Transcript:
Well, happy Friday, everybody out there. This is episode number 34 of the Service Legend podcast. And I have a real treat for you guys today. Um, and super excited about this one. I have. Uh, Jason, welcome to the podcast, man. Hey, how you doing, Ryan? Jason Larson of American Remodeling and Epoxy Floor Experts. Um, absolutely. An entrepreneur in the home service space. I’ll give a quick intro for those of you that don’t know Jason yet. Um, he started in the remodeling business when he was 16 as a summer job. Uh, had his first son at 17, which I can relate. I had Presley at. When was the last semester of high school myself. Um, and we, we talked about that when we had lunch. Um, graduated high school, started working for a midsize remodeling company, did that for two years, ended up being the sub or the top sub rather for that company and just saw the money. The company was making and decided to learn sales. I love that part too. So we’re going to focus on that today. Sales marketing lead to sales cycle, things like that. Uh, and he, you know, like all of us, he was fortunate to meet some great people along the way, willing to spend the time with him, to mentor, coach him, show him the ins and outs of sales and marketing, which I can relate with that as well. Uh, and hey, look, 23 years later. Um, still young, still a stallion. Uh, and $15 million in sales growing every day. And obviously you’re fortunate of your, of your team to make that happen. Uh, man, so glad to have you here. Um, obviously, that’s, you know, like a quick intro, but just give us kind of some, some, um, some foundation to kind of start with kind of how things were going, you know, before all of this. Kind of just give us some maybe sort of, you know, some more, um, more context to kind of that bio who you are. What’s going on now?
Well, you know, I used to, so I started out as an installer grinding every day. You know, saw what the companies I was working for was making. I’m thinking, man, there’s got to I got to I got to figure out how to do this. So I decided to go out on my own. Had a lot of bumps in the road because I really didn’t know what I was doing. I mean, like I said, I came from an installation background, was lucky enough to run into, you know, Larry Pauly, who’s a great sales trainer, a lot of knowledge in the business, been around forever, and he pretty much spent a lot of time with me, you know, showing me the ins and outs of sales. You know, he was an old vacuum salesman. So, you know, he started from the bottom, too. But then I was lucky enough to meet a bunch of other guys in the business. That pretty much helped me out, you know, showed me the ropes, um, showed me the sales end of it. You know, I changed a little bit of stuff to make, you know, fit my my business, my personality. And, you know, here we are now 23 years later, and I’m trying to just share what I, you know, what I learned with some guys that are in the same position I was in 23 years ago because, you know, you pay a lot of dumb tax in this business. So I’m just trying to, you know, help somebody else, not pay dumb tax and grow my business at the same time. I mean, this year, you know, we’re not really looking to grow. We’re looking to refine, you know, our costs to make more profit off the business. We’re, you know, we’re doing I’m going to grow anyways. We’re already way ahead of last year. So that’s just going to happen. But, you know, now I’m just trying to my goal now is to just make more make the business more profitable, you know, refine where we’re spending money.
Yeah, I love that man. You know, in business, there’s all these different seasons of business, you know? Um, and so I love that, that you have that so clear in your mind. Um, you know, obviously you started in remodeling. Um, how long ago did you start the, the epoxy flooring division there?
About 4 to 5 years ago.
Nice.
Just because we’ve seen another vertical that, you know, nobody’s in it really. You know, you go to a home show, there’s maybe 1 or 2 guys that are doing epoxy. You go, you know, we go to home shows, there’s ten or 20 or 30 roofers, ten or 20 or 30 window guys there. So we were looking just for another vertical.
Yeah, man. And what’s crazy is five years ago, that’s about when I got into the industry. And, I mean, it was it was more silent then in terms of the, the, you know, the scale of the industry than it is now. You know, and there’s all these companies popping up, marketing companies popping up, I mean, sales training, um, service legend. We had our first event, uh, in January, and the turnout was, I mean, there’s about 100 people there. It was incredible to see the industry grow. Um, and I know the topic of discussion today is really going to be focused on the sales and marketing side, which I actually, um, posted a reel, um, yesterday about the biggest challenge I see in the concrete coating industry or in home service in general is just failure to convert leads into appointments, appointments into customers and get, you know, what I call the triple R’s reviews, referrals and repeat business from your customers, like this entire customer journey or lead to sell cycle. And obviously you guys have mastered that. And I know that’s one of your, your strong suits. Um, just real quick to, um, for those because, you know, I think a lot of the home service owners have gone from, you know, employee technician, installer, painter, etcetera, and then started their own thing and are doing their thing. Um, and a lot of them don’t get, you know, really good at sales. You know, they usually are good at, you know, kind of the production side. If you could speak to that for a little bit, like what drew you into sales and kind of what was kind of more practical steps that that you did like the coaching, the mentoring, things like that to get better? I mean, what.
What drew me into sales, obviously, is money. You know, you can make a lot you can make you can make a living, you know, installing epoxy floors. You can make a living installing roofing, but you’re never going to get rich doing that. You know, you’re going to get rich by selling the products. So obviously, that’s what, you know, I wanted to make the most of if I’m going to if I’m going to grind every day, I want to make the most amount of money possible. So like I said, you know, I was fortunate to run into guys that that showed me how to do it. And, you know, the other thing is a lot of these guys don’t understand what business they’re in. You know, they think they’re in the painting or the epoxy business. That’s not the business you’re in. You’re in you’re in a lead generation business because whoever controls the leads can control the sales, which means you can control your profit margin. Because if you have 100 leads and the other guy has ten, you know, he’s under a lot of pressure to get, you know, half of them jobs. If we have 100 of them, we’re not under as much pressure. You know, we can we can sell higher for a higher volume, which is going to make us more profit. So, you know, you just got to understand what business you’re in with what I believe. And then you have to you have to have a unique selling, unique selling system, you know, a unique selling proposition. Why are they going to buy from you over the other guy? You know, it can’t be your family owned because everybody says that. Yeah, you know, we can’t be. You’re the best and everybody says that. So, you know what? What is it? And you may have multiple ones. We have multiple products. So we have a different proposition for each one. You know, why are we why are we better in that product? So, yeah.
I absolutely love that. And I think that’s missed, you know, it’s missed. And even if, you know, if you’re listening and you’re not that super salesy or marketing guy, you know, I did a a client coaching call yesterday with a great client. Brian has a great painting company. He’s a great guy, knows how to paint better than anyone. Um, but you know, is learning the sales and marketing side and he’s getting over that hump. And, you know, like the concept is, you know, you own a marketing company that happens to do painting, that happens to do Exactly. Etcetera. And you’re a great example of that. So super happy, super happy to have you here.
The other thing is, you know, I’m not the best salesman, but I can teach people how to sell. So you may not be the best at it, but surround yourself with people that are better than you. That’s what I’ve done. I mean, we have we have 52 employees now. I’m not the I’m not the best at doing online marketing or Facebook or Google. That’s why I hired you guys. You know, I’ve searched I was I was gun shy on hiring anybody to do it because everybody I hired ripped me off or you know what I mean? But I found you guys. You’re fantastic and and it’s the same with all the other parts of my business. I have a VP that that handles all our sales. I just kind of, you know, I. I work on the business, not in it anymore. So. And that was a hard change for me too. You know, I always my thing was all, you know, I can take care of that in the field. I’m going to go do it. Well, that’s not what I can do. You know, you have to have you got to trust the people you hire to go and take care of it so you can see what everything else that’s going on and manage that.
So, yeah, man, I wish I had the bomb feature, kind of like Bradley where I could drop some bombs here, like because I would I’ve already dropped like five of them. This is absolute gold, by the way, guys, if you’re listening live, put in comments, hashtag live. Let us know that you’re live. Let us know where you’re tuning in from. We get quite a few viewers live here in our Facebook group. We get the majority of our listeners on Apple and Spotify from from downloads there. So if you’re on Apple or on Spotify on the replay here, please give us a review. Let us know how we’re doing. We love to get that feedback, good, bad, indifferent, anything that we could be doing better. And again, if you’re here live, hashtag live if you’re on the replay here in the group, just put in comments, hashtag replay and share the podcast. Share the podcast. If you got home service owners, if you have a sales manager, if you have a production manager, share this information. It’s really going to elevate your friends, your business, your team members. So would appreciate that. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, you touched on, um, kind of owning a marketing company that happens to do, you know, remodeling or epoxy just to go on the sales side for a second. I think it’s so important this lead to sales cycle. If you could speak to that a little bit. When you guys were setting up this epoxy division or even the remodeling company kind of growing that, um, how important was it to implement a system in place? You know, I mean, you mentioned you want to do everything yourself, right? Um, just speak a little bit to us and educate us a little bit on how you did that, kind of why you did that and kind of what that system might look like for you guys.
So what we do, I mean, we’re still we write SOPs for everything, So that’s standard operating procedures. So we have an SOP for when the lead comes in. You know how to handle every step of that lead right down from, you know, the rebuttals on the lead, you know, how to mark the lead in the system so we can track every lead and know what’s the disposition of every lead. You know, why is it disposition like that? And then, you know, it goes down to the sales. So then it’s issued to the sales rep. There’s an SOP for the sales rep, have an sop for how to handle every single lead. So they got to follow the demo If they don’t follow the demo. And what we do is if they don’t follow these SOPs, it affects their commission because if it doesn’t affect their commission, they’re not going to follow it. They’re going to do what they want to do. And and when they do what they want to do, you can you can see the sales reps. We have 14 of them. We have reps that sell 30%. We have our top rep sells at 75%. And you can see the ones that follow the SOPs. I mean, you can see there.
You can see.
It’s very.
Easy concept. Um, God, forget the concept. But like, um, it’s easy to see when you have multiple people, you know? Exactly. That’s. Yeah, because, you know.
People. People fail. Processes don’t. So if you have if everybody follows the same process and that doesn’t mean you have to be a robot and you have to read, you know, the the demonstration word for word. It just means you need to follow the steps in the demonstration to get you to the end goal, which is obviously closing the sale. Right. Too many people, you know, they want to everybody wants to instant gratification. So they you know, they they don’t want to spend the hour and a half it takes to sell a customer an epoxy floor, if that’s what it takes. They want, you know, these guys that are out there are going out there and they’re measuring the floor, showing a couple samples and giving a price. Well, you’re never going to be successful doing that. You’re going to get what we call lay down. You’ll get a couple of them. Anybody can do that. But you’re not going to get the jobs that nobody else is getting. Now, when you sit now, when you go in and you look at the garage floor and then you take them in the kitchen table and sit them down and do a demonstration for them, that makes a huge difference.
I mean, for us, we implemented a concrete floor evaluation. We go in with a moisture meter, we go in with a hammer to check for hollow spots. We go in with a screwdriver to dig around cracks and we tell them we’re evaluating your concrete, which we are doing that. But it also makes us look like the experts. So, you know, we’re constantly subliminally telling the people we’re the experts, all our gear. So our demo kits are labeled right on their epoxy floor experts. So we keep just beating that into their head throughout the whole presentation. And then you look like the expert. You are the expert at that point. And why? Why would they buy from somebody else that came in and spent 15 minutes at their house and pretty much just showed them? They didn’t really teach them, you know, how we’re going to do your floor the right way and what needs to be done to do it that way.
Yeah, and it’s so true, and I learned this from somebody years ago where it’s like, you know, and we teach this to all of our clients that, that aren’t aware of it yet or don’t have a system in place. It’s like a five step system. You got this methodical system that can be and Jeff Gear talks about anything in the business has to be duplicatable and repeatable or it is not going to be in the business. You know, it.
Won’t be around long at all, that’s for sure. You might make some money, you might make a little bit of money, but you’re not going to be around very long. Yeah.
And you know, you know, for us, I don’t care if it’s changing the coffee filters, like when is that going to be done? Who’s going to do it? You know? Exactly. Otherwise you’re just going to pull your hair out, especially as you scale. You know, I think a lot of people on home service, whether it’s painting concrete coatings, garage doors, HVAC, um, you know, I think when we start out and Tommy Mellow had explained this to me where when we start the businesses, the vision is usually big enough for us, like, hey, you know, and we reach the money that we want to reach, or Hey, we get the boat or the house or, you know, whatever it could be. But if you want to really be successful and scale the business to seven figures beyond eight figures, you’ve got to have a team in place and you’ve got to get systems for them to be successful, you know? And so I love that. You mentioned that on the sales side too, because I think a lot of times, you know, the or the systems are production related, admin related, and you might have 3 or 4 sales guys that are all doing sales. Different expectations are different. And it’s you cannot scale that, right.
And not only that, you’re setting your you’re setting your your employees up for failure because let’s face it, they don’t know our vision. And they a lot of them come in here with no experience. You know, they they might have been working at a McDonald’s or maybe they were a bookkeeper somewhere who knows what they were doing in their previous, you know, jobs. But we need to set it up. So it sounds redundant because some SOPs might overlap other departments, But I mean, that’s what it takes. I mean, when I’m writing, you know, we’re changing our SOPs to you might have to adjust your SOP. It’s not you don’t write it once and it’s, you know, it’s fixed. You adjust it because trust me, your employees are figuring out ways to get around your SOPs, which is kind of ridiculous, but so then you just adjust it. But you have to. Every step of the business should be in writing. That’s the way I. I mean, I was never really a fan of that until I seen how well it worked. And that’s what helped me grow. I mean, for 20 years I was almost at 2 million and then I started implementing this stuff and I blew up to 15,000,000 in 2 years. So. Wow. It. The proof’s in the pudding. Yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, I was struggling for you know, to hit 2 million, and now we’re writing 2.6 million a month sometimes. So it’s a huge difference. Yeah. And it’s just a matter of having everything, you know, in place and having SOP. It’s just having a system to follow.
Yeah. It’s so true, man. Have you found that having those things in place has helped in the hiring onboarding training process for for new people when they when they first get here?
Absolutely. Because it sets an expectation for them. And then if they have a question, rather than them coming to me, they can just go to the SOP and usually the answer is in there. You know, we have even one for our financing. It tells my finance manager, you know, exactly how to run the credit, who to run it to first, how to if they have this score, you run it here. If they have that score, you run it to these guys. I mean and that that makes our ability to get deals financed even better. Also because we’re not just you know, we’re not shock unaffecting it. We’re running it where it should go. And we’re the best chance of getting it bought is.
So is that gonna.
Who does that? No, that’s Kelly does that. Okay.
Because John is here. She goes, I’m the finance or I’m. Oh, I’m the fiance to Jason’s canvas manager. Okay. What’s up, Donna? Glad you’re here. I thought that was the finance manager. Okay. Anyways. That’s cool, man. You have your team here. Shout out to Jason’s team. You guys are crushing it. It’s obvious. So great job to you guys. Um, okay, so the systems there, the onboarding there, Um, and I want to go back just, you know, like a quick step on the sales side. How do you find these, these folks Like, you know, you hear this big, big term or phrase in the industry, I can’t find good people, right? Or like, even if I get good people in, they won’t, you know, they don’t want to work, you know, all these what I call excuses or or complaints. Um, how do you find good people in the sales department and like, how do you train them up? How do you get them to, you know, close 75%, you know, in the business? I mean.
We don’t find good people. We build good people. So, you know, if you’re going out there and think you’re going to find good people, a lot of those people are already in in the same kind of company that I’m in. So unless they’re ticked off at their sales manager that day, the chances of you getting them guys is not that great. So the best thing to do is you got to build your people, you know, you got to you got to train them, which all our sales reps went through two weeks of training. Then they run a week of on the road with another sales rep. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad. So you got to make sure they’re going with your reps that are following the rules, you know? So sometimes, you know, you’re forced to go with a rep you normally wouldn’t, you know, because you normally wouldn’t send somebody with. But I mean, the reps are two that are the biggest pain in the butt sell the most too. That’s the other thing. I mean a lot of, you know, that’s that’s just the nature of the business. It’s just like a canvasser that’s marketing, You know, the one that’s the biggest pain in the butt is the one that’s doing the most business. So, you know, you learn to deal with that people and and build them. But like I said, you know, most of our reps, we build them. We don’t really get them from other places.
Yeah. And I see that a lot too, in all the Facebook groups where, um, you know, and you see some, some, you see some job postings where they’re like, you know, we’re looking for a, a journeyman painter that has 30 years of experience. I’m like, guys 30 years, like, you know, and, you know, you see the best companies that are taking good people, making them great. And you see some companies that are bringing in people that have little to zero experience, um, in the, you know, whether it’s admin or sales and you look up and, you know, 12, 18 months and they’re just dominating. And I really think it’s, you know, it’s a leadership thing, you know, you know, culture thing. It’s not, um, it’s.
Absolutely, yeah, it’s absolutely leadership and culture. I mean, we’re looking for somebody that doesn’t know anything. You know, we’re all we’re looking for when we’re hiring our sales person. We’re just looking for somebody that can talk to anybody. And we’ll teach you what to say to them. But you have to have you have to be comfortable in the house sitting down with two people you never met before and just having a conversation with them because that’s what sales is. Yeah, you know, you’re getting 90% of it is getting them to like you and the rest of it’s getting them to like the product, but they’re not. If don’t like you, I’m not buying anything from you. You know, doesn’t matter how cheap or great it is. If I don’t like it, I’m not buying from you. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how many times I’ve walked into a car lot and the sales guy came up and rubbed me the wrong way. I just leave know, go somewhere else. And it’s, you know, it’s the same way with anything else. There’s hundreds of contractors out there. So, you know, it’s just about getting, like you said, you know, get a good person, make them great. So it’s all about building them. And that’s all done with systems and management.
Yeah, it’s so true, man. And so, you know, if you’re out there and you’re looking for somebody that has all the experience in the world, you know, also to when you’re scaling your business, you know, if you’re doing 1 million trying to get to three. You know, you know, it’s going to be a people thing. It’s going to be a leadership thing. You know, you know, sales can only go so far. Marketing can go so far until you can kind of develop a team. But, you know, if you can develop the culture first before you look for these folks, you know, versus. Try. You know, think one of the biggest mistakes that we can do in home service or, you know, in business in general is, you know, you’ve got, you know, these issues at hand, right. Or whatever it could be. And you’re trying to hire people to solve your issues, you know, so if you’ve got a finance issue, you’re like, oh, well, you know, I’ll, you know, I’ll hire this operations director and they’ll fix it. Or, you know, I’ll hire this sales guy and they’re fix it versus us taking the, the ownership, the initiative to really solve for the problems and set the business up, you know, successfully. That way people can come in and just thrive. Um, and I’ve done this many times where, you know, there’s something going wrong. I bring somebody in, they’re stressed out, they’re gone in three months. Oh, yeah, exactly.
I mean, the other thing is too, you got to, you got to be able to change with the times. I mean, these younger kids. You know, they want to make money, but they’re not all about making money either. You know, we put in a I put in pool tables, I put a gym in. I put go karts in. You know, I have a big warehouse, but I put all this stuff in. And when they come when they’re done work, at the end of the day, they’re here till eight, nine, 10:00 at night just wanting to hang out at the office because, you know, there’s stuff for them to do. You know, they they love that. But that’s building a culture and that’s that’s bringing these younger kids in that aren’t all about money all the time. They want to be happy where they work. It’s not like me back in my day, you know, we just wanted to go to work, you know, hammer out a good day’s work and then leave. But these kids want to be they just want to they want more out of life than just getting a paycheck. Yeah, they want.
To have fun.
Exactly. Yeah, they want to have fun.
And then they also want to have friends at work more so it seems like. And they want more freedom, too, you know, they want to be able to say, hey, I’m going to be going off, you know, on Friday. I’m going to go Salt River tubing here or whatever it is. Yeah, Yeah. And I think, you know, our initial reaction is like, Dude, hell no, get to work. But like, if you let them have a little bit of freedom, have have some fun, you know? I mean, I mean, for me, you know, they get to work when they’re working more, you know? Um, are you finding that too, over there?
I mean, you know, I brought in a company two years ago, too, that showed me that no matter how hard you push anybody, you’re not going to get more than 75% of work out of them anyways. So the harder you push, the less they’re going to work. So, you know, that’s hard for me to swallow because I figure I’m, you know, I’m putting 100% efforts. They should too. But that’s just the truth of the matter. So sometimes, like you said, if they need a day off, you might as well let them take a day off. Because if you give them a hard time, they’re just going to come with a bad attitude the next day or that day. Nothing’s getting done anyways At the end of the day, or the quality of work’s nowhere near what you need, where you want it to be.
Yeah, you know, it’s so true. At service Legend we implemented and this will be our third year doing it. Where And it’s a small thing, but it’s a big thing. And, uh, the week, you know, in between Christmas and New Year’s, the company just shuts down, you know, and it’s fully paid for. And the first year was challenging because, you know, clients were like, well, you know, how’s this going to work? Yeah, but we try to explain like, we want to serve these team members so they can come back and be ready to crush it into the new year. And I’m telling you, the first year was a little bit rocky because, you know, just just letting everyone know. But the second, I mean, it was mass. I mean, when they came back, they were so thankful they were able to spend time with their families like they’ve never been able to do anywhere else, like they worked at Geico. That was never there. I mean, they, you know, they worked at the local coffee shop or at, you know, at a grocery store. And to them it was like they’re like, Wow, this is amazing. You’re going to pay for me to spend time with my family. Like, yes, that’s important to us that you have, you know, a life outside of here that you can have fun, you can enjoy your family. Um, kind of more holidays. And, um, I think if you give more, you get more back. You know that concept in life. And it’s I don’t think it’s any different, you know, with these, with these team members. Um, well, let’s circle back here on, on the sales side. So, um, what are some of the key metrics that you guys focus on when trying to, you know, whether it’s hold them accountable or whether it’s just a, you know, kind of deeper a, you know, effectiveness or whatever in, in their roles, what do you guys look at in terms of KPIs for them?
I mean, demo rates is one, because if you’re not down with a certain percentage, that means they’re sniffing and by that means you’re looking for the easy sale. So that’s a huge I mean, the demo rates are big for us, I believe, because if you don’t demo the lead, you can’t sell the lead and the.
Demo lead just for the audience here. Um, just just to elaborate on what that means for you guys.
So what that means is we were able to get in the house, show the, you know, show the customer the product, go through the sale and go through the sales process rather than just knock on the door and the customer comes in with some excuse. You know, some of the sales reps are just say, Oh, this is bullshit lead. It’s no good. I’m not you know, I’m not even wasting my time here. I mean, I don’t know how many times my top guy that close at 75% would call and say, hey, this is going to be questionable. I’m giving a shot. And he ended up closing the deal and coming out with the check, you know, but he that’s what he does. So the demo rate to me, you know, a pretty big KPI. Yeah, it’s like.
A full appointment. So it’s like because it’s really a half assed appointment, if you will, if you don’t have an opportunity to present your, you know, your presentation and all those things. So like the demo rate’s important. So, you know, if you run 100 appointments but you only, you know, and, and you ran.
50 to 60%, that’s not good. You should be down one over 75% of your appointments because you got to remember these appointments are qualified at the office. So we know they’re a good appointment. Yeah. The only reason you shouldn’t be demoing that appointment is one of the homeowners, isn’t there? Yeah. Other than that, you should be demoing the appointment or nobody’s there. Obviously, it’s a no show, but other than that, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be demoing. They’ve already told. They’ve already went online. They’ve talked to our rep. They said the product they want to get done. So there’s no reason why aren’t we downloading the appointment. You know what? What a lot of our guys, some of our guys will say, well, the wife’s upstairs on a meeting. Yeah. So what? Bullshit with the husband for 15? 20? Once you’re going to be done the meeting, you know, so then they’ll try to get out of that appointment. It’s like you drove an hour. You don’t want to. Why wouldn’t you run the appointment? That doesn’t make sense. So it’s stuff like that. Or they just hear something they don’t want to hear. You know, the customer says, Well, how much is it going to be? You know, So they’ll think, well, this guy’s not buying anything. Yep. You know, so now now they want to figure out a reason they’re not downloading the appointment, you know? So that’s why I said that to me. That’s the first one. I mean, obviously your your demo rate’s huge.
Yeah. So the demo rate. So number one there. Um, and you know, it’s funny because there were some, you know, there’s, you know, there’s clients of ours and people in the industry where, you know, if you get a phone call from a Google ad, from your Google business profile SEO call from your website, an ad online or whatever, and somebody says, Hey, this is Ryan. Yeah. You know, you know, I’m actually looking to get my three car garage done. Just moved here to Arizona and was just really curious what the price was like. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad lead.
Exactly. Yeah, that’s a great lead. Yeah.
The guy wants to do it right away. I’m like, This is great. And you got to learn how to overcome that. Yeah.
When he’s asking is, is it. Can I make it affordable? Can you make it affordable to me? That’s what he’s asking. Yeah. So you got to get, you know, that’s a great lead.
Yeah. Yeah.
But a.
Guy like. Well, that’s a shitty lead. That’s exactly what he wants, is the price. I’m like, Well, how do you know that? Don’t assume that guy could be a millionaire. That guy could be a doctor. He could be a lawyer.
You have no idea. Even you could even go in somebody’s house going to let that money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have money. You don’t know what they have in their bank account. Yep. And you know, that’s another thing. Like one of my reps, he’s still closed as well, over 50%, but he’s the worst at that. Within 20 minutes he knows how much money they want to spend on the product. He’s like, Dude, how do you even at that point? And that’s another KPI, you know, how much time are they spending in the house? You know, if they’re spending, you can tell right away the guys there that are there 45 minutes to an hour, their demo, I mean, their closing rate is way down because, you know, if you go through your demo and I’ve done this, I said, so you demo the product completely and Well, yeah, of course I did. All right. Well, you were only there 45 minutes. Well, yeah, they didn’t want to do this. They didn’t want to do that. So they controlled the demo at that point, you know, warm ups, 15 to 20 minutes. So now you only had 20 minutes of demo the product and you didn’t even measure the garage floor yet, you know? So how so Time in the house is a huge KPI, too. If they’re if they’re in a house under an hour and a half, you know, their closing percentage drops way down at that point.
Yeah. There was a guy that we were hiring at Cardinal. I’ll tell the story, I’m interviewing him and he sits down and he’s like, moving quick and. And I’m like, Yeah, Hey, um, you know, is there a resume that you might have here just real quick? He goes, he goes, Look, man, I’m gonna cut to the chase. I don’t do resumes and I’m a closer. Okay? I don’t need to do this long interview. Look, I’m the guy, and, um. And I’m like, okay, so, you know, I kind of went on with it, and I asked him about, like, how he handles it, like his own home stuff. He goes, he goes, Look again, don’t play around. Hey, I walk in, I’m there for 15 minutes and I walk out with a check. That’s how I do it. I’m like, Yeah, sure you do. I’m like, I’m like, Dude, like, are you some magical unicorn? Like, you know, if that was possible, then why aren’t you teaching us all this? You know? So people like that, right? They’re toxic. Um, I love what you do, though, because. So you really emphasize the effectiveness, the communication, and you’ve, you know, and based on what you’re saying is your guys know how to overcome objections, you know? Absolutely. And it could be open up the door and, hey, you know what? Just go around back. Um, yeah, you know, you know, the patios are on back and, you know, instead of saying, okay, and you walk over, there you go, Hey, hey. Actually, just real quick, do you mind if you have, you know, just maybe a couple minutes to sit down in a quiet place real quick. I want to go over a couple things before we get exactly before we go ahead and get rocking and rolling or whatever you want to say, you’ll be surprised when they’re you’ll be so surprised, guys, if they go, Oh, sure, yeah, no problem. And he walked right over somewhere.
Listen, in the concrete coding business, it’s definitely easy because they don’t have people like us that close in the concrete coding business. So these people don’t know what’s going on. When you’re in the roofing and siding business, they know the game. They know you’re going to be there for two, three, four hours. They know what’s going on in that business. So but this business is so I mean, it’s so easy to get in the house in this business. I mean, in our business, we’re telling them we need to go to the bathroom. I mean, whatever we got to do to get, you know, and then we then we bring our demo kit in and then we park it at the table, and then we go to the bathroom and then we come back and that’s fine. But that’s how we get in there. But coding is, is, is in the infancy of its of its lifespan in the remodeling business. I mean, it’s so such a small vertical right now, but it’s going to be huge. And you know, I was when I came out to meet you guys, I was going to a Rubber Stone convention and that was for a concrete coating. And, you know, I did a sales presentation there, and it was amazing how many people told me they’re running six, seven leads a day. I’m like, that’s impossible how you’re not running. And I’m like 20% of them. Yeah, well, no kidding. My people run 2 to 3 leads a day. They’re exhausted every day because, you know, it’s mental. You know, sales is a science. You’re in there and it’s a system, you know? So when you’re in there an hour and a half, two hours, that’s mental, that’s mentally straining on you. And then you got to drive to your next appointment. I don’t know how we’d ever cover eight leads a day. That’s ridiculous.
Yeah, I’ve done that. You know, before I started this company and in the home service company, I sold jobs in the home in Bakersfield. And there was times where I was doing the marketing. And then I set the appointments and, you know, I was doing quite a bit there and I and I tried doing that. I mean, I did like ten appointments one day or like for a couple of weeks. And I was like, this, this is, this is insane. I couldn’t follow up or do any of these things.
Yeah, exactly.
You can’t do it. But I did some math on my, on, on, on my vibe board yesterday. On the client coaching call for service Legend and I broke down $1 million a year. Like, what does that look like, guys? It’s really like 20 something, like 21 grand a week. Yeah, exactly. For like 48, 49 weeks a year to get to $1 million top line, like. And if your average ticket is like four grand, like guys, that’s like five, six deals a week. Yeah. You know, that’s one salesperson, you know?
Exactly. I mean, I have people selling two, three jobs a day, but they’re they’re not getting home till seven, eight, 9:00 at night either. Yeah. You know, but that’s what it takes. I mean, if you, if, if you don’t want to do it, hire somebody to do it. You shouldn’t actually be doing it if you’re if you’re, you know, you’re in the business, if you’re the business owner, you shouldn’t be doing it. You should be paying somebody to do that. Yeah. You know, well, what do you have to do? Raise your prices? Big deal. Everybody knows stuff’s more expensive thanks to COVID. Yeah.
100%. And two other things, you know. No, we won’t go there. That’s a different podcast, you know? But, um, um, you know, Jeff Gear, he owns TSR Concrete Coatings. He owns, um, a revamped the holdings company. There’s never been a better time, like if you have a concrete coating business, an epoxy business. Um, and, and you can do what Jason’s talking about. Like what we talk about here all the time. The systems, the hiring systems, the team, the culture, the leadership, all of these things to build a world class home service company or a world class concrete coating company. Guys, private equity is here like they are coming in right now. There’s never been a better opportunity to, uh, you know, in the next couple years sell your company, you know, if that’s something that you want to do. Um, I talked to a lot of home service owners, and a lot of them think that that’s, you know, that’s the dream, right? To build a company, scale it up, sell it and go off into the sunset a little bit. But guys, it’s so important. And I just really challenge and encourage everybody to, um, you know, anything challenging in, you know, and, you know, difficult, you know, is going to be hard, you know, Um, you know, well, I didn’t really make any sense, but like, my point was, or like, the better way to phrase it was anything worth anything in this world is very challenging and difficult, right? It’s going to be hard. The systems are going to be hard. We’re business owners. We’re entrepreneurs. We’ve got sometimes we’re moving fast. Absolutely. It’s very annoying to think about building systems, but we’re building systems for the team, not for ourselves. Right. Exactly.
Think of at the end of the day, gives you more time, gives you more time to focus on other things when you’re not getting, you know, because I mean, I had to, uh, I had to set times that my employees could talk to me because it just got to be that bad that they were asking me for every little thing. It’s like I come to work. I worked like an hour, you know, because I dealt with all these little fires I’m putting out throughout the day, which I shouldn’t have to do. And that’s where the SOPs gave me a lot of time to, you know, it took me time to write them and my VP write them. But at the end of the day, that time was well worth it, right? It gave them a way to explain explained, step by step What? How they have to handle certain situations. Yeah. And I learned stuff from another podcast. You know, if somebody comes to you with a problem, you know, first they should try to handle it themselves. Then if they can’t, if they can’t handle it or they shouldn’t try to handle it, then they got to come to you and with a solution to handle it. Yes. You make them get the solution, not just come to you for every little solution. Yeah. Because you’re paying these people, you’re trusting these people and they have to understand that you trust them to do the right thing, too, and to make the right decision. And if they don’t make the right decision, you simply correct them. You don’t belittle them or anything like that. You just show them, you know, that that was okay, but this is how you should handle it. Yeah. You know, and the next time they know how to do it the proper way.
Yeah, 100%. Um, staying on the sales topic a little bit, uh, what do you guys do for, like, rehash? Like, what did you guys rehash system look like? You know? So all that stuff.
We, we rehash everything we don’t sell. I have two guys in the office and all they do is call those customers back. Yeah. And then, you know, a lot of it is to find out what the actual sales person did to you learn a lot by rehashing. Yeah. You know, you find out that, you know, they didn’t even show me your system. You know, they just pretty much came in here and, and measured and gave a price. So even even your some of your best reps will shortcut stuff sometimes. So rehash is that helps a lot too, just to hold people accountable. But but then we go into, you know, start digging deep into why the customer didn’t buy. That’s that’s what your whole rehash is about. It’s more about that than getting the deal. You want to get the deal, obviously, But it’s about why Why do we miss the deal and what do we have to adjust to get that deal going forward or what do we need to retrain the sales rep on? But but, you know, once you’re past all that, obviously you’re just breaking it down to make it affordable for the customer because at the end of the day, the objection is always price.
You just need to get the customer to admit that. And if you can get them to admit that, then you can break it down. Then you go into your financing options and make it affordable for them because at the end of the day, they if you do your job right, they want it. You just haven’t, you know, made it affordable for them. And we we find out a lot to the sales reps don’t talk about financing and how you know when we do those rehashes some customers which should never happen that should never happen but like I said sales rep people are lazy. Some people just get lazy. I mean, you know, they’re running to to them, running three leads a day is a lot. So I couldn’t imagine running 6 or 7. But you know, when they’re when they’re grinding every day and running three leads a day, they get lackadaisical like anybody else could, you know. So it’s it’s huge that the rehash is a lot helps a lot with that.
Yeah. How long do you guys you know let’s say an estimate was ran today and it didn’t close like how long do you guys rehash before you’re like okay we’re gonna, you know, not follow up anymore.
So the next day our call center calls it automatically, but then we’ll, we’ll follow it up with a with a text message. We’ll do that. I think we have like a month and a half that we follow up with them either by text, email or phone.
And then a month and a half, where do they go?
Then they’ll just go back into our nurturing program where we’ll try to reset the lead for to run it again if we have if we can or rehash it. Yeah. You know, we keep we keep calling them until they tell us to stop calling them. Yeah. You know, we bought that lead. We’re going to work the hell out of that lead. Yes. I mean, once you spent the money on it, it’s just. It’s a couple more dollars to have somebody call text or email. It’s not a lot of money.
Yeah, I think a lot of, uh, you know, I think a lot of companies think that they’re going to hire a marketing company or they’re going to do Angie or Home advisor or radio, whatever it is, and that customers are just going to come to them and say, Here’s my wallet. I don’t you know, I don’t need to be sold. Boom, here you go. And I think you can build maybe a half $1 million business doing that, maybe 750 a year. And you can work off of referrals and these things and laydowns. But like if you want to scale, I mean, you’ve got to learn how to develop sales and communication and rehash systems mean you’ve got to.
Oh, absolutely. Because if you don’t, I mean, if you’re at Angie and you’re doing half a million a year, you won’t be in business very long because they’re going to say a lot of garbage leads, that half a million will disappear real fast if you don’t work down leads. And those those are the absolute worst ones to work because you got to be on them constantly. You know, they’re selling them the five, six, seven, eight other eight other companies. Yeah. And if they have a phone room like ours or another bigger company out there, you’re not a smaller guy is never going to last. It’s just not going to be possible. Yeah. Because they’re going to sell you a lot of garbage leads to that have absolutely no interest that that you should be getting credit for it. And I mean that to me, if I’m starting a business, I would never use Angie’s List unless you have a lot of money to waste. Yeah. You know, if it’s just too they give you way too many leads and you just can’t one guy can’t handle it. It’s just not possible. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, so the last thing on sales, like, in terms of, like, training or coaching the sales people, like what is like the meeting rhythm look like? Is it like daily huddles, role playing, You know, like one meeting a week, Like, how do you guys meet and like, how do you guys kind of, you know, like coach or train?
So new reps are in the office every day for two weeks training pretty much 6 to 8 hours depends on on what we’re going over that day. But then we’ll do role playing with them too. Once we get them to learn the demo, you have to learn the demo and you know, the good ones will learn the demo at home too. And they’re not, you know, they’ll role play with their wife, girlfriend, brother or sister, whatever. And they’ll get it down a lot faster, but. Yeah, usually it’s two weeks in the office and then, like I said, a week out on the road they’ll go with a sales rep, see what, see what it’s all about. See it actually in live and, and how it’s actually working face to face with somebody rather than just role playing. Because like I said, yeah, you know it’s a lot to to to be able to talk to somebody that you’ve never talked to before. I mean, that makes a not everybody can do that. I mean, it seems like it’s simple, but it’s not. I mean. So they’ll go through that extensive training. They get a then we give them a PowerPoint that they can we don’t want them to really use the PowerPoint at the house. It’s just like a reference for them because you never want to read anything to anybody. You just people lose interest and they’re focused more on the PowerPoint than they are focused on the sales rep. So we try to teach, you know, teach them not to use that as much as possible. Just kind of memorize it. Yeah.
Yeah, that’s cool. Um, I know there’s this software Toki talks about, uh, engage and what’s cool about this engage. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of that from them. I’ve heard.
Of it. We don’t use it. I mean, it’s a great tool because it tracks that, like I said to you about the time, the audio, right? Well, it tracks the audio, but it also tracks how much time they’re spending on the demonstration. So, you know, you know, they’re spending X amount of time on this page, X amount of time on that page. So you can see how long they’re on the actual demo. So it definitely helps with that. But we actually we’re doing our own. So that’s I’m actually have a call on that tomorrow to hopefully finalize that because we want to be able to track that, track it better because like I said, if you’re not in the house an hour and a half and you’re not spending the right amount of time on the right stuff, then you’re going to have a hard time, the hard time getting the sale at the end of the day and being successful.
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, there’s so much technology out there. Why would you not use it? Yeah. Yeah, it makes your life so much easier.
Yeah, absolutely. Um, and guys, this is a conversation. All this stuff we’re talking about, if you want to stay an owner operator or, you know, you want to do 500 grand a year, this is probably not the stuff that you want to implement, right? Correct. But if you’re trying to grow the business, trying to build a team, and that’s what the whole mantra at service legend is more profit, more freedom, more impact. And, you know, the whole thing of that is the first thing you need is to make revenue and profit. Like if you don’t have any money, then you really can’t do much. But if you, you know, if you can develop the top line and the profit, you know, and there’s money coming in, there’s cash flow coming in, you can start to develop some freedom, which is, you know, like more profit, more freedom. The freedom part comes in where you have more money. Now you can hire people, you can develop a team, um, where you’re not doing everything yourself. You can get some freedom back to work on the business versus in the business. Maybe you can spend more time with your family and your kids because you’re not doing everything yourself, and then you have more impact. And ideally you would take the freedom, take the profit, and you would make more impact internally in your team, train your team, develop leaders, maybe donate to the, you know, like, you know, the church that you go to or the charity that you’ve always wanted to donate to or open up a non-profit that you’ve always wanted to like.
You get to have an impact. So it’s not just, you know, making money to make money or having freedom to sit on your ass. No, no, it’s you have more profit, more freedom, and then you ultimately get to have some impact in your life and in your employees lives. And that’s what it’s all about. So if that’s something that you want to do, um, then service legend is you know all about that, you know, and Jason’s, you know, obviously all about that as well. Um, before we go on to the marketing stuff, um, Tommy talked about the vision, um, starting out with just ours as we grow the business, the vision has to be big enough for everybody, you know? Um, just talk to us a little bit about, like, why are you, like, didn’t just stop at, you know, X revenue where you were comfortable. Like, why are you keeping on going here? Like, what’s what’s fueling you here?
I don’t know. I just I love doing what I’m doing, to be honest with you. I just love doing it. Yeah, it’s just something I have a passion for it. So it’s not that I want to be the biggest remodeling company. I mean, I just want to I want to I want to take care of my employees and I want to have some freedom, like you said, you know, that’s the biggest thing. But you can’t do that if you have to grind every day. You know, if you have to worry about making every little payment or having enough money to pay something else, you know, or you have a bad month and now you know, now you’re struggling. So, I mean, I just wanted to get bigger so I could have more, more freedom.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that man. Um, and I think this is, uh, your team member. We grow our team together. I love that man. Um, so on the marketing side a little bit, you know, obviously you’re working with service legend. Things are going well for you when it comes to the online space. Could you just give us a little bit of a mix of all the marketing that you guys do? Like all the offline, like just yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot going on, but we.
Do every every home show or every flower show, whatever kind of gun show, any kind of event we can get into, we’re in front of where people are going to be like a trade show and all that stuff.
What’s that like a trade show booth and all that stuff? Well, yeah, a trade show.
If we have to go to an Apple festival, we have to go to a river festival we have to go to we’ll go to gun shows. I mean, those people are buying guns. They have money. If they have extra money to buy a gun, they can they need home improvements, too. A lot of them, you know, any of the flower show, any any kind of event, A market. Uh. And we were just at an Easter egg hunt last weekend. I mean, you know, there’s families there. Who do we sell home improvements to? Families. So, you know, we sponsored that. You know, we had a great turnout. So any kind of place you can get in front of people. And the great thing about stuff like that is it’s cheap. I mean, an Easter egg hunt was 200 bucks to be in no way. And that was just a donation to the to the lady running the place. But there’s 400 kids there. So you had at least, you know, 100 or 200 or 300 parents there with them, you know, So anything and nobody else was there that did our business because nobody else thought to do it. So and it helped us with branding, too, because we donated to the local Easter egg hunt. I mean, any kind of event like that, I don’t care what it is we do every we try to get in as many parades as we can get into. We do.
We do placemat advertising and restaurants. We do Clipper magazine. We do another hometown magazine. We do canvassing. So we go we have I have I have three monsters that go door to door. Each one of them do about a million a month or a million a year. I mean, and just door to door themselves. So we do that. I mean, we have there’s just so many anything you can think of to get in front of people is the biggest thing we do. We do obviously, we do car shows because they’re great for floors. Yeah. Uh. Newspaper. We do newspaper with epoxy. It does great, but it doesn’t do. Great with with our other with our roofing and siding. So we don’t do newspaper with that. But we do it with epoxy. I mean, we did we messed around with TV. I mean, there’s. Think of something somebody else didn’t think, Oh, that’s what I always try to you know, I try to get into something that I’ll be at an event. I’m like, Man, we should have been in this event. Why weren’t we here? Yeah, you know, or we have an events team that just deals with getting in as many events as they can. You know, we want to be an event. If we’re not an event every weekend, there’s nothing going on this. Why aren’t we in the event? Why aren’t we in something? You know? So events are huge for us.
Yeah, man, I love that. Um, and what’s interesting is, you know, it’s very familiar to, to Tommy Mellow. Um, he’s, you know, he’s just a home service giant, and, um, you know, he just wants to be omnipresent, be everywhere, you know, um, even if it has a little bit of a return or even just more of a branding return. Exactly.
You know, the Easter egg hunt, my my employer is like, well, we didn’t get that many leads. I said, Who cares? You know, how many people saw our stuff? That was more about branding than getting leads? I mean, of course we wanted to get leads, but people remember that every time, you know, they go back to that location, all these guys were here. They need a roof or they need a siding or they need an epoxy floor. They’ll remember us because we were the only ones there. So it’s just about being in front of people. Yeah. You know, if you get leads, great. You want to get leads. That’s the main goal. But if you don’t, at least you were out there.
Yeah. And sometimes it’s hard to, you know, claim the attribution because a lot of those people, you know, there’s different personality types where, you know, they don’t want to come up right in person, but they’ll go to your website, you know, they’ll go research, right? Um, that’s why, you know, it’s so important to, you know, to make sure that you try to claim as much attribution as possible in terms of when leads are coming in. Like, where did you come from? Oh, I came from Google. Oh, was that an ad that you clicked on? What was it? Did you find our, you know, our Google business profile? Like dig in on that because you’ll find out sometimes they’re like, oh, well, actually I saw your yard sign and then I went to your website. Exactly. Well, yeah, find me on Google.
You know, and that’s a good point because if you don’t do that, it messes your metrics up because you I mean, we just got a lead from an we did a parade in October and somebody called in, you know, for that, you know, so that was, what, five months ago, six months ago. And we’re getting a lead from there. So, you know, and like you said, they’ll say we called on Google because that’s where they actually got your phone number because they couldn’t you didn’t remember your phone number. But that’s like, yeah, like you said, that’s where the sop, they can’t just say they got it from Google. Okay. Well, did you did you, you know, just search roofers on Google or did you go to Google because you knew about us? Yeah. You know, you got to be able to you got to be able to put that lead in the right area. Yeah. You your KPIs.
Yeah. Um, and you know, you know a lot of home service owners right now and I hear it all the time in the Facebook groups and just like even on our sales calls or even clients where they’re like, you know, where’s the best, you know, like, where’s the best place to advertise? I’m like, everywhere, you know? And obviously you’re smaller. You have to kind of pick and choose. You have a certain marketing budget, but a lot of these companies are doing seven multiple, seven figures a year. And, you know, they’re only doing Facebook, they’re only doing, you know, SEO. And I’m like, Guys, you’ve got to really create a robust marketing budget and plan that is omnipresent everywhere, you know, because your customers are are I mean, they’re everywhere, you know, And.
You know, the other thing, too, I found it depends where you’re different parts of the country, different stuff works better, too, right? You know what I mean? I mean, Google or Google and Facebook, they’re pretty much the same everywhere. But all these other marketing events and stuff like that, you know, they work there. It’s, you know, like, I hate when somebody says, well, they’re killing it in this. Well, that’s great. That may work there. But that that is based on their demographics. They might have more older people there. So guess what they read the newspapers. You come in an area where there’s more younger people. They don’t read the newspapers. They’re online. So you can’t just, you know, say, well, this guy’s doing that, so I’m going to do it. You have to test the waters. Yeah, yeah. And see how it works.
You got to figure out what a acceptable and reliable ROI is going to be from every little channel, you know? Uh, you know, I think a lot of times people are going to be like, Well, I made more money from Facebook and I’m like, Well, but you made money from that Home magazine. There’s a return there. Exactly. There, right? Like, if that’s working at some level, be there. Be the dominant player in that magazine. Um, yeah, there’s a massive opportunity. Um, are you guys doing any, like, any direct mail or things like that?
We do with epoxy. That’s, but we don’t do it with anything else. Okay. We’ve done it with, with the other verticals, but they just don’t, they don’t the return on investment is just not there.
What’s the best thing for for the remodeling side that you guys are seeing?
Uh, home shows in the Internet. Home shows in Facebook or Google, whichever one we’re getting there. Yeah, we do. We do a lot of stuff with just straight Internet vendors, too, but we set a lot of them up on a straight flat commission. We don’t pay for leads. We just pay for when we sell and let them. Yeah, so that was a little bit higher. But we don’t care because we just figured into our price. So we already know we’re paying that for that lead. So we’re going to charge more money for it. Yeah. You know, and then and.
Then online you guys are, you know, so we’re doing Facebook, Google ads, SEO, things like that for you. Are you doing anything else, you know, online or is there is there certain things like email marketing or is there anything else that you’re doing?
No, we we were doing stuff, but we switched it all to you guys because the other places we were dealing with just weren’t hitting their numbers. So we pretty much just put it in your guys hands. Okay. Don’t fail me. Yeah.
Won’t the entire team? Hopefully. Guys, are you listening now? Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool, man. Um, and then, um, on the financing side, I know we didn’t touch on it much, but like, um, is there a certain percentage of all the customers that finance? You know, I’m not sure if you guys have that data or not.
It’s like 80, 80% because we push it. Yeah, we put in the epoxy side, it’s a lot less. Yeah, that percentage is probably about probably under 50. But on the other side, the tickets are so much higher that we push financing because like I said, you got to make it affordable for the people. When you drop a price of 20, 30, 40, 50 grand. Not everybody, even if they have it, who wants to write a check for 50 grand? I’d rather write a check for 500 bucks. You know what I mean? So we we teach our guys and the ones that are successful just follow the program. You know, every time you drop price, you have a payment with it, you know, So they know right away we finance and listen. If they don’t want to finance, they’re going to tell you I don’t finance anything, so who cares? It doesn’t doesn’t hurt you. They didn’t say they don’t want to buy. They just said they don’t want to finance it. But there’s a.
Guy named, uh, what’s his last name? Joe Chrysorrhoea. Um, he’s, uh. I think he’s mainly HVAC and garage doors and plumbing. Um, but they call him Uncle Joe. And, um, he. He just preaches options. Like, you know, how do you know your customer doesn’t want financing? How do you. How do you know they won’t want X, Y and Z? He’s like, you know, his big thing is give them options, right? Be the option provider, the broker provider, if you will, to give the customer options. And then he teaches, you know, hey, you know, the price is going to be, you know, $10,000 or $500 a month. What should we do from here? And he just crosses his arms and yeah.
Because you got to let them talk first. Whoever talks first loses. So you never you never say anything and, you know, and rehash rehash. We’ve learned, too, you know, we’ve had sales reps that lost $30,000 jobs because they didn’t offer to people financing. They said, Well, why didn’t you buy why couldn’t afford it? Why didn’t they go over the financing with you? Well, no, we didn’t know you had financing. Well, I mean, that’s just a sin. Why wouldn’t you? Why would you not offer why wouldn’t you use all the bullets in your gun? Right. It doesn’t. It just it’s just being lazy at that point. It’s like, you know, that’s why you got to constantly train and, you know, use your systems and processes because like I said, you know, people fail. Processes don’t.
Well, there’s a lot of guys out there that I hear and it seems to come from painters more than anyone else, it seems like. But, um, they’re like, well, I don’t do offers, I don’t do discounts, I don’t do financing because, you know, we’re a premium company. And I’m like, Yeah, that’s so what is that ego or pride mean? I don’t know where that comes from.
Like Amazon’s a premium company they have you get discounts on Amazon all the time. You’re going to tell me you’re more of a bigger company than Amazon. I mean, give me a break. Everybody wants a deal when you so you know, okay, so you’re a premium company. So when you go to buy a new painting, a new truck for painting, do you go to the dealership and tell them, I want your vehicle, but I don’t want a discount on it. I want that retail. I mean, are you kidding me? That’s what I say. Doesn’t even make sense.
If you went into I mean, the last time you went into Costco and bought an 80 inch TV or whatever you bought, did you pay full price? Exactly. The last time you bought a car or whatever it is. So, you know, I’m not sure. You know, I think that’s like an old school home service thing where it’s like, I don’t do discounts, I don’t discount my services, I don’t do financing. The people I do business with. They have money and they want premium price or, you know, you know, like a premium company. And just like that’s gone.
The thing I learned in this business is the people that have money are want more discounts than the, than the average. Joe Yeah, I mean, that’s just the truth.
The rich people know how to spend their money.
Well, exactly. They know. They know how the game works. They have money for a reason. They’re not stupid. Yeah, of course they want a discount. They don’t want it. They. They don’t have an ego where they want to say, Oh, I got a lot of money, so I don’t want to discount. Yeah. I mean, that’s just like I said, that that person shouldn’t be selling, you know, they should have somebody selling for them because they don’t understand what sales is. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, if that’s anybody out there listening, I’m sorry, but do yourself a favor and hire a salesperson. Yeah.
Yeah. Which is actually a good thing. You know? It is a good thing. Um, hey, real quick, we have a few more minutes. Um, I like to ask these questions. What is, like, the best advice that you feel like you’ve ever received in business? You know, over the last 15 years or so.
Uh, to work on the to work on the business, not in it, probably, to be honest with you, because and that had to get beat in my head for years before I actually, you know, because I’m like, What are you talking about? I’m working on it and in it I’m doing both. Well, you can’t do both. I’m doing both. Yeah, exactly. You know, you can’t do both. I mean, so and putting, you know, systems and processes in place, you know, I’ve learned and that, you know, I didn’t come up with that myself. I learned that by going to conventions like you guys hold and stuff, you know, things like that, and listen to people that are already doing it and they’re smarter than I am. I’m not the smartest guy out there, but I know when, you know, I’m smart enough to listen.
Yeah, If you’re the smartest person in your head, then, man, you’ve gotta. You got a ceiling there, that’s for sure. Yeah.
I went to that convention I was talking about. I was there to to speak and. You know, the guys, the one guy comes up to me and said, I know you can’t learn nothing, but Buddy already learned something here. I’m not closed minded. I can learn something. I should learn something everywhere.
Hey, hey, hey. I think your wife said that she beat you up on, uh. On working on the business.
Oh, she does. She does. She absolutely did. Absolutely.
It was great meeting you guys as well, you know, a little while back. Um, okay, so that’s the best advice. What’s the worst advice that you’ve that you feel like you’ve received?
Uh.
Besides cut the beard, because that would be a horrible decision. Hopefully nobody’s ever told you that. No, no, they didn’t tell me that.
I mean, I don’t know. That’s a hard one. I try not to focus on the negative. Yeah, but, like, has.
Anybody ever told you, like, something and you’re like, dude, like, you know.
Well, I mean, probably the worst advice, honestly, is, like I said earlier, how, you know, this guy’s killing it over here. You know, I got I got myself stuck in situations where I was spending money where I shouldn’t have been spending money because somebody else was doing it. So, you know, don’t jump into doing something just because somebody tells you that, hey, this guy’s killing her or try to jump on the next great thing, because chances are you’re not going to be successful doing that. You know, slow play it and do some of your own research before you just jump into doing stuff.
Yeah, Yeah, I love that one because there’s there’s there’s so much, you know, it’s kind of like that shiny object syndrome. Exactly.
Exactly.
Oh, this guy’s, uh. He bought a LaVena. Now. Well, hey, I got a I got to change all these up. Now you’re like, that wasn’t have been, you know, I shouldn’t have been focusing on that right now. I should have.
Exactly.
Okay, So stay focused. Stay in your lane. Yep. Um, I love that.
Okay, last question.
Go ahead. Don’t try to grow too fast, you know, because you can grow too fast, too. I mean, yeah, as long as you have systems and processes in place, it’s not a bad. But make sure you do stuff. You have that in place before you just try to like, you know, when we grew like we did, I mean, luckily we didn’t run into any major issues, but that can be a problem too, growing too fast. So you got to be careful doing that.
Yeah, that’s saying, um.
Nail it, then scale it, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Don’t scale it and then try to nail it because you’re just going to be fighting.
Had 20 years of of figuring out how not to do it.
Yeah.
Well with that segway of that 20 years. Um, just last question here. Just leave the audience here because we got some people alive, people, you know, go on the replay, Apple, Spotify for anybody. That’s whether they’re new getting into the coding business or home service or home improvement. You know what’s kind of some advice that you’d give them as they’re getting in? Um, maybe in the first couple of years, you know, you know, of business.
Uh, well, surround yourself with good people that you can rely on. Have yourself a culture like, like we talked about earlier and write your business out, have a plan, have a have SOPs for have every step of the business of what you’re going to do. Have that in writing. So when there’s an issue.
So don’t wing the whole thing.
No, don’t, don’t, don’t wing it. I did that for 20 years. I didn’t get very far. I spent a lot of money. I’ll tell you, you know, the last couple of years, I really my business really grew because I, I figured out what I was doing wrong for so long. And so, yeah, I mean, write everything down and have a have a plan and stick to the plan. You know, don’t veer off because somebody finds the next best thing. So, you know, you’re trying to veer off your plan to do that. And, you know, don’t be afraid to go to these seminars and learn from these people. I mean, you know, some of these seminars are six, $700, but I’d rather spend six, 700 and learn how to do something the right way than spend 10,000 and do it the wrong way. Yeah. You know, so don’t be afraid to reach out to people that that are doing it. I mean, there’s seminars all over the country, you know, from that, from that have people teach them that are a lot smarter than I am. I’ve been doing it a lot longer. So don’t be afraid. I mean, don’t be afraid to go to them. And and the other thing, when you go to them, you’re going to have you’re going to learn a lot of information and a lot of things to do, but do one thing at a time. Don’t try to do everything that they’re telling you to do. You know, pick the thing that’s the most important at that time and work on that first.
Man. That is absolute gold man. And and I’ll leave the audience with that. Man Jason, appreciate you being here, guys. Again, Jason Larson from American Remodeling and epoxy floor experts, eight figure service legend. And by the way, guys, the you know, the company name service legend is short for home service legend. And Tommy Mellow was one of the inspirations kind of for that name because, you know, I saw Tommy over and over again donating to the community, you know, serving in the community, building an amazing culture, building an amazing training to develop his team leadership opportunities, growing the business selflessly for his team versus himself. I mean, he’s made it right. And, you know, just being a good person, a good man, a good leader, all these different things. And and that’s what that’s the type of clientele that we want to work with, the service legend. And that’s who I feel, you know, adjacent is and that’s who we want on the podcast, is to share the knowledge because again, it’s about more profit, more freedom, more impact, not about more money and doing things the wrong way. And the easy way, you know, anything worth anything is worth doing well, and it’s challenging to do that. Um, so guys, um, next week we’ll have another episode, uh, Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific time, 1 p.m. Eastern time. And thank you guys so much for tuning in to this client Spotlight session of the Service Legend podcast. We’ll see you guys next week. Have an amazing weekend and talk to you guys soon.
See you guys.
