From Sales Rep to $28M: What Jordan White Learned Building Seek One Roofing

Year one, we did two and a half million. Year two, five and a half. Year three, 10 and a half. Year four, 20. This year we're on pace to do 28 to 32. We really measure about everything we need to to be able to continue for this business to soar. What's one thing you're going through right now that's the hardest thing in business for you that you've ever dealt with? Marketing, we're dealing with it right now. Taking the business, diversifying it, you know, and roofing, it's a lot of door to door and we're really focused on building two or three different legs and tiers to this business to diversify and create predictability and reoccurring. And so it's really understanding the different channels of fueling this business to take us to 50 million here in the next two years through marketing. And do you love insurance or do you hate it or a little bit of insurance and regular clients? Yeah, I absolutely love it. A lot of people say, hey, insurance, re-roofing, the industry's changing, a lot of shifting. At the end of the day, I think it's great to be able to adapt and play ball and have a blend of everything. And so that's our main goal here at Seek One is we want to diversify and have about a 33% split amongst, you know, Resi retail roofing and then about 33% Resi re-roofing and then about 33% residential custom home build new construction roofing. So we're really focused right now on trying to, you know, build the different legs to the business to create sustainability. Let me ask you something, Jordan. How many bankers have you talked to about exiting? A lot. Yeah, we've had a lot of conversations, a lot of groups have reached out. I think it's hot in the industry and, you know, our business has doubled revenue for consecutive years. And, you know, it feels if due to our age and our location, you know, I'm 26 years old, my partner's 30 and we've got a long ways to run and I feel as if we've got a lot of eyes on us. So it's interesting. I've talked to probably 10 bankers in the last week, just about a one and they're very, they all say, they don't know my industry very well because it's not quite the limelight like A-Track plumbing, electrical and roofing. But they say never do more than 10% new construction. They say you're gonna get hit, you're gonna get whacked 5X on the multiple. For sure. So I would just, my best advice, this changed my life in 2019. I got around the right banker, Eric Van Dammen. He was like, I'm gonna tell you exactly how to build your business, how to create a AAA asset. And I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just telling you the guys that have sold to Blackstone and KKR and Apollo and Aries and Leonard Green, they know what the buyback looks like, they know when they get excited, they know when they pay up more. And that's probably the best thing for the listeners to start thinking about is, how do I build this asset? Because there's two type of owners. One is just looking for cashflow to live on and live a good life and raise their family. The other one sees their business as their number one asset and they wanna build enterprise value. And I think there's a big misconception and they both work, but I'm the latter one. I'm like, look, I'm gonna build this business up, I'm gonna sell it, then I'm gonna sell it again and then I'm gonna sell it again and I'm gonna make sure there's millionaires created every single time that happens, lots of them. Jordan, I wanna just jump in, let's hear your journey, where you got started, where you're at today and what you're looking forward to get going on. Yeah, I'll just kinda give the origin story. And 2022, I moved up to Nashville, just had a dream and a vision. Before that, I worked for a roofing company headquarters out of Atlanta. They had scaled to 100 million and we're located in about 10, 12 different markets. Saw a lot of growth and really put together the playbook of what to do and what not to do. And I figured, hey, look, I'm selling millions and millions of dollars as a sales rep for that business. But for me, it wasn't about the sales and it wasn't about the money, it was, hey, look, I wanna make an impact and I wanna build a team and I wanna be able to change lives and transform people. And how do I do that? I've gotta do something bigger than me. And hey, the best time's probably now while I don't have as much responsibilities. So, I was able to work in this Nashville market a couple of times for that business and saw, hey, look, this is an untapped opportunity that I feel as if we could really thrive. It's got the right recipe for our business and re-roofing, especially within the insurance side. So, Nashville is the second fastest growing city in the United States. Our business is located in the Brentwood and Franklin area about 15, 20 minutes south of the city of Nashville and that's the fifth wealthiest county in the United States. And so, I saw, wait a second, it's a recession proof market. There's people moving here all day every day, over a hundred a day are coming here. It's got great insurance carriers. It's got, you know, five million to $10 million homes everywhere we look. We've got good storm damage. And I was like, hey, everyone wants to be here. So, as a young guy, I was thinking this is gonna be good to start life off for many different reasons, decided to come chase this dream and loaded up the car, threw the clothes and the truck and the desk and slept on a buddy's couch for three months and came here and started tapping into the country clubs and door knocking the, you know, the artist and, you know, the musicians and the athletes all throughout town and, you know, build a name and build a name that, hey, look, you know, we're gonna rattle the market. And if it's a big project, it's a sequel and job. I can assure you that. And that's exactly what we did here at one. So, when I started, you know, really, really putting this market into a headlock and, you know, rattling and creating noise. And sure enough, built a sales team, built the office staff, built the department heads, built the C-suite. Year one, we did two and a half million. Year two, five and a half. Year three, 10 and a half. Year four, 20. This year we're on pace to do 28 to 32. And we operate with, you know, very, very good margin and feels if, you know, what doesn't get measured doesn't get moved. And we really measure about everything we need to be able to continue for this business to soar. So that's a little bit about kind of the story and where we're at now. So you started off as a sales rep. Yes, sir. Well, tell me about a few times you got smacked in the face where you're, because a lot of people, and you pulled it off, but I'd say you're one out of a dozen that actually do this because most, most great sales people in a company, they go, well, I'm doing all the work, but yet you gotta get the fulfillment, you gotta get the calls booked, you gotta understand E-Mod score for workers comp, you gotta understand insurance claims, you gotta understand what Google my business pages and how to optimize it. And there's all kinds of other things that I'm not even discussing, but I think a lot of times as a worker, you just say, look, I know what we pay for the product, I know how to sell, but by the way, sales cures all. So I'm not trying to sales the top sales guys in the company make more than I do. And I'm proud of them and I'm glad they do. But tell me, tell me sometimes where it just was like, dude, I didn't know that I didn't know it was gonna be like this. Yeah, for sure. And I think that my God given talent was just business. Like I like business. I don't care if it's roofing or I don't care if it's garage doors, I don't care if it's windows siding, it doesn't matter. Like I love business, it's a widget. And how do we create a successful business? Well, I was just blessed with the opportunity to be able to go out and sell jobs. And I was blessed with the ability to be able to be in an industry where you can go out and go to someone's door, offer a service, and be able to move the ball forward. If it's a HVAC company, you can't really go knock on a door and ask if their unit is gonna break or if it has broken and needs some repair. So I was able to thrive from that standpoint, but then getting into the business side of it, really focused on being able to build and delegate. As fast as we were growing and as much as we were doing, I was taking every dollar and putting it back into the business to be able to hire the people in these areas that you're speaking about, that are A players. We didn't start off with three Cs. We started off with A players. And these individuals would have helped me. It's not myself. It is the team that I've built around me to be able to get to where we're at. So I think just immediately getting experience in here and experience matters. I wanna hear your perspective on something that happened yesterday. I had a really small shop tour, the smallest I've ever had. And three out of the four people, funny enough, were in power washing and window washing. And I said something that they probably didn't wanna hear and I wanna get your take on it. I said, if I were you guys, you built a good business, you got a good dream, I plan on a two-year exit and I switch industries. Cause I used to be a landscaper. I used to do massive drip systems. And what I realized was the multiples low, there's no barriers to entry. And there's really hard to set yourself competitively different. I said, most of the guys that started power washing were in their early twenties, late teens. And they went to Home Depot, they bought a power washer and they were off to the races. And I didn't want to destroy their dreams, but I said, my business, I'm very lucky I fell into it 19 years ago, but you're garage door breaks, you gotta get your car out. Your HVAC unit breaks, it's 120 degrees in Arizona. You're gonna get that fixed. There's a lot of things that are, your roof starts leaking, you're calling somebody and taking care of it. Do you think I might have given bad advice or how would you have responded to that? No, I think that the truth hurts, but you know, with pain comes change and with change comes growth. And you know, maybe it shifts that individual to scale the business and get out and get into something with a higher demand and you know, something that's more fragmented. You know, I actually came from the power washing business. I actually bought a box truck. It was a coffee brand, ripped the logos off of it, painted it matte black, put the systems in there and went and locked down the HOAs and got in and we're doing Taco Bells and Chick-fil-A's, but I saw what you just said. It's not scalable to the level that I wanted and where I wanted to go. And so I think you've said this before, but it's really, what does that individual want? You know, if that's a great business for that person doing two million in revenue, putting 200,000 in their pocket, then great. You know, for me, that's not what I want in life. So that business model wasn't gonna work. So I think it's great advice. I said, listen, I'm not gonna tell you what you want here. I'm gonna tell you what you need to hear. You know, roofing, it's kind of got a bad name because it's hard to trust. And I will say that every industry has a little bit of this, but roofing in particular, especially on insurance claims, like somebody will have a little bit of hail damage and they'll be like, it's a $30,000 roof. I think insurance is starting to get more difficult, but not for the great companies that do the stuff right. But early on, how did you think about building credibility before you had scale or brand recognition? Yeah, you know, I'm gonna keep going to it, but it's our people. You know, majority of my sales guys are very sharp, clean. You know, they're college educated. Some of them have MBAs. I mean, these are just sharp people that when they come to the door, when they come to run the lead, there's the reassurances there. We fit the target market in the audience of where we work. And I think it's very important in any sales to be able to mirror the customer. I feel as if when we show up on site for that call, you know, we are who they are. We live in this community. These guys go to church in this community, grew up here, played sports, went to high school here. Their family still live in these, you know, neighborhoods that we work in. So I just think that we have a lot of familiarity and trust and we were able to bring that presence there, which was reassuring to the client right off, you know, the rip before we ever even did the inspection. I think it's how we present ourselves. So the business will do 20 to 32 million. You run it to 50. Good margins in a business like this, 20%. That's a $10 million business. I mean, maybe you get a 12X. I don't know what the multiples are for sure, but I know what Lance Bachman's getting. Possibly more, depending on how the business composition is. What happens next? Do you roll equity? Do you go rebuild again? Do you sell it to a platform? What would be the perfect outcome? Yeah, so we've had a lot of opportunities, a lot of banker conversations, a lot of, you know, strategic, so you've got about 25 platforms in the roofing space right now. You know, they're all in the, you know, adding on probably the eighth to 12th add-on right now, sitting in the third inning. You know, that's just not me. Like you said about the pressure washing business, you know, and you know, that's not you. You look for enterprise value. I'm the same kind of individual. I want to do it big and I want to turn many people into millionaires and, you know, for me, I just, you know, I feel like I'd be handcuffed. We've had those conversations. Hey, this platform, LLI presents itself. Hey, we'd be the night spot, cap table, you know, kind of diluted a little bit. And I feel as if, you know, for me personally, as a strong visionary, I would have my hands tied on my back, right? And so I feel as if right now, for those existing platforms, if you're coming in later into it, you're really just focused on the integration. In my eyes, you know, I'm viewing it as if, hey, there's a fire pit, they're stacking the logs right now for the next buyer before they pour gas on it. You know, they're coming through, cleaning up the CRMs, coming through, cleaning up the accounting, coming through, you know, putting us and aligning us and all the buying and making sure that we're, you know, using the same distributors, working the rebates, working money to the bottom line, you know, for me, that's just not what gets me excited, Tommy. It's just not. So we're in that awkward, you know, tweener stage right now where could we be a platform, you know, or do we need to continue to go and you nailed it, right? You know, this year, if we do the 28, you know, we'll be sitting at a Rial on 485 in Ibada. You know, once you hit five, you start to get into a little bit better tier of private equity firms that are, you know, investing into the roofing space. Right now we have some opportunities by some unique individuals that are just wanting to invest in the person, right? My partner and I, you know, they believe in the people and they see that, hey, we're here to run, we're not here to, you know, take a jab, hit a bite and get out, right? Like I want to successfully turn. And in turn, and in turn. So right now I'm just, I'm head down and I'm really focused on being able to grow the business to where Seek One can be a platform name and we can go rattle growth through acquisition and through green fielding. You're on a fun journey. I mean, I like the fact that you're 26, you're partner's 30, you're far ahead of where I was, although there were no private equity companies in the home service industry. I didn't know what private equity was. I didn't know what EBITDA was. I didn't know what arbitrage was. I didn't know what it meant when you buy a company to have an integration team. I just knew I wanted to grow. And I didn't know COVID was gonna happen and I was gonna be deemed essential, but things are good, man. I mean, God works in mysterious ways and I'll tell you, if he wasn't looking out, but like I feel like sometimes I'm in like a matrix because things keep going right. It's like, I don't know, the right person comes in at the right time to my life. It's like obviously divine. I wanna get in a little bit just briefly on faith. What are real decisions where that actually shows up in the practices of your business? Yeah, I mean, it happened last week. Honestly, it happens all the time. But, for example, contracts dated, this shingle, this color, superintendent shows up, crew shows up, we're working on a $5 million house. We come through, we tear the entire roof off. If you're doing it right, most roofing jobs are all done in one day, no matter what the size is. I mean, we'll put a standard cruise, and a standard job is probably 50 squares, 10 guys, but like let's just say it's a big time house. We're putting 25, 30 guys on it. It's launch time, we've ripped the roof, we've already shingled half the home, wife pulls in and she says, hey, this color just doesn't look like the color that I thought it was gonna look like. I don't have to do anything in that moment, right? I can finish up the job. Now there's a lot of liability, there's a lot of pressure, rain, hey, look, exposed roof. If it was our fault, we would tack it a little bit different, but we decided, no, we're gonna do it the way that we would do it, and we're gonna take care and the customer's always right, and we ripped that roof off and we put back the color that was right. Since then, we've signed 17 jobs in that neighborhood. So I feel as if it's doing the right thing. And for me, hey, our businesses seek one because we seek the Lord and I love what I do, I love who I do it with and who I do it for. And hey, in that moment, I didn't have to, but I did. And then in business, just last week, getting on the phone with a guy in our office and sitting down and we did performance reviews and I was sitting down with some of the team leaders and their teams and having the conversations and just motivating a guy to, hey, focus on another area of life, right? Like you're killing it, you're making a lot of money, but that's not everything. You read it earlier, I focus in five areas, faith, family, fitness, finance and focus. And I'm like, hey, there's some other areas you need to live and really dial in. So I just feel as if we work through our faith in many areas of this business and are just extremely blessed to do what we do every day. You know who Aura is, the founder of Service Titan, one of them, is that Ring of Bell? I've heard the name, yeah. I said, how do you do what's right for your investors? Cause you got a fiduciary responsibility to do what's right. But yet you've always said you're for the trades. Your dad was a tradesman and he says, Tommy, how many times have we screwed up for you? I said, a lot. He goes, have I never not made it right? And I go, you've made it right every single time. He goes, now how many clients do you think you brought onto Service Titan? I go, hundreds and hundreds, if not a thousand. There's 14,500 on Service Titan. He goes, so do you think it's in my best interest to make things right for guys like you and all the other clients we do? Now we're not perfect. You know, you got an onboard ride and we make a lot of mistakes along the way, but what you just said is you made it right and 1% of our clients leave a bad review. But we've got a full team designated to call them up. And by the way, my dad always taught me, he's like, you're not gonna make everybody happy. But we really, really try to, even though you get those hard to please clients, we don't try to market to the people that are looking, we're not discount cross doors. We're not do it for less cross doors, like all these other punks out there. But by the way, I was a punk that was discount city. And so I'm not talking bad because I grew beyond that. But I realized that you attract those people that you're never gonna please. The $400 jobs are the biggest complainers that wish they got it cheaper than found it on Amazon or Home Depot. Whereas you could write a $17,000 job and they're like, how do I get your cards and pass it around at church in my business? So I like how you said you did things right and then it echoed through the neighborhood and you got 17 more jobs. When you train salespeople to win, how do you protect integrity and the reputation? That's a great question. I feel as if anyone that's a part of the Seek One family understands that this is a special place. That is an honor and it is a privilege to work here. And with that being said, do it right or you're gone. I think to answer that in full is, you have to make the example and set it and show it. Over the years, throughout this business, we've had different points and times where something has popped up, something's occurred and us taking the necessary steps has shown the team that this is truly what we care about. We don't just say it that, hey, look, when something arises and someone's not doing something right, that, hey, they're no longer on the team. That doesn't mean that we don't have opportunities for people and sit there and hear them out. But if something's crossed the line, you can't sit there and say, hey, he's a two and a half million dollar producer. We're gonna keep this guy here just because of revenue. And I think that you actually squeeze a lot more juice out of the team and that there's that much more respect when you actually take the necessary steps when something's not right. You know, it's interesting. A lot of people in my company, I kind of, I got a CMO but I'm very, very involved in marketing. We just hired him two months ago. And you'll hear people echo through the hallways of we need more marketing. And I wanna remind you of one thing. This little formula that I tell everybody and I beat this drum is the most important formula is you look at your contact center, you look at your complete booking rate through that, including all the form filled social media, every single thing phone calls, then you minus your cancellation rate from that. And then you gotta look at your face to face conversion rate. And then you gotta look at your average ticket. And then your cost per lead fits into the equation. But if all those things aren't world renowned for the industry, like above where everybody else is, marketing will never fix anything because I told my CEO, I said, look, we're at an 89% at the time booking rate. We're at a 14% cancellation rate. So we're losing 11 plus 14, that's 25. And then our conversion rate was 73.8. So we're losing 51%. And I said, if we add more dollars into marketing, the booking rate's gonna go down, the cancellations continue to climb and our conversion rate's gonna go down. And not to mention we're gonna be flying through jobs, not getting the average ticket we need. So that could be 60, 65% of all the dollars spent are going to competitors. So I really started to work on the operational excellence of the business. And once those numbers, now we're at less than 8% cancellation, 91% booking rate. We're at a 76%. Those numbers are gonna continue to climb. And then I could pay more per lead. Then I'm not going out and by the way, we're gonna build a massive 10,000 person door knocking team. But what's super great about what I'm talking about is if I could win, when the LLMs like Chatchabee Tea and Grock, and there's a lot of them coming out, but when they all start, Claude is a big one right now, when they come out with the paid models, I could pay more for those. I could do top of funnel TV radio billboards. And that's something where most companies can't do because they're number one, they're not price right, but number two, they're not looking at the operational excellence of what I was talking about. So how well are you tracking those numbers? Yeah, so for us, we have one of the very early on, second year in business of a roofing business, only doing a couple million in revenue. We actually brought in a data, individually, IT guy to build out and customize all these boards. And roofing a lot of things are archaic. We feel as if the technology is there. One platform will be 80% of the way, but then it won't let us do 20%. Another platform will do this, but it won't do that. And so we kind of just said, hey, you know what? We're gonna create our own game and play in our own way. And we were able to consolidate all the data that we needed and we've created these custom boards to a platform called Plecto. And we have them all over our office. And within, it tracks in real time, you can walk out there and understand exactly what the booking rate is, what the conversion rate is, what the claim to build ratio is, how much in revenues going in the ground today? What is our aging AR sitting at right now? How many days? How can we dwindle that down? Hey, how many jobs are in repair? Like I can literally look at six different TVs within walking in my office in 30 seconds and understand what's needed. But to go even deeper than that, to what's gotten us here is not gonna get us there. I went out and hired an A player. I was able to hire a guy named Trey Sheneman, who was the CMO for Ramsey Solutions for Dave Ramsey. And within two years of exiting, he took a business in the home service space and roofing from 30 million to 50 million, from 50 million to 80 million. And so I am working firsthand right now with him real close on, hey, what is all the data? Before we get to spending, before we're spending 25, 50, 100, 150, $250,000 a month and PPC and different campaigns and TV, radio, let's make sure that we have it all tracked. Let's make sure that we have every single variable, phone numbers for everything, call rail here, evoka there, just every piece of this thing we need. And so I just feel as if right now, we're really, really collaborating on that and making sure, hey, look, all of these different numbers that we measure in our business are what have created and are directly correlated to the success of Seq One. Let's build all that out right now and have the recipe from the marketing side. So currently working on that right now, tell me. You know, another thing is I sit down with bankers and private equity companies, they always talk about market share. And a lot of people like to build popsicle stands in every market and get three to five, 10 people selling. I can tell you what's very impressive when you do go to market is when you own the market. And you own the market, you should start studying the Wizard of Ads, Roy Williams. And when I go into a new market, if I'm in a green field, the first month is launching three months before we got boots on the ground and I'm spending 300 grand. And it's gonna take 18 months. It's gonna take 18 months before I even get in the black. But guess when I'm going after, I'm not going after a million or two or three of EBITDA. I'm going to take market share. And we're willing to pay a lot of money to get A players to move there and bring the culture with them. And in one sense, you're Robin Peter to pay Paul, but in markets, I've got a machine to build A players. So if you get a couple of them to go, they start building that machine to build more A players. And one of the best things I can tell you, Jordan, is, and it's so hard for an entrepreneur, is take market share where you're going to church, where you planted seeds, where you've got a great company and make sure you've got a lot of market share and then go to a market within two hours of you and then do another one that you can get too quickly where A players can get there quickly. A lot of people think- That's our play. What's that? That's our play right now. You know, we just, we're not focused on the vertical growth as much as we are the horizontal growth, just from our playbook. We stepped into Huntsville, did a Greenfield hour and a half away, took a guy that knew the play, knew exactly how we operate, what the systems look like, you know, did it here and is absolutely killing it. You know, down at Huntsville, we've already got 10 guys, you know, superintendents, you know, five-star Google reviews pushing heavy. And, you know, Nexus, we've got guys on the batter's box sitting here at corporate ready to rock and roll because they've seen the success and seen the, hey look, we can duplicate this. And so we want to go into, you know, Louisville, Kentucky and so on and so on. And, you know, but I do agree with what you said first, which is why go anywhere? Because if I'm a $25 million business and we move to go open up two locations that each do, five million, okay, but then we go do 15 million here, it's a wash, why waste the time and the energy? And so for us, it's, hey, how do we continue to scale, seek one here in Nashville, but at the same time, create the horizontal growth with the A players, because you reach a point in time where, you know, someone's going to go do it themselves, right? And so I think that, you know, that's where we're able to slide in and say, hey, wait, we can successfully allow you to make more money here through our play than if you went out on your own. Smart. Yeah, I like that. It's a good call. Well, you wouldn't did that. I mean, you're the prime example. When you really end up taking market share, what ends up happening is your team has to grow. We pulled out of probably seven markets total in the last 10 years. And because we realized, which is impossible to do for an entrepreneur, like it took me swallowing my pride, moving my ego aside and saying, we gave it a really good chance, and we don't see the way to take market share. And the market share is not enough to even want to take in Wichitaal. I mean, we weren't set up a Wichitaal or Omaha or Portland. I'm not saying I want to go back to some of those markets, but we knew when to walk away, because if we put the time out for an energy into Houston and Denver and Detroit, we're going to get a huge ROI. And I look at Groundworks, Matt Malone. And this dude's doing like 280 million of EBITDA. And I've had the opportunity to look at the playbook, and it's absolutely phenomenal when you build the machine. But what it takes is true talent. And the talent that got you here, unless they're raising their lit every day, working 20 hours on themselves, very rarely, but some people do, then you got to rebuild the team again. And there's abs and flows where the team's got to get built. It's got to get reorganized. People got to get moved around. And very few founders have the ability to make those shifts because they feel like they need to be loyal, even though they're not getting loyalty back. So something to keep your eye on. A players today in your business might be C players in the business in two years. And you might not want to hear that. What's one leadership lesson that you had to learn the hard way at C1? Yeah, interesting. I think one big leadership lesson that I had to learn is you've got to get other people and you've got to delegate. And I've gotten other people up underneath the hood of this thing and I've had people hurt us and take our information and shared this and spread that and exposed us in many different areas. And so I've really learned to really focus on, hey, who is the individual? Who's the person? Is that person the right individual to have in this company? Do I trust them? Because I had people that had sold me and I feel like the experience was there, but they weren't the right person. And they really hurt us at points in time. So for me, it was really just understanding, hey, look, don't get caught in the wow of, okay, what can this person do? But more of who is this person? I want to tell you what Al Levy taught me in 2017. And I remember this vividly. He said, you must build a box of what the person must do and what good looks like and what metrics you're gonna base them off of. And then find the person to fit into that box. He said, Tommy, I love you, but what you always do is you're building a box around the person, setting a box and putting the person in the box. And man, that was profound. That was profound for me. What's one growth opportunity you intentionally said no to because it would have cost you something important? Yeah, I mean, I think that happens all the time. I've had the opportunity to go into many different markets. I've had the opportunity to take on a couple million dollar commercial projects. Last year I had a job that was at 8.3 million and I turned it down. I said, hey, look, this isn't what we specialize in. This isn't what Seek 1 is gonna soar and excel at. And I didn't want to risk it, right? I've got over 300 people here that depend on us when you take into crews and families. So I feel as if it's just being able to not let the big dollar distract you and stay true to what's built us and what's made us. So, now I get distracted with big time opportunities and different markets. I used to take those opportunities. I took a commercial job one time. Not only did I get 20 warranty calls, but I had to pay a company that knew what they were doing to come do it right. But when you're small in business and you see the dollar signs, you're like, we'll just figure it out. We'll build the parachute on the way down. And man, that's a mistake. Taking on stuff that create liability and then your accounts receivable will go through the roof. You don't have your billing worked out. But it's dollar signs. And this is what happened in the garage door industry. This is why it's fragmented, but there's no, nothing fits my buy box. Cause I'm like, well, how does your revenue work? Well, they're like, well, we got Home Depot. We do Costco. We do commercial. We do docs and lovelers. We do fireplaces. Every once in a while we do front doors. And we do a bunch of new construction. And I'm like, well, where's all the profit coming from? They're like, well, that's the hard part. And I'm like, oh boy. And the crazy thing, there's some businesses out there that are buying these things. And they've done a good job of kind of duct taping them together, but it's going to be a lot of work for the right buyer. It's going to be like, how do we pill this apart and rebuild it? I'm very impressed with the people that are buying these companies that are actually somewhat integrating them. I'm not mad about it, but it just, if I buy a business that's 30% new construction, I don't like the new construction, I'm just getting rid of it. I'm just, I'm saying we're going to buy this knowing we're getting rid of 30%. But by the way, when you drill into it, that 30% is only 2% of EBITDA. And that's what's important is to understand that. I want to say this earlier, when you brought up the new construction, I'm not really focused on the new construction, getting in with builders, building 100, 200 home neighborhoods and they're razor thin margins and it's callback after callback after callback. We just are in a very unique market here in Franklin Brentwood of this upscale high end residential where we've got a handful of builders that are reoccurring, putting in these $10 million homes. And the margins are great. I mean, we're running, you know, 40, 50% you know, on a custom home build. So why wouldn't I if it's sitting here and you know, in this market. Now is that, is that the sequel and way in a part of our playbook when we go into five, six, seven, eight other markets? No, of course not. I just feel as if that, hey, here in this specific market, that is something that's somewhat attractive to us because the margins are so good because they're not there focused on building, you know, volume of the homes and cutting cost everywhere. And I agree with that. It's smart thinking and that's when it takes somebody to actually peel back the onion and look deep into the business and understand it. You wouldn't happen to know a guy, a good friend of mine just passed away, Aaron Stokes. Yeah, so Aaron Stokes nephew actually worked for Seek One. His tool belt's hanging right here in my office. 21 year old passed away that worked for Seek One, Aaron's nephew. I was at the funeral last week. Yeah, I got the call and I was like, he was supposed to come over that Sunday before and he got tied up and he's like, I'm still coming. And he goes, dude, let's just do this in a couple of weeks. I'll come back. And dude, I was like, this can't, it just doesn't feel real. I just still, and you know, it was a plane accident and he had his own plane. You know the story. I'm just letting the listeners know. But he touched a lot of people and a good, you know, he really changed a lot of lives. He was a man of God. I got an opportunity to speak. It is a couple of different things for him. And we chatted on the phone every other week. He was building something and he was a great planner. I've been out there to Tennessee to visit. And it's still, it still kind of just doesn't make sense to me. It still hasn't hit yet. That's just, I don't know. But yeah. It was really hard for our team. We were actually on a sales meeting on a Friday. We had a company-wide meeting and my CFO came in and shared the news, you know, Mr. Stokes had given a call, you know, Colin's dad. So, you know, this family, you know, he lost his brother, his business partner. He lost his son. He lost his nephew. There were four men in, you know, on the plane. And another one of them was a business owner of Husky Wumbreard here in town in Franklin, you know, a 38 year old with two kids, younger than five years of age. So I can't imagine. But Colin and Aaron, you know, the Stokes, I will say from the service, one thing that I picked up on was, you know, the motto is Stokes do hard things. And that's what Aaron lived by. And I think that the family is in a great space and moving forward. And honestly, it's just, it's very impressive coming out of that service and just seeing how strong they are. And I think it's, you know, due to Aaron and who he was and what he stood for most importantly. And it's so well said. Is there anything that you took away? You know, I started thinking, I'm a driver. I'm a hunter. Good is never good enough. But I try to, I'm trying to enjoy, you know, I was on a podcast recently, the guy said, Tommy, this is the most profound advice I could give you. You spend your first four hours on yourself, the next four hours on business, the next four hours on family. You still got a few hours a night to catch up on any of the three. If you could work that out on a five day work week. If you can't, you're not successful. If you can't get your business. Now listen, I've never lived by that model, but I started to change instead of working hard, work smart, delegate, automate, eliminate. But as far as your life, seeing something like, you know, he was on top of the world. He was living his best life. He had his lake house. Just, dude, he took me through his auto shops and like his son, just. But is there any lessons that you think you might think differently based on that story? Yeah. You just nailed it. Nothing's ever enough. Right? You know, I have that, you know, just as a, you know, just high performer, just as a winner, you know, someone that's very ADHD, ADD, you know, it never feels as if, you know, I've accomplished enough and, you know, I'm never satisfied. And for me, it's the little things after this, you know, it's the being in rush hour and I'm sitting here, you know, like, let's go. No worries. You know, I'm here. I'm breathing. I got life, you know. So for me, it's just the small things, you know, it's waking up and it's not, you know, I have to as I get to, you know, and I think that our entire team has felt that and realized that, hey, look, you know, we don't have to, we get to and we're blessed to and we're thankful. And, you know, I think that we've used this to put our team closer and realize that, hey, look, what an amazing opportunity we have. The fact that, and I tell our guys this all the time, you know, sure, door to door, run a lead, however you want to look at it, Roofing may have a bad name, I don't care. You know, we love what we do and we get to go out there and go do it. You can put your windows down, you can turn on some music, you can go engage with a customer, you know, like at the end of the day, be thankful. And so for me personally, it's just, hey, don't let the little things, you know, get to me. You know, if I'm in traffic and I'm late to something, you know what, it's gonna be all right. You know, hey, if, you know, we didn't hit that number, yeah, it's frustrating, but you know what, get up and go hit it and the next month and surpass it and make up for it and don't dwell on the little things. So, you know, and then to continue to really not let work, you know, control me and to still make sure that I have that time for all the other areas, as I said earlier, you know, make sure I'm covering as a leader all areas, you know, the faith, the family, the fitness, the finance and the focus. So yeah, for sure, it's definitely made an impact and definitely opened my mind. You know, it's hard to say this when you're not making money. So a lot of the listeners out there, it's gonna be hard for you to understand this and I completely get it. But if you don't start really enjoying the journey, the destination will not change. Everyone says, man, if I had that house and I could go on that vacation and I could drive that car and I could actually, it does not change. In fact, there's more things you need to worry about, more things you could lose. You buy all these cars now, someone's gotta take care of them. You gotta have insurance on all of them. They need oil changes and it's true. When you're not ready for it, this is why lottery winners go broke is more money, more problems for most people. In fact, they know a lot of billionaires, the smartest ones, not me. What they do is they rent a house. So that way if something goes wrong, the landlord needs to take care of it. And I just, I remember talking to Gino Wickman and he's like, dude, he's like, I got piles of gold. He goes, but for a long time, I just wanted my old life back. You know, I sold the business and a lot of people tie up their identity into their business. And that's something I'm being very, very cautious of. So it's advice. I'm a few years ahead of you. I mean, I'm way older than you, but I still feel young and with these peptides, maybe I'm reversing my age. What changed you as a leader once the company was no longer just about you? I mean, because when you're smaller, you're the guy and the business has grown. Yeah. I really find a lot of passion in being able to build other people and to be able to see them win. Right? Like for me, it's okay, cool. I have the cars, have the house, have the life, have the money. That's never what it was about for me. It was truly being able to see other people win because I think the gift of giving's more impactful than receiving all day long. And as I shared with you as a sales rep, I was making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a company at 18, 19, 20 years old. It was, hey, look, I'm doing this and I wanna grow and I wanna double revenue and I have such hard goals because I want that many more people to be able to experience what I've experienced and unlock the freedom. So early on, yeah, it was about me, but truthfully tell me, it never really was. And I think that's why a lot of people ask and they say, hey, how have you accomplished this? I didn't have an investment banker. I didn't have an investor. I didn't have wines of credit. I didn't have anything. Shit, I didn't even have a house. You know what I mean? Like I had no collateral to be able to get approved, right? Like I had one thing and that was our people. And so I needed to value those people and make sure that they were more valued than myself. What do you have in place? You're pulling on investors, it sounds like, but what you could do is buy time when the capital, you know, when it's predictable. You put a buck in, you take a buck 25 out. Where are you looking for sources of capital? You know, for me, I'm not really looking for sources of capital right now. I feel as if we've starved the distractions and fed the focus and we've really saved a lot of, you know, what Seq One has been able to obtain. And now we just want to go double and triple down with that money. You know, Tommy, look, I was 21 years old, 22, 23, 24, 25. I didn't need the money, right? And so I was able to, you know, all the way until a year ago, I lived in an apartment complex with 13 of my employees. So at this point in time, I just want to continue to starve it, take that, double down, triple down, bet on myself and do what I've always done. And, you know, when the right time presents itself, I'm having those conversations, of course, because I want to play my cards, the industry's hot, you know, and I don't want to go be an add-on or a bolt-on acquisition. I want to go be a platform one day and I want to go fuel this growth through acquisition and green field and go dominate and make Seq One a big time name. So that that many more people get to experience Seq One. That's what I'm here to do. That's what I'm seeking from an investor. If you get the right CFO, which is a missing piece of guys like you and me, when you get a CFO that knows what they're doing, and this is the hardest thing for me to learn in 2020 is the right CFO sees around corners. And what you could put in place, and I did this, a $25 million delay drawl term loan, where you don't borrow unless you need it, unless there's opportunities. Now, one of the questions I'd be asking myself if I were you is how much do I give up versus private equity is going to take five, six times leverage on the business. They understand this is what entrepreneurs won't do. We don't like debt. We don't like to owe anything. We'd rather pay up our house. And we're proud of it. We're the Dave Ramsey. We paid it off. We got it paid off. We bought that car outright. But the next level to unlock is using debt and leverage when it's predictable. And that's why a delay drawl term loan is something I'd be looking into if I were you. Before, I'm not saying don't take on investors, but it's something that I was able to use to grow the business faster and get to the EBITDA I wanted to get to. And then if I do take on a partner, what do they bring to help me get to where I want to go quicker? Is it just money? Because if it could be capital and expertise, then it's like, then it's strategic. Then it makes a lot of sense. Is that resolution? I think it's experience. For me, it's not, hey, look, what do they value the company? Is it the highest multiple? Is it the most money? Cash, for me, it's the person. It's the people. It's what have they successfully done. Where is that experience? And what are they willing to do and build for us? When I'm having these conversations, what does that look like? What does the management team? How are you? And flipping the tables back on them and saying, what are you going to do? What is your plan? What is your thesis here? Do we align truly? And not being focused on the multiple that everyone gets caught up on. Because at the end of the day, at the beginning, let's just call it a 10X for an even number. Yeah, sure, if I were to take an 8X, but we successfully turned three times versus taking a 10 on the front and never seeing the role, then I messed up as a leader. Well, listen, I think reverse engineering, that's one of the goals of, we got Pinnacle next week. We're flying into Cancun on Monday. And one of the exercises we do is reverse engineer the North Star. The North Star is not my North Star, it's your North Star. What do you want? And if you don't dream bigger, and I don't know exactly that you want to go to Disney World with your kids and you want to skip all the lines and you want to buy a second and third house. Because that's just a mathematical, this is why I love math, it's arithmetic. It just says, well, this is how many calls you need to run. And here's your conversion rate, average ticket flips. And if we build this right, and then you're accountable right here on this bracelet, it says keep your commitments. I'm going to make sure you're committed to this and your wife and husband, depending on the person. Everyone in the family is committed and they know the dream. It's not just written down in your personal diary, it's out there for the world to know. And then would it be okay if I kept you accountable and I want you to keep me accountable as well? So I think understanding where you need to go, and I think you do. This is not necessarily speaking to you, it's just a lot of people, they say I want to do what you did. And I go, why? They go, well, you proved it's possible. I go, you wouldn't want to do what I did. You don't know, it was a lot of suffering, but for me it wasn't, it was learning. I didn't really have a lot of mentors for the first 10 years. I didn't realize I was suffering, but looking back, I was internally. Relationships got neglected. A lot of ones that are personally important to me. But I just said, this is what the cost is gonna be. But I didn't know you could have your cake and eat it too, and I think you can. It's just, it's pretty cool to watch what you're doing. And I really, I mean, I'm looking at you going, man, you got a good head on your shoulders. And that's, and you got passion. And it's very rare, you see a good head plus passion. There's a lot of high IQs out there, but they don't have the EQ, the emotional intelligence. And part of what you do is, I'm going back to who not how Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan is, how do you hire? Because I think if I look at how do I get to a billion dollars of EBITDA, it's going to be stacking the deck with talent. How do you, how do you get talent? How do you look at talent? How do you interview or go out there and recruit? Yeah, I mean, what we've really been able to focus on is, I think when you've got a strong baseline, and these individuals come in here, we do a lot of what we call an SOM a sales opportunity meeting, not doing one-on-one interviews and wasting time just because of the talent in our space and bringing in 50 people plus to a Zoom call and then inviting a handful of those to an in-person and bringing in part of the team. And I think when you provide so much and when you have the manuals and you have the SOPs and everything is so laid out and so organized and so structured that they almost feel upset when they don't make it, right? Like they almost feel as if they've let me down. And so I feel as if we've just created a rocket ship for people to come in here that Tommy, they maybe wouldn't have even been the right person and maybe they aren't the right person. But because the way we've got it set up in our Seq One training academy and just the way from the initial interview to the emails, to the onboard, to the package sent to them, to them coming in and going to the training center for days and being invested into and not just giving a hat and two shirts and here's a ride along, right? Like they feel as if they are a part of something and that they can thrive and that they can be successful and we're reaching a point in time at scale now where I think that when you start onboarding groups and not one by one by one, that they have something to compete with. So I feel as if it's just due to our current structure more so than it is, hey, how exactly is it that we're finding the A talent or finding talent? I think it's that we're able to take a C player and turn that person into an A player due to the Seq One way. That's the exact answer I would have said. I wanna tell you one more thing and then I would have a few close out questions. So during my first deal, we did the quality of earnings. We got a study done by Parthenon. We were at 27 and a half million of EBITDA. The biggest question that I found out a year later that these private equity companies were saying is could we tame the beast? Tommy Mello's super entrepreneurial, can he take advice? Can he sit there and be collaborative? Can he be in a room and hear other people's opposition views? And the main guy at Cortech, the main partner that works with us, said that was one of our worries, but he's a strong A, stronger than me. And I had a lot of humility. I went into the room and said, oh my gosh, we're doing this wrong. Why do we have AR at 6%? Now it's at 0.2%. And he said, Tommy, everybody was wrong about you because you do listen. You actually think before you talk. You've got a lot of no people around you, like to say no. And I think it's something to be very careful about because I'm a really strong, like it used to be my way or the highway. I'd slam the hammer down and said, we're doing this. And now we test things out. We really are methodical in the way we step into things. And we fail fast still. That's the entrepreneurial side that continues to exist. We embrace failure. We make a lot smaller failures quicker rather than this grand failure. It's just something to be cognizant of because I see a lot of me and you and vice versa. So I want to know a selfish question because you've probably listened to some episodes of the podcast and I've talked to you several times. What is the biggest thing, and it could be from my failure, I don't know, but what's one thing that you've taken that you're like, that was good? Or just a podcast you listened to? Yeah, I've listened to a lot of your podcast. For me, I really enjoyed Freedom. Can't wait to be back. I feel as if that conference was great. I like how majority of the podcast, even today, for the listeners and Freedom, the conference that you put on, it's tailored to the entire industry of home service. It's not tailored to garage doors. It's not tailored towards HVAC. It's not tailored towards roofing. So I feel as if I've been able to obtain a lot of secret sauce and really formulating our own game plan through a lot of these different podcasts, through a lot of these different conferences and speaking to you. And for me, I truly believe, like you said earlier, I see a lot of myself in you and I feel as if, hey, look, I'm not here to go be just a 30, 50, $100 million business, right? Like I want to make a dent in the universe. I'm here to do something big. I'm here to do something that other people don't see. And I feel as if for me, there's a lot of alignment that, hey, they're not supposed to see it. They're not supposed to understand it. And I've got to be comfortable knowing that. But overall, I think it's just the adaptability of being able to take any podcast or any message that you've put out there and being able to integrate that into my business because it's not trade specific to just garage doors. I've been able to use a lot of the network here. Last month, I was on Peter Min's podcast. We had a great episode. A few weeks ago, I was talking to Hoffman just about some pieces in the industry. And I think what's been great is that, I've been able to find out who are the right people to actually go listen through due to Tommy's portfolio of guests on the podcast. Like, hey, I don't have to go out there and guess and assume that maybe I'm gonna get some false information or some bad advice or gearing or steering me towards the wrong things. I've figured out who are the right people through your platform. And those people are a lot of the reason that why I am where I am. You know, it's interesting. You look at our group of eight guys that are texting all day every day. Ishmael Tom Howard, Travis Ringey, Chris Yano, Chad Peter Min, Chris Hoffman, Tom Howard. I don't know if I included him. Every one of us have a lot of flaws. And I'll tell that to them to their face. And I'm probably the biggest one. You know, I'm sitting here, I'm engaged, I'm 43. I don't have kids. Probably don't spend enough time with my parents. You know, and I talk about six things, the six Fs. But it's a good group because we're honest with each other. We give each other a lot of shit. We're ultra competitive. And we share and we share a lot. And I'm at a very unique point because everything they share, they're sharing in the same industries for the most part. I'm sitting here as a unique, like I haven't taken this stuff and I'm like, I'm gonna apply this to garage doors. But then I tell them something I've learned in the garage door industry and they're like, holy shit. And then I've got that group of 16,000, that you know, the home service expert group that I just asked questions on service agreements because I'm writing a 50 page book, a simple book on service agreements. And I'm gonna go interview the top 10 people on the planet to sell service agreements or protection plans. But it's getting around the right people because in a lot of ways you pick up the good, bad and the ugly. But what I've learned to do is really get around the right people for the right things. And I was just thinking about Pastor Travis at Impact Church. I wanna just briefly, just briefly touch upon your faith because you know, we're only here, it's a glimpse, it's just bam, it flies by and the older you get, the faster it goes. It's like, it's crazy. So how do you feel about faith in Jesus Christ? Yeah, man, I'm just extremely blessed and thankful to be where I'm at. I'll never forget, it was, you know, five years ago, I was sitting there in my truck and I was going to college and I was trying and I was hustling and I was doing everything I could. I wasn't, you know, not being successful for the wrong reasons, distracted party women. That wasn't a thing for me. I'm just super ADD and ADHD and dyslexic and just honestly just would get to the test after studying and kind of get the answers. And, you know, I realized, hey, wait, you know, that maybe the education just isn't the answer. Maybe it's I put my trust in my faith in the Lord and say, God open the door and put me where you want me. And, you know, I've continued to pray or, you know, say the same prayer for many years now. And I say it every morning and, you know, I say it to our team, you know, on Mondays and Fridays and meetings and that is God, you know, continue to bring the people here that need to be here. Continue to work through me to work through your people. And, you know, or, you know, I just asked that we can continue to change lives and make an impact. And so I know there's no question that I am where I am because of Jesus and, you know, as my Lord and Savior. And so the other big piece is you got to give. I say it all the time, you got to give to get. And, you know, what we've been able to do is successfully being able to give back, not just to our people, but within the income that I make, being able to give back in many ways and get back to in my time and give back, you know, and tithing and give back to the church. And I think that the more you give and back to Aaron, right? I think Aaron was a giver. I think that, you know, Aaron really received what he's received in his life due to how much he gave. And so I just, you know, when you speak on faith for me, it's that I know I'm not where I am for any other reason than the Lord. And honestly, I've just seen so many other people's lives change through this business. And I know that this business is bigger than just roofing. So my faith is being able to be lived out every day here. You know, Zig Ziglar was a big man of God. And he, his famous thing he said is, you can get everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want. And that's on my desk. And you know, as much as I do, I feel like I can still do 10 times better. And I'm never, I'm never gonna arrive at that I've given enough. And there's a good book called The Go-Giver. Jordan, how do people learn more about you and One Seek? Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, all socials, seekoneroof.com is our website. But if you go to LinkedIn, you know, Jordan White, feel free to DM me. You know, one other thing that I think, you know, from the faith standpoint and a lot of people is, you know, it's always, you know, when I ask, it's more of how they grew up. It's more of, you know, their families were either, you know, active in that or not. And I heard a quote the other day and I loved it. And it was, when you're born, you look like your parents, but when you die, you look like your decisions. You know, it is your decision and how you live your life and what you believe in. Yeah, that's pretty profound. A quote that I always talk about, I heard Alex Hermosey say it, didn't he? He said, everybody wants the views, but very few people are willing to take the hike. And it's not an easy hike and it's full of pain and struggle, but it doesn't need to be. But here's what I do know. My dad had 12 kids and his family and my mom had five kids, siblings growing up. And I'm getting ready to go through this time. I mean, they're hitting 80, a lot of them. And it sucks because I don't love death and I try to view it as they're in heaven. But selfishly, I wish that my uncle just got the triple bypass, he's on a ventilator. It sounds like he's getting off of it today. My dad's going in on the first. We're gonna be golfing here in two hours. He's the one texting me, which, and I think he drinks four liters of soda a day and his breakfast is cookies. So we're working on his diet. And I gotta go get him checked for diabetes because my grandma did, but you never know. And just with Aaron Stokes that we talked about, I wish, you know, he texted me the day before. And, you know, I'll pull it up. He texted me this. This was, I'll just pull it up to give you the exact context. Aaron Stokes, shop fix. This was Wednesday, February 11th. Call me one garage reserves today or schedule online at meonegarage.com. And you want some day one. It was him listening to the radio and he said, killing it. And that was the day before, I believe. So it was like, man. And then John Ruhlin passed away a couple of years and then Steve that wrote Blue Fishing, if you ever read that book, I highly recommend it. But I'm like, yeah, it's crazy. I mean, Aaron's nephew, Colin, who worked with us and was on our team, it's just crazy. This is why I love what I do, Tommy. I mean, this was a 19 year old working at tractor supply. A hustler, right? Grew up in the Stokes family. I mean, his dad and his dad's brother were big serial entrepreneurs, had multiple locations to shop of Eurofix, you know, created shop fix, you know, lost millions of dollars, had his hands behind his back and had the opportunity to file bankruptcy or move forward and, you know, created, you know, this fantastic business through the hardship. But Colin was working at tractor supply at 19 years old. And he was motivated by his uncle Aaron and his dad, you know, Joe, and he went out and got his real estate license and was hustling and just couldn't catch it and went out and did some other things. And he found Seek One and in one year, he made $273,000 in his first year in the business. You know, he couldn't even buy a drink. You know, we went out to Arizona and we did a company trip out in Scottsdale and he couldn't even go to the casino, you know, and I'm sitting there going, wow, this is crazy. We've got people making $300,000 a year, you know, within one year. But what's really cool is that, you know, Colin really ended up going to church within this last year. There was a lot of similarities of myself and Aaron and he saw that as his leader here at work. And so I texted him, you know, that week and I had said, you know, Colin, I'm so proud of you. Push yourself and stay hungry this year. If executed, can really push you forward. You currently are on my list for the next team leader within this organization. I said, grab the trophy in the sales room on the podium. He responded back and said, thank you, sir. Blessed to have this opportunity. It's truly changed my life in the direction that God set out for me. Couldn't thank you and your partner enough, you know? So I feel you, it's hard, it's tough, but you know, we got to continue to move forward and understand that, hey, they're in the best place ever. And that's what's given me peace and joy and gives me the opportunity to live with risk every day knowing that I'll be right there with them. Well, Jordan, this was amazing to spend time with you today. Glad we got to do it finally. And it took a lot of notes. You did a fantastic job. And I appreciate you very much. Well, thank you, Tommy, for having me. I greatly appreciate it. I hope that we were able to provide some value just like this has done for me.