Episode 298: The Value of Employee Buy-In and Customer Experience with Ron Holt

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it.

Just get what you need and go.

So with that, let's get into today's episode.

Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. So on today's episode is actually someone who is just a couple hours south of me, but that's not why he's on the podcast. I actually heard him on the John Warrillow Built to Sell podcast for the first time. I thought his story about how he took really a boring business like cleaning, absolutely transformed that business, was able to make a name for themselves, and now is doing it in a totally different industry— we're going to come at it from a different angle than what he did with John, but I do encourage you to go back and listen to that episode with John Werlow on the Built to Sell podcast because he gets into a lot more of the acquisition and how he actually ended up selling that company. But today we're going to talk a lot more about what does it actually mean to be able to scale a company that way to where then somebody is willing to see that as an asset that they ultimately want to buy.

I think you're going to get a ton out of this.

I think this is like a business masterclass. I've said that a couple other times, uh, but not too many other times, and I think you're going to get a lot out of this interview with Ron Holt.

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Podcast.

Ron Holt, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you on.

Oh, I'm glad to be here, Bradley. I can't wait to talk with you today.

Oh man, we're gonna talk about so many different things around business. As you know, whenever you and I connected on the phone, uh, I shared with you how I came across your story, uh, one of my favorite podcasts I've listened to for years, Built to Sell with John Warrillow. We'll make sure we link that in the show notes. But Ron, we always start with background and origin story. And I'm sure from this question alone, we're just going to go into a lot of different places. But for people that aren't familiar with you and, and kind of your story, why don't you take us back, uh, wherever you would like to, and bring us today? We always like to start with background and origin story.

Yeah, so I've got 20 years of professional life to share with you. I'll try to condense that into a few minutes here. So, you know, it starts in my early 20s, forever ago. I wanted to own a business. I just had this dream of becoming an entrepreneur. I had no money, had no real experience, and was, you know, still in my early to mid-20s at the time. But I had this huge dream. I really wanted— I didn't know what it meant at the time, but I wanted to like fulfill myself. I wanted more purpose in what I was doing besides just a, you know, a fat paycheck. And so for the first 6 or 7 years of my adult life, meaning after college, I just sort of chased that dream. And while, while I was chasing that dream, I saved a bunch of money along the way and finally hit this magic number in my head of around $150,000, which felt like $150 million at the time and started a cleaning business. The cleaning business, I called it Two Maids and a Mop. I opened that in Pensacola, Florida on April Fool's Day of all days in 2003. So I started it many years ago and much like my earlier dream, I had this second dream that I would build a brand that scaled across the country, would really be a major player in the industry. And I didn't know how I was gonna get there, but I started with that big vision and figured, you know, I'd, I'd use my hustle and grit and all strong work work ethic to make it happen. And so I, for the next 2 years opening, after I opened that original location in Pensacola, I lost money every single day, you know, so I would work 6, 7 days out of the week, sometimes crazy times like 6 in the morning to close to midnight, all for the opportunity to, you know, write a check to make it all happen. And the ultimate, you know, small business owner at the time just trying to make it happen. And so I finally, Made that happen, started making some money and started scaling, started chasing that bigger dream that I had, opening more and more locations. Eventually I opened 12 corporate locations across the Southeast and sort of hit another bit of a wall because we had sort of outstripped our infrastructure. And so I had to make a decision. Do I stop the growth and just sort of maintain that? Do I build out the infrastructure to support more corporate growth, or do I grow a different way? And the third option is what I selected. Thank goodness, because it became sort of one of my bigger decisions in my professional life and decided to franchise. And so we started franchising the brand. We scaled beyond the borders of the Southeast and across the country from California to, to South Florida. And long story short, through all those next years, built that into an almost 100-location brand and sold it to a group, which is what John talked about when we were on together in a separate interview. And, you know, that has its own whole long story to how that all came about. But I was fortunate to sort of live the American dream and built, you know, a tiny business into a large business. I sold it and that should have been enough, but it wasn't enough. So I decided to stick to my entrepreneurial roots, and I started another home service brand called Pink Zebra Moving. We currently have 10 franchise locations across the country, expect to open a lot more over the next several years and redo it all over again, recreate the magic. So I tried to pack 20+ years into 3 minutes there. Hopefully I was able to pull it off.

You did. You did pretty good. Trust me, just that alone, I've got so many threads I'm going to pull together. So as I shared with Ryan, In this episode, if you go and listen to the episode with John, he really unpacks, I mean, the nature of that podcast is to unpack the selling, the acquisition or the selling of the company. We're not gonna dive into that because you can go and listen to that podcast. John does a fantastic job asking all the questions around that. There's a lot though, just in that introduction that I wanna kind of peel back some of the things.

Okay.

First, Why do you think having, in those early days, having that big vision was so critical for what then came over the years? That's kind of a two-part question. That's number one. And then number two, for someone struggling with creating a big vision, uh, I know some, some people just have a really hard time of thinking past just what they want to do this year. Like they just almost can't allow themselves to have the big vision, the they'll sometimes creep over there to it, but they just go, I just don't think I can do that. What would you share with, with someone that maybe has that?

Yeah, so it's a great question. I've thought about it myself over the years. What did push me? What, what, you know, there's a lot of valleys when you're building a business. Um, sometimes those valleys are so deep and so tough that you don't get out of them. You know, in business you have two options. You have to keep fighting or quit, you know, and that's the competitor in me kind of loves the fact that that's the only way to lose in, in business. You can lose every single day but never actually lose the bigger battle, you know. So, you know, I guess the, for me, it kind of goes back to what I said earlier. I, I believe that if you believe your work matters, if you have purpose in your, your life, then you're gonna you're gonna overcome challenges, you know. So kind of think of it almost like a parent, you know. If you've got, um, as you're raising a child, that child's gonna go through ups and downs, right? Just like a business does. And some of those are gonna be tougher than others. I have, don't have teenage kids yet, but I hear that the teenage years are, are very difficult. And so let's say, you know, you have a moment where, you know, your son sneaks out of the house, does something really bad and, you know, all sorts of family drama that comes from that. Well, that's a problem, you know, that's a challenge. That's something that the family has to deal with together. You do it though because you're a mom, you're a dad, you fight because you know that's what my role in this life is. The phase of life I am right now is my job is to raise this teenage son to learn from these mistakes. There's no question, like, you never think— a great mom or dad never thinks, well, I'm just gonna quit. You know, I can't, he's made mistakes. I'm sick of the mistakes. It's been going on for 12 years. I'm done. That never registers. Well, that does register in business and in other parts of life as well. And I believe it's because of, of what I just said. If by setting a vision for myself, a, a large, crazy big goal, by setting those dreams in front of me, I, I believe everything I did and still do to this day matters and works my way step by step towards where I'm eventually going to land. So when I have a bad day, you know, maybe, maybe it is tough. Maybe I really am glad the day is over. But every single day that I walk inside my business and my office, I know that that's a step towards something bigger and better. I'm not just trying to get through Tuesday. I'm using Tuesday as a springboard to something much bigger and better. But you can't have those bigger and better opportunities and dreams without first just creating a vision for yourself. And so that's the really, that's the funnest part to me is nobody ever, you know, as an adult, you get very few opportunities to just think big, you know, like you've got so many operational challenges with as a business owner. You've, you've got, you know, bills to pay and employee issues to handle and all of these operational things really pull at you. You never really, you know, sit down and say, what can I do today that's fun? You know, so step one is just thinking big, you know, and think what that dream looks like for you and how does it make you feel when you think about what that future might look like. And then go, you know, then really believe in the dream and, and take it from there. Then I guess that's probably sort of a good segue because dreams and visions are great. But if you don't believe in them, then you're not gonna believe in what you're doing on a daily basis either.

So, you know, it's my personal belief that so many things, and you're, I mean, you're, the companies that you've built are such a good example of this, is that so many things other people can do. You can absolutely build the operating system for the business and create the playbooks for other people to actually run them. I mean, you've literally done that with the franchising of the companies. But one of the biggest is like you can't delegate the vision. Like right now you are vision casting. I'm sure even when the idea of Pink Zebra came to life and what you do even in your organization, you're still casting the vision. What does that actually look like from— now I'm going kind of high level down to like, what does that actually look like for you today in owning Pink Zebra and how do you actually cast the vision on a regular basis with your team?

So I've got sort of two worldviews here. Early on, building Two Maids and a Mop from a one-store, just really tiny business into a large national brand that was as hands-on as it could possibly get. Part of the reason for that is because I was cash poor. You know, you heard the $150,000 number earlier. Well, that was all the funding we ever received. And so we needed cash flow. To fund all the future growth and investments. So my early vision casting was, we were based in Pensacola, the Gulf of Mexico was in our backyard. I can still remember this like I was there in this moment. This shows my age, but I pulled out a notebook, I drove to the Gulf of Mexico, parked in this like public parking lot and used several hours in an afternoon which operations was calling me saying, hey, come over here and fix this problem. But I told myself and my business and the employees that I needed some time this afternoon. I didn't call it vision casting at the time, you know, to work on the future of the business. And so I literally drove to the beach, sat in the car, pulled out a notebook. Again, that shows my age. No apps back in those days. And I wrote down what I wanted in life, you know, just personally. And then how I wanted the business to help make those things happen and what needed to happen with the business for it to occur. And used that piece of paper, 2 hours of just high-level thinking as a springboard for everything else that came later on over the next almost 20 years, really 19 to 20 years. So that's my first worldview, very hands-on ground, you know, floor, grassroots kind of stuff. Here it's much different. So one, we're not as cash poor, thankfully. You know, we've got 20 years of history behind us. Along the years, I've been able to attract really strong talent to join my team and organization. And so now I'm able to sit in a boardroom and do those things. We have to start Pink Zebra moving as a brand. We had an off-site retreat myself and my leadership team, and we had some fun. We went down to the Keys, you know, did all the things you do in the Keys, but also worked really hard to kind of come up with what our plans are for the future. And again, when I start talking about plans, I'm not just talking about big goals like for the business revenue, profit, and, you know, type goals. But what, what happens to my team when those things are accomplished? What happens to their family and their personal lives? What do they want to happen? And we tried to put that puzzle together. And so now we have this symbiotic type environment where everybody's working for the same goal and it's not just Ron, you know, so I love being the founder and sort of the spokesperson for our brand, but there's so many people around me that believe just as much about what we're doing here at Pink Zebra Moving. And that's really different than what it was before. So you're probably going to be in one of those two sides. If you're, you know, if you're, if you are cash poor, but you're, you know, you're time rich, then that's going to have to come from within you. And you, I look at that as sort of the general in an army, you know, people are going to follow you. So you got to lead by example and you got to do the things that are necessary. Um, that same thing applies later on when you're not as cash poor, uh, but it, it definitely takes an army to pull something big off. And that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to, create a whole new category in this space. And it's, it's bigger than me, you know?

So, yeah, you know, a couple of things that stand out to me about what you just said that I think is so critical, and I'll share this with people too, is that environment dictates performance. So therefore, what you didn't do whenever you went to the Gulf of Mexico, looking out over the ocean in Pensacola, Did the Blue Angels fly over that day? Maybe. I don't know.

Wasn't quite that magical, but okay. It was a fun day though. It was. Yeah.

Actually, if the Blue Angels were really doing an air show, you, you, it wouldn't have been very relaxing. It would have been people. Okay. Anyway. Um, but you, you, you did, you were not in the office. You were not in front of your computer screen. You were actually away out of, and you said, no, this is actually more important. And I think a lot of times we think that the fires that need to put out, the operational day-to-day things are more important. I mean, they are. I mean, it's not like you can be vision casting and going and sitting in the parking lot every single day. Nobody realistically is going to do that. So I think that, that stands out to me is that you actually got out of the office, went and did that and spent several hours doing it with pen and paper, even with the apps today. I do believe that doing it with pen and paper is, is so valuable. So that's one thing I just wanted to pull the thread on. And then number two is that you did the exact same thing with a leadership team. And so while it is nice with boardrooms and, you know, glass whiteboards and cool Zoom technology TVs and all of those kind of things, you still then got the team on an offsite, uh, to be able to do some of that strategic planning and then being able to share. And then the other part of that What I really loved, and I wrote down, is that you Todd, okay, if this happens in the business and we actually start to do these things, what will this mean for you personally in your life? And I'm sure it gets down to houses that they want to buy, cars, schools that they want to send their kids to, vacations that they want to go on. And so like the connection, and tell me if I'm wrong here, but the connection of all of those things to this much bigger vision of what the company is doing.

Now they see the tie of their day-to-day.

Is that fair to say?

100%. We had some that were probably more materialistic, like, hey, I want the RV or whatever, you know. Yeah. But we also had, we had one person in the leadership team said, hey, I actually want to start my own franchise brand one day. You know, I don't, it's not going to be home services. I've you know, that had this different idea. And we were like totally supportive. I'm still very supportive of that, you know, because that means if you're reaching your goal, the brand has reached its goal and it's helped everybody reach all of our goals together. So we don't, we don't, we don't shy away from those goals even if it means we lose that person down the road.

Man, that's good. All right. So one of the, let me, I'm gonna go back and then we're gonna pull forward back to kind of where, where we are. You mentioned around, um, when you got to around 12 corporate locations, you had hit this moment. It was almost like a plateau, so to speak. Can you just talk about at different times and maybe even a little bit with Pink Zebra, but you may want to even go back to, to Maids right now, is whenever, how have you been able to find like the busting through plateaus and ceilings, you know, I mean, it's— people talk about that a lot when they're working out, you know, like I've just kind of hit a plateau with my, you know, growth if you're trying to, you know, get strong or something like that. But have you experienced that too at different times within the business that if I can bust through a million and then we just sit at a million and then if we can get to 3 and then we get to 10, but there's these different things like the the things that were working at a million are just not the things that work at 10 and how you've been able to kind of build to start busting through some of those plateaus over time.

Yeah. So I'm, I am every, I think every really good entrepreneur is a little crazy. I was really crazy, um, in, in those early days. Now I had no family, no kids or anything like that. So it was easy to pull some of these things, easiest, probably wrong, easier to pull some of these things off. And so, I, one of the crazy things I did, I would move, relocate to our markets and hire the first people, you know, set the tone, create the culture just to try to get us started in the right way. And so I would live there anywhere from as little as 3 months to in some cases almost a full year while I'm also managing the other locations. And so I did that. For the first 7 locations and wasn't able to pull off, you know, 8 through 12. And it was pretty clear because I was just too busy. I did have a, you know, I got married, you know, and so it was a little bit harder to pull it off personally. But that's what I, that's really what, how close I was to the action. I lived in Birmingham and Pensacola and Huntsville and Atlanta and Nashville and all these different places. And I was there just to, again, get it off the ground. And so when we reached number 12, it was pretty clear that it was so dependent on me. You know, we had, I'd built a really small but effective corporate team based in Birmingham. We had relocated the corporate headquarters from Pensacola to Birmingham at that time. And to, we were, we were doing okay, but there were some holes being formed and kind of more visible to us. For instance, You know, we had, when we had a sales issue, it was sometimes less about process or technology and more about people. And so when we had a people problem, then we had to fix that. Well, it wasn't, it wasn't that simple because what happens if we terminate this person in Charlotte, for instance, we're in Birmingham, you know, and so, or how are we gonna fix that very quickly? So do we, manage that situation and let it linger, or do we go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off and deal with it? And those were very difficult conversations because our team was so small that we just, we couldn't really do some of the things we felt like we needed to do. And so again, the pivot for me, the moment where I sort of reflected on that was, what do I do here? You know, my vision is the reason I'm here to create this national brand is the whole reason for our being at the time. And so staying stagnant and just who we are, being comfortable with— at the time, we were actually one of the largest residential cleaning companies in the country because of everyone else that was large had a franchise system behind it. So they were populated like we are now by all these mom-and-pop businesses with employees under their umbrellas. And so we had hundreds of employees working for us who just focused on residential cleaning. And I, there's no way to track this or prove this, but I believe we were one of the, like, two top, two or three largest cleaning residential cleaning companies in the country, in the country because of that. Well, we wanted bigger than that, you know? And so I said to myself, all right, then we're gonna have to build a stronger, bigger, larger infrastructure here. We're gonna have to get better technology. We're gonna have to be less people dependent. Um, all of those things are gonna have to. To play out. Well, in the meantime, I saw all the money being pulled out of the field and back to corporate, and it just, I don't know, it didn't really resonate with me. And so franchising was the logical solution to that because again, we have to chase the vision, we have to go for the gold here, you know, we got to keep growing. That's the whole, again, reason that it all started in the first place. And so that was the sort of way of thinking at the time. You know, when you look back on all this stuff, you see that they are like really critical moments in your life. But, you know, when you're in the middle of it, it just sort of feels like Tuesday. Yeah, you're, you're, you're again, you're either going to quit or you're going to fight. And so we never, ever once thought about quitting, even during those 2 years of losing money. And so every time we hit a moment, you know, we worked and we reflected on it and we came up with solutions. Sometimes we had to fail from those solutions to get to a better solution even. But everything we did and still to this day do is meant to chase something bigger than us down the road.

You know, I've heard this term just in the, I guess in the past year or so, maybe 2 years. I'd never heard it before, but this quiet quitting. And I think to myself as an entrepreneur or a business owner, there's no such thing as quiet quitting. I mean, Your team may do that. You cannot do that. All right. I mean, no way. If you do that, you might as well— that is failing, basically. That is actual quitting.

All right.

So this is one of the most important questions I wanted to ask you. So I'm actually excited to ask this question.

Okay.

I may get these numbers wrong and you probably have better statistics on these. So I'm actually anxious to hear if you do have So I've seen numbers that say, you know, 96% of small businesses fail before their 10th birthday. 50% of businesses never make it past the first year. I recently, in the past month or so, I'm sure you've seen this, the Inc. 5000 list came out and I saw some research from Kaufman that said 67% of the companies that have made the Fortune or the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies have within, I think, 3 to 5 years have either been disadvantageously sold, gone out of business, or had a huge reduction. In other words, they did not continue on with the growth that they had even even after making Inc. 5000. However, there's this subset, okay, of businesses, specifically franchises, that have such a lower failure rate than almost anything else that's out there. And it's my personal belief that that has to do with the documented processes, the operating system that you're effectively buying into. That has all of like, we've already proven this out. So I can tee up a lot of questions around that. What are your thoughts and what you have seen specifically after now doing this twice? And how can we take, even if we don't have a business that we think that we could ultimately one day franchise, but we could apply franchise-like thinking and operational excellence to what we do in our business? Does that question make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. So I'll, I'll get to that. You're onto something. I think it's actually more of a two-part answer, however, at least from my own personal experience. So go back to those 12 corporate stores we had. We were okay, you know, doing some, doing better than others. What I noticed was even though some revenue would be very, very similar to another location's revenue, their bottom lines were completely different. And when we looked at all the reasons for that, it was, it was pretty obvious why, you know, we just didn't have enough structure in place. There wasn't enough process. We were very dependent again on people. And, you know, people made different decisions in this market versus that market, and that contributed to a different bottom line performance. And so we had to look within before we could ever franchise this opportunity. We had to actually document every single systems and process that was working and successful for us and then learn how to teach it and support it for future franchisees later. Everything was in my head, you know, which is not a good thing. That's the wrong thing. Thankfully, it was in the right head because, you know, I loved the business and believed in it. And so I just kept on going and chugging along. But You know, if that's in, if that's in someone's head that doesn't have that drive, then it falls apart and quits. You could quit pretty quickly. So step one is, yes, getting to those systems and structure so that you can have a more consistent, uniform, just operating model. But at the same time, one of the other great things about franchising that I didn't see coming, honestly, I just sort of, I didn't know what I was, what I was missing. Is when you, when you sign a new franchisee to market, they're writing a check. Maybe not an actual physical check, you know, but they're writing a check for that. They're spending money, they're investing money towards this business opportunity. You feel that, you feel that as a business owner and you know it. And you remember the day you did that because, you know, that's money out of your bank account to do that. When you hire someone, I'll use an example like, let's say Charlotte again. We're based in Birmingham. We're going to fly our team to Charlotte. We're going to train you how to get this thing open and stay open. We're going to teach you how to use the software and how to push the vacuums and all those good things, right? And then we hand you the keys after a week or two of training and we fly back to Birmingham and say, go get them. Well, when we do that same exact thing with a franchisee, the way you honor and respect those systems that we just taught you are completely different. You're not working for me, you're working with me. We're not actual business partners, but it feels pretty much like that, you know. And so systems and structure and process, yes, that is franchising. That's Franchising 101. But the entrepreneurial pursuit that comes from, you know, combining that with an actual business owner, it's— that's to me, that's the reason you see so much success in franchising. It's like the, it's like the perfect business model in my opinion. And I've lived it on both sides. You know, I was actually very nervous to enter the space because I'd heard a few negative comments from franchisees within the home services space and franchisees are bad, you know, and meanwhile revenue is great, you know. So I was like, gosh, this sounds terrible. Well, I learned how to be a great franchisor, how to provide great training, how to provide great support, how to find and qualify great franchise candidates. Not just because you've got money doesn't mean you open a franchise. You know, we have to learn more about you. You have to learn more about us. We have to ask personal questions. We have to take you through your own franchise development process to see if you're going to follow that. Because, you know, everybody comes in hot and heavy emotionally, if you want to call it that. And wants to open a franchise very quickly, usually. Well, we slow people down and we take them through a process, not because we're just trying to be slow. We want to see if you can actually follow that process, because if you can, that probably means you'll do it later as a business owner. So that's why I think franchising is great. I think you said the second part of that question is how do you, how do you do it outside of that world? It's the same question. You know, I'll tell you how we built our franchise model. And it's the same thing you can do as a small business owner in retail, food service, services, whatever. We sat around a table. I had a— we had thankfully 12— we had 12 managers at the local level, had a few field managers, and then myself and my corporate team, which was 2.5 people at the time, by the way. And we sat around a corporate boardroom for almost 2 weeks, for about 10 days, and in Birmingham. And we went through A to Z everything that we do in this business or the time in that business to run it, you know, how to, how to, how to end up with a consistent, uniform bottom line. And some people had different ideas than other people, but either way, at the end of the day, the end of that particular phase, we, we ended up in the right place and we all agreed on it. And so we built our operations manual over that 10-day period. And it was very detailed, like how to— like, we were a cleaning business, right? So how to enter a home. We never really thought much about that. Well, there's a process to how a team of 2 housekeepers enters a home. There's a process on, you know, obvious things like how to sell and how to market and things like that. But you forget some of the small things like that until you really focus on it. So if you're a small business owner and you've got a growing business that has strong— a strong bottom line, and you don't see that you're the most important person anymore in that business, you may have a franchise opportunity in front of you. Even if you don't go that direction, you certainly have an opportunity to scale that brand and potentially other locations by just simply looking within the business, pulling all that information out of your head, documenting it, complementing it with strong vendors. Vendors are sort of a— such a boring word, but they're critical component to any brand success, certainly in franchising, because if we're successful in Birmingham, that's great. But if, if our vendors can't support you in Dallas, Texas, then it doesn't work. And so all of that, you know, said it's, it's not easy. It's going to take some work and you're going to have to answer some tough questions and you have to do the hard work. You know, you're going to have to literally write words down on a piece of paper and pull that to pull this off. And then you got to go do it, train it, and support it.

Okay. Yeah, this is so great. Um, what the— there's so many things around that because I think people have like the idea that it's all living in your head. I mean, Ron, that was— that's my story. Like, that was my journey myself, is that was all sitting and the business was running off of an operating system, but it was called UOS. In other words, Bradley OS is what it was running off of.

Okay.

And so it was all living in my head. And so you've said a couple of times that the business was too people-dependent, but what I want, hopefully, and I'd love for you to comment on this, is that you're not saying A-players are not critical to the business success. I mean, you said in your opening there that the leadership team, the people you've been able to attract now to you because of the success that you've been able to have, the track record, etc., is exceptional.

It's a higher level talent.

But at the same time, you're also finding this balance, and I think it's a— it's nuanced, but I'd love for you to comment of like having a way of doing things. These are the operational manual, even now for obviously Peak Zoom, Zebra, etc., for how you do things. But it's then being also ran by exceptional people is kind of what I'm hearing. Can you comment on that?

100%. I mean, there's certainly talent is still a critical part of any business's growth and success that, that you can't systemize your way around that. And so that's a compliment. Great systems that are not executed properly are still bad systems. You know, there's, it's still too, so you've gotta have someone that understands the systems, believes in them, because there's some things that you may do that you may not disagree with initially. So they've gotta believe in them and then they've gotta consistently execute on each one of those. And so that is an A+ performer. So like in our case, Pink Zebra Moving is a brand that's sort of built on this premise that we're gonna disrupt this industry by providing an amazing positive customer experience. And so a lot of people who find us to go, you know, ask this question to me, like, does that mean I've got to be like the next Walt Disney to pull this off? Because we, we put on a show here at Pink Zebra Moving. It's a fun theatrical style type of a service experience when you hire us. So it's a lot of fun and creativity even that comes into play. However, no, you don't have to be Walt Disney, but you do have to execute the systems. That to us is an A+ performer. Now, if you're Walt Disney, who executes systems, that's even better. That's on steroids, you know, but it's, it's not that dependent on someone's personality being the reason for success.

That's so good. All right. So I'm gonna ask this question around. I've heard it called digital dust. We call it sometimes binders on bookshelves. Somebody may be listening to this that says, well, I get this. This is not new information for me to document systems and processes. But I've done this before and I put all this work in. I didn't spend 2 weeks doing it locked into a room, but I did spend about 4 hours on, on creating this playbook only for have to have nobody look at the doggone thing. So how have you been able to take, and again, now you would have it to where like, well, this is just the expectation, this is what it is, but if you kind of go back and you started to document those things. There's this— I'm sure it took some time to actually get the adherence to where, no, we're actually using the systems and processes. We're taking it from a, in some cases, maybe quite literal three-ring binder to also now it's also digitalized to where we can access it on iPads and phones and that sort of thing. Like, how have you been able to get people to where, no, we actually put the work in, but we're utilizing them.

So that is, that is true. This is gonna sound like grandpa, but back in the old days, we did have 3-ring binders. Kinko's was, they loved us, you know, and all those, all those things. We supplemented that with different types of technology. Most of the, it got, you know, had improved, evolved over time. Today, we still have If you want the 3-week, 3-week, the, the, the big book, you know, with all the words and everything. I mean, our, our operations manual is, uh, I'm trying to go off memory here, over 400 pages long, you know? Mm-hmm. This is for a moving company. And if you ask the, you know, Joe Q public, like, what does it take to run a moving company? Go get trucks, couple strong guys, and go move. You know, that's, that's how they would summarize it. Well, we have 400+ pages to prove that it's bigger than, and, and much more difficult than that. Well, you need more than a book, obviously. That's sort of like the ABCs of, of it. You have to supplement that with various forms of technology. And so we have, um, an intranet system that helps with, in terms of support and training within that intranet system, we have video, um, that teaches people how to move. Like if you've never moved a grand piano before, um, we're gonna be show you how to do it and teach you how to do it. Mm-hmm. If you've never, uh, actually provided a quote to a moving customer. Like, if you don't— if you, if you walked into our office today, by the end of the afternoon, we would be able to tell you how to provide a quote to anyone without any background, without any professional moving experience in your history, because of different types of technology. So whether it's software or apps that, you know, like ClickUp, that you can use to actually create tasks that follow other tasks and create other tasks. Like, all of those are kind of combined together now to create this real process around everything that we do. For instance, out in the field, you know, movers are very hands-on. They are picking up things, manual labor throughout the day, some fun things as well, you know, to put on a show. However, we have all sorts of different things to make that things are happening. Like, we know where they are, we know how long they've worked, we know how long they've driven, we know the maximum speed they traveled to get there and to get back. We can tell the customers, you know, when we're going to be there to the minute. Inside the home, when it comes to the different types of tasks that we perform there, we have an app that actually, that actually walks you through that. And so you're not going to have to just say, hey, I started last week, and you hit your friend on the shoulder and say, how do you do this again? How do you wrap all this? You can actually pull that up and see all those things. And so we didn't have the luxury of that back at Two Maids, uh, in the early days. But you know, it's 2023 and life has evolved. And so we were able to complement all those words that are on a piece of paper with all the other things that make life much easier for us.

You've mentioned culture a couple of times. We've talked around people, we've talked about operations manual, documenting of systems and processes.

Talk about culture.

Um, what, what was that like maybe in the early, in the early years? You talked about flying, um, you know, to the actual places, being there with them and engaging in the culture. But I'm sure that there's been times where, you know, the culture was not where you wanted it to be, and, and, and maybe that was at a single location or half the locations, et cetera. What have you been able to do? What are some, uh, culture gets talked about quite a bit and, um, but sometimes we don't know what is it actually like to build the kind of culture that you really want.

Yeah. So that to me, it's my wheelhouse and I, you obviously there's books written on it. You, it's bigger than a, a quick conversation. But to give you a quick conversation out of this, for instance, here at Pink Zebra Moving, we have great systems, great process, great technology, super proud of all of those things, great training, support, all those things that come along with a good franchise brand. But we exist for one reason, not to just grow. That was my original dream at Two Maids. We obviously want to grow here at Pink Zebra Moving. We want to make a lot of money like every business owner wants to. But the reason that we exist, the reason everyone who works for us, every franchisee joins our network, is because we all share this common belief that we're not just going to disrupt this industry, we're actually going to create a whole new category. We call it happy movers. And so we, we think we're the pioneer there. We think we're the world's first happy moving company, but we think other people are going to follow us down the road. So when you open your location in whatever city it might be across country. We have 10 open right now, a lot more coming hopefully down the road. When you open that new location, you have to believe that, like, you have to truly believe that you're there to do more than just book jobs, send guys with on trucks, go do the work and bring money back. We, we, you have to believe that you're gonna put on a show, like you're gonna create this memorable experience. Our tagline is we make moving fun. So you have to make moving fun. You have to put on a show. Guys will only do as much as their leader will do. And so you have to lead by example. So to me, that's culture, you know, so believing in something so much that other people will follow you. That is to me, if you, I know there's books that have thousands of pages within it, but to me, that's, that's what culture is. Just creating that type of environment. And then people will do those things because they believe in you. They believe in your mission and what you, what your dream is for the business or the brand.

You know what? That's actually what I wrote down was mission. Like, you can really tell that you and your leadership team, your franchisors, franchisees, excuse me, all of that, they are on a mission to create happy movers, that you're going to disrupt the industry. That. And the way that you do that is through one experience at a time, obviously. And so all of that starts to build in the culture. I think that that is a great example of blending this kind of— it's almost like saying leadership, right? Like when you talk about leadership, it's kind of like this hard thing to get your hands on, but everybody kind of knows when it's good and knows when it's not good, etc., you know. And so, um, yeah, is there anything else I mean, we've talked on, uh, talked on culture and operational plans, your team. Is there anything else that you feel like that when you look over the two companies that you've been able to build and being successful that we haven't touched on that you think is really critical for maybe another business owner to hear?

I talked about it briefly. Again, it probably sounds like a very boring, sterile topic. But vendors, you, you gotta have strong vendors. You gotta have great relationships with your vendors. You've gotta have honestly preferred rates or preferred conditions or terms that are unique to you and your business. And that vendor has to believe they're bigger than just a, a transaction between you and, and a business. So when that day comes that you actually you know, hit go mode and the hockey stick happens, what's going to happen? Is your vendor going to be able to stick around with you? Are they going to give you cost efficiencies because of that growth? Or are you going to have to go out and, and find someone new? If you find someone new, there's risk with that. Like, what happens if the service or the product that you need changes? Does it affect the quality of your service or product that you're selling to the consumer? And so getting in front of that early and telling people your story— that's what I do That's what we did here. This is our story. This is what we're going to do. Who wants to ride? Who wants to come along with us? If you want to come along with us and ride with us, then you're going to have to do some things differently right now. And not everybody was a believer. Some, some vendors said, I know you did this thing at Two Maids, but I don't know about this. Okay, let's find somebody that really believes in us. And so that way, when a franchisee, for instance, joins our network, there's no thoughts, there's no questions. Hey, I'm the new guy in, in Huntsville or Dallas or whatever the location is. You're not wondering, who should I use for payroll? Who should I use for moving supplies? Who should I use to go buy a truck? All of those things are easy to figure out. And on top of that, you get such strong cost efficiencies even though you probably are still very much a small business owner. So I know it sounds super boring, but having the right vendors Knowing the people behind those businesses as well is very critical. You need to be able to call somebody. In most of our vendors' cases, we know the ownership. We can, we can call the owner of the business. We have reps, you know, so we don't always leverage that and use that, but we can if we need to. And they want to talk to us because they believe in what we're doing because it's going to make them money as well as we grow.

Yeah. Ron, this has been great. You, it's, it's, it's awesome. I love talking to, someone with the entrepreneurial disease, uh, like myself, uh, it's clear that you have that. Um, and, uh, just really excited to, to have you on and for our listening audience to kind of get to hear your story. People want to connect with you, um, your, your, your companies, maybe even find out, uh, about the, the opportunities that you guys have at Pink Zebra. Where would you point them to?

Yeah, there's a couple places to go. If you're just a consumer and you want to be a part of the magic, and you want to see what this crazy moving company does, then just visit our website, pinkzebramoving.com. You'll get a quote pretty quickly and hopefully book a job with us and, and see the magic happen. If you're interested in the franchise opportunity, also very simple. pinkzebramovingfranchise.com is the website to learn more about it. You'll see what the investment opportunity looks like in terms of cost, even what some of the financial expectations can be for you as a franchise owner. And so either one of those, we'd be super excited to work with, whether you're a consumer or potential franchise candidate. That's what we're in business of doing here. So all, all together, you know, I keep saying it, but our job here is to make moving fun. And if we can make moving fun, we're going to change this industry. We're going to create a whole new category. And when it's all said and done and I look back on this part 2 of my professional life, that'll be called victory. You know, so hopefully we'll pull it off.

Awesome. Well, for those of you that can't tell, Ron's down in Birmingham. I'm out of Huntsville, so he and I are going to go, uh, we, we'll have lunch here hopefully one day, maybe go play golf or something sometime. Ron, great to have you on.

Thank you, Bradley.

Well, there's so much with that, but I'm going to say the biggest thing for me in that episode is whenever I was talking to him around the idea of franchises. Now I don't personally have a desire to want to own a franchise. However, the idea of franchising a business and what does it take, so to, to do something like that by building an operating system and creating playbooks, documenting what it is that you do. I thought it was fascinating when Ron talked about that they went for, what did he say, 2 weeks, something like that, and they started to document everything to where they literally had a binder So many times, and you're going to hear me talk about this more in the coming months, but so many times we've heard, you know, systems and processes and have a good team, that's the things that I need. And yeah, that's true, but a lot of times we don't know exactly what does that look like. And for him to have done that and get it out of his head, he gave the example of what is it even like whenever we walk into, uh, how do we walk into, uh, someone's house. It's that level of detail that ultimately someone said, hey, we're going to, uh, we're going to buy this business. And so for him to go from 10 into ultimately well over 100 franchisee locations, and now he's obviously doing it with Pink Zebra and what they're doing in the moving industry, I think it's just an absolutely fascinating way of looking at business. And I think it's a thing that we can learn, whether you are wanting to scale your company across multiple different locations, your business, or if you're an industry that you can ultimately, you know, have a, a payday, uh, an exit like that. I think there's a few different types of exits that you can have in your business. I think most people think that there's just one. Um, I think there's actually 5 different exits. Ultimately, Ron was able to completely exit that business and walk away with a really nice, uh, payday. But there are some different exits that maybe, uh, we'll talk about in another podcast at another time. Well, shout out to our podcast partners and our sponsors that allow us to be able to do this and produce this. Every single week that hopefully provide a tremendous amount of value to you. TodayApp, Pro, Coach P Consulting, Autopilot Recruiting, and Club Capital. You know, when you think about when you're scaling a company, the vendors and the tech that you use to be able to do that is so important. TodayApp has some of the best technology, the best user interface that's in the market today, and it actually puts Customized word tracks with a corporate-approved CRM that your team is going to love using. Go to TodayApp Pro. Let them know that you heard about them on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. And you know, whether you're on an Excel spreadsheet or you're with another, you know, tracking bonus type compensation software that's out there, give TodayApp Pro a try. Now, I'm not big on switching just for the sake of switching. But when it is better, gives you better data, has a great experience, and your team is going to love using it, you'll get a return on that investment many times over. TodayAppPro.com. You know, I just said a minute ago that you got to document systems and processes, put them in what I would call playbooks. But also, you got to have a good team. And having a team full of A players in the process, having a recruiting system that you have documented in one of those playbooks is key for you being able to consistently scale your business by bringing on incredible people. And part of that process, in fact, the part that most people really don't enjoy, especially if you're an entrepreneur or business owner, you don't enjoy the filtering through, the going through the posting, etc., and going through those initial resumes, those initial phone interviews. I mean, don't they just sometimes feel it's like a necessary evil? Well, at the end of the day, you don't have to do that. It is so important for you to be able to buy back your time. And one of the best ways to do that is by working with Autopilot Recruiting. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com, autopilotrecruiting.com. Let the team there also know that you heard about them on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. It's my personal framework that when I think about business and you think about your team, you think about how do you attract, how do you develop, how do you retain— how do you attract, develop, retain A-players. And we just mentioned about Autopilot Recruiting, but with Coach P, Coach P is going to give you— if you're an insurance agency owner— going to give you a behind-the-scenes look, but he's also going to give you access to the tools and the templates and the assets that he's been able to build, the actual things that they are doing, not in theory, but actual things that they're doing. They're going to wrap that with an incredible community of like-minded business owners. And one of the most incredible parts about it is the fact your team is going to be able to participate on these calls. And then he has a once-a-month agency owner call so you can be around other like-minded business owners to be able to, you know, see what's working and ask questions that maybe you're not normally going to ask if you're there with your team. Go to coachpconsulting.com. Coachpconsulting.com. And lastly, whenever you're, you know, thinking about wanting to scale a business, you've got to allocate your resources. And one of the biggest resources is your time, but another resource is the financial resources, the cash in the business, and deploying that and knowing, you know, what is the profit margins, what's my tax liability going to look like, what's my marketing investment, what is it actually, do I have the money to be able to to make the investments in another account manager, into another sales acquisition person. And all of those decisions come down to impacting financials in some way, shape, form, or fashion. And having really clear financials— I was sharing with some people the other day and giving them an example, and they just did not have the type of perspective to make better decisions, and they were kind of winging it. They had money in the bank account, they would spend. If they don't have money in the bank account, they don't spend.

And I can relate to that so much because that was my own story.

But with Club Capital, it doesn't have to be your story, or at least it doesn't have to be your story anymore. Go to club.capital. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well.