Episode #5: Jeff Gear, CEO & Co-Founder of TSR Concrete Coatings

Transcript:

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the Service Legend Podcast Episode number five. Let me just make sure we are live. Everyone can hear us. How you doing today, bro?

Didn’t was quite the intro. I felt. I felt pretty.

Privileged.

Such a.

You really.

Hype that.

Up? I do. I did. We have a great editing team, KMO, that did that for us. We have some some viewers here so far. We’ll let everyone get jumped on. Let me do a quick bio of Jeff. I mean, honestly, man, like I was telling you, like, I don’t think anyone knows what’s what here, but or as many people as they as as there’s not as many people that know your level of excellence and what you’ve really done for the industry and this whole service in general. And I’m excited to really bring that to everybody today. But. So you really need no, no introduction. But if I have to give one, we have Jeff Gear here, a former police officer of the great state of Illinois. Right. Is that where.

You. Yeah, very.

Very short time.

But that’s cool. And he’s now the CEO and co-founder of TSR Concrete Coatings, 13 year plus career in home service and home improvement with a background in roofing, windows, siding and bath. And there’s a lot of other things I know you do from owning apartments or different things that you do in real estate. But Jeff fell into this garage coding career because he got his garage coated and then like this stumbled upon this. And so that’s that is. Jeff, welcome to the podcast, man.

Well, hey, man, thanks for having me. I’m actually I’m actually a little surprised it took this long.

But it is what it is.

Five episodes to get you in, you know?

I know, I know. I felt like I was I felt like I was waiting in line. I was waiting in line.

I was thinking about getting you first. And I was like, no, you know, I’ll come in a little I’ll come in a little more patient there. But man, I am just honestly, man, I am stoked to have you here. I’m honored privilege. I’ve been looking up to you just as someone who has really done things right and built the business right, solid operations, the training, and just really developed a world class company. And so you’re someone that I’ve personally looked up to for for a couple of years now. And so for me, it’s a little selfish. One of me here, I’m just I’m just excited to be able to have you here, bro. So.

Well, let’s get this get this rocking. These people, these people probably want to get some answers to some questions.

And, you know, I.

Don’t know if they can write in questions to you, but.

Yeah, they can.

No problem answering most of them. I’m an open book, so yes.

I.

Here we go. Whoever popped that question in there? A lot of this stuff will get edited out for the actual podcast. Facebook user whoever said What’s up, guys? You both need to be on the pod. Let me know what your name was. So as you guys make comments, whether you’re in the Facebook group or on one of the pages, put your name in the comment and then and then say what you want to say. Because sometimes when it gets brought up to stream, it does not say your your username. But if you guys do have specific questions for for Jeff Corey, what’s up, Corey. Corey of easy concrete supply. That’s not.

Here.

Yeah.

Corey, is Corey keeping my rollers in stock?

That’s really short line for you, by the way. Or. Or do you put you with somebody else?

No. No. Well, what I have when I.

Have things going on, I just message hammer.

Cameron But Powell says pallets. Okay, good. Powell There you go.

Love it, man. Corey is another Cody legend for sure. Well, let’s get right into it. If you have comments, seriously, drop them in the in the comment section and I will try to bring them up here. First things first, man, just tell us kind of about the business a little bit from the front end. So how long has the business been around approximate revenue and crews and just how many employees you guys have, things like that?

So it’s got you know.

Obviously there’s been some acquisitions and stuff, but it’s been it’s got a little convoluted. So I kind of go back to 20, 21. We actually started a business in 2017.

And on.

Our first year we did about 2.2 million in revenue. We started essentially we started in April, April 1st of of 2017. And last year we I think we closed the year out at 26 million was the revenue for.

For 2020 126.

With a capital M.

Capital miles.

Yeah, I know.

So we did we had.

We had a great 20, 20, great 20.

21.

Tell us their secrets. Don’t hold back all of them. Trent. Thanks, Trent.

What did he say?

Trent said, tell us all your secrets. And so we did. We had we had a fantastic year in, but we’ve grown and we’ve built sustain. I feel like we’ve built what seems like meteoric growth, but also.

Sustainable long term.

And like you said, a lot of people may or may not know me, but I also keep a pretty low profile. We’re not.

You know.

I’m not all over the place like a lot of these guys are.

So and I like I like.

It that way. I don’t like.

To be.

Out in the forefront. So we’re just we’re just cruising along as the largest residential concrete coating company in the.

Country and.

The biggest littlest company nobody’s ever heard of.

That’s what we want to be.

I love what you said, though, man. It’s like fast growth, but sustainable growth. And I think even in different sectors, whether you’re in roofing, even outside of home improvement, I mean, you could be a nail salon. And putting those two things together is certainly challenging. And I’d love to get into like how, how those things make sense in one sentence, because they say.

Three words, three words replicable, duplicate, able and.

Repeatable. There’s a big risk.

If it doesn’t hit those three things, I don’t do it. So that’s that’s and I think I’ve told you that before. You didn’t like you didn’t listen to me at first, but now you do. But if it doesn’t if it’s not replicable, if it’s not duplicated and it can’t be repeated, then I don’t want any part of it.

So I love that man. Now, is that something that you take into your whole life, too, or just in general that you that you guys do in every business and things like that.

Every every single business, like, you know, you mentioned the real estate thing.

So.

You know, we have we own like a little hotel up north. We’ve got.

A cabin.

Like a cabin resort up north. We have two bigger properties that we rent out. And again, it’s replicable, duplicate, able and repeatable. And so it doesn’t matter if it’s real estate, doesn’t matter if it’s concrete coatings, doesn’t matter if it’s bats. You know, I’m a part owner of a bath company. And so if we can’t do all of those things, because that’s the only way that you’re going to be able to deliver the quality of service to the customers and sustainability and growth within your organization for your employees.

You know, when you see these like.

Rises and falls and companies like how do.

You how are you.

Want I don’t know how these companies, you know, hold on. Most of them don’t. Right. Yeah. They are the same bread. That’s why. Yeah. Replicate will duplicate well and repeatable.

You know.

I just started a seven figure. Really? Started and is on a seven figure run rate and a painting company. And know these these practices and these principles can spread throughout. Coding, painting, roofing, obviously. Bass, real estate. Love it, man. So you said so it was really quick. But for everyone in the in the nosebleeds. So the first year you started in 2017? Mm hmm.

Yeah.

And so we actually ended that year. And by the way, we started with pen tech. Right. So I do want to.

Kind of kind of get we’re not, you know.

Not a pen tech dealer anymore. But, you know, we did we started our our career with with pen tech. And the main reason was, is that I wanted my own garage done. And I called like maybe like seven or eight guys, you know, that I thought could do what I was looking for. And same old story, right? Nobody called me back and one guy showed up and then he was like, it’s ten grand. And I was.

Like, okay.

What do I what do I have to compare it to? I’m not in the concrete coding business. And then I said, okay. And then he never came.

Back and.

And I was like, All right, well, and then I found out that he went out of business later on. But at the end of the day, I was like, I know I’m not the only guy that wants this, right? Like, it’s cool. Like, I’m cool like, like this. This coding is cool. And so I.

Thought.

Well, if I like it, then I think that a lot of other people would like it. So I actually got a hold of Scott Weiner at Penn Tech, who I’d known from. He used to sell bathtub baths to me through bath reps, and we got hooked up. I went to like a little training thing that we went to. And you were Penn Tech dealer. You know how it goes. And it kind of kind of got me into at least the the very minimal knowledge that you need to to start a coding company, which is great for guys that are in the 800 to, you know, probably under 2 to 3 million spot. And so we did that.

And and we were with.

Them until like I think.

2019.

So you started with Pinto, you started the company like did you like the first the first floor you guys did. Was that underpinned tech in the beginning?

Well, we were CSR, but I mean we never actually like one of the things I’ve learned, you.

Know.

Over the last 15 years of being in home improvements is I don’t have a brand, my manufacturer.

Or, or.

Or whoever I’m with like it’s CSR, right? So like some of these companies will really go hard for the manufacturer, but at the end of the day, well, and at the time I was saying they manufactured it. They didn’t, you know, so I knew that. I knew it was like the whole private label thing wasn’t really something that I wanted to hang my hat on. I’ve been down that road before, so it wasn’t like a huge deal. But anyways, we, we, we just went straight. Tcr The whole.

Time and.

It’s been super successful because now I don’t we don’t have to change our marketing or anything like that.

Yeah, for sure. And a lot of the like social media pages. I know you told me one time I was like, people ask you like, why do you have so many followers on Facebook? Who cares these days? Right. And you’re like, that is my ongoing daily, weekly, monthly, yearly billboard, you know? And well, you couldn’t do that if you have your, your, your entire brand in existence is under a franchise or someone else.

So I think I think.

Our brands collectively are probably closing in on 75 to 100000 followers. It’s crazy.

Yeah, freaking awesome. But just.

Wild for a home improvement company.

Right? I mean, if you go.

And look at some of the biggest home improvement companies in the in the nation, I’ll use the filter as an example like we have more followers and leaf filter does. Yeah, that’s, that’s wild. They have a whole team of people. Like in the beginning it was just me, like I was just the one that did it right. So to me it was kind of crazy. Like I would always be like stunning. Not only filter, you know, like we have more, we have more followers than them. So it was pretty neat.

Yeah, that’s really cool. So starting in 2017, started as a tech dealer and found out that it wasn’t the right thing for you, etc. Now when you first started, you had a business partner, right?

Yeah. So Tyler, he, he exited the business and he’s still, I would call it a silent partner.

Not, not not in day.

To day anymore. But he, he exited the business in February of this past year. Yeah. So so Tyler. Russell. So it’s kind of funny. So we were the name of Tzr originally. Like, everybody’s like, what does it stand for?

I’m like.

Yeah, what does it say here? I never Oh.

Yeah, it was.

Supposed to be total surface restoration. And unfortunately it happens to also be Tyler. Steven Russell.

So we just.

Yeah, so he got lucky. We just kind of went with.

It and.

We turned it into what I would consider at least in the Midwest. It’s we’re definitely a household name, household brand. Like you don’t get you don’t get a concrete coating. You don’t get an epoxy floor, you get a CSR coating. Right? And that’s really what the whole vibe was that we were looking for.

Right out of the gate is that we didn’t.

And it was crazy to me like and I don’t know if you felt this way, but I came from what I call real home improvements, roofing windows, siding base, right?

And when.

I stepped into concrete coatings, I was like.

Whoa.

Like, this is antiquated. Like.

It’s like allowed. Yeah. And well, but, you know, in.

Doing that, I saw a lot of opportunity. I’m like, these guys have not a clue what they’re doing. Not not from not from a marketing standpoint, not from a technology standpoint.

And, you know.

And this was five years ago, you didn’t see an ad on Facebook for concrete code and you didn’t see none of that. Like like we did that, like our whole marketing platform has been copied and replicated. I can’t tell you how many times, but it’s awesome. I’m glad that, you know, other people are following it and being successful throughout the country. Like and even when somebody like starts up in our back yard, I’m like, I don’t care. Like it’s, you know, you have to like rest on your, your company and the work that you’ve done and everything that you’ve put into it. You can’t be so concerned about what somebody else is doing.

Yeah. And I’ve actually spoken to random people from Minnesota, from Wisconsin and Chicago, different places, you know, just people that I’ve spoken to and I’ve always asked them, Have you ever heard of TCR? I’m always curious. And every single person has heard of us are like, I.

Haven’t found you can’t get away from me. Ryan We are. We’re branded to the gills, right? So I basically have TCR underwear. I have Tyler’s initials on my underwear. I have Tyler’s initials on my shoes.

So our our our trucks. Yeah.

I do have I do have shoes.

Yeah.

But I our trucks are wrapped our trailers are wrapped to the gills. You know, every morning at every gas station that we have an office near, it’s just like a flood of tcr, you know, trucks that are out there supporting the local economy. We really appreciate the high gas prices this year.

You know, so it’s yeah, yeah, it’s it’s.

It’s been tough. But ultimately.

You know, we’ve got.

22 offices.

Now and it’s pretty wild. You know, the the amount.

Of exposure that you get just with truck and trailer being wrapped.

It’s nuts, man.

So 2017 started had a partner and Tyler I met Tyler for dinner one time and the guy the guy is sick. I love everything he’s into like his Instagram. I love following his Instagram. We’ve got some bad shit all the time. I’m like, This guy just got fat and shit every single, so I love following him on Instagram, checking his stuff out in his trucks and stuff like that. That lowered duly is legit. I want to I actually want to write in that time. But so you had a partner he exited last year and then the the 2 million, was that in 2017 or did that go to four year independent?

No, no. That was that was all 2017 numbers. So just like 2.2, I think.

Interesting. And then what do you really like? Like what’s the answer to 2.2 in the first year? Like was it like what type of activity like produce that in terms of a marketing standpoint, was that the Facebook ads that you guys developed or.

It was it was almost all Facebook.

We didn’t really.

I’ll tell you what, this was never an intention. I had.

A.

15, $20 million home improvement company that I end up leaving to come do this full time.

And it and.

So we set a business plan of a half a million dollars in 2017. And I was like, you know, half million dollar business plan. I kind of put that together. I said, that’ll that’ll give you an income of what you were making as a police officer. It gives me a little bit and we’ll just kind of we’ll just kind of roll with. Right.

Well, I went and I did all the.

Answering of the phones. I did all the marketing. I ran all the leads for 45 to 60 days.

And at the end of it I went, Oh shit.

I go, This is not a half a million dollar business. I go, We’re going to.

Be.

1.5 to 2.5 million. Tyler And he’s like, What?

I’m like.

I go, This is, first of all, it’s not sustainable for what we said we were going to do. I go, we’re going to I go do it. I just went and sold like we had a hundred and 125 or 150,000 sold before we even had a truck, a trailer, grinder, equipment, anything.

And he’s.

Freaking out. He’s freaking out. He’s like, Dude, you can’t like, you can’t sell. You shouldn’t be selling this much business. He’s like, We don’t even have the ability to do the job.

That’s awesome, you know?

And he’s like, We’ve never done a job. He’s like, We don’t. I go, That’s fine, it’s fine. You know? So my, so my philosophy with.

Oh, you’re the visionary is first pushing that ship forward. And he was kind of like following you.

It’s Tyler’s Tyler’s all he’s a lot of brake pedal, but he’s never he was never like, pull the Iraq and spin us out. He was always like, I’m 100% gas all the time. And he was he was riding the brake a little bit to get us around the corners. Right. So, yeah, yeah. No, it was it was pretty wild, like, so we didn’t have anything and we didn’t know how to do any floors. Actually, our first crew was Tyler and his wife. Surprisingly, I’m surprised they’re still married. But she was. She’s out there in a hand grinder, you know.

Getting up at this point. And so he or.

He had just left from Mojave County, Arizona, and came back here. He wanted to come back home.

And yeah, when he when.

He did, I was like, dude, we don’t need you don’t need to go back to being a cop. I go, we’ll just make you a job like people make jobs all the time. Yeah. Look. Look at Corey Henson. This makes he just makes jobs for people.

And actually, I think Corey, if he’s still alive, he’s he has a challenge. He’s supposed to be his salespeople this month. They trying to sell him this this little competition over there, I guess.

But it’s probably not going to happen. Corey Yeah, we’re.

Rooting for you. Corey But this is super, hopefully really, really inspiring. So like there’s a lot of companies, even that service legend we have, there’s a lot of companies that are doing under a million between 500 and a million that have quickly transitioned probably in 12 months from a mid to high six figure run rate and now going into seven figure run rates, which is really inspiring for me to see happen within the client base. But if you guys are listening to this and you guys are just getting started your year in and you think you don’t know what you’re doing or you’re scared or whatever it is, just know that. I mean, kind of like what I’m hearing here, man, is like, like you saw an opportunity and you just executed on what you felt you knew you could do well. And so I would just challenge and encourage everyone listening that to to dip into the arsenal of what you’re good at. Don’t be afraid of partnership. I know a lot of people talk about keeping everything to themselves. I think partnership. I mean, you guys did.

That’s all bullshit.

It is. It is. I, I believe it. Without a doubt. A lot of I think I think historically people wanted to keep everything to themselves.

But everybody everybody who says that they’re the shitty partner. So if you ever run into somebody who says if you ever run, anybody who says that they’re the shitty partner, so don’t go into business with them because they’re just they’re not they’re not the right person. I mean, honestly, at the last exit we.

Had.

You know, we had ten partners. I want partners. I want people that are rowing the boat at the same time as me.

And.

All of those people that that. Are with us and continue to say with us, you know, beyond this.

We’ll we’ll.

We’ll continue to to tense their lives. Right. And so it was it was important to me, like I can’t be everywhere at once. And so I need to have people that I can trust in all these different locations. And it just, you know, it makes sense. Right. And and I’m super proud of the people that we have that we started with and and where they’re at now. Not everybody’s going to going to be with us till the finish line. Right, because people are jumping off the boat at different times. Brad and Dave Peck at Legacy. They exited this last time. Tyler exited. Bryant exited. But the six of us stayed forward and then we’re building on that.

With.

More acquisitions. So that’s cool. Yeah.

That’s amazing. And then so again, for people in the and the nosebleeds, it didn’t here. So 2.2 million the first year, 2021. You said you did what again? 2626 capital M, guys. Capital M so we’ll we’ll get back to that big number here in a second. But let’s get practical a little bit. So who is TSR is like ideal customer because, you know, I think five years ago it was different than what it is now. Right? It’s a little bit different.

I don’t think so. You know, I think that the you know.

The ideal customer I mean, I guess if you probably profiled our all of our customers that are probably between the ages of 38 and 58, they’re really like, you know, landscaping. They probably drive some type of a Cadillac. Lexus, you know, not nothing. That’s that’s crazy. You know, they’re not driving Maseratis or anything like Lamborghinis, but.

They’re not Maseratis, bro. It’s all lambos.

Yeah. Yeah.

We don’t like. We don’t like, I don’t know, maserati’s all right. But it’s not my car for me.

But I think that, you know.

That that being.

Said.

You know, those, those customers, you know, they play golf. You know, there’s there’s a lot of the profile of of the homeowner is generally somebody who spends money on disposable income.

You know you.

Know, what we do is it’s not a.

Need nobody.

Needs a concrete coating. I’ve yet to run into anybody who needs one. And I think I told you when I was in Arizona and we had dinner, I said, you know, one thing I love about this business is, is.

That not.

Once in the history of concrete coatings has there ever one time been a concrete coating emergency? Not one time, you know. So when you get someone that’s calling, you know, no, there’s never been a concrete coating emergency. Whatever it is, can always wait till tomorrow or, you know, but it’s not an emergency. Right?

So, yeah, that’s true.

That’s another thing I love about this business.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the customer is just generally somebody who has.

A, you know, a.

Mild amount of disposable income that likes nice things. Right. And generally when you pull up to their house, they have some type of like concrete curbing something that’s.

That’s.

Their they like aesthetically pleasing things.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Now, I was always I always thought in the Midwest you could dip into a little bit of a need with the salt pitting and things like that. Do you find that to be true there or still is a one?

Yeah. I mean, we fix plenty of I mean, I guess I guess maybe you’re right in that in that regard in that area. And, you know, the area that we live in is that, you know, you get some the winters can be kind of hard on the on the concrete and the coating actually does a fantastic job of holding up to the salt and doesn’t allow it to get into the concrete and damage it.

So there’s a lot of functionality for sure out of a coating out there.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean.

I would say 50% of the garage floors that we do, you know, have some type of pretty, pretty decent damage to it.

Yeah. Okay, cool.

If you look at our before and after pictures, actually, we’ve.

Had the crazy.

We’ve had people we’ve had people tell us like there’s just no way, like, you guys shouldn’t do that. And I’m.

Like, I mean, they look good. I don’t know what to tell you. Yeah, they hold up and.

You guys are.

They hold up. We don’t have a lot of service issues. I mean, I think it also comes down to experience, right? Like our guys have probably done like 20 million square feet of floors and we have over like 25,000 customers. So it’s like.

You know.

We have the our guys have the experience to fix the type of floors that we’re fixing.

Yeah. It’s not like you guys are new, untrained and unqualified out there fixing salt, pitting that is going to bite you. So, like, like in the beginning, did you guys tackle those types of things first, do you think, or do you guys ease into like those types of bigger projects, things like that?

Well, I think that there’s definitely we definitely weren’t taking on like I see some of these companies do that they’ll take on like a like a 10,000 or 20,000 square foot job. They have one crew. I’m like, What are you doing? Then they’re on the forums, they’re asking for help from everybody. And I’m like, maybe just say no. So we didn’t we didn’t take jobs like that until we were until we were ready and maybe we missed out on some revenue.

But, you know.

We don’t we didn’t have some contractors or anything like that. Everybody was employee. All of our trucks and trailers and grinders and everything were bought and paid for by us. So it was like, yeah, we did have to grow. And by the end of 2017 we had four crews.

And you can get a lot.

Done with four crews, right? I mean, you can you can knock down if you had to four or 5000 square foot in a day.

Yeah.

With this and so like right now.

In.

What we would consider our Lena market, which is Lena Madison Quad Cities, I mean I have like 19 or 20 crews. There’s not a job I can’t do.

Yeah.

And I can do it faster. I can do it faster than you.

Yeah. What? That’s me, that’s for sure.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, if I had if I had to, you know, it would be a logistical nightmare. But if I had to, I could. I could throw 19 crews on one job if it was big enough.

Yeah, I know. I saw one. Maybe it was last year. Mersenne one big. Like it was like an elementary school or middle school or college or something or like a massive project. And I felt like I saw like at least ten crews on there. It seemed like.

Yeah, it probably seemed like that.

We, you know.

We, we also, you know, one of the things for the guys that start up, a lot of them I’ve heard this thrown around a bunch of times and I’ve always thought it was was.

Bullshit.

But this two man dance like two of my two guys should be able to do a thousand square feet a day. Like, have you heard that? Like, I don’t know who said.

That, but.

Have you ever tried to do a thousand square feet a day, five days in a row?

You know, I don’t think that that’s sustainable, that.

It’s not.

So morale and culture and, you.

Know. Yeah.

If you’ve ever owned a, you know, a concrete coating.

Company and.

You say that, then you’re an idiot because it’s just not.

Really, you know, you’re.

Going to burn your guys out. If you don’t care about your employees.

Then yeah, go.

Ahead and do it and let me know how long it lasts. But ultimately, like.

We do.

We have like three guys, three man crews and two man crews. But when we started, we basically were building. And so we had a lot of three man crews like.

I would say like, you know, in our.

Guys still kind of complain a little bit sometimes when they’re like, What ever happened to all the three man crews? We just have three men on every job. And I’m like, Well, that’s weird because now you guys, if I put three men with you, you’re back by 1 p.m..

You know.

And, and so.

We used.

To do a lot of three, man, but now it’s like.

5050.

I remember you telling me that one time I, I forget this a while ago, but you were like, there should always be that floater learning and preparing the next crew. You know, if you’re looking to grow, you can’t just hire when you’re looking to start that crew like that third person should be in there 69 320 days before the next crew start or something like that.

Oh, yeah, we’re way ahead. Like, I’m not.

Like right now, like I’m not planning for July. July is already done and planned for we’re we’re planning October and November is what we’re looking towards. We already have these that’s already set, right.

Yeah. Yeah. And what our, what we need and we already.

Have, we have five years worth of data of what we should do, where we should be at a little bit of.

Growth. I don’t.

Know. I’ll be honest. I don’t know how much more we can.

Grow in in.

The current territory that we’re in. I mean, where Lena did Lena Madison quantities of like 1.3 million last month, that’s a lot.

So that’s a lot to manage I imagine too. And well, hopefully we.

Can get on.

How you stay sane. And I think I think a lot of people would be inspired by how a how one man and I know you do a lot too I actually one time like, hey, do you have a C suite? You know, if you’re like, No, I don’t. And so I think a lot of people would be inspired by how you even stay sane and how you stay productive and things like that.

Because I love this shit. That’s why. I mean, if you don’t.

If you don’t.

Yeah, well, I love I love the you know, I’m a sales and marketing guy, but I do.

I am.

Pretty involved, like I actually still do because I like to do it. I actually do our production schedule.

Really? That’s why you’re so damn good at that. I remember you told me one time I asked you, I said, Hey, there’s this big job you like, girl, put three crews on there, knock it out in two days. And I’m.

Like, okay, yeah.

I still I still do. We have ten crews in this office and I do their schedule every single week. So I’m still I’m still intimately involved in in some of those things. I don’t have to do it. I just, you know, I’m just really fast at it and I like to do.

It and it keeps it.

Keeps me in touch with them, right? Like I have a reason to talk to them.

Do you put it on your calendar? Like like is it a to do for you or just your weekly schedule? It’s just on.

There.

It’s it takes me like 4 hours a week.

So I build it.

It takes me like an hour to build it, an hour to run the payroll. And then updates throughout the week is like an hour or two.

It’s cool. I like that. I like how you said it. It keeps you in in the loop, you know, it keeps you in the trenches. That’s probably why you have such a good pulse on things, too, because you’re most most CEOs. It seems like they you know, they want to get out too quick. And I be I mean, I’m guilty of this, too. You’re on the marketing side where sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know as well, you know? And so having mentors and things like that is great, but you try to get out too soon. And then like Alex Ramsey always says, Well, like if I was doing everything, then nothing would go wrong. But what happens is, is you scale and no one knows how to actually train and build the operations. And so the quality goes way down. We try to scale, but it seems like it sounds like you mastered the the growth, the scaling kind of phase, but also you keep your foot in the door, in the trenches to say like on pulse. That’s really.

Interesting.

Yeah. There’s actually not a job here that I can’t do. Except for maybe Kyle, I would say I don’t know how to weld, but he’s pretty good. He’s pretty good at welding, but, you know, trailer axle breaks.

But I, you know.

One of the things I really made sure I did right out of the gate was.

I.

I set all the leads. I did all the marketing for the leads. I ran all the sales. I went and helped Tyler do installs, you know, Tyler named do installs. And I did the follow up on the back side and I’ve done services, right? So there’s nothing you know, one of the things that’s.

Probably unique about us from a owner and.

Our general managers is that.

You can’t get nothing by me let you do this. We’ve already we’ve.

Already done it, right? And so like when we do like acquisitions and like there’s just no way there’s no way that you can do that.

I’m like.

I think I think I think I know.

Yeah. I think I think a lot of people would be surprised at that that that you that you’ve been in the trenches that much because a lot of times I think a lot of the team members, like new team members, technicians and normal employees look up to the CEO or management or leadership or whatever. And they feel like they are. They’re not they have no clue what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, what they’re going through. But you actually can say, no, no, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and here’s how I can help you through that. Do you find that you get more buy in and like like the morale and the culture is better for that?

I would say that like our, like our people like.

And we.

Have 300 would be able to help you have like 320 employees now, but really it’s 320 employees.

Yeah.

And like Mileena guys, you know, a lot of these guys have been with us for the entire time.

Oh, no way. That’s cool.

Five years. Yeah. I mean, Jake. Jake was literally driving his lawnmower past our TSR shop about four months when we started, and he’s been here ever since. You know, we have there’s many stories like that, but I’m just using that as an example. And he was driving his lawnmower passed up. He’s like, Hey, what do you guys do? And I was like, We do concrete coatings. He’s like, I’d like to come work for you.

You know.

And he’s been he’s been a team leader ever since. And so we take really good care of our people. And at least I think we do. Maybe. Maybe they don’t think we do. But I feel like.

You know, I don’t know how.

Many concrete coding companies out there, you know, paying some of the rates that we do, but then also offering benefits.

And pay.

To dig out, all get two weeks paid time off. They get health insurance, dental vision.

You know, they.

Get a matching 4% company match for one K. I mean.

We it’s a.

Legit deal. I mean, our intention was for this to be a career for anybody who joins with us. Like, I don’t hire somebody with the intention that, oh, hey, we’re just going to use you for a season.

Like we, we hire people.

Based on the fact that we think.

That they’re going to be career individuals. Yeah.

And that’s and that’s probably what brings in a lot of good talent, a lot of good and, you know, it helps the recruiting department, I imagine, a lot, too. And that’s what’s really inspiring for me, too, is something that I’m really passionate about personally. And I know a lot of our team members that service legend, like, we just share this concept of professionalizing this industry, you know, like there’s so many owner operators out there that aren’t providing benefits or aren’t providing opportunity because they might reach their income goals personally without scaling the business. Well, no one else is going to reach their income goals or develop their careers. And so like this, this concept of professionalizing the industry is like you’re. Tsr is really the epitome of that. You’re providing so much opportunity, you’re continuing to grow. So your team members are also going to be able to grow their careers and develop their personal attributes.

Well, it’s because we centralized everything.

So yeah, really the.

Key to all of this is that everything we always say the the money flows in and the money flows out of Lena.

Right? And so like.

Our whole marketing team is here.

In.

In this area.

All of our, like.

Our human resources is centralized, like all of it centralized. Right. So really what we want our, our, like Arizona, our, our office that competes with you out there. I mean, all they do is sales, sales and installs. That’s all I have to worry about.

Yeah.

Everything else is taking care of back home, payroll, everything.

Yeah, I like that concept. Everything’s streamlined. Everything’s streamlined. So let me get back to a question here. What is your guys’s like? What is TSA? Maybe top three USP, like unique selling propositions, like how do you guys position yourselves in the eyes of those of those ideal customers? Like, what’s that.

For you guys?

You know, it’s crazy. There’s a lot of them have had some type of epoxy done. And, you know, there’s like always this huge debate about epoxy versus poly area and who like who likes what and whatever. You know, at the end of the day, I don’t care. What I don’t like is I don’t like the job taking more than one day. And because that’s not good for the customer and it’s not good for us. Right.

I mean.

If you look at a lot of the companies that use the epoxy as a base, right, wrong or indifferent.

They generally.

Can’t scale their business. I think think about all the companies that.

That that.

Tout that and then look at the ones that can’t scale. It’s those there’s still two there’s still two trailers.

Right.

And and we’ve our polyurethane floors are fantastic. I mean, we get them done in a day. I mean, it’s it’s the customers are super happy with them. They love the way they look. Our guys like working with the product more. If we have to put a moisture vapor barrier down, we do. It’s not like a huge deal if it’s like, you know, if it does take a two day job.

But but you.

Know, obviously the area aspartic is our is our thing. I would say, like for us, it’s wash, rinse, repeat, right?

Yeah.

And we just do flake floors. Like I don’t mess around with metallics. And actually, I was I told you that in the beginning, like you were starting.

To trail.

Off into doing some of these crazy stuff that these other guys do. And I told you, I’m like, Dude, just stay with what you know.

Yeah. You know? And if the guys.

That want to do like metallics and that want to.

Do the wood planks.

And all.

That, that’s cool.

That’s that’s great. That’s a niche. It’s very expensive. It’s time consuming. Takes multiple days. Again, not replicable, duplicated or repeatable.

Yeah.

And that’s a totally different technician, too, right?

You know, our other unique.

Unique selling proposition is just, quite frankly, we are the best. Like we’re not. Again, we’ve branded ourselves in such a way that that.

You know.

We are the best. You don’t again, you don’t get a concrete coating, you get a CSR floor. Yeah. And it’s like that way with all of our brands, you know, with Legacy, with Icon, with Ninja.

Poly Pro and.

A couple other ones coming up here pretty soon.

Yeah, we’re all looking forward to those. I know I am. I’m not sure if everyone else is a certain people in the country, but I am. I’m excited to see it. Okay. So this is incredible. So we’re the best. Now, when you guys first started, you guys obviously couldn’t use or the past, like, right? I mean, I mean, I guess you could, but like, was it the one day system in the beginning that that was very helpful.

Yeah.

Well, the customers, the customers want the one day system, right.

I mean they don’t, you know.

That they really like the fact that we can also fix a lot of the issues that they have. So whenever we’re able to show them that, you know, the type of work we can do. And if you look at our pictures, one of the things that I love that our guys pride themselves on is like the lip of the garage and cleaning that off. If you look at the before and afters of it, it’s.

Like.

They do like insane work, like the amount of work that they’ll do. They’re like cutting the asphalt straight, rebuilding the lip. It looks fantastic. And so like, like the quality of what they’re doing is fantastic. And in these customers, they just love it, right? And so if you can actually show them the before and afters of what you do, in the beginning, it was just me. I was just a really good salesperson, actually. I wasn’t. I was like, I would consider I’m a mediocre salesperson in coatings. I have really good sales people for for our coatings division.

But I’m not. I did. Okay.

You surround yourself with better people. That’s that’s the.

Key, right.

In that regard.

Right. Almost everybody around me smarter, whether they believe it or not. It’s you know, I definitely do look to hire in specific positions that people are that are smarter than me, like our GM, like our GM’s that run the other offices like these guys are awesome.

You know, and.

What I what I really look for is people who don’t just look for the problem, they look for the solution.

And and.

Almost all of our, all of our people.

That are.

High ranking in CSR or revamp, they all are solution finders. And they don’t come to me with like a bunch of BS, right? Like if I say, if I say, hey, this needs to get done. Like we have this problem and say.

Like, you know, wherever, you know.

I’m assigning you to the task, it’s.

Not.

Calling me with a million questions. It’s, you know, generally these people just take care of it.

Yeah. And I think I’m a big believer that that that culture right there comes from the top down. So you’ve obviously done a phenomenal job to to really, I guess, create that type of culture, though, because you’re always going to attract people that want to follow. You know, in this world you’ve got leaders and followers, right? And some of the followers are going to be leaders with within certain departments or what have you, but they’re really going to be a mirror of your leadership, your culture, your vision, your heart, things like that. So kudos to you too on that, bro.

Now we’re like the Oakland Raiders. We say, like, that’s where the black and silver, you know.

Yeah, yeah. I love the brand, too, you know, it’s definitely a very unique like like I wouldn’t say hardcore, but it’s like definitely macho, definitely kind of cool, you know?

Well, everybody believes in it, right? And so that’s that’s one of the the.

Key.

The key indicators, you know, I can take a I can take somebody who’s maybe not as talented, right. Like raw talent. But if the attitude and the drive and.

The.

The culture is there, we can make them whatever we want them to be. It’s just if they have those three things, we can do whatever, whatever we need to. But the rest of it, these guys, you know, if they don’t have those things.

What’s you know, it’s.

Crazy. Some of the most talented people you ever meet have the worst attitudes.

You know, it’s it’s wild.

Look like Elon Musk, right? I mean, look at some of these guys. You know, they’re very interesting people, but they just get after it.

Oh, they’re just going through and fire in their staff that doesn’t believe.

In the mission. And and he.

Does it with zero apologies.

Yeah. So you don’t like it? Quit.

I saw a headline the other day that he had he just had two twins with his executive just recently.

Probably not the smartest move from the world’s richest man.

No, no, no.

Okay. So back to CSR. So, you know, in terms of marketing, like if you guys could if you could share something at some level to help everybody, like what type of marketing you guys do, what’s the mix? What drives the most leads? What’s the best thing for you guys just to share what you could share?

Wouldn’t you like to.

Know.

Your Arizona market, your other markets? You know what I mean?

Oh, okay. Okay, okay.

Well, obviously, we’re very social media. Our presence on social media is probably second to.

None right.

Now. We carry that across all of our brands. And so we always stay with a very heavy Facebook Instagram.

Model.

Followed up.

By Google.

Ads. And we do a pretty fair amount of TV advertising as well, because the TV advertising, I always feel like hits a different demographic than the social media. Like, it’s, you know, generally I don’t watch the news anymore.

But I know that the people.

In there 55 and up, you know, are watching those programs. And so I’m watching Netflix at night and then I’m falling asleep.

But there are.

People that do watch the news.

And so we do.

We do a pretty a pretty healthy mix of it. And then we try to keep our marketing budget under 7%, which I think is I think last month we did 6.8.

Wow, that’s awesome. And I know TV’s legit for sure. Google ads could get up there. It seems like a lot of companies when they start, you know, like they they, you know, it’s challenging to do certain things that you might be able to do or a one or, you know.

It’s just it’s not knowing your numbers. Right. So like we keep track of everything obviously daily and weekly.

But yeah, I would say like.

Here’s a good example. And Lena last month, our goal was 1,050,000 in net volume. Right.

Well. How do you get there?

It’s cool. It’s a cool number to say. Right. So so how would you get there? Like, I’ll ask you the question now. So how would you get there to that number?

To a million, let’s call it a million. Like like like the business plan there from a marketing perspective. Mm hmm. Well, I mean, I think any goal always starts with determining the finish line, so. I think so. Hey, let’s figure that out. It’s $1,000,000 reverse engineer. And I would reverse engineer that all the way down to a lead cost. Appointment cost. Cost to acquire customer. Those three numbers there which I have a a sales and marketing KPI calculator for everyone that wants one. You can hit me up for.

That and.

Throw all that shit out. Okay. I’m going to show you how to do it.

All right? Let us know. Let us know.

Okay. So I didn’t.

Finish, but.

But I.

Understand it. But concrete coatings, like one of the rules that I use is keep it simple, stupid, like don’t overcomplicate it. First of all, you need a million bucks. What’s your average ticket? Right. And so we know in that particular market, our average ticket generally is around 40 to 50. Okay. So that tells you how many sales that you need, right? Which in this particular instance was 247 sales is what I needed.

Now I know.

That my team generally demo is at about 85%, right? So now I got to get 549 demos to hit 247 net sales. We issue it 80% of the leads that we bring in. So that’s 646 issued leads that are going to turn into a demo and then 807 inquiries, right?

Yeah.

Does that make sense to you?

Yeah. Yeah. I like where you started, too, with the average ticket. You know.

Average ticket drives everything, right? So if your average ticket is 3500, it’s not 807 inquiries. It’s probably a thousand, right?

Mm hmm. Yeah.

And so I do have this calculator that does. You’ve got to punch in a couple of numbers. So if you punch in your your cost per lead, your average ticket, and it basically figures out all those numbers for you right there. But the average ticket is key to this because if you get your average ticket first, right. So you have your your goal average ticket, and that determines how many sales you need to make, obviously, to get there. And then and then you start with that number and then reverse engineer that back, it sounds like.

Yeah. And then the most important people in that in that scenario starts at your your call center, your marketing team.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very interesting.

What happens with the RA inquiry?

Yeah.

Translating into an issue, into a demo, into a sale, you know. And then we have metrics, you know, that we know and we know, you know, because we’ve been doing this for a while and we’ve been doing it in multiple markets across the United States. Like I don’t have the same goal for Phoenix like and you probably, you probably know this, but you probably throw away about 60% or 40% of your leads that come in.

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s our average ton of out of like the, the.

Capital of out of area leads.

Like, what the heck?

Well, Minnesota. Well, they’re all coming from where you’re at. So, like, they should know TSR, Cardinal TSR and TSR or TSR and Cardinal or a lot of them, probably. Have you guys had any, like a double customers yet that have?

Oh, yeah, really. A lot of.

A lot of them live in.

Mesa. Yeah. Yeah.

Because, because they can fly direct out of Rockford so they get a coating here and then they get another coating down there. But but what we found is.

That what I.

Would Phoenix is what I would consider a very transient market. And so because people are either living there part time or there are a lot of visitors, you know, and so when they get there, they might live in New York, they might be on vacation in Phoenix, and they get it served an ad they like. Oh, yeah, I would love to have that at my house. And they’re like, Bam! But they live in New York and they don’t have a.

Concrete in Phoenix.

And so.

Yeah, so.

So in Phoenix we throw away our.

Issue.

Percentage is 60%.

From.

Is is the goal from 80.

What percentage is that you’re looking for?

60%.

And for what metric? What is it for?

For. For inquiry to issue appointment.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I always try to get up to 70%, but do you find if you get too high, the quality goes down because they’re just focusing on the wrong metric or.

Oh, it depends on the area. Right. So I would say, like I’ll give you an example.

In in.

Our icon brand, they issue it 92%.

Holy mackerel. That sounds like a frickin freighter.

Oh, that’s insane.

Right.

Right there.

Yeah.

So what we know, we know by market.

Really.

What the what the metrics look like across the board.

And so it sounds like you guys do track, okay, lead conversion rate to an appointment and then you have your your sales closing rate. You have probably a rehash rate like are these are these numbers that that that you keep track of? Or is there like maybe like a leadership person there that might keep track of them or how does that work?

So we do a marketing meeting every every Tuesday or.

Wednesday, and.

I present the numbers to the team. But it’s all, it’s all in market share.

Yeah. Yeah. So I just pulled now is it automatically pulled, I imagine probably for you. No.

No.

How many? How many markets do you have in your market share?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. There you go. It sounds like you might need a virtual assistant to knock out something.

We’re working. We’re working on a you know, it’s growing pains, right? So we’re working on a different a different CRM that will actually serve our needs. You know, Market Sharp is was, you know, and you find these things right as you grow in business when you’re the problems that you had.

At.

At $2 million just get exacerbated.

At.

$75 million. Right. And so and so you learn to cope with them, but then eventually you just get tired of dealing with it and you’re like, I would just much rather just go to a different program that’s going to serve our needs.

Can you disclose the new program yet?

Yeah. Builder Prime.

Builder, prime. After looking at that one. I’m working on one right now to. We’ll see how that works.

So but because we’re.

Transitioning, you know.

A massive company, it’s like turning the Titanic, right? So like, I have to make.

Sure that.

I’ve been building it for about six weeks.

Now and we won’t.

Officially launch it.

Until January one. Nice.

Nice. Okay, cool. So some really cool marketing insights there. And I like how you simplified things because I was getting ready to get pretty complicated. So I like how you did that. Now.

Well, here’s here’s why I do it, right. Yeah. Do you think tier people give two shits about how much you spend on Facebook ads?

They’ve which people. That’s probably the question.

Well, but.

But it doesn’t matter, right? It’s not something they can control.

Yeah.

So. So when you’re feeding the data and the metrics to these to your your employees, feed them the data and the metrics of the things that they can control. They can’t control how much you spend. That’s not their problem. Yeah, they can control how many leads you gave them. What you spent is irrelevant to them.

Hmm. That’s your.

Fault. It’s the opportunities they need. Four points a day or I need X appointments a day. Or I need what? I like that. I like how you simplify things because I think sometimes I’m more of a marketing person than than a home service GM. I’ve had to learn those things myself. But I think I think a lot of times smaller companies like, like, like Cardinal and like all these clients we have at Service Legend, they do complicate things and they do overanalyze things, and I’m super guilty of that. Why do you think that is?

Because some asshole at a conference told.

You you should. Probably.

I’ve been to a.

Few of them.

Yeah, some. Some guru told you that you should focus on this and you’re like, Oh, I need to. And then you go to another one. He’s like, No, you need to focus on this.

And then at the at the end of the day.

I care about the things that I can control, which I control, the marketing spend me and Joey.

Do, and then I feed the data.

And metrics back to the to my people in a way that they can control them.

Right. And if you don’t do that, like.

All you’re doing is they’re fighting and losing battle because they didn’t they can’t control that. You overspent. That’s not their fault. Like all the KPI, like the how much you spent per lead and all that, like how much a lead costs. That’s not their problem. Their problem is getting 80% of what? You bring them out the door.

Yeah. I love that.

Now, is there any channels that you guys have stopped marketing on? Like in the past, I just haven’t worked that were just like, don’t ever use that ever again for anybody.

Home shows. Not that they didn’t work. They worked extremely well. I just hate them.

Why do you hate home shows?

Have you ever worked a home show?

Dude, actually. So when I. Terrible. I used to work there in in California before I started the marketing company and. Yeah, I mean, I guess I wasn’t that fun, but I’m more of a I am an extrovert, so I do. I like seeing people talk and things.

Like it’s.

You know what it is? It’s the logistics of it. Right. So what I’ll tell you and what’s actually impressive, if you’ve ever seen like, like Lee Filters and other, I’ll just use them again as an example for a company that’s so big, they’re their road home show thing is like it’s pretty crazy how many home shows they do in a weekend, right? Like it’s pretty wild. And so.

We did.

We had a tremendous home show program for a long time.

And but we.

Didn’t like hold our, hold our hat on it, right? Like we were all digital. All digital. And that was kind of an ancillary thing that we did. And thank God, because COVID hit and then you couldn’t do it if you were a home show based business before you were Sol.

Right.

Because you didn’t have the ability to pivot like we did. And so when we started TCR, I told Tyler, I said, We’re digital everything. We’re digital marketing, we’re digital contracts, we’re, you know, just everything is digital. And so and we would do home shows on the side.

And, you know, honestly.

It’s just a lot of logistical problems like, you know, setting the booth up a day before working the two or three four day show and then tearing the booth down. I mean, that’s a that’s a whole team, not to mention that, you know, you might pay three or four or five grand for a spot because you probably need a ten by 20.

Right. Yeah.

And and what if nobody comes?

You’re screwed. Really?

I mean, how many home shows did you work whenever you’re working for Steve Holloway that you just didn’t get the results that you wanted in the.

You know.

That’s the hard part about a home show is that you’re completely reliant on their marketing to get people to their show. And I said, I don’t ever want to be reliant on somebody else.

You know.

I’m reliant on myself. Jeff Geer.

You know, Joey.

Tsr I’m not going to put my my future in the hands of some home show person.

Yeah, yeah. I like that a lot. You guys stopped home shows, and this is kind of like Rapid Fire, by the way. But do you guys have any special niche initiatives to attract online reviews? Is there anything specific that you guys do? Because a lot of the challenges I see out there with guys that are doing a million or 2 million even even though they get there, they don’t have this like consistent flow of new reviews coming in.

Yeah, so we have a great reviews. If you look at our Facebook page, it’s every day it’s popping, right?

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it’s every day, every.

Day, all day. And it’s in between, every post.

Right?

So we get a lot of Google reviews. So I kind of give everybody.

The key to that.

I won’t even charge you for it, but we use. Nice job. But we we integrate our nice job into our QuickBooks.

Very nice.

And so we hit them on the front side and the back.

Side and.

We had our Google reviews have gone up like in the last three months. They’ve gone up 450.

Reviews.

Across the board.

Yeah.

Wow, that’s incredible.

Yeah.

By the way, Google’s Google’s bullshit. So if you work for Google and you’re listening to this.

Suck.

Because we had 400 reviews, this is no bullshit. This pisses me off. And we had a 4.7 rating, 200 reviews. Later, we finally got to 4.8.

Wow. That’s. That’s weird. Yeah, I’m on Yelp, too. Like, Yelp’s got an interesting. It’s pay to play. They only spend more money on Google ads. Part of what they do.

Yeah, but nice job. Dot com, guys. Integrate that into your CRM or QuickBooks or however you want to do it. Hit them on the front side for review, hit them on the backside for a review.

And it’ll make all.

The world of difference for your for your Google reviews. Like we, you know, we, we thought we were pretty good about getting Google reviews until we implemented that.

And it made.

It just was crazy.

Yeah. If you guys anyone listening that’s a service legend client in the new service legend in the academy. There’s going to be the vendor village that we have in there. There’s special discounts that I went out and got from nice job. And so it’s in the actual Service Legend Academy where you can find all of our trainings recordings and you can find discounts there. So if you’re not a client, obviously sign up to be a client so you can get discounts on. Nice job.

There you go. It’s awesome.

It’s also part of our sales pitch.

Too, by the way.

Oh, the reviews or a nice job?

No, it’s part of our sales pitch in the house.

Oh, okay.

Hey, if I. If I. If I suck. If you didn’t think I was very good, you’re actually going to get a review of it on me, whether you purchase or not.

Wow.

Okay. I like how you guys insert reviews in there from that.

Yeah. You want to.

Have the reviews in your in your sales presentation? Because that’s what this whole thing is about, right? I mean, one of the best leads you can get is a referral lead. And so we’re always trying to spur up more of those.

In.

And put the onus on the sales rep. And then the same thing when the production tech goes out, hey, when I’m done here today, you’re going to get a review about how good I did or how bad I did. Please be honest.

I love that. And then do you guys do any follow up marketing like all those leads you guys pay for, all the estimates you paid for that don’t close. You guys do follow ups, rehash things like that.

Yeah. We’re monsters.

Okay, there, there. He’s out of the cage, you guys. I got him out of the cage.

Yeah. So we. We have a.

Gentleman. I’ll give him a shout out because he’s probably watching. He’s probably sitting at his desk watching this right now. But so we have a guy, Justice Reed, who is our our rehash specialist. We use we currently use Hatch, which I don’t know if you’re using Hatch, but we use Hatch not on the front side of the lead, on the back side of the lead. So a lot of guys will use it for speed of lead because they’re too slow at getting to their leads. But we have ten markers, so it’s not a problem. So we use hatch on the back side of of a sale as follow up and justice I think you did over 300 K I probably shortcutting it I think I have it right down here because I knew you were going to ask me.

I don’t shortcut know a shortcut. He’s waiting for this moment.

61 deals for 340,000.

For the year. So far.

No. For last month.

Oh, just last month. Wow, that’s incredible. So that’s the power. You know, I see it in the forums all the time. They’re like, hey, you know what? If they want to work with me, they’ll call me back. Have you heard that one?

Actually, I saw that the other day. I saw somebody was you know, I try to stay incognito on those and I don’t try to comment on everything because I can get myself into trouble.

Yeah.

But I when somebody says that like that is literally what this industry is, right? Like that that was that. It’s that mindset. It’s that mentality that has allowed guys like, like myself and my, my partners to to walk into concrete coatings and go.

No, we’re.

Going to do this the real.

Way, not.

Not the way that you’ve been doing it since 1970. And and that’s why we’ve we’ve had a lot of successes, because all we have to do is is apply basic principles and be consistent about them. But we do that every single time. So it’s actually I think it’s programmed into our system that three days after.

A lead.

Was ran, we follow up with the people.

All we do is follow up. Justice says, Hey.

Sends him a message. He says, Hey, how are you doing? How are you doing, Ryan? I happened to notice Jeff was out at your house the other day. Just curious how he did. I mean, it’s literally that simple.

I followed up with people like. Like on the marketing side for the agency to say, hey, and well, actually, so I so I have a I have a self support lady named Angelica. She is a rock star. She called somebody the other day and won a bid back. And the guy or the lady goes, Oh, I was just curious about step six and seven and wanted to know more. And I’m like, well, nobody knew that, you know? And it’s like such a simple thing. So we told her, Hey, here’s how we do step, step six and seven. And that did it. She wanted to move forward. So is it is it that simple, Jeff, to just, like, literally pick up the phone and just say, hey, I want to follow up with you?

It’s literally that simple, like, but.

Nobody wants to employ somebody to take the time to do that. I was I was the first one. This is what’s wild. So I was the first one that employed a full time videographer in 2018 and 2018. The beginning of 2018, I had a full time videographer as a concrete coatings company. And dude, everybody made.

Fun of me. Everybody did.

Yeah, they, I was.

They, they it’s.

It’s not funny now.

Is it. Yeah.

And now they’re, they’re probably in a little ball crying right now.

But everybody made fun of me for having a full time videographer. But the amount of content that we generated.

In that time frame.

Was insane.

And we still use use it today, you know.

Some of it. And, you know, we’ve also got we’ve got a different videographer. We have like a much better program now. But people just thought I was crazy for doing that. And it’s wild to think that.

Now.

That’s like a.

Whole.

Like it’s it’s basically if you own a home improvement company, it’s a job. It’s one of the people that you have to employ. Do you have a full time videographer?

Well, we have a lot of different solutions, but not like full time at Cardinal. But we have we have a creative director here. We have a lot of contractors locally that do a bunch of stuff for us. So we basically do we have a lot of access to it also.

I had a full time employee. That’s what he does, what his job was. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I don’t have a full time videographer myself, but my my business partner, Marc always listening. He has a lot of experience in it. But we have a we have a bunch of contractors locally that we use, but we have a creative director service and we kind of mix them all together a little bit, you know, some. Yeah, some softwares.

But I didn’t have a service legend.

Yeah, yeah. So it’s a little unique for me. But yeah, we got a great team that can help anytime. That’s pretty interesting, though. So you thought that content was important back then? What made you think content was so important back then?

Because it’s a very visual product, right? I mean, everything about what we do every day is coatings. It’s it’s the whole process is, is that we’re going to come to your house, we’re going to do this great coding. It’s going to look fantastic by four or 5 p.m..

Right? And the whole.

Mindset and process of that is that.

You know, you have to.

Be able to show that and just before and after pictures aren’t going to cut it.

You know, and it’s funny.

What is a company’s name? Some company encore. I remember I sent you the video.

They they.

Literally copy our commercial.

Almost verbatim.

And that’s the franchise, too, right?

Yeah, they’re a franchise. No, honestly, like, I was a little pissy about it first because it was like such a rip off of our commercial.

But then I’m like, garage opening up and everything.

Everything they copy, they literally copied everything. And, you know, me and Joe, Joey was kind of kind of stewing about it. And I said, if it’s so.

Great that.

That they’re copying it, like, you already know, we’re three steps ahead of them with the next ad, right? So don’t don’t worry about somebody.

Copying what we.

Posted a year and a half.

Ago. Yeah.

Yeah, I see that a lot with myself too. Like, it’s very interesting. Do you guys do anything special? Like on production day? Like the day of an install? Like, is there anything special you guys do that helps kind of, I guess, create an awesome customer experience or create raving fans like on production day, like does it lead technician do something special? Was there a project manager or anyone that does anything special there?

You know.

I kind of leave that up to the guys.

I’m not you know, we have.

The yard signs and all that, all that stuff. You know, we did the whole take a picture with the customer. Actually, Aaron, in our Madison office is like the.

King of.

Getting a picture with the customer. He’s got his arm around them. They love that guy, you know. But every every kind of production tech, your team leader kind of has their own little thing that they do. I probably should standardize that, but I also like them to have a little bit.

Of freedom with it as well.

But it really kind of starts with when they get to the job site.

We have a.

Guy, William Graf, he like. He’s really good at setting the expectation.

Right.

Right out of the gate. And I know a lot of guys have kind of learned that from him, but he gets to, you know, backs the truck in, goes to the door, goes over the contract with them, shows them the flake, makes sure it’s the right color because you know how salesmen are.

And and the.

Whole process when he gets there is very informative. He says, this is what it is. This is what we’re going to do. This is how long I think it’s going to take by looking at it right now.

And, you know and.

I’ll let you know when we go on lunch and then I’ll give you a better time frame.

That’s awesome. So clear communication, clear expectations, professional. We’re going over things. Here’s the color, here’s the job. There’s no surprises at 4 p.m. on the customers perspective, that’s awesome.

We want to get.

Paid and we want them to want to pay us.

Right at the end. I don’t want.

To get to the end, actually. A lot of yeah, a lot of companies actually have problems collecting final payments. It seems like it’s a huge issue obviously in home improvement, but in encoding specifically, if anything special you guys do there, just get a form sign at the end or.

No. I mean, I don’t even.

Have them sign a form. It’s on the original contract that says payments to a completion. So again, it’s all about salesmen setting the correct marketing, setting the expectation sales, setting the correct expectation, production, setting the expectation. All of those things have to align. And so if we’re all saying the same thing all the way through, then the customer there is no deviation. Because if the customer says something other than that, he’s either lying or one of our team members messed up and then we just drill down on which one it is. Generally, the customer wouldn’t say lies, maybe just didn’t remember it correctly.

Yeah, we actually just started our sales coaching clinics at Service Legend just this last Wednesday. And Hunter, the CEO of Sparks actually is is running those. And it’s just like a Q&A, just having that support for the clients. And one of the clients was actually talking about expectations and I said the same thing. I’m like, look, so the salesperson has this has has one message that they land the plane with from an expectations perspective. Well, the person that’s scheduling the install carry that same message, lead tech, same message. And it’s that consistency that you’re always talking about here from the from the actual operations itself. But you guys really live that in every single aspect of the business. It’s pretty incredible.

So I don’t know if you guys do this, but we make our new salesmen do two weeks of installation, training.

Not two weeks. Not two weeks.

Yeah.

They have to do two weeks in the field.

We’ve done we’ve done like much shorter like a day or to.

Make them do two weeks.

In in the trenches. I love that.

Yeah.

So somebody just asked on payment topic, are you asking for a deposit in what percentage upfront. So 30%. We’re in so many different markets and basically some of them don’t allow more than 30% and we don’t really need it. So for us, I don’t know, 30% is is what it is. If I can’t cash all the rest of it, I probably shouldn’t be in business. So.

Okay. Cool. Getting to the end here a little bit. I know I’ve had you for over an hour now. Thank you for your time, bro. How do you guys hire? Interview on board training. Is that important to you guys?

No, not at all.

So we’re very fortunate.

Now to have we have.

Just a fantastic recruiting.

Team.

So for some of our more local positions, you know, like I might just make a Facebook post or something myself and say, Hey, before I post this, I’m looking for this, this position. But if anybody knows, let me know and I’ll let that sit there for a day or two. And I generally like if it’s an office admin or marketing or something like that, I don’t have to dig too far, but like April and Cory just do a fantastic job of of recruiting.

And I mean, they can.

Fill it they can fill an office with four techs like that.

So we don’t.

We don’t struggle too much on that. And honestly, in the past, like we’ve had, we used to have a waiting list. We still kind of kind of do have a waiting list of guys, which was just totally unheard of. You know, I would go to these meetings, people like, well, it’s so hard to find people. And I said, I said, Well, there’s a difference in hard to find.

You know, nobody.

Wants to work, right? Is it kind of like the big thing, like, oh, nobody wants to work anymore? So I go, Stop that bullshit. You need to learn something. There’s a difference between nobody wants to work and nobody wants to work for you.

Yeah.

And quite frankly, judging by the way your attitude is, I wouldn’t want to work for you. And so so if you have, if you’re doing that and you have people who.

Don’t want to, you know, if if you’re if your boss is saying nobody, nobody wants.

To work, everybody’s a lazy piece of.

Shit.

Like this. Like, wants to work for that guy.

Yeah, yeah. You know.

All the time. And it’s like. It’s like you just want to, like, shake the guy or the girl and be like, bro, like, put the pride to the side. And but also, I see a lot of times, like, no one, no one has a process for anything. Like, there’s no there’s no documentation, there’s no systems or policies. And do you guys, like have a really solid process in place for like, like everything’s documented and things like that, I imagine.

Yeah. So Cory and April two, we’ve had a big transition here this last year and go into like more of like a corporate like structure of, of how that works. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect yet because.

And.

It’s not Cory and April’s fault. It’s really like our fault, like as Gmb’s. And because, you know, I’m still a sales guy at heart, right? So they’ll they’ll send us people to interview and I’m like, I’ll interview them. And then I like, forget to get back to them or whatever. And then April sent me emails that subliminally say F-you and.

You know.

But she she’s really, you know, she wants the feedback on her position, which I which I totally agree I get so.

She she but she’s like.

Like right now example we’re hiring some sales reps in like.

Birmingham.

For that office. And I think there’s like four or five or six candidates out there that are pretty solid. And, you know, Justin hasn’t gotten back to her.

Yet, even.

Though I know he’s interviewed him. There’s like there’s still like that communication breakdown. And so I think there’s actually like we’re probably going to go towards more of a.

Which, again.

Another app, another program to use. Right. But I think it’s called greenhouse maybe we’ve looked at potentially using.

That’s cool. Yeah, I know one of my mentors, Brandon Vaughn. Brandon if you’re listening, shout out to you, bro. But he he has this he has a coaching program called Conquer and there’s a training in there called the Ultimate Hiring Flywheel. It talks about developing like this hit list and you’re always hiring like you shouldn’t hire. When you need to hire, you’re just always hiring. You know, you’re always trying to find people that are going to help build the dream and be a part of the vision. And he talks about developing like an actual hit list and like, like basically a waitlist, you know, and and it’s so important and I see that a lot where people when they need to hire, that’s when they start hiring. So there’s like there’s this probably 3 to 6 week period where it’s just, it sucks because that person should have been hired six weeks ago.

Yeah, we have some of that. Like I will say that, you know, for us we’re not we’re not quite so dependent on that anymore. Like we went from 180 like this is, this is crazy. This is crazy. Stats went from 180 employees in February to 320 today.

Late February this year. February last year.

February of this.

Year.

We macaroni.

Bro. Yeah. Yeah. And that. That was pretty wild, you.

Know, for that, the amount of growth that we had.

And you’re still alive.

Yeah, I’m. I got a few. If you look, I get a few more gray hairs, but.

I got a couple coming in. I’m like, I’m 29. I just turned 29. I’m like, they’re they are starting to show a bit.

Yeah, it’s culture and culture. Salt and pepper. Right. Oh, but we’re still working on defining what that process is and how that works and how smooth it’s going to be.

And it’s.

I will say it’s always like all of our processes are always open for renegotiation as far as.

What.

What that looks like. Right. And we’ve changed it. I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t say we changed it a lot, but I would say like like yearly at least there’s a there’s a there’s a change in the process of how those types of things work. And I think that.

You know.

Korea and April are doing a great job of defining what that’s going to look like in 2023. I’m pretty I’m pretty pumped for what their processes are going to be.

That’s cool, man. We have Mason from concrete coding guy. Hey, Mason, really quickly, man. This will be this recording will actually be in the Service Legends Facebook group. So you can go in there any time and watch the replay. The podcast, the audio version will be on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, you name it here in the next couple of days, probably early next week. So make sure you grab that. I mean, you can download it from the group, things like that too. Man.

I did want to talk a little bit about I.

Don’t know if you had another question, but.

I’ve got a couple more, but it’s okay.

But like when you when you move forward.

So I get a lot of questions, like especially when I was in the Penn Tech group, right? Like they would just they would just like anytime anybody had a question, they would just send it to me and I’m like, All right.

Well.

I’ll start sending you guys an invoice.

But one of the one.

Of the biggest questions I got was like, when do we know when to grow? Right? When do we know when to add an ex trailer? When do we know to do this? And we still use this exact same formula today.

And I think that.

It’s it’ll ring true for anybody. But when we get to 9.5 weeks out, if your current trailer, your current trailer basis gets to nine and a half weeks out, buy another truck at another trailer.

Wow.

Okay. And now y that’s pretty specific. Like, how did you guys find that out?

Because that’s about when your customers start to get pissed.

That’s a good reason. Yeah. Yeah.

They’re like, they’re like ten weeks out. Like, what kind of operation are you guys running here?

So, like.

I’m doing a proxy now.

Yeah, exactly.

Your proxy over.

Yeah. So.

So when we got to just shy of ten weeks.

We would, we would get.

Another truck because now you have enough work.

Right.

And I think that’s where a lot of these guys get scared is that they feel like they don’t have enough work to move.

Forward and they don’t want to recruit.

Or hire or train some more guys if they don’t have the work for them. But I would just say, you know, when you get to nine and a half weeks, be ready to have that. And then this is what I would always do to Tyler is I would set.

The date that.

That second truck or that third truck or force truck, whatever.

Day that.

I wanted, I would just say, Tyler, this truck and trailer needs to be ready to go. It’s seven, eight I would say 812.

That’s the day.

That that thing goes.

Live. That’s cool.

Because if you don’t set the date, they’ll never hit it.

Yeah. You’re such a visionary. It’s so awesome to see. And what’s so interesting about this interview here is and just for everyone listening, we’re also going to do another one. So just a little hype on that is we’re going to do another episode talking about revamp and how Jeff is acquiring companies and really taking them to a another level of professionalism, operations and scale. And we’ll we’ll talk about that on that on the interview. But let me ask you this here so we can transition. What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

I tell people all the time. So Alan Erskine from Elenco. Long time ago, I was a young kid. I was sitting at a table with a bunch of millionaires I don’t have.

Maybe I had a couple.

A couple of dollar bills to rub together. Might not have been quarters. Maybe it was dollars, but.

I noticed that.

I didn’t notice it. But Alan noticed that I that I had a lot to say.

And but I didn’t.

He goes, kid. He goes, No matter what you say, it doesn’t matter. You ain’t got no skin in the game. He goes, When you’ve got some skin in the game, you come talk to me. And you know, because at that point, I think I was just like a salesman, salesman or sales manager or something like that. And it was like literally the most humbling thing that nobody or somebody ever said to me. Like, I mean, honestly, I still get chills, like, thinking about.

It because.

It totally changed my life at that. It was like literally at that point. I like he said that to me in front of all these like pretty prominent people in the home improvement industry. And I was like, I just sat there, I didn’t put my head down. I just was like, I thought about it, right? And I was like, okay, well, I need to I need to listen more and talk less. And it’s probably why, you know, there’s a lot of people that don’t know that we’re the one of the largest. I wouldn’t say that one of I really feel like we are the largest residential concrete code. I’ve never met anybody that’s bigger than us.

Yeah, I think you guys are. I mean. I mean, unless you take some rent, if there’s a franchise that might have more crews in total, I mean, talk about revenue, talking about culture, talk about impact, talk about those things. I don’t know.

But but I will say that that that that one statement from.

Allen.

Probably changed the course of my life, right? Not necessarily.

Where, you.

Know, where I was, where I wanted to be, but it definitely made me go, okay. Well, so I’ve used that philosophy every time. Any time I do something, I’m like, I need a piece. If I’m going to do this, I need a piece. I need to have I need to have some.

You know.

Vested interest in this. And I find, you know, there’s there’s so many people out there that don’t want the responsibility of of having skin in the game. Right? Because at any point, they can just walk away and it’s no big deal.

Mm hmm.

But then they get a little skin in the game. And you know what? Now you sink or swim with that ship.

Yeah, for sure. I like what you said. Listen more. Talk less. I’ve actually been given that advice. I think he might have told me that, actually. Well, Tommy told me that, too. So I’m like, okay.

I think I told you that at dinner. I said, Man, you need to shut up.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I’m always talking. I’ve got this thing about me. But, you know, as I’ve gotten a little older and since that dinner, because that was like.

Two years ago.

Yeah, about two years ago. I definitely learned since then, but I share that same thing. I can relate with you a lot on that and. Why do you think like were you constantly like trying to just get to that next level by your own? Like, well or like why do you think someone gave you that advice?

The advice from.

Alan I think that he.

Probably saw.

That I, that I could do it.

But like a lot of people, I was probably scared, right? So in order to get a piece at that time, which it was a lot of money, it was like 250,000 or something like that.

200,000 maybe.

I basically mortgaged my life.

I put every everything I had on the table at that point. You know, I.

Was a kid. I was 24 years old, 25, brand.

New, brand new baby. You know, I had nothing, you know, and I actually.

Conned the bank into giving me the money.

And if it.

Didn’t work out, we’d probably.

I don’t know. I don’t know where I would be.

But I mean, we worked for Cardinal, you know what I mean?

I don’t know where I would be.

I’ll be honest with you, but I got I got them to believe in me. And so it’s kind of like the whole the whole process, right. Is like.

All the way back then, I got.

A bank to.

Believe in me because.

I basically mortgaged my whole life, my car. So I didn’t have loans on this other stuff, but I have mortgaged everything I had in my house all the way to the hill.

Right. And.

I remember at one point I had like I want to say I was down to like my last 700 bucks.

And I had two leads that day. Then.

Like I was going to jail. Like if I didn’t sell it, I was I was they were going to haul me out of there in a cop car because I wasn’t leaving without a sale. And so I don’t think that you really, truly know how good or how great you can be until you got your back all the way to the wall. Right. Because like it was getting to the point where like, I might not have gas money to get to my next lead.

You know, all.

All the way back.

Then.

That’s amazing, man. Thanks for sharing. Um.

I don’t really I don’t really I.

Don’t really like reminiscing about that, to be honest with you.

Well, no.

What there’s a lot of people out there right now that probably feel that exact same way. And you took that to 26 mil last year and probably going to double and triple or who knows what’s going to happen. You probably know. But you know, like if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re still listening, I mean, we still got some listeners and thank you guys for still tuning in. Just know that I feel like that sometimes too, you know, I’m like, okay, back against the wall. Let’s go. You know, and I think you’ve got to have I love those Modelo commercials. You know, it’s that fighting spirit and the fat ass commercials they have. And like, that’s what like and then I go back to, you know, I played sports my whole life, football, baseball. And I always my coach is always talked about this factor. You know, you’ve got to have this it factor. And you are definitely just a amazing example of that. But if you are owning your own business right now, you own a concrete coating business, a painting company, you have the it factor. You are the leader, your back is against the wall. And so the only option is to push through whatever it is right in front of you. And Jeff is an amazing example of that. Let me ask you this. What is the worst advice you’ve ever received?

Oh man.

When we first started TSR, I was like, I was like, Hey, how, how do you guys how do you guys market? I already knew how I wanted to do it, right?

I hadn’t actually. Well.

Yeah, I hadn’t actually done it yet, but I knew how I wanted to go.

About.

The marketing.

Plan and they were like, Clipper ads, bro.

Clipper ads are where it’s at.

And I go, What?

They’re like, Yeah, you just get like a vowel pack, and you just, you know, you just put like a $500 off in this Val pack.

And like, it’ll just rain leads. And I was like, that is.

The dumbest shit I’ve ever.

Heard.

And obviously I didn’t do.

It, but it was like.

That’s what told me. They didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.

Yeah, we got some, they got some people laughing here, so yeah.

They’re laughing. They know what I’m talking about. Yeah.

I actually got called that same exact thing. I got to be honest with you, so I can, I can, I can.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Val.

Pack was just rain.

Leaves like.

And like. I mean, I get him at the house here and I’m like. It’s like, you know, so like bad marketing advice. Now, this is my last question. What is the greatest insight that you can share with our audience that has helped you find success in your in your career? I’m not going to say just concrete coating business in your in your home improvement career. What is the greatest insight that you can share with with people that are doing 400 grand a year that are trying to get to 1.5? Maybe people are trying to get an opportunity to get acquired. Like, what is the greatest insight that you could share? Well.

Well, it’s like seven different questions.

But I.

Would say I think it comes back to the partnership. Right? I’ve never been afraid to give up a piece of anything that I’ve that I’ve had. And as long as I was getting the value back in return. Right. So like I said earlier.

When we did the the.

Private equity deal in February, we had like ten or 11 partners in that. And it was it felt.

Really cool to.

Send a lot of those guys off into retirement like that was that was like a I don’t have a lot of feel good moments because I’m just not that type of person. But that was a really cool moment in my life to be able to send a couple of people off into retirement and those of us that wanted to continue on because we’re too young.

Dave year old, we were.

Able to we were able to do that.

And.

I thought that was pretty awesome, you know. And so I would say.

Don’t, you can’t.

Do it all yourself like you’re not. You know, it doesn’t mean that maybe you don’t have to give up.

A.

Full piece of the equity, but just don’t don’t think that you’re so smart or you’re so great that, you know, I have so many awesome people around me.

That like.

Like people don’t even know, like, like it’s not just me. I’m not the only guy that’s just, like, running the show. Granted, I make a lot of the bigger, bigger financial decisions, but.

Like our like.

We have so many great operators, right? And so what I tell people, especially when we’re doing like acquisitions, is I say I collect great people, I collect specifically, I collect great concrete coding people.

And so when.

You look at Revamp or TSR in the beginning of 2023, the amount of great concrete coding people, knowledgeable concrete coding people, the people that anybody would want on their team, I have them all. They’re all on my team.

Right. And so.

That’s the that’s going to be the really cool thing for me is is is also a collective great.

People.

I love that man. So you heard it here first. That is my last question. So get into partnership. You cannot do it all yourself. That’s a big one for me, too. That I’ve that I’ve been learning these past three years get awesome people around you and get get operators. So like as the CEO, you’re most likely the visionary, the leader. You’ve got all the ideas and you’re a mover and shaker. Get some operators behind you. You get an office manager that’s more operationally sound, get get people around you and don’t do it all yourself. Jeff, anything that you want to add in in in closing, yeah.

I mean, break your company up, too. It’s like we break our company up into four different divisions. And a lot of times when I see questions on the forums like, how do you guys do this? How do you do that? And I’m like, Okay, well, that would actually fit into this division of your company if you had it.

We have marketing.

Is always driving the bus, right? So marketing is always first. Then we have our sales team because you don’t need a sales team unless you have marketing and you have you.

Have.

Leads, right? So then you have your sales team, you don’t need a production unless you have sales. So does that make sense? So now, so now you’re there once.

You production.

And then admin because you have to have somebody that’s going to take care of everybody, right? So you got to have a mother hen.

I love that man. And Mike, I don’t know who this.

Happens to be, happens to be my actual mother, which is.

No.

Way.

Oh, yeah, she’s tough still.

Now, I heard that story. So she’s still there?

Yeah.

She’s the mother hen of everybody now. She has, like, she has like, 20 admins underneath of her.

It’s wild. There’s her name.

Stacy Carney.

So she c shout out to Stacy, you are a true legend.

Well she’s yeah.

So she has she has a I share my mom with a lot of people, 320 of them to be exact. But, but, you know, so, so a lot, a lot of your problems will actually be solved if you start to compartmentalize. Right. And really start working in those in like they’re like, oh, I can’t afford to hire them. I’m like, dude, you can’t afford not.

To like you.

Can’t afford not to have this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard I can’t afford to. I’m like, Then you can’t afford to be in business? Like to hire somebody for 20 bucks an hour to answer the phone so that you don’t have to do it, or to hire a salesman to go run the leads.

Like that’s.

What’s always crazy is like when we come into a market.

They’re like, like I.

Would say most people do not want us to come to their market is probably the the general consensus. I don’t think you were that happy about it.

I have heard that a lot. I was I was happy about it just because well, you know what? The market is really big. If it was a smaller market and I might have been different.

But we help drive the the leads, right?

So we do a lot. It’s professionalizing like I’m excited about it because like there’s more professionalism, there’s, there’s legit companies and it, in my opinion, it’s good for Cardinal at some level obviously, but not it probably.

Forced you to do some things that maybe you weren’t even ready to do.

Yeah, well, 100% totally changed my mindset. I’m like, okay, you know, and now I have someone that I can pursue that I can, I can, I can, I can chase a little bit.

So so we’ll.

Announce it right.

Here.

Indianapolis is is 718.

No way. Yeah. So we’re exclusive. Yeah, you got dropped.

You got the exclusive, bro. 718 and. Oh, and Sarasota, Florida.

No way.

Yeah, we’re doing two at once.

So Sarasota is a very interesting market, too. And then Indianapolis, I was actually born in in Lafayette, so.

Oh.

Yeah, I was born in Lafayette. My dad went to Purdue and. Yeah.

So yeah. So you got you got the exclusive launch. I haven’t even haven’t even posted on Facebook yet. You know, normally we get the picture of the city and we say, hey, we’re coming. We’re so excited to be here, you know. But so Parker.

Mcgee, who we did who we.

Did like that whole podcast for a year when I grew up, which kind of started, a lot of people started doing.

Yeah, a lot of people started doing.

And so Parker is out running Poly Pro in Fort Wayne and he is opening a second branch of Poly Pro in Indianapolis.

Wow, that’s incredible, man. Shout out to Parker. I yeah, I watched that here and there and really solid dude. Really solid dude. How do you know? Like, was he an employee or was he?

I’ve known him since he was three.

No way.

That’s. Yeah, yeah. I used to.

I used to be a cook in his mom’s restaurant.

And then that little shit.

Little shit would come back there and steal fries from me all the time.

That’s hilarious, man. That’s. That’s really cool. Any other gyms you want to drop on on the podcast before we go?

No, don’t be scared. Don’t be afraid to reach out. I get people that reach out to me all the time.

And now, like I said, I’m not it’s.

It’s never that.

I’m you know, there’ll.

Be maybe some things I don’t want to answer that are maybe a little bit more. I won’t say proprietary, but we kind of hold close to the vest.

But I mean, I’ve gave.

Quite a bit just even on this podcast, I think that, you know, what do they say? Money. Don’t make.

Money. That’s right. And you can’t.

And all starts in marketing.

And and I see.

A lot of companies that don’t have dedicated.

Male.

Lead setters and they’re actually we did an acquisition I’ll tell you this, this is funny. So we did an acquisition. There’s actually a poly pro. And I couldn’t believe that this is how they operated, but they would generate the leads and then it would the leads would go to the salesman and the salesman would set their own leads.

Okay.

It’s like the worst. It’s like literally the worst thing that you can do because now they’re cherry picking the leads and they’re not going to sell them. And the follow up isn’t there and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Yeah, there was there was this a lot.

About it that I didn’t I.

Didn’t like, but we end up getting it fixed, whatever. But like, that happens so many times.

That it blows.

My mind. I’m like.

How I go, you guys.

You don’t know what your attrition rates are. You don’t you know, you don’t know if you know what your issue percentage is. And then the second thing is just not using your CRM, right? Every acquisition we’ve ever done doesn’t use market sharp appropriately. And shame on Market Sharpe if you’re watching this that you don’t teach these people how to use it appropriately. And I can blame that. I’ll blame that on commerce, not necessarily market share. They don’t teach their users how to use the program, which, by the way, is a giant pain in the ass for me when we do an acquisition because now the data is bad.

I never told you that when you were acquiring some company, you were like, I was like, Bro, what are you up to? And you’re like, I’m frickin been here for 6 hours fixing this company’s market chart. And you were like.

Oh my God. Well, they just don’t teach them how to use it correctly.

Right?

And that’s going to be part of the transition for us into Builder Prime.

Which by the way.

Don’t everybody switch to Building Prime right now, because I need I need the time with the owner, Jonathan, to get our straight.

But you’re only two so so wait for our affiliate link to.

You know what.

I don’t it’s.

Funny, I don’t I probably give away more away for free than I should, but I don’t care about any of that stuff.

Well, that’s part of what makes you great, bro, because you’ve been so gracious, like you’ve helped me out, like, and we haven’t even spent so much time together, but you’ve helped me out tremendously. Give me insights. Whether it was obviously like some of the times you’ve talked to me, you know, you’ve kind of told me the truth, which is great. You know, like you’re like, dude, shut up, bro, do this. I’m like, you know, and and I’ve just learned and I’ve developed this, this, this consistency of putting my pride to the side. And, like, I don’t care about being offended. I want to be I want to be trained. I want to I want to know how to develop and how to be the best version of myself. And I think you share that same that same thing. So.

Well, I was I was very fortunate, like I said, to come from what I would consider the real home improvement industry that has you know, don’t get me wrong, this is called service legends, you know, but guys like Alan Erskine and his son John Erskine actually BJ from West Shore, if you want to talk about somebody who has a recruiting platform that is like blow your mind every they treat them like leads, right? So they have a whole platform dedicated to recruiting.

That that.

It goes through this funnel just like you would a lead for your business. And so actually that’s what we’re trying to work towards is get to that point. But that’s a whole nother conversation for a different day. But there’s like some, like some fantastic the guys from Reborn, you know, Vince Nardo and Nick Coughlin from Nypro. I mean, these guys all just, you know, actually, they just got purchased by Onyx.

No way.

Yep.

I know who those guys are. Well, I mean, I just hearing brands, things like that, but also like Sherwin-Williams. Just spot door flex.

Yeah.

So there’s some things happening, man.

Yeah, I think that that’s that market’s going to cool off a little.

Bit.

Just from a standpoint of, you know, obviously you look at your stock ticker every day, it’s like the world’s.

Blowing up.

And so I think some of some of the private equity stuff is getting a little going to start to slow down quite a bit.

But, you know, ultimately at the end of the day.

There’s some so much cool things happening in home improvements and you just have to align yourself. You know, if you’ve never been to a yellow.

Meeting, you know, go to a yo ho meeting. If you’re I don’t know if you’ve.

Ever been to.

One. I never heard of it.

No.

You know, if you’ve never been to a Tony a Tony Haute meeting, you know, I’m just kind of like putting these names out here for these people in the concrete coating industry so that if you’ve never been.

To one of these.

What’s.

So Yoho is it’s why oh ho. And they talk a lot about like KPIs and things like that, just a really good like home improvement meeting. And then there’s also Tony Hodes consulting.

You know.

He he does.

Company.

He just I think he just did one.

In.

Ohio. I wasn’t able to attend it. I went to the one year before in Orlando. But just if you’ve never been to one of these and you’ve never spent a time to market and network with people in this industry, not just kind of coatings, but the home improvement industry, right. You’ll get a totally different perspective of home improvements like when you talk to.

A.

Like a window company is generally a lot more sophisticated. I wouldn’t say a lot more a shit ton more than than a concrete coating company.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. It’s been inspiring. Like what? Tommy, if Tommy is listening. What’s up, Tommy? With a one? I mean, dude, it’s nuts. Like, just it’s nuts, you know, just what they’re doing and, like, the level of service that they’re providing their team members and like what you said, like actually providing an amazing experience not only for customers, but for employees, too. You know, it’s it’s really inspiring. And I think I think I think there’s a lot of renaissance of professionalism that’s going to happen within the next 5 to 10 years in concrete coatings. And my hope is that within five or ten years, you know, there is an association, there’s I’ve had thoughts around creating a mastermind, you know, like with like an in-person two day mastermind. So that way, like the yo hoes of the world, you know, in those conferences it can be specific to concrete coatings. And I think that this industry needs more of this type of conversation right here, you know?

Yeah. The other you know.

One of the biggest things also. Carrying inventory. I cannot tell you how many times I see they’re.

Like, Hey, is anybody got a box that flake.

You can overnight me to.

Georgia, you know, or I’m just. But it’s like.

It’s like.

How do you how do you.

Not carry the correct amount of inventory? I understand things happen and you run out and whatever the case is. But ultimately, like for us, like we carry. I mean, you.

See, I mean, we.

And just even in Phoenix. So the amount.

Of of of.

Inventory that we carry, there isn’t a job that we can’t.

Do, you know.

And so we carry 18 colors in stock, 50 boxes of every color in every office. And we carry.

Probably at.

Least at least two pallets, if not three pallets of every single product that we use.

Yeah. I love that. So you’re prepared. You’re prepared for whatever your marketing team brings you guys essentially.

Well.

We’re like, remember the Titans, right? What did he say? We got six plays, split veers, left or right. Right. And that’s what we do. We sell 18 colors.

And.

We have all of them in.

Stock and.

We reorder every single week for what we.

Need. And we.

Don’t have to worry about.

If we have.

A spot in our schedule, let’s say Friday, on Tuesday, I don’t have to go. Oh, shit, I can’t do it because we don’t have the color.

No, we have it.

And if you notice how we build our offices out.

I have two.

They’re all 2 to 2 and a half hours apart.

Really? What is what’s the purpose behind that?

Well, because if I have to go help Quad Cities, I can. If I have to go help.

I have I have I have product in.

Appleton, Wisconsin, Madison, Milwaukee.

Lena.

Waukegan, South.

Bend, Fort Wayne.

I have four all the way in a straight line. I’ll cross Illinois in Indiana every 2 hours. I have a warehouse. I go down to Bloomington. Then we have one in Edwardsville that’s servicing Saint Louis and we have one in Quad Cities and we have one in Cedar Rapids, just in the Midwest. Right. So we have we have these offices that are all within 2 to 2 and a half hours away from each other, and they all service that specific area.

Yeah, it’s incredible. Well, man, look, I know that you’ve got a crazy busy day, I’m sure. Thank you so much for your time. This was episode number five of the Service Legends podcast. And if you guys want to connect with Jeff, how can they get in touch with you if they have questions about just whatever?

Yes. I mean, Facebook is usually the easiest way for guys. I’m not going to throw my cell phone number out here. A lot of these guys have it anyway. But Facebook, just throw it throw it in the DMS. And I’m actually looking forward to switching hats and doing the revamp and the revamp, the revamped podcast. I think everybody will like that because.

You know, everybody.

Wants to talk about maybe what their exit plan is.

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Actually, I was. That was one of your smart coding guys questions.

Yeah, yeah. 100%. You know, and you know, a lot of the clients that service legend, you know, probably have a lot of thoughts about it too. So I’ll be excited to do that, man. Outside of that, bro. Have an amazing weekend and we’ll talk to you guys soon. See you guys.

All right. Thanks.