You Are Responsible For Making Your Team Better | Ep 906

because they have to have an appreciation for the craft. It's the sale on them. It's like, how hard are we selling them on this is a skill that you will use for the rest of your life, and you're going to have to get good at it here or somewhere else, but you might as well get good at it here and get paid to do it. Trav diggity dog, Trav City. All right, tell me about the business.

All right, sounds good. So we are at about $4 million a year in revenue.

Awesome.

20% net, uh, residential window replacement. So, so the homeowners, um, and our biggest bottleneck as far as I see it is with our model. So our primary customer acquisition method is door-to-door. It's a two-part sale, setter-closer model.

Yep.

And it's a high-churn role. Like, we know how to sell windows, we know how to do it well. But getting reps hired, trained, and retained has been a huge challenge. And so we can't just like— and there's, there's kind of levels to that, right? There's getting people interested enough to say yes to the job. There's getting them to stick past, you know, week 1, and then actually producing. Our biggest fall-off right now is literally just from Showing up day 1 to making it the end of week 1 where they just get in and realize, oh gosh, I can't hack this.

Yeah. What do the top closers make?

$16K to $20K a month.

Yeah.

Okay.

They make good money. Okay. So I wanna give you a couple frames on this and then we'll dive in. So frame number 1 is that this is a feature, not a bug. It's the nature door-to-door. So instead of thinking like, man, I think there's something wrong with our business. Like, it might be just like, we need to do way more of it. Like at, at, at the very most basic level, like it could just be, how do I do 10 times more of this? And I deal with all the numbers I currently have. That's like thing one. Thing two, it might also be an avatar selection issue. So to pull back the thing that I was just talking about, these applications, just like leads that you have for a business, like I'm sure it's like we, they have to have at least this many windows or they have to have a home that's valued above X or whatever, right? You look at certain neighborhoods when you go door to door, right?

Yep.

Right. So the same degree as you might be, you might be knocking it to give you a, you know, a one-to-one example. It's like if you're going into the projects or the hood, right? Where home values are lower, the likelihood that they're gonna buy a higher ticket thing is lower, right?

Sure.

Right. And so you might still be attracting apps for SDR, you know, door knockers, whatever, for the setters from figuratively the quote, low-income part of the internet, right? And that doesn't actually have to do anything with income, but I'm just saying, just to give you like an analogy here. And so the question is, what do the people who make it have in common?

Balls.

Well, yeah, sure. But what we want to do— no, no, you're good. You're good. What we want to do is look at, we want to look at what are the behaviors. So I look at demographics just like you would with a customer. What are the demographics that have higher likelihoods of success? Is there age ranges, things like that, right? Number 2, is there any kind of past experiences that they had that make it more likely for them to succeed? The next is gonna be the behaviors, right? What did these people do? Just like we'd have activation. Now you're not in a service bus— well, you kind of are, but it's a little bit different. It's not like, like, it's not like customer has to do something, right? But if you were in a, if you were in a business where a customer has to do something, we'd say like, what are the behaviors that a really successful customer did? And then we say, okay, we wanna force that activation path for everyone. So what percentage of people who are starting make it past week 1?

We have two small offices and it does vary per office. One of them is significantly worse currently with this issue, but ultimately I don't know, but bad, like not, not a lot. And again, it's more, it's less of a like they couldn't see results and so they fizzled out because they need to pay their bills because it is 100% commission. And it's right now more of a, I don't get past day 3 because I realize once the rubber meets the road and I'm on the doorstep by myself, I can't hack it, is kind of what— right?

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. How much role-playing do you do with these guys before they get out there?

Um, so they've got to have the script down. Um, and we do, you know, we meet daily, um, for an hour or two. Um, and so that couple hours a day is, is—

do you have like two makeshift doors that you have at your facility where they like knock on it and open it, there's nothing on the other side of it?

Um, we've got the office door and we will either just not use a door or use that door.

This is going to sound silly, but I am 100% right. You want to approximate the conditions of the sale as closely as humanly possible in the training. Something as simple as them not actually knocking on the door will have a very meaningful difference in their ability to retain the information and actually deliver it in a comparable setting.

Okay. Yeah, we have definitely not focused on that.

Right. So you have a training issue, right? Like to me, this is a training issue. It's a training and expectations problem. So obviously there's some element of like, who am I bringing in? That's gonna be one component of it. You know, if you look at 10 people, I'm sure right off the bat, you could probably be 50/50 on like, I could for sure tell you that these 3 guys aren't gonna make it. Right. But there's some guys who are like, I'm not really sure. Well, it's like, let's just take out the guys who we already know aren't gonna make it. And then let's get the other 50% and try and approximate the training. So what I would do is I would set up 2 or 3 freestanding doors inside of your facility. And the reason I would want to do that is because I want them to learn to run. I want them to learn to hustle between doors, 'cause it's a huge difference in terms of their doors knocked per day, right?

Yeah.

Right. So I want them to practice like they play. So you're gonna knock on the door, you're gonna do it, we're gonna hit the script, and if they mess it up, we say, stop, step back, knock again, do it again. Because the thing is, it's gonna get, it's gonna be so muscle memory for them, like, literally, like, their hand's gonna— they're gonna knock the same number of times, they're gonna say the same words at the same spot, and that will approximate so much more closely what they're going to experience, uh, there. I would also encourage you to have basically the, the rowdy customer, because it going mediocre, okay, is not what they're afraid of. That's not why they're not— that's not why they're leaving. It's like, we have to have people slamming doors in their face, we have to have people not liking them so that they can get used to that.

So repeat kind of what you were saying there. Like I got 90% of what you were saying, but the, the missed the punchline. You're saying—

Yeah, yeah, no, you're good. 3 freestanding doors. Yeah.

They are the, the responses that they get in the real world.

Yes. I want them to be okay. I want to role play out what someone losing their shit on them is like so that they stop having this big fear around it. It's like, it's gonna be okay. You're gonna survive. If someone calls you a rodent, guess what? You can knock on the next door, baby. The only person who knows how the last door went is you.

Cool.

Right? And so where it gets nasty from a training perspective is when someone gets hot, someone gets on fire, cuz everyone's been there, right? You're like, man, I feel like I, like I can close everybody today. Right? They actually talk differently. They move differently. Their tonality changes. And then what we want to do is be as granular as possible about what those tonality changes, how their body moves, how they comport themselves to maximize the likelihood that they get more closes in a row. But this to me is like, thing one is you should absolutely set up this training. Like, this is like a tomorrow thing. Like set the 3 freestanding doors up so they can practice one knocking on doors and also quickly transitioning between doors. Thing one. And that way they can also have a bad door, good door, bad door, and still know that, hey, I'm gonna get one outta 20 doors who opens, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get a set, right? And we have to set expectations of like, listen, we need you to be doing 10 doors an hour or whatever the, you know, whatever your numbers are, right? It depends on how, you know, far apart the doors are and whatever. But like, we should set these number of doors knocked per hour goals so that we can just— they have to look at it as a numbers game.

Yeah, cool. Yeah, I would agree that it's, it's— I mean, there's levels of that, that it's a training issue, you know. There's the week 1 training issue.

Well, it's for sure because one of them is doing way better than the other. So we know one of the trainers is already doing way better than the other location, right? Between the two that you got right now. Right. So already there's a discrepancy. So we know that like if the, if the bad location was doing as well as the good location, we already know that's 100% possible. Cause it's already happening. Right. But I'll bet you both could lift. And I also think part of this is, um, do you have the, uh, ACQ, uh, sales, the Closer Handbook? Yeah. I would have them read the, what it's like to be the top 1% and what is selling those two parts of the Closer Handbook. And I would use that to set the frame. For what this experience is gonna be like for them. And what is selling? Because they have to have an appreciation for the craft. And I think that if they, if like, again, part of this is just gonna be the sale, is the sale on them. It's like, how hard are we selling them on this is a skill that you will use for the rest of your life and you're gonna have to get good at it here or somewhere else, but you might as well get good at it here and get paid to do it. Well, so for me, the selling is like, if you sell, if you sell with the correct messaging, it will attract the right prospect. So you've probably heard of the Shackleton ad. Have you heard of that? So this was the ad that he ran that was like, whether it was him or not, it's become lore. So the ad said, "Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success." That was the ad. And he was overwhelmed with people who were into it. And so it's like, we want to, we, we wanna state the facts and tell the truth. And the truth is very compelling, which is that this will be a skill you will learn for the rest of your life. And it will take you 30 days. If you make it 30 days, you will have an experience that you will remember forever. Any person who's ever done door-to-door will tell you about their experience doing door-to-door. It shapes you, right? And so we need to paint that picture truthfully to them. But truthfully explain why it's in their best interest to stick it out. And we want to have as many reward cycles as possible. So are there ways that we can give a scoreboard that are like, I want somebody who gets an award for most doors knocked, most doors opened. Like we want other ways of giving them recognition early and fast so that they could see that they're at least on the right track, right? So if I were to zoom all the way out, thing one is gonna be, I want the types of people who have higher likelihoods of succeeding in this based on demographics, past experience, and the behaviors they demonstrate in the application process. Thing 1, this will be online too. So if you're like, I'm not writing fast enough, that's thing 1.

Yeah, yeah, no, you're good. I'm— yeah, thanks.

Thing 2 is that I want the training environment to approximate reality as closely as humanly possible. I wanna have multiple doors. I want them to knock every time. No one just says the script. You knock every time because that's how you do it in the real world. Thing 3, as soon as they do begin, I want to have multiple ways for them to win. That are ideally approximations or, or, uh, on the way to them getting their first set or multiple sets. I want to award them for knocking the most doors. I want to award them for having the most doors open. I want to award them for the, the biggest cuss out that they get, right? I want to make this fun. I want the, I want to take the pressure away. Just make it a game.

Yeah. Gamified. Yep. Yeah. I like it.

We do that and you have leaderboards just for the setters beyond just sets. I want to have some of the other metrics that are there. Right. Just closes is one thing, but I want to have who did the most dials. I want to say who did the most, who had the most pickups, right? Who had the most calls that lasted past 2 minutes, right? Same idea.

Yeah. Cool.

Love it.

Um, is there anything that you feel is worth mentioning as far as just like the overall talent acquisition funnel, or this is going to trump that regardless of where and how we're bringing people in? I mean, we kind of talked about the how.

Yeah. Doing more. I mean, doing more in general might, this was kind of the feature bug thing of like, well, what does it cost you to get an activated rep? Are you willing to spend more for that? If so, spend more so you get more of them. Like if we change nothing, it would still grow the business. If we just had more reps, like if we change nothing, if we change these 3 things and spend more, it'll be double-double.

Yeah. I guess I was more asking like, because right now, yeah, 99%. Come from just like an Indeed listing and obviously changing what that Indeed listing looks like and sounds like can obviously change who we're attracting.

Um, but— Well, I think the copy that I just kind of outlined, again, state the facts and tell the truth, but I would just try and make it look like a hardcore life opportunity, which is what it is. Like you're not selling windows, you're selling a skill that they're going to learn. And get paid to do, which I think is pretty compelling for sure. I would also strongly encourage, cuz almost every door-to-door team that's very big has a 3-step process for the career progression. Step 1 is learn how to sell. Step 2 is learn how to get one person to sell that you taught. Step 3 is recruit a team. So I think that you probably are missing step 2 and 3 for your team if 99% of your dudes are coming from ads. Missing out on the entire referral component of them bringing their friends and getting an override on teaching their friend and then building a team.

For sure. Yeah. Right now we're at a spot where we need this base level of momentum to even do 2 and 3, but yes. And I've recently made some changes there that makes it compelling towards like, not just a, oh yeah, I can make a little bit extra with bringing a friend in and be more sticky, but I can make a side hustle just bringing my friends in, even if I don't sell.

Yes. It's a career path. Yeah. It's a recruiter. It's another, just selling, selling, selling a different opportunity. Yep. But yeah, that's step 1, 2, 3, and then obviously do more, the unspoken fourth. Rock and roll. Appreciate you, man. All right. Talk soon. All right. Okay. I have a screensaver on my screen, so I can't see the chat. All right, here we go. We're back. All right. So Richard Ferris. For Mozy, I have a real estate development business. We do value-add deals. How do I apply your principles from $100 Million series to this business? Okay. Uh, you're scaling ACQ, which is private equity, very similar in my opinion. Yeah. So, okay. So if you're in the development business, do you see your leads as the deals or do you see your leads as the investors? So maybe, uh, if you guys can scroll down, um, we'll be able to see Richard's answer. He's, uh, let's see here, Richard, where are you at? Give me an answer here, man. Um, you see both as leads. All right. So which are your— we're on right now, but yeah, do you see, uh, which one are you, are you not getting leads for? Use your own capital. Okay. So you really want more deals then. Okay. So I guess from a development perspective, you're looking at teardowns and/or land. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, this is going to be just an advertising thing straight up. It's like, all right. So can I build a brand around this? So this is gonna be all this book. It's gonna be all Blue Book, right? Yeah. Land and Conversations. So I would be looking at me.

Hmm.

Thing is, it's so targeted. I would probably be using an outreach method and then having a base level of content. So I wouldn't expect that content was gonna bring me like tons and tons, 'cause you're probably so specialized, 'cause it's, you know, it has to be certain size, certain area, all that kind of stuff. Um, I would be making sufficient content that people would know that like I'm legit and I do this for a living, but outreach would be my primary method, um, of trying to attract deals. And as silly as this may sound, kind of like I was saying earlier with Sharon in the, in the real estate industry, like he did 260-something events. Like in industries where it's super small and very aggregated at the top, the conference or shooting them in the barrel method Uh, is one of the most effective ways of doing it. Like if I had to like start over tomorrow, new industry, I would be at every one of these conferences and I'd be meeting every person that I possibly could there because it's not the person you meet, it's the person that person introduced you to. Like that's the, that's the game, right? Um, and so that's kind of like an investment that I would be looking at, uh, in terms of increasing number of conferences that I would attend. I'd be like, can I do one a week? Um, and then outbound and follow-up would be the next thing, but it's gonna take a lot of violence for this, but Once you have, you know, a few good deals and like, I'm sure, I mean, if this is the main business that you do, um, you having a few good big wins will attract more attention and more capital, obviously. But a lot of the deal stuff is like building out the broker network. Like that's what we have in our, cuz we do a lot of real estate. We just have a network of brokers that we've done a lot of deals with. And so over time we've just, you know, it's a long business, right? And so it's like for the last, like we've been focused on, you know, one market particularly for like 6 years. And now like most of the brokers come to us with all their off-market deals, uh, first, cuz they know we can close. And so some of that takes time, but it's also like kind of how it works. So I know that was a little bit less of like, here's, let me tell you this one secret, but I think you already knew there wasn't gonna be a secret method. And so yeah, that's the deal. And I will not respond to spammers. We do not negotiate with spammers in the chat. That is our, that's right. That's right, Duke. That's right. We do not. All right. Senaro Senani. Alex, I'm from Albania. My question is in real estate— real estate. Here we go again. Can I grow the business with little connections and no big capital? Yeah. You just start wholesaling. I mean, yeah, that's what you do. You, you get, you get deals under contract for less than they're worth and sell them to people who are willing to spend more. You make the difference. That's the zero down, zero capital play when you're in real estate. Then you build enough capital that you start taking those deals down and, and then you just, you work your way up the, from minnow to whale. Just takes time. All right. Prince Gemini. I have a janitorial business. What kind of lead magnet, uh, my ideal avatar need help attracting and nurturing clients? Appreciate it. Well, dude, if you're in the janitorial business, it's going to be commercial, you know, commercial building owners, right? And so lead magnets there are I mean, it's gonna depend on the size of the buildings that you're looking at. If you're looking at smaller buildings that you're doing, you're really just looking at business owners, probably. I would imagine, like, the, the first and most likely path would probably be a Google PPC campaign, so pay-per-click campaign, uh, on anyone that's searching that in your local area. That would be like the fastest first method of getting leads. They'll be the most expensive, but they'll be the most qualified. All right, so that's kind of like thing one. Thing two, um, in that space is I would probably Trying to think about, I mean, door knocking would work okay. It depends on the size of the building again. So I don't have as much, like if you have smaller buildings, door knocking work. If they're bigger building, then it's gonna be outreach to building managers, which is gonna work pro better off of LinkedIn outbound strategy. So I'd be looking at building managers who are actually, who are the decision maker for, uh, for those services. And I would be doing outbound on LinkedIn. There was a business that I looked at, uh, not that long ago that had a, they, they went for whales and they only were talking to building managers. They did it all exclusively on LinkedIn. So there's two strategies that I would do. And in terms of lead magnet, I think the lead magnet actually matters less for like this type of business. Um, it would probably be more like, what is my offer rather than what is my lead magnet? So I'd be focused more on like, what's my more compelling way to pull cash forward? Which might be like, I get paid quarterly and I get paid in advance. So that'll be one of the like ways that I would pull cash forward and decrease churn. But in those businesses, churn is almost nothing. So it is definitely the acquisition game. Of getting customers. All right. David Kissel. Kissel. Kissel. Kissel. I'm a pro volleyball player. I have 150,000 followers across platforms. Any tips for monetizing my audience? Yes, I have tips. So many tips. Many, many tips. The frosted, the most frosted of tips. Right now only taking one-off brand deals. Well, dude, couple things. So I think one of the things hard for a lot of kind of like celebrity or sports people is understanding what business they're really in. So if you want to be like, basically you are a media company, like fun, like fundamentally, what are, what, like, what are, what are pro sports and sports in general? They're entertainment. That's what they are. Right? So they entertain people. What is the point of entertainment? To get people to continue to watch. That is what the point of entertainment is. And so really good entertainment gets lots of people to keep watching. That's what good entertainment is. By the way, that's what the news is too. Crazy. Anyways, so if that's the business that you're in, you need to make the decision.

Okay?

So first off, you're in the media business more than it's like you are a performer. You perform a specific skill, people watch you, and that's how the game works.

Okay?

Now from there you kind of have two paths. Path one is you keep going in the entertainment direction, which you can do by just showing more and more clips of you playing, you spiking and doing all sorts of stuff and probably interweaving stuff about you, which will then kind of build some depth to the audience rather than you just being some trick shot. Guy, right? That's path one. And the primary way that you're probably going to monetize is the way you currently are, which is that you're gonna have to do outbound via sponsorships. But I see that as relatively limited. The alternative path is to become more of an education business. And so I'll, I'll give you a shout out to Trevor Bauer. He was, if you don't know who he is, he was one of the best pitchers of all time and had a really unfortunate situation that came up where a girl lied and whatever. I don't wanna get into it, but And I'm saying that because she came out later and said she left. But it ruined his career and he basically wasn't allowed to play pro anymore. So what did he do? He couldn't play pro anymore. And so he had to find another way to monetize. And so one is he shows people how to pitch. So I think you showing people how to do volleyball stuff and do it the way that you do it is a really good one. So it's like, can we develop an app or training program that you could sell digitally to show people how to jump higher, spike more, run faster, the workouts associated with volleyball, all that stuff would totally work. The second is that you can sell kind of like high, like depends on how much clout you have in the space, but like you signing balls, you signing shorts, you signing shirts or having merch associated with a brand that you wanna, maybe it's like, you know, High Level Spiker, maybe you're a serving specialist, whatever your thing is, right? I would have training around that and I would have merch around that. Now when you do that, you kind of transition more into an educator And less of an entertainer, but from a monetization perspective, I would be strongly looking at that. Now, door 3 is that you just find a company that you really like a lot and see if you can negotiate a deal where you can get a percentage of the company from an equity perspective and maybe even a tiny slice of a royalty based on the traffic that you send, where you become a brand spokesperson and then you hope that that business eventually exits and whatnot, and you just focus on making content and playing. So sponsorships is gonna be more passive. Obviously you just have to sell and then keep making content. When you become an educator, you have to do more work cuz you have delivery. Now you could just sell pure digital, um, that would make you less money, but it would be less work, uh, if you sold digital and then also services in terms of you looking at people's spiking, giving them feedback. That's like basically a personal training business that's, that's focused on volleyball. So, uh, that works for any kind of creator that's kind of in any of those niches. But those are kind of the paths that I would be looking at. Um, and all those are different ways that you can monetize. Uh, but if you guys dug this, uh, it helps the team know that we'll keep doing this stuff. You guys rock. This was a ton of fun. I love doing this stuff. This is the kind of content I enjoy making cuz I could literally do this all day cuz I like business. And if you like business, then you will like this stuff too. All right. Uh, keeping amazing. Yeah. I'll see you guys on the next stream. Rock and roll.

Out.