Wealth Hacks and Motivation for Entrepreneurs with Tom Howard

All of the people in your company are relying on you to be the best leader you could possibly be because they're working for you. They pick you just as much as you pick them, and you owe it to them. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy Chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text notes, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build the $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to Elevate and win.com, 4-slash podcast to get your copy. Now, let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today is always a special day when I get to talk to Tom Howard. One of the best home service people in the industry, I think what makes Tom really special is that he's just a really, really good. He's always curious, it's such a good communicator. He's friends with everybody. He's an expert in sales, business, customer service. He's the VP of customer experience at service, Titan. He's also the owner of Lees Air. That a lot of exits, just a machine when it comes to business. He brings significant owner operator and M&A experience to the home service industry, having previously bought, built, and sold several HVAC and plumbing home service companies. He also closed with Horizon Home Services, a leading East Coast provider of plumbing, heating, and air conditioning services. On the integrations of its ad-on acquisitions and development and implementation of its continuous improvements programs, including the digitalization, not amazation of critical business processes. I could go on and on about Tom. I just want to jump into it first and foremost. How's it going, brother? Great, good to see you again, Tommy. Always, I'm just going to jump in. What's the hardest thing? Would you say in 2025, 2026 about the home service industry? Oh, gosh. I think there's a lot of uncertainty for people about what's ahead. They don't know how technology is changing and how it's going to affect them. So I think people are concerned about whether or not they're off-and-all mean rate, right? AI product, what AI is going to look like in the next five years, how they should be moving now to a stout top of it. Are there competitors going to all run them? And yeah, just a lot going on. So, the thing about how do you compete with private equity? You know, one of the things I realized at Pantheon was just service times largest event. And I've always the last week and a half, I've been saying, there was more blue coats, Rolexes, and loafers there than I've ever seen her at a home service event. There's money pouring in and I just know there's certain private equity companies willing to go to zero percent profit. They're literally willing to undercut. And it's something we hear a lot about and they're willing to go, I can tell you this Chamberlain made an investment and I was just speaking to the COA Chamberlain and they said, we're not going to see a return on this till the end of 2028. How do you compete with that kind of investments? Well, a few things. One is that most private equity companies are going to go ahead and they're going to do more to raise prices than the argument to cut them. So in a lot of cases, the price pressure isn't the issue. I mean, there's somewhere they're going to take a play where they're going to try to push into a market and price cut things to get in. And those are all business ideas that they're thinking through. But in most cases, what people have realized is, I mean, I've sold the private equity before, I own things that are private now. Private equity brings the table has a lot to do with sophistication on a larger scale, budgeting, forecasting, those kind of things. I'm sure the cortex talk to you a lot about high level things. The downside is those that once private equity comes in, they're going national. It's hard for them to compete on the city by city basis. So that's where the private guys, the privately held things really get, I guess everything's privately held, but like individuals, mom, pop shops have that advantage. When you have that ability to go into a city and people know who you are and you're posting on social media all the time, getting to know people and going out there and meeting with people at the home shows at the soccer games and the church get together and those kind of things and getting your name out there and really becoming strong. Pro skill that it really great with their Pro Skill Care program where they went around to all the little individual, the little individual organizations that wanted to raise money and said, look, we're going to help you raise money. And what we're going to do is we're going to give you a phone number. It's our Pro Skill Care's number. And anytime, if you refer anyone to our business, have them call this number. And anything that comes in through that number, we're going to give you 5% of the proceeds. And it was basically a 5% cost of marketing. And they went around to every single place out that said dozens and dozens of these phone numbers getting tracked or service tightened. And they would cut these checks. And that's really hard to do that kind of grassroots marketing as a private equity company. I'm having that problem now where I've got companies in Sacramento, well, just with Leeds, we have locations in Sacramento, Fresno, Los Angeles, Vegas and Phoenix. You have five locations and trying to do it in three different states. It's hard to get to where you can do grassroots stuff where you really get to know people and, you know, bringing in these organizations to help market for you. That's how I'd be competing. I'd be finding all the spots where private equity can't fight as well. I'd fight there because they're going to be all fight better than you on some of the mass scale things. So do better on the smaller things. There's room for everybody. You know, this is a personal question. I'm noticing now that everybody involved in home service expects to just become mega wealthy. It's crazy. Like you're seeing numbers now if you were like an a Fortune 500 company to come in and run. Like it's like, you know, the technicians have the ability. Some of them make a million dollars, but they're selling 10, 10, 20 million. And I just feel like, you know, I kind of am able to do that with equity, but at what point does the market kind of crash a little bit and say, you know, I'm reading article after article after article of like P's coming in, they're taking advantage and they could afford to pay these prices, but you know, now you get like a director level that wants to come in at like some mega crazy number and ask for a bunch of equity. And some of these companies are paying it, but the problem is they're turning them over so quick. There's no like they don't even get vested, but what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I have a few ideas. So one is get efficient at what you are right now. So if you're a $5 million shop, get efficient and strong at that and make your profits. And then with those profits, you can afford to get some more people that are going to help you get to 10 million. But don't pretend like you're going to grow to 10 million and then figure out how to start like making a profit. As you get bigger, it's going to be hard. It's hard to move. It's hard to do all those things. So then fight with what you have now. You don't need that director that's coming in that wants to make all that money. You should be able to get through that yourself and invest in yourself a lot. I don't, I think a lot of people come to me and say, well, you know, it's cool that you got a background in, you know, an education and finance before you came to the industry. So first of all, no, I came to the industry before that. And then I used the industry to help pay for college. And we're on number two. It helps understanding finance. But guys like talking to you, Tommy, I don't know. People listen to his podcast. Tommy does a brag about a lot. Tommy reads, forget 10, 20, sometimes 50 books a year. It's crazy. The amount of reading he's done. And Tommy sold his business for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars already. And he's still reading and he's still learning. Sorry, I'm talking to the third person here, Tommy. But like, I want that listeners to hear this. All of you guys should be investing in yourselves and growing so that you would not constantly relying on someone else. And then you do a knob that you can kind of get past that five, 10 million mark. And then you can afford to get that director to come in or whatever. Maybe you're a 20 million revenue, 30, 40, 50 million revenue. And you keep paying up to keep getting more and more staff. Now you should be getting there and you should be taking that responsibility on yourself to become the best operator you can because all of the people in your company are relying on you to be the best leader you can possibly be because they're working for you. They picked you just as much as you picked them and you owe it to them. So you should be trying. And so when I look at my college education, like, guys, I've read way more sense college than I ever did in college. Like I've learned so much more all those things because I kept going and going. This year, I looked at my goals. I've read nine books year to date that are calling thousands of thousands of pages. And I'm like, I'm going to keep going. And that's going to happen. I don't I've sold businesses before it doesn't matter. So do that. Then when you get there, don't be stingy with your equity and your with your freaking wages. I looked at my, my lowest paid field installer last year, helper, install helper. Last year made $120,000 in Fresno. You could buy a house for 500 grand. This dude literally came. He was picking grapes in the fields or whatever and they taught him how to do air conditioning install as a helper. He made 120 grand. You should be now. It took a while to get to a pay plan that was paid on performance. So we can pay that to and still be profitable. But that's what I want to get to so that the people want to come work for me. And if I need a director, whatever, I want the best and baddest. Tommy does that a lot. He goes and tries to find the best people he can because you're not going to be perfect. Whatever you need to be his best you can so that you can question them. So you can push back. You can get yourself to the $10 million mark without a ton of really expensive staff. But the reality is like, as you get bigger, you should be able to pay top dollar for people and get the best talent. And that's how you're going to win. Yeah. I, um, I also think that I've hired people that wanted a lot of money, but didn't have the skills. So you got to be very careful just because they came from a big salary or big position before. I think it's really hard for somebody to come. Can you imagine a lucre of Brian Davenport going to a $10 million company today? I don't even know what like even me go into a $10 million company because we built these tools over the years. We've built these relations with our technicians. It would be so hard to go back. So if I was going to go, like I'd have to go to a $100 million company to be effective. You know what I mean? It'd be very hard to be as effective going back. I mean, when Adam started in 2014, we were doing seven million. So it'd be very hard to go back to those days. And that was such an organization lack of systems. But what I would have to do is take a team with me now. You know what I mean? Because we've got so good working with the team. You know, you've said to me, I think the worst year in HVAC in 40 years in California, just you didn't get the weather. I know you had some really, really big stretch goals. And I don't know how much you feel like talking about them. But it doesn't always go as planned. It's sometimes it doesn't. And even the great Tom Howard and the great Tommy and Ishmael, whoever you want to say, you know, we get up to bat. We strike out a lot. But when we hit a home run, we hit a home run. But what, how do you regroup? What do you do? What do you tell your team? I mean, you got to be facing a lot right now because you've got a lot of partners. What's that like? Yeah, it's an upco battle. So I'll tell you, we had the coldest summer on record in 25 or 26 years, something like that. It's all over the news. And it's just the West for states and my companies are in at least leases, mostly in California, Arizona, Nevada. And so it didn't show up and we, we killed it in August because all the summer got a little heat in August. Finally, we outperformed our goals, but we underperformed in May, June, July. And that's tough because to me, I'm like, well, let's not sell the company. Let's just wait till the end of, you know, next summer. And the partners don't want to do that. They're ready to go. So I think in the end of the day, my feeling is that I could try to push and lead and get them excited to go through next summer. The other side of me says, well, you'll get some friction on that. And I don't know, I feel like pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. We had a good run. We have a decent amount of EBITDA. Less than I wanted, like what half of what I wanted, which is going to cost me about nine figures. But I think we'll be clearing about 15 million of EBITDA at that company. And we'll definitely clear that word, you know, it's a layup for that. But anyway, and we're most the way through the year now. We got three months left. We got the last quarter. So anyway, I think when you have partners, you've got to realize that not everyone has the same timeline. Not everyone has the same mentality. Not everyone has the same goals. And if you don't take your partner's goals into account and you don't take their mentality into account and their timelines, then you're just, you're just pushing for yourself all the time. And it gets really selfish. And people don't want to work with selfish people. So you might push it and get what you want on this one. And then people don't want to work with you on the next one. So I'm going to make plenty of money. I don't care that much anymore. And I'll do the next one and I'll be happy and continue to be, you know, investing in the future. If you could go back and talk to these partners from the beginning, would you say, would you give like a double like we, we're going to go to three years and whatever, or if we hit this number, would you have thought about things a little bit differently? Yeah, I mean, I did, but we exceeded that number. So the problem is I told them we'd go to market if we hit this number. But then we got close to realize, oh my gosh, we're like double that number. And so now they look at it and say, well, Tom, we hit the number you said we're going to hit. And on the timeline, you said we're going to do it. You can't re-nig now. And so now I have to shrug my shoulders and say, well, okay, you're right. And that's why I'm just kind of going along with it. What, what, think about the last 15 years, and think about where you started, who you were hiring? What do you think? I know Tyson was a really big hire, but you ended up allowing him to move to service tighten. I mean, I won't say allowing just agreeing with the point that he could do that. But, you know, who do you think the most key hire was, and why? Why? Gosh, there's always a different key hire for different things. We should talk about the Tyson thing for a second. It's Tyson Freeman was my right hand guy, and I learned a lot of lessons there. I knew that he was gonna be GM one day. I didn't tell him that in the beginning. And I just said, hey, I put his desk in my office. I could hear everything I was saying. He was such a humble guy, hardworking. And I think this is a key point that like people miss. They always want to drive for themselves of their companies and look at the short-term vision. When service titan called me, they called me to say, hey, would you mind if we talk to Tyson and I think we need to hire him? And I asked him, my first question was, how what are you gonna offer him? And they told me what they're gonna offer him. And I realized at that point that Tyson had a better opportunity at service titan than what I could offer of him my company. With the equity there, package there, offering him and the salary there, offering him and everything else. And I realized, I mean, he's just more effective there. He can help thousands of contractors at one time while we're getting service titan. I don't have that kind of impact. So I couldn't do that. And because of that, I knew that him moving to service titan was gonna be the best thing for his family. And when you think about it, like, could I, I knew I knew Tyson outside of work. We became friends outside of work. And I could never look at his wife and his kids and him. And think I stood in the way of them getting this awesome opportunity and hurt their family like that. So I had no choice but to say yes, go ahead. And so what are you gonna do? And I said, you know, the reality is I don't know, but I will figure it out. And we will succeed. And we did. And Tyson was an awesome employee for six years. And, you know, I would have loved to have him as a GM, but the reality is like we've kept growing since then. When Tyson left, we were about 15 million in revenue. Now this year we're gonna do like 125. And you always figure it out. You got to trust in your own business acumen and you can't operate out of fear. Oh my gosh, if we lose that one guy, we're never gonna succeed and we're gonna fall. You know, you're gonna get through it. I know Tommy, you've had some key employees like including Adam Cronerberg. And he was an awesome guy, but you guys, you know, I'm sure it hurt when he left. But you get through it and you keep growing. And you gotta put your trust in your own business and trust in yourself to grow through it. But I think at every different size of company, there's a new key hire. I think one of the most important ones though for Lease was Phil Flaski was just an awesome, awesome, awesome hire. I saw what he did while he was at Fetchetac and for Soldat. And then he went on to other places. I said, Phil, why are you going these other places? Like just come work with me. And I had to give him a nice equity package and things to come over and it was well worth it. And he did amazing things and it's really made the company, you know, blow up. So he's the most recent one that was very, very critical. So you've done some things where you're kind of known to go into companies. I think it was Dustin Past controlled. I've seen you do this a lot. If I had to sit here from a spectator point of view, I think I don't know if your marketing is like the best in the world. I don't necessarily know if you run the best call center or dispatch, but you have abilities to recruit people that are not only anomalies, but just crazy good. But you know, you can't really do that in pest control. So I think you're very good at just looking at a balance sheet and income statement, P&L and like determining, whoa, this is a big hole. But if you had to tell me like how you turn around the pest control company, they were losing, I mean, they were running it in that loss and you turned it around. What are some of the things you go in and what are the first steps? Is it KPIs? Is it the financials? I think there's one thing that you can string through almost any business, especially service businesses. If they follow this business model where you have leads come in, that lead is turned into some kind of sales call or a service call or whatever. And then then someone goes out to, you know, service either service technician or salesperson or whatever. You're gonna have a close rate and then after that close rate, you have an average ticket and then average ticket turns into, you know, a job and, you know, whatever. And then you have profitability after that. And that's really when the P&L starts to really matter is like below after that sale happens. Because once that sale happens, then it hits the top line of the P&L and then the P&L works this way down there. And what I see that is, and for all of you listening, Tommy and I talk about this funnel all the time. And these businesses work this way. It's even if you're investing in real estate, you'll say, oh, it's not the same model because I'm going out and finding houses. It is the same model. It's how many houses am I gonna look at? Out of those many houses, how many can I actually get appointments to run through and whatever? How many, what percentage of those is gonna turn into things that I actually wanna buy? You know, why do I wanna buy them? You know, what things can I change so I can get more of them? Whatever, there's just, how can I increase the top size of my funnel? There's all kinds of things like that. By the way, Tom, I learned that, I learned that formula in 2016 from a real estate trainer, a realtor trainer. So anyway, keep going. Yeah, yeah. And in home service, I just look at the funnel. I don't even care, I don't know, I don't care if it's roofing, I don't care if it's electrical, plumbing, age, pest control, or, you know, birthday cake sales, I don't care. It's how many potential leads can I get? You know, I'm looking at that top leads and everyone in our industry wants to just get more leads. If I just have more leads, if I just have more leads, they don't realize it's like a funnel. And below that, those leads coming in, how many of those do we convert into actual book choffs? And that's our code bookie rate. And I'm just gonna look at it and I don't care if you press control, I don't care if you're electrical, whatever. What's that booking rate? Now, I don't care if they're coming in through the phone, I don't care if they're coming in through online advertising or webformer or whatever, how many of those do we actually book? And then out of those, how many actually turn out jobs? And what's my cancellation rate? I look at all the places where it could fall out and I find the spots where they fall and then I fix that. And then below that, once I get to the bottom, they ever stick it and everything else, then I start looking at the PNL. Because then once the sale happens and the revenues generated, created, it goes the top of the PNL, then I can see from there, okay, do I start losing on the gross margin? Do I start losing on the overhead? Do I, where do I start losing? Where is it falling out in the PNL? I basically try and figure out how do I optimize not losing money all the way down the line? And it gets simple. You just, you gotta put the emotion aside though. And I see these people go into businesses or go into a company meetings and say, well, I can tell you, Johnny, that sales guy really sucks. We should just fire, you know? Or I gotta tell you, you know, Sally's wasting time in the CSR office or Johnny, my dispatcher, gosh, he sucks. I, we need to fix that. And they just randomly point at things. And I tell them like, look guys, if I don't care, if you're saying Sally, the CSR is terrible, but my call of looking at it is 85 to 90%. I'm not even, I'm not gonna bother Sally. Sally's doing her job. You may not like her. You may have emotions that you don't like, blah, blah, I don't care. I just, I see this as a spreadsheet. And then I'm gonna move on to the other things that are failing. If my conversion rate in the field is 40% or 30% on service calls over the house, I'm gonna go, okay, this is a problem. Now maybe for that industry, it's okay. I don't know, each industry is gonna be different. But I can tell if you got a service call and you're converting it 40 to 50%, half your job are just going down the toilet. So get your conversion rate up. And so let's focus on that. And I don't care how much you like the technicians. If the conversion rate's low, it's time you gotta work out. And so, you know, I look at that funnel all the way down and make sure they're not losing money all the way down one. You know what's crazy is there's a bath remodeling company. I'm not gonna say who, but I just didn't met with somebody from that company. And I learned a lot of statistics. They're at 12% close rate. That's, so there's, there's 60% booking rate, which is crazy to me because they come out for free. And then their closing rate is about 35, 40% when they're in the home. So if you do the math, and then there's a couple other outliers, and they paid $5,000 to acquire one of those customers. And that's home improvement. But what's crazy to me is they're doing over $500 million. And they still make it work. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I don't think like those numbers just to me, like I can make them work so much better. But the home improvement, they're gonna call you 25 times to follow up. They're gonna get the appointment. That's the difference is if we had the tenacity that home improvement has in home service and you combine the two, what would happen? Yeah, you start picking up all those things that you're losing. And really when you talk about the tenacity on the follow up, it's really, it comes back to, okay, what's the close rate? Because the follow up is just gonna change that close rate. So it's like, it's still on the line that we should be looking at. It's like, oh my gosh, look at that. I saw it with the company we got down in Texas. They looked at us and they started laughing because they were so good on social media. And I thought, how are you guys so awesome as social media? They just did direct marketing on social media for new system replacements, not even service repair, anything else. And then at $18,000 average ticket, because usually when social media and you're just doing direct sale, you're not really going there for a service call or anything else. You don't get that high of an average ticket because you're usually competing on price or something like that and trying to convince people it's a good idea just because it's the price below. The average ticket was super high and their booking rate was low, but it's still way higher than ours on social media coming in. Well, we consider low because we're considering, like, oh, we want 80, 90% booking rate. Well, the reality is someone's filling up a whole lot of my- 30% tops. Yeah, yeah, third-cent tops, big time. And I said, how do you get your booking rates much higher than that? And they said, well, it's all speed to lead. And so I said, okay, what goes on? They said, Tom, we've realized if someone pulls out their phone and is scrolling on social media and fills out a form saying, yeah, talk to me about a new air conditioner. I want the phone to ring, to call them, to book it before they put that phone back in their pocket. I do not want them to put their phone away before they get the phone call. So they're constantly tracking how many minutes or seconds, it's down to seconds on how fast they call back that customer from the time a web form comes in. Meanwhile, over at least, we're looking to, like, we call them the next day, we call them five hours later, whatever when a web form comes in or our car, our call center just didn't care about them that much. And these guys are like, dude, you're just burdened the money. I'm like, you know what, you're right. There's a study published in Northwestern University shows that if you call someone back within five minutes instead of five hours, you have a 3000 times more like, you're 3000 times more likely to book it. And because people can't remember what they're doing five hours ago. So basically, if you go web leads coming in and your calls are just focusing on the phone calls coming in, you're just burning all these web leads for nothing. It just disappearing. You need to be under 30 seconds to a minute and a half getting back to that customer from the time they put that web lead in. And so it's still fresh on their minds. And they still remember the ad and everything else what's going on and why they should be booking with you. So, do you think leading up with an SMS, a text message and saying, hey, we're gonna call you right now just so you know, this is the number? Yeah, so it's like, you know, automated if you can't. And that way you can, the bottom line is that it's the same principle. You're trying to get back to them super, super, super fast so that it, you know, hits them and they know that you're on it. Where do you think, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this in the last two weeks and I started thinking about, who's gonna be the real big winners? I mean, I really believe there's gonna be massive amounts of big, big roll ups. And I started thinking about just one thing, the manufacturer, because Amazon is not gonna start manufacturing HVAC units or garage doors. And I started to think about kind of what Leland said years ago is like, I was able to buy better. And this idea of how can you get with your manufacturers and like, I always think what's in it for them? How do I have them when? But what are some of the better ways that you've seen to really get, to be able to buy better? I mean, whether it's vehicles, iPads, whether negotiating with vendors or specifically, the, you know, the cogs, the goods that you buy and install. Yeah, it's, I do, well, there's short term, like what were you talking about about, like, how do we get to the, what we buy and install? Honestly, I think the long term is what the manufacturer's is, is that they're honestly gonna be the long term winner in this. I think, if I had to guess, he'll say how, and I'm like, guys, it's gonna go BDC, it's gonna go directly from them to the consumer soon. Yeah, it's, so is the point where they can own the robots that put the stuff in. Or if one of the manufacturers figures out how to change out an air conditioner, make it so easy to change out, you literally just like plug it in and that's it, they change the technology. So it's like ultra simple. No one, no one hires someone to come, install your freaking, you know, microwave anymore. You just set on the counter and you plug it in. And if, if the technology gets to the point with air conditioning where they can do that, if Tesla figures out or something like that and they can manufacture it, then they win, period. And if not, the robots are gonna do it and that's gonna take 20 or 30 years, but I think long term, that's really what's going to happen. So I'd be thinking along those lines and I'd be thinking about, hey, if that's going to happen, what am I gonna do and where do I fit in that model and what's my business gonna look like? We've got a long time until robots are installing these things, but I would be thinking about that right now because at that point, the manufacturers can just own the robots of dispatch everything and it'd be done. You know, I was with a genius guy last night, I was with my buddy Joe Paul, I was talking to this guy and he was talking about the last rocket that SpaceX shot up. Some of the shit that they're building is like, if they just took a half a percent and went into home service and said, we're gonna go there next, that's scary. I mean, we were talking about that with the LSD group is like, hey, what happens if Elon, and there was talks about Elon getting in the home service industry, he wouldn't even have to put a lot of people, he'd put one engineer on it and it could really disrupt everything. I mean, think about it, the driving, driverless cars, I mean, I don't know, my brain doesn't think, my brain thinks yes, driverless cars, less cars, or use, yeah, I'm thinking like long term, but what could be a disruptor? Like you said, plug and play, hot water heater that just has a couple of valves that just locked tight, different, all different methodology. I don't know, but where a handyman can install it. But what are some of the other, obviously, AI is a massive disruptor, but what would happen if Elon got in the home service game? What do you think he would be looking at first? Honestly, I like which industry would be looking at first. I know he's already gotten into solar, and his solar tiles look pretty cool. I think what'll happen is his stuff like that, it'll probably have robots doing that. The things that are very risky to do, like roofing and solar. Right now, you've got a huge opportunity there because the cost of labor in there is so high. You'll say, oh, roofers don't make that much money. It's like, no, they don't, but the workers' comp company does. So with any roofer right now, if you got workers' comp on your roofer and you're paying the roofer $30 an hour, you also pay the workers' comp company $30 an hour, at least in state of California. It's $25.40. So just because they're so worried about someone following and dying in those cases, not only do you have a financial incentive, but there's probably gonna be a lot of investment around just because they're probably gonna need a lot of credit for saving human life and not having to follow off roofs. And when I see that, I'm like, okay, that's probably gonna happen. It's a repetitive task. And so they've got machines now that actually go across roofs nailing shingles down. They're not. You still need crews to turn them and push them, and they just keep going. But they're getting better and better. I think also lawn care is gonna change draft. We have talked to guys that are just buying up robots like you wouldn't believe. And I got one of them in SoCal. He's literally buying up all the robots he can, and they want to lease them to other landscaping companies. He's a big landscaping company over 20 million revenue. But he can literally just go drop off robots in a neighborhood and leave them all day and come back and pick them up in the end of the day and all the landscaping stuff, or at least the lawnmowing. And so a lot of this stuff, there's some things that technology is gonna take a little while to figure out. I asked him the other day, I said, what happens if one of these runs over a baby that's in the front yard and kills it? It's gonna kill switch on it. Yeah, and he's like, oh gosh, I didn't think about that. I thought I would be thinking about that right now. It was actually at pantheon. What I'm talking to about it. But they're gonna figure those things out. And so all these people right now complaining and kicking against the bricks saying, well, AI can't handle this. AI could, one guy told me, AI can never demonstrate empathy to an individual. I said, are you kidding me? We can program them to demonstrate empathy in a heartbeat. Like it's already happening right now. And he said, oh wow, good point. AI is going to replace all these things. And we're going to be using it. It's just thing at our time. I just, I don't wanna fear it though, because we've all been at the opportunities. What? Gus will get involved in those opportunities. I mean, the fact is that there is some worry about it, but at the same time, who are you gonna go to? Like if you had a robot, if you had AI, like they come to me and guys like you, and they go to service time. Like they're like, because we become influencers or whatever, but they're like, you could help get the message. They still don't have distribution. So they gotta go to somebody, right? Yeah, 100%. Man, I got million other questions. We gotta, so, you know, let me ask you this. This is, because I was 30 million before I decided to rebrand with kick charge. And I know that you did a deal with Dan Antonelli on Fetchatec. Well, you actually made him an equity partner. Why, why did you do that? Why did you decide to make, like that's a pretty bold move to decide to make a branding company a partner? Obviously we know the ghetto story, Dale Still went out and tripled his average ticket once they got rebranded. But what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One is that branding is huge. I'm talking to another company right now, and their brand, their truck is basically a white truck with black letters on it. It looks like it's from the 1980s. It's just, I'm like, do no one wants that come to their house. And you've gotta change your brand and that kind of thing. And I highly recommend if you have it, go to kick charge, talk to them, look at what they were doing off, going, what they've got going on. Go to their website, they've got all kinds of brands on their website that they've built. And it's pretty awesome. But the reason I made him an equity partner, in that case is because when I saw the value of the brand, but number two is that I was trying to prove when I did Fetchatec that we could do all this without spending a single dollar. And so we did, we bought the whole thing and flipped it and everything else. We got, started out with zero dollars. Zero out of pocket and grew it and sold it for tens and tens of millions dollars 16 months later. I can't say the number, but it was six million in profit. And you could assume that we got between, I don't know, nine and 12 or 13 times even top, if you look it up online, what the, you know, things are going for. So it was, it was well over 50 million. It's put that way if you can look online and see what the stuff was. Anyway, and to do that was zero dollars in and sell for that is awesome. Now in the end, it was, it was cool to do it and do all this say that we did it with zero dollars and prove that we could, but it would have been smarter just to pay him, you know. He made a ton of money way over 10x when he would have gone by state of the money up front, but in Keith mine, he took the risk on that. It could have been worth nothing. And I think bringing him in was awesome. I think definitely having your brand locked up tight is awesome. You gotta have something to build off of and you gotta be something that, it's gotta be something that homeowners when they look at they can identify with and be happy with. It shouldn't be something that your buddy thought was cool and you think it's cool to put on your truck. It's gotta be something that homeowners identify with that Mrs. Jones who's 60 years old with, you know, a, I don't know, steady income on retirement is happy to have over to her house to invite you in and feel comfortable with. I've seen Dan debate probably a hundred people online when they put the big muscular guy lifting up a log, you know, and he's like that's all. It looks like it's got rabies on the side of your truck that would have been out of a horror movie, you know, but it's just so cool. And then they make it all this masculine when it's the women buying. And I think that Dan takes this pretty seriously. Like he scolded me about a dozen times. Like who did that bill or why didn't you give it to me? That's crap. Or like the yard signs or like change your signature or this isn't the color pattern. Have you looked at your last truck? It's a shade off of red. And because he cares, you know, it's something that's interesting to me because he's not just a guy that does branding. I mean, he's like, he's, he considers it artwork. And he's like, if you don't get the right, the right rap company and they try to play with the vector file and they move it a little bit, he will have a shit fit. Like that's how much he cares, you know what I mean? He will. I remember we asked him one of the guys asked on the Fetchitech brand for him to change the dog to a rotwiler and Dan about losses mine. I mean, Dan just fuzz as no. But it's just, it's not happening. If you want to do that, go call some other branding company. It was, it was pretty funny. Yeah, he gets a lot of rip off. So at Service Titan, you lead customer experience and product adoption. And I would say Service Titan is an enterprise tool like Salesforce. And what's cool about Service Titan is you could set up things. There's so many different laboratory or business. I remember when we barely got, you know, the ability to reconcile the statements. I was there for that. I was there for, what was another cool feature that we got that I was thinking about? Oh, configurable payroll. Convenable payroll is a freaking phenomenal. I mean, the fact is that everybody pays a little bit differently so you guys figured that out. But everybody kind of sets their stuff up differently and gets their data differently. So what do you think the biggest roadblocks when you get on to Service Titan? Because it's not like a quick, you just type in a few things and it's set up. What are the biggest mistakes people make? It's hard because a lot of us when we're small companies, we've been on smaller softwares or not, really enterprise grade software. And we're used to a few clicks to get it going. And honestly, if Aura had his way, it could, if he had a magic wand to make it happen, that would be the number one thing he would do tomorrow's, make it so simple to set up that it can do go and art be. It's very hard though when it's a software that's that big to make it that simple. If you look at really big software is like sales force and others, they don't even have in-house marketing, in-house onboarding teams. You have to go to the third party on-boarder and you're probably gonna pay them a couple million dollars to implement and they're gonna be focused on it for two or three years until it's fully implemented. With Service Titan, we know that we're dealing with contractors in most cases, they're not willing or able to do that. So I think a lot of people don't realize like, hey, with a really big software, you're talking about full implementation teams that are focusing on doing this. At Service Titan, you're getting an enterprise level software, but you're not gonna have to put that big of an implementation team. But you're going to, and the issue that people have at the big mistake they make is that they don't realize like, I'm going to have to put significant effort into getting this live. And it's going to take someone that can think through the whole process and see all of the different options and what's going on and think how they're gonna do it. And I tell them, look, in the very beginning, have someone focused on it in your office, it could be a, if you're a small company, it could be your dispatcher, that their job and they are responsible for making sure that the service that goes live on time, somebody that really wants to run with it, it could be a CSR, it could be the service manager, it could be somebody, they don't have to quit their job to do it, but they should be the one that's responsible for it and making sure that they take ownership in it. Number one, and number two, they need to focus on it in the beginning. Don't get all the flashy stuff going. In the beginning, when you go live, make sure you can take a phone call, book a job, run the call, collect the money, and put it into your accounting software. And you can do those five things, then you can start adding on all the pieces of service time later. If you do those five things, take the call, book the job, you know, run the job, and finish it, collect the money, and put it into accounting. If you do those five things, and at least your business is still running, and you can build on top of that. And if people try to do like what you're doing now, a year company told me, and they're a $2 million garage door company, it's not gonna happen. It took you guys years and years and years of developing and getting stronger and stronger and stronger. They can sign up for like garage door freedom, or home service freedom, whatever, and get some advice on things they should be doing and move faster, but they're not gonna go from zero to 200 miles an hour in a heartbeat. Well, they couldn't. They, they, like we've got virtual product specialists are even if I gave them the whole playbook and how to do it, they'd have to fill in all these roles that are specialties. You know what I mean? And you just can't do that at that level. I'm gonna ask you a personal dilemma I'm in. You know, we're probably one of the most competitive companies we've got score cards. And a technician came up to me yesterday and said, hey, I ran a service agreement for a member and I sold an operator bracket because that's all they needed. We did a lot of work last year. And he goes, anything over $100 counts as an opportunity. So what I saw, and he's a newer guy, he said, I saw my score card come down dramatically from that. And so here's what I found out. Guys are going to jobs and rather than either they say it's a warranty, if they're gonna write a low ticket, they'd rather just fix it and figure out a way. I'm a very competitive guy, but how would you solve the problem? Because I'm like, yeah, but that's your score card. Not the money you're making. You sell things, you make more money, but they don't look at it like that. The score card is their pride. It's like the back of an MBL card. Like, runs battered in. Like, we're so, and I'm never gonna take the score cards away, but they're afraid to take a job that's gonna hurt their score card. And I'm like, this is kind of a dilemma. And I can't really come up with any solutions except for just using fieldsparks to listen to those calls and really finding out what was there and looking at the inspection list and service tied. But what would you say to that? Because I'm not getting rid of the score cards of the competition. What I'm hearing from you is that you have an issue with the guy trying to play the score card and I'll play the money. But I think that's not really the problem. And I think that's what a great guy was, he was giving us speech and business before and he said, what do you do with CEO? He says, I ask questions. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, Tom, it's, the difference for the good CEO and a bad CEO is the good CEO knows how to figure out what the right question is to ask our. He doesn't know the answers. But in this case, the question is, and seeing what the problem is, like, how do I align their goals with my goals? Because right now his goals aren't aligned with you because you want to make sure that he's making more money. But you've built a system that has two different goal sets in there. One is the money they want to make. And two is their score card. And the issue is that you're going to have people in your company that want different things because they're at different spots on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yep. So the guy that's just at low ends, like, and the competitors have this issue all the time, the guys that are at lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. So for people that don't know Maslow's hierarchy, it says that the bottom needs in life are like biological and safety needs. And then, so you got food, water, shelter, you know, that kind of thing. Biological then above that is safety. So safety is like the part of town. Maybe I'm getting shot at in my part of town. Like people, there's robberies in this part of town. I want to move out of that. So as soon as once you get all your biological needs met, and you can eat and you have a roof over your head, then you're like, man, I want to be a better part of town. I don't want to be in this part of town. Then the next ones above that are love and belonging. So I want to be part of a team. The next ones above that are a steam of recognition. And then above that is self-actualization. So the thing is, is that if you have somebody that isn't getting their biological needs met because they don't have make enough money to pay for their groceries, they don't care about your team environment, they don't care about love and belonging, they don't care about a steam recognition, they probably don't care, give a crap about your score card either. They just want to make sure that their money comes on their paycheck to pay for their bills. But as soon as they have all that paid, then they're looking for a steam recognition and they're looking for love and belonging. And so Mazdas Haraker says, you get incentivized by the upper levels as you move up. Now in every company, what I tell people is, you're not going to know where a guy is in that level because you can go up and down anytime. You might be killing it and then everything's good. And then all of a sudden you get a divorce and you got no money now and all of a sudden, you went down three wrongs and now you're like, just trying to get to a good part of town and I get shot at. So you have to build something in your company like you have, which allows them to get their money that they make and also if they're looking for a steam recognition, they get it. If they're looking for love and belonging in the team environment, they get it. If you want self-actualization, you got like, you know, giving these a charity and doing community events on the weekends or whatever, like they can get that too. So they get all of the things in their company. The problem is is that when we do these things sometimes, in this case, you have a steam recognition that people need that they want because that's their at that level that competes with what you're actually trying to get, which is to get them to generate revenue on the job. What I would do is I look at the incentive on that job and not say like, okay, it's on your scorecard, maybe be another thing on the scorecard that shows like consistency on the job. So it's like, all right, every single call, they're actually just, you know, making something happen then you have another one that's an average ticket. So you know as well as I do, the guys like Phil, they like to say I got the highest revenue. They like to say like the highest sales, guys like Dale steal, you know, and then I got the guys on my team that you know, like that doesn't even matter what the other scorecard stuff is. There's a lot of other stuff on my scorecard. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, do they feel like though that they can look and say, look, I have the highest in this. Whatever you do, you know, Morris Jenkins came up when I was out there, Reese, not that long ago, he said, first of all, you need three tiers of leads. And then you need to praise, there's a different scorecard for the second and third tier. He said, the top guys, I go, what if there's no tier one leads? Then they don't run jobs. They only run tier one, tier two, you could be at the top of that, tier three, you could be at the top of that. And there might be a different scorecard alignment, even structures of pay depending on the level of lead, something it's complex, but it's something worth looking at. But it's nothing that's going to like break the company. It's just, and by the way, I'm getting the top 20 guys together to discuss this because the only way I know what to do is ask questions and say, what's working? Tom, we got three minutes, brother. I want to ask you real quick, fetching millions, you wrote the book, why'd you write it? I just want people to be able to see that what's possible. I wanted them to see what happens in the industry and what can go on. I realized when service height was going public about six months before that, the Wall Street Journal published an article called the new class of millionaire. And it was about air conditioning and plumbing contractors. And I realized mission accomplished. That's what we wanted. We wanted people to realize what the trades can do, how profitable it can be, how much prosperity can bring to the people in it and just pass that word out to everybody. And so that's why we're the book. What's your new favorite book that you've read recently? Oh gosh, I just picked up one called the flip side. It's about one of the, she's the fifth Thunderbird pilot that to be a woman and be in the Thunderbirds. And she talks about using fear and turning it into a driver. And making it your friend. And I've just been reading out in the past few days and I'm just really loving it. And close the cell with a final thought, brother. I could, we need like two hours. We both have tight schedules today. We're here on a Friday, which I appreciate. Close the cell with whatever's on your mind. We talked about a third of what I wanted to talk about. Yeah. I gotta tell you guys, I think just make sure that you're pushing all of these things and you're making sure that you're constantly developing. You're probably listening to this podcast because you want to learn. Make sure that you're going out learning all things that you can, even the things that you don't like. If you don't like accounting and finance, pick up accounting and finance. If you don't like marketing, just do it. You don't succeed by going and doing the easy things. If people succeeded by doing the easy things, guess what, everyone will be successful. You're gonna be successful by doing the things that other people don't want to do, that they don't want to get good at and they don't want to perform on them. You're never gonna be successful doing what everyone else does. Last thing, how do people get a hold of you, Tom? On Instagram, it's at Real Tom Howard and it's probably the best one. Then, in addition to that, my email is t-howard at serverstighten.com. And yeah, email me there. Tom, it's always a pleasure, my man. I'll see you. We got it on Australia trip. I want to do a round two if you don't mind. This is just round one. We'll do another one in Australia. Sounds great. I'm your brother. Thank you. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high performing team like over here at A1 Grasger Service. So if you want to learn the secrets, tell me, transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees growing in the same direction, head over to Elevate and win.com, for slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.