says, keep your commitment. You better commit and you better yell from the rooftop that you're gonna do this and it better be a huge why. And the only other thing is try to get into better circles. If you wanna be a great golfer, go golfing with three scratch golfers, you're gonna be better. Get into the right circles and you do what I'm telling you to on all six of those, your life is planned on, it's reverse engineered, it's manifested and it will come true. Speaker 2: I'm gonna run through a f***ing wall. That's how I do it. Speaker 3: Sam, anything we say after this will just make the podcast worse. Just do the line and let's end the pod. This is perfect. Speaker 2: That's it. That's the pod. All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcasts.