How I Built a $1.7B Business Repairing Garage Doors

we're gonna spend four point three million dollars this month in marketing and here's what i've learned tommy mellow tommy mellow tommy mellow the founder of a one garage door you're doing this blue collar thing but at this really big scale and i love that combination a one graduates we fix we repair we maintained and we replace garage eighty one from day one the original valuation was now the business is north of eighty million of the no shit i've read hundreds of books on sales and even more on marketing so ring ring i pick up what are you telling them you never say the cost you say the investment you never say the most expensive you say top of the line you never say the cheapest you say builder or gray these words matter tommy given us the talk what other businesses have you seen in the services industry that you are shocked at how big they are most of what i've done is repeatable it's not like this crazy thing that only works in garage yours don't over complicated dude i've i've known you for twenty seven minutes and i love this guy mean what are you stuck at where's your weakness right now i was gonna go broke there was a stripper living in our dallas warehouse with my manager we were doing so well and then probably me went to jail there it is there's the weakness i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a less travel have you ever listened to m my first million this podcast yeah we list i listen to a dozen what do you think i i love the come up stories and like i hate how every single guy is pushing for entrepreneurship because it's cut out for forty to five percent of the population like you won't be able to handle this the the rejection the failure the five years of taking a loan against your house the people that quit and cheat and lie the cancel appointments the long drives the the hard nights the walking out of the movie theater to go run a job like i just i don't feel like everybody's cut out for it and some people that invested a bit bitcoin early like they don't know what it's like so so who do you think is cut out for it how do you know well there's there's this thing called driven it's a book my buddy gary wrote the book and it's actually if you're a hunter it's in your dna it's literally a different chromosome and there's so much more usually it's add usually you're d forensics some people but it it just means you have a high tolerance for failure you're you're you're okay working a lot you don't ever mention the words like balance you're off balance on purpose and there's seasons of life and you actually have a bigger why and by the way you can't quit the goal post always moves there's no like finish there's no end zone so if you're gonna start from nothing the chance of success is less than ten percent so you so for the audience you started this thing called a one garage which at this point i think does north of three hundred million in revenue you took some chips off the table you sold about half for a little bit less than half of the business recently for i i think north of a billion dollar valuation is that right the original valuation was about five hundred and forty million we were at twenty seven million of eb now the business is north of eighty million dollars of eb so now it's worth the close to one point seven wow and how long did you start the company two thousand seven so the first ten years were practice and explain what does the company do so people understand who who you are and what you do garages we fix we repair we maintain and we replace garage stores and we do this in now twenty three states thirty seven markets we run on average twenty five thousand jobs a month and give us the origin story we don't usually like the origin stories because you can you know you can get those elsewhere but i gotta ask i gotta know well this is i mean the end point is so interesting i gotta know the beginning you know when i was a kid my mom was a real estate agent my dad had a transmission shop he didn't pay the irs so that got taken they got a divorce so i learned a shovel snow lawns in michigan i got a job when i was twelve washing dishes at four dollars and five cents an hour and i always had the entrepreneurial gene i started a landscape me business when moved arizona and i was living at this house seven hundred dollars we paid rent for three guys i paid two hundred by the roommate two hundred they got at the master paid three hundred and one of the roommates was manager to garage your company he goes dude i cannot find a good painters save my life if you guys know what to about painters they're pretty unreliable and so is like can you paint garage by the way i'm busting tables serving tables and bar tending and i'm flipping bow flexes i buy them on craigslist selma on there the arizona republic i've sold over three hundred bow flexes and then i did total gyms and i sold over a thousand cars buy them fix them clean and sell them and so i'm doing all these things and i mean i am hustling i am like the epitome of hustle at this point and i was like sure how much you're gonna pay me he's like i could pay you a hundred dollars to paint per garage door but you gotta pay for the paint and the tape and the paper so i was like i had a g twenty infinity in ninety six it had a hundred twenty thousand miles on it and it was cheap on gas and by the way two thousand six two thousand five this is when the real estate market was booming and so i hired a painter this old man and i paid him three hundred dollars per order to teach me tommy me on three doors i went to depot about a magnum five pink gun and i was off to the races and i got good i could paint ten doors a day i went through the yellow book and called every garage company i'd say seven out of ten i became their primary painter and does the garage door company mean like i stall a new garage door or your garage door needs some type of service and i fix it so the garage or company does both they fix them and they replace them so every time they replaced one if it's an hoa property or a house pay match i was the guy they'd grind out a little section they give it to me usually the owner would meet up i'd get ten from one guy three from this guy and i go knock them out and i'd literally use map quest to build my routes i mean this is back in the day before gps you mentioned that you called all the garage companies and you became the primary for whatever seven out of ten so what was the pitch so ring ring i pick up what are you telling i'm mean what what work there because it sounds like just being a reliable guy who's gonna do what he says he's gonna do was a was a differentiator here what did you say on the phone yeah so i mentioned the company that my roommate work for i said i've been paying groceries for several months i show up on time i worked the warranties if there's any which is rare because i spent time with the clients i'll pick up the samples myself i'll pay for the paint i'm only charging a hundred dollars that includes drive time and all i ask is that i get paid when i finish the work i clean up after myself i'm very reliable and most of these guys didn't have that service to offer so i said it's just one more thing you could charge three hundred give me a hundred out of it you know this is another way to make money it's another way to go into hoa and they're like you sound hungry kid yeah let's meet up i'll give you a couple we'll see how you do in arizona it was easier in the summer because it dries real quick in the winter when it's kinda wet outside and it's cool you you gotta go on real slow it takes a little longer and you gotta tape the windows if there's windows it gonna be a pain of the butt but i got really really fast and efficient and so i'm meeting up with these technicians and every technician because half the time i met up with the technicians to get the sample and they're like dude i just made three grand this week and i'm like you made three thousand dollars as a technician and my like i said the real estate market was booming people were just like their real estate was going up so fast they were just like fix it i went out with a guy he charged a hundred and fifty dollars per remote and i'm like who would pay you go to home depot pick him up for ten bucks at the time so my other roommate got a job working from him as a technician and he approached me his name's gabe and he goes we should start her own business and i was like well dude i'll from the llc i'll get the ein number i'll i'll get us going i know enough i could handle the marketing but you're gonna have to teach me how to be a technician he didn't know much because their training was crap so i i went to all the manufacturers that got trained i had the business with gabe for three years he also smoked about a pound of weed per month at the time so that was like it was like he'd be eating and by the way still my best friend but he he'd be like listed after i finish lunch i'll give you a callback and i'm like i i watched to answer the phones so every time he went out of town i take the phones and man we made a lot of money when i took the phones but i also ran all the calls because this is when i quit the bus boy job all i kept was a bar job twenty ten i gave them him an ultimatum i said dude you're my best friend you're my roommate and my business partner you take the business in the debt i'll start my own or you could give me the business i'll take on all the debt you're the clearing because i wanna move to montana i wanna be closer to my brother i said great and at this point just quick little to top it off i had six employees full time two ten ninety nines and by the way people were still in toilet paper didn't have a real office so i rented my first real office we were working out of our house and i was kind of like just at night just holding my hands over my face what am i doing i can't i don't trust anybody so who do what are you doing you don't trust anybody you call mom so i call my mom in michigan i said mom i don't know what to do i said i could really use your help but i don't have enough money to pay you good money i could afford to pay you fifteen bucks an hour i could pay my step at sixty five grand which by the way my mom's best year in real estate she's sold fifty five houses so she she's done well she's like tommy i don't know i'm like listen mom i'm your only son i need your help you think about it i love you she called back at two weeks and we're gonna sell our house we're gonna move our lives arizona oh my great move baller her mom hey everyone really quick if you're enjoying this episode on ceo stuff so del having hard conversations with your team hiring then i've got something for you so the team at hubspot they actually went and fit together a bunch of best practices that sean and i use in our own companies and they put it together and something that's really easy to read and understand and so if you wanna just save yourself ten years of headache and heartache then you should check it out i wish we had this long time ago would help me a lot but there should be a qr code on your screen that you can scan or a link of the description so check it out it's totally free and totally awesome at the time the business is doing what roughly said like you know because that's a big leap of things it's a million an half bucks a year okay it's and by the way like a lot of people love a tough time hitting a million but i was the highest ticket writer for seven years and then i finally started to delegate like anytime we weren't working at payroll that my mom would call and say hey because i'm working on marketing and hiring and training she's like i need you to go run two jobs today and then in twenty fourteen i found a good integrator the dude was super smart and he still tells me the stories he's not here anymore he's kind of retired now he's younger than me he goes you would pay me two grand one week and then not pay me for two weeks and then give me like twelve hundred bucks the next time he's like we didn't even have any type of payroll work out the first year i was like yeah dude but twenty seventeen we got on the right software and man all of a sudden we were doing seventeen million but keeping being hardly any of it next year we did thirty million next year we did fifty million and we'd never lost money in profit or revenue sit well basically since the beginning but twenty seventeen we were just on a rocket ship so you were you made a joke that you the first ten years were practice so on your tenth year of business what was your revenue and profit revenue was seventeen million and that was out of grit that was just like working nice weekends and holidays just over working and i remember a came in and said let me tell you something buddy i'm looking at your p and l looking at your bell to income statement revenue is for vanity and profit for sanity you're not making any money you're just a squirrel run around a circles goes we need to figure out how to make serious profits so i was seventeen million everybody's like man and i'd popped my chest out everywhere and i'd say how much revenue we're making revenue means nothing i don't even talk to anybody about revenue anymore the name of the game is you gotta make profit would do you remember your profit on seventeen i was you know we i was paying myself a hundred and fifty grand taken a couple hundred grand out there was not a lot of money left and by the way we didn't have a great cfo or controller at the time it was it wasn't super lined up that's one thing that changed my life is getting control of the money when you said as you were growing sorry how many markets are you in to do that you know that type of scale to do seventeen million in revenue i started in phoenix and it i went the tucson in twenty twelve twenty fourteen were in wisconsin in las vegas milwaukee and vegas and by twenty seventeen i was probably in seven or eight markets but phoenix was just massive by the way i had to close down four markets a year later i had a close down dallas houston atlanta and tampa and if you wanna talk about somebody having to swallow their bride and basically say you're a failure but i was gonna go broke these there was a stripper living in our dallas warehouse with my manager i mean i just didn't have the systems in place to scale as quick as i thought we could right and what i tell people now they're like what had a change i said the hustle had to die for the leader to be born and i truly mean that now i'm a systems guy now i sit down and i work on systems and processes and if the system's broken either there's no system it's the wrong system or the systems not being followed and that's like i mean i'm a student for life i'm the most curious guy i walk and i take notes i try to stay super humble and i'm always learning i've always got three to five coaches at one time i need help all the time and i extract and then i implement you saw i i have a ton of questions on the courses and the seminars r's and stuff because you you've talked about them a bunch and and i'll get to in a second but first you mentioned four stories so the the technician who you used a cold call your integrator your mom and service titan where you convince them to do something special were you always convincing or did you like have to read to get good with words i mean how how is the way you're telling me stories i'm like this seems like a no brainer this also seems like this person's incredibly persuasive i i don't necessarily know if i learned that my dad when when i'm five years old i remember this day vividly i was in royal michigan and this the longest driveway i've ever seen in my life and there was a yard seller garage so my dad always stopped at those and i found this cb radio and i'm picking it up and i'm playing with the antenna and i got the little i'm like five zero five o when i'm like just talking into it and i put it back then we walked back to the car and my dad looks to me and goes hey tommy you really wanted that didn't you i looked at and like oh yeah dad he goes here's five dollars go get it i go dad there's a scotch tape out of that says twenty dollars he goes i know go get it for five and that didn't make sense to me he goes just go up to her i want you to smile i want you to point at me and say my dad and i were wondering if you take five dollars for this radio and i'm talking this was like i was worried i'm looking back at my dad and he's like keep going and he's waving and he's like keep going and i look back at him every five steps and i walk up and i mean man i had it was like i was anxious as hell and i go ma'am i was just curious would you take five dollars for this radio and i go that's my dad over there and he's waving and smiling and she gets done on one knee she pulls out the scotch tapes she takes the five and presents it to me and i'm telling you guys the radio was awesome but i walked back and i learned a lesson that you'll never lose in life like don't be afraid of rejection you go up there you ask you just go for no and i think that he taught me at a young age i watched him negotiate things i never thought possible and just you know he used to say i wish i knew then what i know now and what he told me is like don't be afraid to ask the girl out worst case scenario her loss don't be afraid of what people think about you you're living in your own world he goes a lot of people are gonna have contempt they're not gonna like you you're gonna be more successful but don't worry this is the world we live in continue to run like look hang out with people you got a common future instead of a common past figure out how to get in the right circles and so and my mom i would say my mom gave me more love she said you could do anything i'm gonna get behind you if i went to prison she moved next to the prison to see me every day like my mom loves me if i said mom i got in a really bad wreck the person not okay she'd grab a shovel but like how do we get rid of this mess my dad just was like i wanna teach you sales i'm gonna teach you persuasion and so the combination is just i think it it it turned me into like the belief system that i have somebody no matter what that's why my mom and stepped ted moved out and then my dad was just like you're gonna have the skills because you're gonna be around me and he was good at it you said he used to negotiate things you didn't think possible what do you mean by that we went to mexico and there was a jacket for two hundred fifty bucks les he walked out of it for twenty bucks and he like watch this and he's like they're they're like said you are no no it's it made me in the middle one hundred and he's like tommy we're out of here and like he meant it he's like i don't need the jacket you don't one day we we rebuilt a c ten truck and i mean i spent the whole summer sand this down we got a painted in me and my dad rebuilt the engine we put the transmission in and it was sitting in my front yard and i said dad a guy came by off me ten grand he's like take it he's like you haven't driven it in two years and i go dad mean and you do this together he goes take a picture of it you'll remember it we could do another one he goes you're not driving to sell it and i love that because i was like man i was all sentimental about it he's like tommy it's just material things dude you could buy another one we'll do another one take a picture if you wanna remember it but that's just how how he is you know today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com you were telling the story and i feel like the story had like the the humble origins and you're figuring things out and then it was like zoom we're doing seventeen million or thirteen million it it it's sped up real quick so i wanna i wanna go back to that because you seem to me like a guy who if you don't have the answers up front you'll find a blueprint you find the guy to train you to do the garages to how how do you paint the garage you find a coach you you're so i like this word blueprint a lot because i think that people under use blueprints they exist you can follow them you could build your own thing but it's very helpful to start with a blueprint what were blueprints you saw because it didn't sound like any of the people around you initially we're doing hundred million dollar you know garage repair but at some point you got that idea at some point you started to figure out oh i need to scale this thing i need to do this and do that what were the blueprints that made you think that oh i'll give you real quick example we're getting ready to expand as a saint louis i'm like my good buddy chris hop since since he's been in s saint louis for a long time in fact his parents started like the eighties so i said chris can you jump on a call for about an hour and give me the good bad and the ugly about the marketing what's important and say louis and by the way worst case scenario he says no but he's like tommy absolutely he goes i'll even give you my heat map i'll tell you what zip code to stay out of i'll show you stay out of the the east part he goes this north area and he literally gave me the keys to the city he saved me a year of mistakes and so what i've always said is success leaves clues if you wanna find out how to be number one on yelp go find an hvac a roofing company picked the phone up and you call them and you say my name is tommy mel i wanna let you know i'm super impressed by your company i read your book i've used your business i wanted to buy your whole company lunch today might cost four hundred bucks right bet you buy get them chipotle if i could get an hour of your time i promise i'm not going into your industry i got a allowed to share with you as well seeing a couple opportunities but i wanna understand how you dominate y'all you do that with angie list thumb tag google ls ppc successfully clues they're right in front of you it's right around the corner all you gotta do is ask so my favorite three letters in the world are as k so i did this i learned how to sell see when i had the podcast podcasts i can't get the best of the best i started it early twenty seventeen this is before a podcast where a real thing so i'd be like man i'm having problems with payroll so i'd find like the top person that wrote the book on payroll and i i mean my podcast was simply selfish he was like man i got a question for you if you got a w two versus a ten ninety nine and they they need to show up to me and they'd be like bam bam bam bam bam and then i get like okay what happens cash versus accrual i get a cpa on and then i go okay what happens when you want a greenfield versus buy a company what's your integration checklist and i don't know why but almost everybody was excited to just give me everything they're like dude you're just in the garage industry like sure take it you could have it and i've always just been super humble with especially like the people that have been where i wanna go and i walk in and i'm like man i am so impressed like i will do whatever it takes and they're like you you really are like you you you're not like most guys that come up like you're you you you don't think your shit doesn't stink and only man i come from very humble beginnings i'm just trying to get ahead i care a lot about my family i'm just literally i'll do whatever it takes if you need money if you need me to introduce you to somebody if you want me to come mow your lawn whatever you need i wanna learn from you so i told sean a story about a a buddy of mind from my high school who and bought his parents hvac company and that's since blown up and sean made fun of me because you're not even the most successful person from your high school well that person is chris hoffman the person he just referred to sean he's done the same thing where he's like blown this up these services businesses but what i've noticed actually about chris as well but i'm actually or chris has this trait and i'm inspired more so that you have this trait tommy because our our listeners of m m are are like sean and i and and we have this attitude where we're really good at starting stuff but sometimes you stay scrappy and you stay as a hustle and unfortunately after some type of mark i don't know the ten million in revenue range the five million the fifteen million revenue range that hustle that scrap ness that like just go and get shit done that actually kinda holds you back and i'm going through that right now with my company of like being systems focused and you have done a really good job of showing how a person goes from like being a hustle to systems and scaling and hiring a good team and and being the executive i would say and you actually have this really good quote i think you said that in order to scale i had to kill the hustle inside of me or something like that yeah yeah i'll started the day for the leader to be born and and i'll tell you i i delegate to elevate people i was like dude all out at work do you remember i had my let's say and i could work three days in one day my my day starts in six hour increments and i worked three of them in eighteen hours and i'm like dude i don't respect anybody that works harder i know there's people shoveling poop somewhere and a field that are working way harder than me i look at skill way differently there's certain people i hire that can handle the task of three people forty hour work weeks in ten hours and so i came up with paying for performance and paying for outcomes and i will be very transparent that i am the dumbest guy on my team i mean when it comes to the c suite vp vps directors i'm just the visionary i dream really really big i love sales and i love marketing and i love relationships and culture i am not gonna be the specialist i live in a different planet i don't live within the walls of this company i'm creating a personal brand and by the way there's sixty two guys training next door fifty of them found me on social media said i wanna work for that guy so building a personal brand for your business really matters and you know the thing i asked now is what i work for you what i buy from you when my grandma bite from you and when i go off a beer with you you tell great stories you don't have you don't shake my hand like a limp fish you make eye contact you smile a lot you're interesting i'm gonna ask you tough questions to see how you figure things out there's no right answer and so the i started thinking about this about five years ago it's who not how who is the right hire not what's my strategy not with system systems are super important but what's the next hire that i bring on the bus that'll take me to the promised land and when you start thinking like that and you fill you stack the deck with a plus players your job gets easier like it's gotten so easy and whenever it gets easy we explode the business explodes so you go through these peaks and valleys and i'm like i will tell you guys we did three fifteen three hundred fifteen million and i'm like there's no reason we can't be at a billion in two and a half years and so i gotta set that vision and people are like dude you're crazy and then i gotta map it out and show them this is all that would need to happen the average technicians is seven hundred thousand now and so what would need to happen for us to do this we would need to have this department this department this department we need to make sure we got trucks on command we need to make sure we got a good greenfield strategy and you start reverse engineering your goals you create some accountability and consistency and all of a sudden you wake up and it's there dude that's awesome i love hearing and you talk i get excited guys i i love entrepreneurship and i run towards failure i don't really care what people think i'm not gonna lie to you guys and say i really do care what a lot of people think i care what my parents think i care what the people at work with i'm not the guy that just says i don't care all what anybody thinks i'd love to pretend that's the truth but i guess now i think i'd rather be respected than loved but by a lot of people i'd choose love first yep but do any of your employees actually think that you're dick i mean you don't seem you don't you come off as like a a pretty caring empathy person known for twenty seven minutes and i love this guy yeah like who like who thinks that you're disrespectful rude you might be a guy who says look it it's not working out unfortunately but i think they would still have love and respect i don't fire anymore i i had to fire five people that were direct reports to me this year this past year but when adam started in twenty fourteen i said you're gonna be the bad cop because i'm not good at it but i do have to have these fierce hard conversations with people and it's not easy but it's for the best of them like if you think about who changed your life was there like i i had a coach that literally made sure i got a warm mill like i i respected him i mean he literally told me i'm not gonna play like if my grades weren't good if i didn't show up but give it a hundred and ten percent so he didn't play me two games but he made sure listen three nights a week he was going to buy me a meal with dinner because he knew my mom was working three jobs and i found out i respected him more than i loved him but the their respect turned into love and that was lesson for me is i gotta be straight up i'm gonna tell you what you're doing great but i'm also gonna tell you you're not living up to your potential i see something better in you and it's my job to pull that out of you and i'm either gonna pull that out of you or i'm gonna force you to quit or you're gonna not have a job here i'm gonna give you the invitation to go work one of my competitors me and sean we're talking about like these inspirational leaders and stuff last episode and i think we're we i told a story about how i had a cross country coach that was like this year you're gonna learn how to be better men and we're gonna do it via running and that's kind of the same energy that you have which is you know you young technician you're gonna learn how to be a better man this year and i'm gonna do it by teaching you how to smile when you meet a customer how to say yes ma'am no sir how to you know like it's like more so we're gonna learn how to live great lives and be great high class people but we're gonna do it via you know serving the customers wonderfully it's a hundred percent right i used to find fours and try to make them sevens now nine i sevens and try to make them tens and so now i've got a much harder way to get into the company so i did orientation yesterday with t two people and i say you should feel proud because it takes fifty interviews to even get one of you to this room but now the hard part starts and we got a bell you could ring if you tap out we get about two people a class to just say this is we don't they gotta clean after they're done they gotta a show but if you're late one day there's a good chance for setting you home there's a bell so during training anybody can just go literally ring a bell and quit it's the same as the navy seals are you ex military you have that vibe no i'm not in the i never was in the military okay you mentioned this guy a in passing you said my mentor a and i'm always curious about mentors because i think everybody wants a mentor i think few people ever end up with that special kind of relationship with a great mentor but one of the great things is when somebody has one they can kinda share a story that you know it kind becomes our mentor too and so can you tell me a great owl story what did what did this guy kind of make you realize or or teach you about so he was the second guy in my podcast and he wrote a book it's how my shelf over is called the seven power contractor explains the different stages of the home service industry and he's he had gone through every master class and just studied how to build the business and he had a business with his brothers and his father and one day they just got fed up and his daughter he had his cam quarter on the back of the room recording his daughter at a play and his wife comes up to him and says hell you know what your daughter says she wants at school today she says she wishes her dad was around more and he goes natalie i'm gives me goosebumps but he goes natalie i'm gonna disappear for about a year i'm not gonna be around as much but i need to system ties this business i need to get sop i need to make sure that i can spend time with my two daughters in you and so we're gonna go on a vacation for two weeks in one year and i'm not even gonna look at my pager i mean this is back in the day and l he met me for lunch and i handed him the book i was working on the home service millionaire he flipped through it and said this is garbage he goes you need to rewrite it and i said okay and he he goes the thing that i wanted to work with you originally tommy is you brought a notebook and you wrote out everything i said he goes that's the only reason i thought about working with you he walked into my shop that day goes can we go to a shop tour i said sure he goes why do you have all the calendars on the wall have you ever heard of outlook of google calendar twenty seventeen that was around then it was early stages of google calendar but he goes i tripped down a cord that you had a microwave plugged in and he goes dude this is not organized and he goes i could've have stolen in your whole warehouse the garage was open and no cameras your forklift was sitting there he goes show me your manuals all i had was this like onboarding manual he goes well how does anybody know how to win he goes how do they how do they know are you allowed to get tattoos on your face are you what happens if your truck breaks down like who do you call what happens if you lose your gas card what happens if you need pto for christmas he goes how do people know this he goes it's all in your head he goes what i'm gonna ask is you're gonna pay me a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and by the way i didn't have a hundred and fifty give i had taken an equity line out of my house so that's why i had to pay attention and when i walked in there if i started talking or talked about a book he goes stop you're gonna listen to what i'm gonna teach you where i'm gonna quit you're gonna figure out exactly what i'm gonna teach you and you're gonna do this perfect you're gonna stop reading books you're not gonna do stuff any other way than what i teach you you're gonna turn yourself on off when i'm in this room and you're gonna get your two top guys we're gonna sit here we're gonna work through each and every scenario every manual and then you're gonna read these manuals out loud with every employee have a initial every single one and then you're gonna read a page out of the manual every week in your meetings and man i was h i still am and he's like you are gonna focus you're gonna be all here and we're gonna sit in this room for eight hours three days a week the due drove mercedes he'd he'd pulled back in the same spot really slow it was always detailed and every time he left i'd get forty three set forty three dollars and thirty eight cents was how much he paid in gas i get a bill for it like this i mean he was just high cta personality dialed in like it's my way or the highway and that's what i needed he was tough and he bring in a consultant to get us our financing figured out that he trusted and she's said like i don't know if i wanna work with this guy said listen i'll be quiet i'll do whatever you say and he goes trust me he goes he'll do whatever you say i'll make sure of it and that's what i needed and it was tough love but he set me up for a lot of success with he are are are you now i i've never heard type c personality but are you are whatever that personality type is of just paying attention the details are you it sounds like maybe you're a three out of ten what are you now are you like really high or you just improved oh well i that was pretty dental so i love math i took advanced calculus and i got obsessed with geometry and calculus and and algebra so i'm a numbers guy i've always been but i'm still a macro guy i still look at the big picture i'll dive in into certain areas i always say i live on mars as i look at earth for volcanoes and earthquakes but i'm still not the details guy i don't i love my cfo and my controller and i love my hr team but i don't really interact with them very often i am working on operations and marketing and culture and and always driving sales and quite frankly i don't wanna be good at these other things i wanna take i wanna go continue to be the best at what i'm great at and continue to hone these better skills and delegate the rest i don't wanna be well rounded never wanna be good at that stuff because it torture for me to have to do that stuff like for me to do payroll which i had to do for a long time i mean it was like pulling teeth so the first thing i got rid of if you set up your orange chart and you got you wear a lot of the hats first thing you do is circle what you hate so now when i come into work i love coming to work i'm like man i'm on a podcast right now with you guys everything's getting handled i just got back from costa rica for ten days you think we lost money you think when the owner founder ceo left that things didn't go right we set records the whole time i was gone like i don't need to be here and that's what we've set up is we go on the pinnacle trip my whole c suite all my directors my area managers go my top forty technicians and installers go on this trip do you think we lose revenue that that that week when we leave we've never lost revenue we've talked a lot about in this systems i think if we're playing a drinking game and somebody said you know if you're taking a shot every time we said systems they're they're dead now but but i but it strikes me that you really harp on this because that's what was hard and broken for you and you really had to put it worked to get great at that and it's kind of like you feel the the benefits of having not everything on your shoulders but it i i gotta believe that in order for your company to succeed you know you don't you don't grow because you have a great operations manual per s right you could grow because your great at sales and marketing you sort of survive and thrive if the operations can back that up and i'm guessing it sounds like that the sales and marketing were more things that we're more in your core competency you did a good job over early leon on and you you haven't been as demand constrained but i wanna know more about that so i wanna know what did you do to kick ass and sales and marketing that was different than the average service company what were the things that you did that made you guys rock and roll in terms of demand well step one was naming your company a one they show up first in the white pages right yeah well that was stupid because there's ninety three other a ones even though got irr evo and contest trademark so that's my my biggest mistake was being a one honestly you know sales cure everything and to get sales you need good leads and i'll tell you this i'm not afraid we're gonna spend four point three million dollars this month in marketing not afraid to spent a lot of money and here's what i've learned i was thirty million dollars i met a guy named dan and that a levy my my coach he referred me he goes tommy me he goes i think your wraps are garbage wraps as in car wraps truck the the vehicle wraps yeah and he goes the best way to do it is i took a picture of your truck i made it black and white and tell me what pops out are you he because that's the best way to see like what pops out and you got angie list yelp you got your phone number your you're you're everything you got springs rollers cables bearings all this crap he goes i want you to go to this company called kick charge and i wants you to use dan anton to redo your brand i called dan anton and he gives me an estimate guess how much it cost me to get a new logo and new brand on the trucks thirty five thousand dollars and at this time i'm going i'm thirty million dollars i'm like dude it's working why would i switch and i just i trusted el and i beat the bullet and i did it and then dan called me this guy and we had got a character and like the the logo awesome he'd studied every one of our markets we don't wanna look like any other thing we wanna pop we don't want our phone numbers or or website on it you don't even need any of that angie list or what we do it's just garage to door service and he goes i want you to change all your email signatures with this every one of your yard signs every one of your coupons every single thing needs to be this brand and i remember three weeks later there was a line of people that wanted to work for us like i was like man this is like you know i'm putting everything on the line all my time energy effort but i had such a crappy brand and not now i spent a fortune on tv radio yeah that's so this is exactly before that's that's what it was oh yeah so but it how crappy that is what is that i can't even see it what what is like what the above your above the the red wall it's like what is of a garage just like the the outline yeah that's that's like at two garages that are carriage style with like like brick rock and you why don't why text why horrible and then you go to this yeah so i said dan i want that old fashioned feeling like the may tag in the seventies when you trust the guy to come out and it's like it it just it it pops and it's trust trustworthy and so if you walk in my place dan designed we brought the brand inside so we've got all the brand inside of the building too like we live and breathe the brand and people don't talk about this stuff but like nike is a brand that's why they pay tiger woods and roger federer and like like the the brand is what you could buy a t shirt the same as nike for twenty bucks when you're willing pay a hundred and twenty dollars because of the brand right so what does our brand mean it means my dad taught me you could do three things in business you could be the best best warranty best technicians best quality best you know everything you could be best timing if it happens today you bring your car in we could fix it today or you could be the cheapest he said pick two out of the three you'll never be all three you can't be the cheapest the best and on their timeline and i got this guy in milwaukee best mechanic i've ever met he's the cheapest he does me right right now he's four months out i can't use it he's four months out so i called him up i said hey why don't you triple your prices i'll pay triple because you're honest and you do great work but this is the hardest thing for people to learn you you wanna start out be the cheapest but then you realize you don't have enough to hire people or pay for the right software or buy new trucks or invest in grade inventory and i'm not saying like one of the things that i learned a long time ago in sales is i don't give yes or no like if i walked up to you i'd say listen these are the three options of what we have for springs we got the one year the five year in the lifetime do you might say hey that's too much i say let's just pick another option let's make something that works for you and your family i'm here to earn your business and then i shut up and i've got other options of everything we do i don't give yes or no questions because that's stupid either you're gonna say yes or no i'm gonna say listen let's just pick something that makes sense for you and your family and i've studied i've probably read i've read hundreds of books on sales and even more on marketing and that's where i go to all the google events i show up to different offices i like i speak on a lot of like i live in breathe marketing and sales and honestly i hate to i hate that word conversation to send that i say i always say that's a no no i hate a lot of words but you never say the cost you say the investment you never say the most expensive you say top of the line you never say the cheapest you say builder grade you never say you could cancel it at anytime you see you have the right of precision these words matter but what matters more is the way i say it when i'm making eye contact would you go to a doctor if the doctor walked in and just looked at you and said hey here's your medication no the doctor walks in he smiled he said let me ask you a few questions how's the alcohol was the stress level are you are you any recreational drugs how much are you working out i'm gonna run a few tests here we're gonna look in your eyes look up your nose your ears they're gonna have you call we're gonna run a few tests and then the doctor says listen what's what's better for you cvs or walgreens alright here's your prescription here's what's gonna make you better do you ever go i'm gonna need a few estimates stock no because they're the authority they diagnose the person before the problem they spent the time they asked the right questions and they nurtured you along the way and you believe them and they didn't say i'm like you know well but well no they said here's exactly what we're gonna do to fix you up and we're the doctor the minute we step in that garage and that's what that's what i train the guys and i go over and over like i don't believe you i don't believe you because you don't seem confident you don't either you don't believe in yourself or you don't believe in the products or you don't believe in me and the company which one is it and let's work on let's work on it mh so you i you this is i could do this all day and i love i love training guys because i'm like smile more offer coffee on the way play with the dog get to know the clients that they love bernie sanders talk about bernie sanders if they love fishing ask them what kind of fish they like and what kind of poll they have but you gotta be genuinely interested don't fake it if you hate babies don't talk about babies you know find something you love and you correlate well to to them with and and you'll enjoy every minute of your life dude play with the dog is so true i've i've had a couple guys come over just work and they the ones who play with the dog instantly i'm in on them because they're in on me and the most important thing that they saw it in the house so far i had a guy come in to to do a repair and as soon as he walked i have a tiny dog like a eight pound dog and he goes whoa killer and then he goes i don't i don't want no problems and i just immediately love the guy you coulda have sold me anything he was like there for the year he could've have sold me a washer and dryer if he wanted to now that's great i always say listen we don't we don't ring the doorbell because strangers ring the doorbell friends knock these simple little things listen i'm saw have a seven eleven could i grab you something to get you a coffee no no no thanks listen you come to my house my fiance is gonna cook for you don't make me guess you like green monster should i get your coffee and i want to bring you something because no one that ever fixed your house brought you something it's so you guys order a coffee for or you you you have like a system for ordering drinks or or whatever so they could order i got guys that order doughnuts and apple cider in michigan and and wisconsin and all you do is expense it you take a picture of the receipt and it comes back on your check that next week including the taxes so you could buy i mean we try to say keep it under thirty bucks but literally i don't we don't really check like my goal is that every single person gets offered something on the way have you seen the average customer value or a customer order go up because of you so what what you're saying by the way is like a world famous it's the rule reciprocity it's robert child needs book influence which is basically like if i do a favor for you so if mean tommy or next door neighbors i go hey tommy can i borrow a couple of sugar and you give me a couple of sugar the next day tommy comes to me goes hey sam can i borrow your car for a day because of the rule of reciprocity i feel in debt to you and i will do something even if those two favors are not equal i will do something to get back to sober even because we wanna feel even and so the idea here is if you bring a customer a coffee even if it's a two dollar coffee they're more likely to spend an additional five hundred dollars in garage doors and so my question is have you seen the average order value go up just because of that simple goes up dramatically and it's not a question if you're gonna use this is how much are you gonna spend robert chi and he became a good buddy of mine him and bob oh shit there's seven rules of influence i got i studied him at u of a in my master's program when he's an asu professor they're arch nemesis i got to meet him he comes to the house now my coo and head of sales just went to his conference here in tempe arizona and the more we could apply those seven principles we're always looking to apply more and more and it's not to manipulate people by the way he says you gotta use these for good and i mean i ask him questions all the time he needed a garage and i'm like dude this one's on the house or you know like it's gonna be the taj hall too and that that's just he's just the one of the smartest guys i've ever met alright let's take quick break because i gotta to tell you a story me tell you the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a junky interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send froze they flagged the transaction they lock my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why i use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking at to level locker banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank are provided through choice financial group call them man a and evolve involve bank trust members fdic one of the the many interesting things about you is basically a lot of times that courses kinda get shit on people make fun of like courses and people make fun of seminars and stuff like that and books fall in my category but it seems like you are prolific when it comes to hiring coaches hiring consultants taking courses taking seminars things that people would say even at seventeen million in revenue they would say tommy you why are you paying money to come come to this course what courses and books have like really moved the needle for you in your life because it sounds like you've consumed a a lot well i'll tell you the the the latest one was buy back your time and dan mart tell he goes let's just do this he goes when when do you think you're gonna sell so we wrote it down he goes how much you think you'll make and i wrote the number down he goes how many hours do you would work a week i go probably fifty we did the math he goes do you know how much you make per hour and it's like hundreds and hundreds of thousand dollars and he goes you got a great business money he goes tell me you got a good chef and i'm like a chef i don't need a chef like he goes what do he normally eat i'm like uber eats he's like tommy you don't understand he goes if you wanna become the best for your people he goes you have a driver right i go what why would i i me a driver he goes how often do you drive a week i go about eleven hours he goes what if we could buy back eleven hours for you to be productive and he got me to look through a whole different lens he brought he got me so now i got a house manager we've got a chef we've got a driver our dogs are walk twice a day they go to doggy day hu berry and finn dogs and you know these mentors dan mart hotel was a big one i go to very very i i go to the all the home service ones but you know most people sit in this this procrastination and in indecision there are software i've used that were crap but you know we just got on one it increased our conversion on door sales by eighteen percent in our average ticket by three percent and it picked up an extra five million of eb because it eats dealer fees because i but heard about it from a buddy of mine we were on it within six weeks but to not do these things so many people are like me man one day i'm gonna get started right after the wedding i'm gonna be on the diet right after the golf tournament and they they live in this world of like we're just not ready for that yet man i i'm like let's just fail who cares let's let's fall down a bunch of times we're gonna fail a lot but we're gonna figure it out before anybody you said you guys sold the sold a piece of the business and you at like whatever twenty something million in eb now it's eighty million what was that big jump did you guys start rolling up other businesses or what what what happened what what went so well so three years we bought twelve companies we've grown i think it's seventy percent organically and then the set the twenty two percent was by buying companies and what we did is it's kinda funny because i call my vendors and i say tell me how you win how do you meet your bonuses what is your objectives this year for like the veterans this i'm gonna spend eighty million dollars in groceries this year i say what product mix you need us to be at and i say now if i do this for you when do i get a bigger rebate but my growth like if i sell a hundred orders of somebody they're paying a different price than if they buy one door so i work out these things so you know we've got economies of scale we've got efficiency and you know the crazy thing is what a a great home service business that's fifteen percent of the bottom we're almost double that and i still see because of our efficiency like you might have a call center rep that could book twenty calls a day micah book sixty so let's say you're paying your twenty i pay in my thirty five they're doing three times of work you know what i mean so you get these economies of scale and people don't like when i say this but if you work at day one most people will hire you in their garage door business because we've got we buy six thousand hours of tools we train we train we train you know when i played football i played two a days i practiced twice a day for six days to play one game at home service you say you're gonna go with our best guy for two weeks and you're on your own forever training is not something we do it's who we are and we continue to train it's not just in sales it's smiling it's making sure you're efficient you're showed up to your first job within fifteen minutes these new one on one forms i'm working on i'm more excited about that than anything this month so one on ones with the technicians and installers so they're very complex to get the data i'm looking at but what i'm building is if this is where you're at it's a series of things to get good at if you're not created this we gotta get you good at this before we go on to the next one and then there's a recipe for each one so now it's standardized now in any market this is the one on one form you're gonna use and you're giving the exact same thing across the board that you're gonna do ride along for two days you're gonna go back to phoenix for a refresh for her five days you're gonna do role play for one day in the training center whatever that looks like we're building all that right now and my expectation is it'll increase it'll increase revenue by forty percent wow what has ai changed your business at all yet have you seen any impact with ai call center and dispatch and quite a few things in marketing but call center obviously it's it's coming to the spot where this year right now yesterday my ai agents were eighty seven percent booking rate my agents were a ninety two percent so it's a five percent variance but the ai continues to get better and the goal is not to get rid of people the goal is to go on a hiring freeze and keep the best so right now i got sixty eight agents let's see i go down to forty they last forever but i never need to hire another agent because now you're just blocking and tackling dispatching what what our dispatch software does is regression testing so you could feed it data credit card score how much do they pay off in the home how many garages do they have and then it looks for outliers and it knows what technicians do well on this type of job and the most important thing is customer satisfaction that promoter score and my internal net promoter score so i'm not just looking to sell i'm trying to create a relationship build you know get you on a membership which we call protection plan and be your garage company for life i'm not trying to go w bam thank you ma'am i wrote a big ticket let's get out of here i'm trying to say what's right for you you're selling the homie miss jones let me make sure you pass inspection we wanna work on your new home you know that's what's important is we we need to build relationships and that's very rare in the home service industry i never would have thought in in it mix it's it's it's like obvious in hindsight but never would've have thought that a garage door business could be as big as you and you seem like you have a ton of growth ahead of you you haven't even scratched the surface what other businesses have you seen in the services industry that you are shocked at how big they are or you think that most of our audience which is largely internet or tech based audience would be surprised about i'll tell you my favorite one is pest control tell me tell us about it well well the fact is pest control is the only company that went public and right now they're paying twenty two to twenty five x eb so if you could get your business to make two million dollars you're gonna get fifty million and the best guys that do it it started out the mormon guys out of you utah with knock on doors door to door they're very good at it if you sell religion and they'd all tell you this so you start out by door to door then you get good at advertising on google and radio and you just you you optimize for routes but anybody could do it i mean you're literally there spraying you're looking out in arizona you're looking out for scorpion spiders making sure there's no patient stuff like that what pest control company is is public what's the big one that went public they they bought so many companies but term x went public so alright i'm looking up at term x they have it looks like a nearly a five billion dollar market cap it's so pretty shockingly better yeah well that's the deal and then they have subsidiaries on top of that and when you go public it's like how many companies can you buy because you're raising capital from the investment pool and it's almost like you've gotta eat when you go public you gotta eat you gotta buy i mean that's one of the prerequisites if you do an ipo and there's a lot of advantages but then you got star oxy and all the other things like this is the kind of stuff i get really excited about but you think about he here's something to understand about home service home improvement is it demand generated like if your pipe breaks you're calling me today you need it fixed windows you know i want new windows maybe a window broke i'll get the glass fixed but windows so the multiple of a demand driven industry where need it done and pest controls one of those that's not necessarily needed it done but because that company went public they're paying a lot more and it rose the market cap but a window company might get eight to twelve x whereas hvac plumbing electrical garage doors there's just these must must dos are getting you know fifteen to twenty when you get past twenty million of eb the i remember during like covid those multiples were going in like if if correct me if i'm wrong but it appears as though that there was like a pre and post covid number like the post covid it exploded those multiples here's exactly what happened is think about it your venture capitalist your pe you're going man all of our hotels are failing no one's going to airbnb the nail salon just shut down because people are leaving their houses the movie theaters went bankrupt where can we put our money and they looked at this simple blue collar that we were like we were like second class citizens and they go wait a minute these guys have predictable income they're needed they've shown month after month year after year that they could continue to grow and they're sophisticated they use things like power bi they use things advanced analytics and when they realized that the money started shooting in like crazy there's miracle stories and the multiples are still really really high what they did learn is you gotta keep the founder involved because the founder you know it's kind of the glue and if you pay the founder a lot of money are they gonna stay on and get happy and keep the culture because imagine give it a guy that works this ass off a hundred million dollars and having them hey dude i want you to stick around it and be the same i want you to work harder than you work before it's few and far between so they're getting pretty sophisticated now but there's a lot of home service industries man i'm telling you this like the future of a one many splits in the garage garage flooring e chargers pest control front doors and windows like if i can get into those i'm running twenty five thousand jobs a month seventeen percent is financed it'll be thirty five percent this year of our revenue which is low it needs to continue to improve but hey you qualified for twenty thousand do you want me to make this garage l and you could set up a gym we'll do the floors and we'll put you you know it'll be warm in the winter cool in the summer and by the way we noticed all these spider webs in your garage you wanna take care of that and by the way the garage probably you wanted to match the front door and you qualified for it we can make it a low payment you know the garage i got really lucky because remodel magazine eight years in a row said rogers are the number one investment wall street journal came out with two articles last year two hundred and sixty eight percent return on investment you put a buck in you take two sixty eight out and then we trademark the garage the smile of your home so i'm going into the garage and the plan is to create other opportunities in the garage dude this is fascinating this is not at all what i thought this episode was gonna be you're this mix of a bunch of things that i really love you're you know one third just pure hustle and common sense your one third self self development personal development you know learning machine just how can i load learn and grow and be better and then one third is basically like i'm gonna play play big so you're doing this blue collar thing but at this really big scale and i love that combination that is that is a lot of fun to me to have this conversation i'm glad you came on check this out sean so i've been following you tommy for about two years now and you you get me amped up you know i'm not in the i'm not in your space at all but i feel like i'm learning so much but i also like i feel like getting amped up but sean google tommy mellow conference so he has this conference called the freedom event and if you it and whoever whoever's listening sitting google that and go to the the page the the video is him with his arms out and like fireworks shooting up with him like sage it's it's pretty awesome but tommy that obviously he has a behemoth of a of a business then it looks like you have a side hustle of being like sort of like a a home services influencer and if i had to guess like your conference and i think you had a course or a community something like that if i had a guess that's doing not right too yeah we had fifteen hundred home service contractors at our last when this year off thirty five hundred and the average person that's worked with us increases by seventy percent their first year and that's profitability because that's what we shoot for and basically most of what i've done is repeatable it's it's not like this crazy thing that only works in garage yours it's knowing the numbers it's paying attention to the important things you don't need to be good at fifty things or five hundred things you need to be good at five things a thousand times over so it's understand don't over complicate it's pretty simple so can you explain how this media side of your business so forget the actual nuts and bolts of what you're doing so you have the podcast you have media and so explain how this why you do it and how how the sort of sort of like from a business perspective why do you do this and how does it work what is the goal of how you're doing this for example are you throwing this event because you wanna be the largest kind of event trade show in your industry and that's a a good business to be in is it because you wanna have a relationship and go buy the top one percent of these companies and it's lead gen for that is it you know what why are you doing all this and how does that work well first and foremost used to just have a garage door we realize the industry so crappy the industry would have to improve people would need to raise their prices and show their worth so we figured out that we would have to train other garage companies so we invite hundreds of garage companies and then i looked out in the audience and it was all plumbers and roof and pest control and even mechanics and then i'm like this is supposed to be a garage door show and we didn't really filter who was coming in so was like look i wanna keep garage doors kind of in our realm and then i started this other thing called home service freedom and the real reason is people open the door to me people gave me the time of day people let me come into their home their business and they gave me the answers and people call me up and they're like dude i'm getting a divorce my kids are leaving me my dad took over his business he just died i don't know what to do and quite frankly el levy and all my other you know dan anton tan with branding and we've got this formula of like the step by step it's not for everybody like i said the beginning that everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur new some of them are meant to be entrepreneurs but the other thing the selfish byproduct is if i love a company and they show up and they do the work i could date them before we get married because i know if i invest with them i'll give a man amount of money i could personally give them what's worked in like really one on one because i can't coach anybody one on one i got twelve hundred and fifty people depending on me here but the idea being i gave you guys a bunch of other industries that a one wants to get involved in i like no one trust these people they know they're gonna win with me so it helps grow the core business too if we ended up doing a adult i have no expectation to doing deals and i don't know if anybody wants to do a deal but i know this that if it came down to it and we loved each other and we worked well together and there was a win win for both of us if a one and this other business that you know it just makes sense you know me i know you so yeah there is a by byproduct but the fact is now i know everybody and guess what happens i'll show them everything i know who do you think they call when they figure something up when they figure out google's new algorithm or they figure out a certain on meta they figure out a new mailer technique that i've never heard of who's the first person they wanna call they go tommy you've taught me so much i feel indebted i've i haven't company you for three years but i finally got something i think you're gonna love you gotta try this and i i get those phone calls ten times a week i'm on home freedom dot com it looks like a community plus like you give a playbook the headline is really good it says accelerate five years of growth in twelve months how much does this cost so there's three different programs we only got twelve companies in the top program but you know we got a basic one it's a few hundred bucks a month the next one it's it's about fifty grand a year i mean it's not crazy i'll tell you we took we we took a roofing company that was doing twelve million dollars bringing home about three hundred grand within one year they're doing thirty million bring home six million and a lot of these things are just turning the knobs a little bit and paying attention to some things you're not looking at the data the kpis will set you free and the fact of the matter is i'll i'll come to you guys and i'll say hey what do you think your booking rate is they'll say well me and my wife answer the phones were probably a ninety percent i'm like you don't understand it should be a decimal place it needs to be exact and it should be by csr like i know every single one of my csr booking rate i know exactly what we're training them on every day i know exactly my tech technique you should see my scorecard i mean you these are world renowned like we spent millions of dollars to build this internally and they are the bad ass thing you'll ever see in your life tommy me what are you suck at are you are you what are you bad at where's your weakness right now you know my my fiance might say i'm not the best communicator i don't talk about all my feelings i don't really practice week could be i like i said i i don't like to piss people off too much fierce conversations i'll do it because i love them but i'm not gonna add these conversations with a lot of people i would say with my family i like to do stuff but my mom wants to sit there and chat and i love my mom more than anything but when i was a kid we go to a movie we go bowling she take me like she's she got really involved and i just have a hard time because sitting there and chatting it's okay to catch up on things but it's gotta be something optimistic for me i have a hard time talking about i i don't go down this never anymore am i talking like i mention like what's going on in minnesota or ukraine or whatever but i can't live in this negativity zone so i'm trying to be the best son i could the best fiance i could the best brother i could to my sister the best uncle i could to my niece nephew and i know i got a long way to go like at least i could say that i loud and i recognize it tommy mel is tommy dialed in i mean you you've got it figured it out man like it's it's you're you're you're very inspirational work in progress what's what's the goal you you are you're wealthy you did it you you pulled it off with this company or are you trying to buy the cardinals like what what what's the goal out here you know i was playing with chad yesterday and i would love to tell you there's a goal you know we're building a beautiful house idaho where we're gonna be doing events and then i build in my dream home in paradise valley here in arizona but you know what i've got i got my life i'm forty two i'll be forty three in march and i got my life at forty five on my casket you know what i want i don't want the best odds from to wealthy i want i want number one the best dad ever and i don't have any kids yet i'm a late bloom luckily my fiance is twenty seven she's worked with me for nine years no no yeah yeah nine years because she was definitely eighteen when i met her yeah see if they dude no public math careful yeah yeah yeah we were doing so well and then i went the jail there it is there's the weakness definitely definitely nine years and it's so i i feel like for me the next journey is like listen i wanna be a great dad i wanna be a great husband we're getting married next january first and i wanna live i wanna be where my feet i wanna go all in i want people that know how much i care about them i wanna communicate better i wanna make sure that it's not always about money in finance it's not just working out it's just becoming better every day better your best i always say i'm the best i've ever been but the worst i'll ever be because tomorrow i need to be a little bit better and i can tell you guys i'm generally a happy person i say once a month i kinda get done on myself and i'm like why do i work this much or why don't i do this or why don't i do this but you guys might look at people that are wealthy i'll tell you the most billionaires and i meet a lot of them they're not happy some of them are suicidal alcoholic drug addicts they got everybody chasing them because of their money they don't they're not really good people so be they begin they begin to look at themselves and say the only reason people like me is because i work my ass off and i've got money and that's not gonna be me i wanna continue to be humble stay the blue collar guy i've always been remember that i started washing dishes in mow lawns and just creating the best i i don't want a million friends i want twenty friends that i wanna be lifelong soul mates with and guys it sounds really good and i do got a lot of great things going and i thank god and jesus christ every day but i've got a lot of work work on i i every all the listeners just know that you might think being rich famous instagram famous and influencers is gonna solve your problems but that's not the answer it's it's looking inside and becoming your best self have you ever seen the savannah banana yeah yeah they were just said at event i was at those guys are awesome so jesse cole came on maybe eight weeks ago six weeks ago and sean and i he probably is in our top five favorite people that we've talked to very inspirational and it's so interesting that you guys look very different you have incredibly different businesses and yet there's this spark that you both have that sean and i find incredibly inspiring contagious like it basically a conversation with you we probably leave feeling now i i know what a ten out of ten in terms of operating our lives are at we have to step it up tom you said something earlier you said i used to hire twos and try to make them sevens now i has her sevens try to make up tens me and sam is the reason we do the podcast is you you find tens to make you realize oh you're still a seven to give you give you aerial you know break your frame a little bit and say oh that's an area i could be better he really had a certain spark or he had a certain point of view or he had a a habit that i'm gonna pick up here and so you know for me that's the biggest thing with this podcast is to is to just kind of continually surround ourselves with people who are excellent in some area of their life hopefully multiple areas of their life that we can kind of realize oh you you know you're actually a seven there is actually much there are more levels too that thing that you're you're you're trying to do i wanna finish out if you guys allow me to just once you guys think about this going into this year and and if you could i i recommend everybody to write these down first one is family and friends that's the first half the next one is faith and this could be an any order you want the next one is fitness the next one is finance the next one is future self and the sixth one is fun and i want you to set goals for all these if you're if you don't believe in guide you skip faith i i highly recommend you figure out what to believe in because i do believe we're going somewhere great and then i don't want you to set a yearly goal i want you to get jesse there's big ass calendar i want you to start journal and i want you to use a blue pen there we go blue pen and a white piece of paper and i want you to write your goals down and i want you to put them in your shower your vehicle your refrigerator on your desk for spots and i want you to sign off on the bottom and then i want next to each one of those six i want accountability partners that you now are gonna hold your feet to the fire that and then i want you to put your y and it's simon one zero one but it better be a big ass why and you better have people that are willing to tell you you're failing and you're letting yourself done and you're letting me down and i want you to post it on social media i want you to come out of your comfort zone and i want you to say this is what i'm going to do and don't set a yearly ago weekly or monthly steps it could be calories it could be body fat you know it could be going to church it could be jesse jesse i'm gonna time block time with my family and that's what i'm putting on here first but these simple little tools the accountability partners and you better meet with those accountability partners weekly and it better be hard conversations and it better not just last through march and then fall off like most people do and it's gotta be a strong that chad talks about this i got this race that that says keep your commitment you better commit and you better yell from the rooftop that you're gonna do this and it better be a huge why and and the only other thing is try to get into better circles you wanna be a great golfer for go golfer with three scratch golfers you're gonna be better get into the right circles and you do what i'm telling you to on all six of those your life is planned on it's reverse engineered it's manifested and it will come true wanna run through wall that's how i do bam anything we say after this we'll just make the podcast worse just do do the line and let's end the pod this is perfect that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a less travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets in strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast strategies