Buying Businesses for $30M+ (w Tommy Mello)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. Welcome to the Mike Andes show. Today we're doing a podcast with Tommy Mello from A1 garage door.

Diana. Chef too. His name was Chef Boyardee.

He has over $200 million in annual revenue across 20 states, has hundreds of employees, a pioneer in the home service industry. I'm going to be interviewing him on topics such as leadership.

The company will only grow as fast as the founder and owner grow.

Finding executives.

If you're micromanaging your direct reports, it's the wrong people.

Even private equity in the home service industry and how you can increase the valuation of your business.

Just plan on taking a big haircut if you don't understand those stuff and you're not prepared.

There's a lot of golden nuggets in this one. So let's go ahead, interview Tommy Mello from A1 garage door right now.

It's been a minute. How have you been?

Good, man, good. You've been busy.

Yeah, I was just talking. Do you know who Cameron Herold is? Yeah, yeah, just on the phone. We were, we hired him as a coach for, for myself and my coo. So we had an intro call. But I've known him for a long time. He's a great guy. And yeah, you know, I'm always thinking about who are my next few coaches going to be?

Yeah. Did you, did you put your COO in his like second in command, mastermind type?

So that's kind of. We decided to go above that and just pay for the, the one on one coaching. Yeah, I just jumped right ahead of it because I knew Luke needed more hands on training.

And this is our job is to develop leaders. I mean, basically, you know, get them more connections, get them better leadership, get them to be able to delegate stronger, interview stronger. If we could do those things, the business should run itself. I don't have to work anymore. My job is to just help people.

Know that they're, you know, create this culture. And obviously I'm very motivated on lead gen and attracting the right people to come work for us. But other than that, you know, people are like, man, you must work your ass off every day. I'm like, no, not really. I mean, I'm in a lot of meetings, but it's not really that hard. It's not like it used to be when I had to do everything.

We'll just roll it right into it. I don't want to take too much of your time. I did have several questions. I wanted to kind of pick your brain on stuff that you might not have covered elsewhere. And. But on that topic of kind of nurturing your current team as you've scaled up, and I'll do an intro in terms of, you know, how big a one is and the scale of it, but as you've done that and you have had a core team of leadership, did you have to upgrade that talent and change who they were, or was it simply a matter of investing in those people to gain the skills required to lead it at a higher level?

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, there's this thing called the law of the lid. And the company will only grow as fast as the founder and owner grow. But then there's everyone else needs to be growing too. They need to be listening to podcasts, they need to be reading books, they need to be educating themselves, doing shop tours, going to seminars. And it wasn't always like that. So unfortunately, a lot of people got shuffled around different seats on the bus. And I feel like the C suite is so important. A lot of people don't believe in this trickle down type environment, but it's, it's. What we've done is I've built a new org chart with the technicians at the top because we all work for them, the technicians and the installers. But regardless.

You can only take the company so far based on how much you've learned. And I always say you need to work on yourself more than you work on a one garage door service. You got to be working on yourself. So you got to be able to put in a 50 hour work week, certain weeks and 30. You go 30 hours, you could go 80 hours, I don't care. You could go 10 hours if you're getting yourself stuff done. But still, I need you to put 15 to 20 hours into yourself each week too. Outside of work, Completely outside of work. Some of that's working out and getting in physical shape and then feeling healthy and getting your mindset right. Some of that might be meditation, some of that's reading, some of that's just going out and meeting people and showing up to seminars and just being vulnerable with people. But that throughout the years there's been an amazing amount of top grading. And that's my number one word going into next year. Top grade. I mean, it's two words, but top grading, 100%. That's. I've got every leader in the company thinking, is this a 10 out of 10? And then I'm asking them, how do I know everybody on your team's doing good? Andy or Mike? Sorry, I Said, how. How do I make sure that every single person.

How do I know their. Their performance? Like, if I'm going to call them up, am I just going on a feeling that they're doing good, or do I say, how do you know that they're kicking ass? It's easy to see a technician, CSR dispatcher. There's very clear KPIs. But in our marketing department, there's a lot of people working on different things. What about our warehouse department? You know, there's all these roles. How do we say this person, If I was to grade them 1 out of 10, what are we grading on? What are the metrics? Do they know the metrics? How do they move up in the company? And if we don't have that, we need to figure that out. And I need to be able. And here's what I tell people. It's not to find them doing something wrong. It's to praise them and tell them they're doing something right.

And as you've scaled up and you've had leaders and you might have seen the deficit of skill, how have you handled that with them to address? Like, hey, either you have to improve your skills and gain and acquire these, or I'm going to bring. Have to bring someone in to basically replace this position as we continue to grow the business, because the business is outgrowing your skills.

Yeah. I had a difficult conversation a few months ago with my coo. I said.

You'Re the bottleneck in the company. I said, but you're one of the most talented. So I got a question. I'll give you two weeks to come up with a plan, or I'd like to move you into a chief revenue officer because you're very, very good at generating revenue. And he said, no, I'd really like to stay the coo. So I said, okay, if that's the case, then let's do this. Let's look at every one of your direct reports, and I want to know where you're spending your time. Because if you're micromanaging your direct reports, it's the wrong people. If you're the one in the meetings doing all the talking, coming up with all the ideas, doing everything, then you got the wrong people. So we wrote it down on a whiteboard. He circled two of them. I said, there's your problem. You get rid of this. How much more time do you get? Can you focus on these other things? Can you work in my timelines, which my timelines are not like, let's, let's Take a few months to look at this and make an educated decision. No, no, we got 30 minutes. Let's look at everything and run. Everybody is a lot of people. They wait for things to get perfect. They want to make these perfect. Well, what if this, this, this, this. I'm like, dude, let's make a mistake. Let's fail a couple times. We just don't make the same mistake twice. Like, what, you think we're going to go into this flawlessly and spend months and months and months discovering all this data? Like, we're working on an acquisition. It's going to cost us $30 million. That one. I can't just do overnight. I mean, obviously we don't want to screw this up, but I've got some people that want to overanalyze the piss out of it. And I'm like, well, we know this and we know this, so as long as we fix this.

It'S all well worth it. Plus, we've got five other ways to generate revenue from it and mostly profit. So, you know, I do think that.

I've had situations with a lot of leaders that they kind of knew they weren't ready. They knew they couldn't run this size company. You know, the best thing when you're looking for somebody in your sweet suite, C suite, is to find somebody that just comes in and says, I've been here. I know exactly what to do. I know exactly what you guys are going through. Now, the. The hard part is, are they a culture fit? Because right now our team has got such a great culture, the communication.

You know, there's a good book by Patrick Lecione, the five Dysfunctions of a Team. And it explains, I feel like right now in the business, we're all focused on the main core business instead of our own departments, which is very rare. It hasn't happened at the company in a decade and now we're back aligned. So I think this next year, based on a lot of factors, is ready for an explosive year.

And how do you deliver that feedback to somebody that you might see early indications that they have a skill deficit to be able to stay up with the team? You kind of alluded to that meeting with your co. Let's put this on the whiteboard. Has that ever been taken wrong? Has someone said, oh, you don't think I'm doing a good job and been taken wrong? And how have you handled giving that kind of very, in a way, blunt feedback to many times a very, very highly skilled individual such as your coo.

So the C Suite scorecard is basically the financial statements. I mean, by the way, my report card is the financial statements. I mean we have a partner now, a sponsor. But people say, how are, you know, as the founder, owner, CEO, I'm on performance pay. I mean look, and I, you know, I didn't take a lot of draws and I didn't take a bunch of money out of the company. I left a lot of it in for a long time but. And that's how it compounded. But if you're going to get rated, you need to understand like for me.

Most of my C suites bonus is on gross profit and ebitda. Because we have one mission to grow even that's the one main mission. Now look, everyone knows we're willing to take a few steps back on a percentage of profit of revenue to grow the business and make sure the infrastructure is keeping up. So their whole bonus structures are reliant on growth of ebitda. I mean, listen, I have unrealistic goals, so I gotta have a few key players pull me down and say that's not realistic. And sometimes I overestimate what we could do in a year and that's a mistake. I mean I just know we can and I just know when people have a goal. So what we did.

Is we're, we give a hundred percent of your salary as a bonus. But I said, hey, I feel like we could hit this goal, this big hairy audacious Tommy goal. So I said, well, if we hit this goal, we'll give you 200 of your salary. So if you're making 250 grand, you can make a 500, 000 bonus and it's well worth it. You can do the math. I've done this really in detail on like a pivot table. And if we hit my big hairy auditions goal.

The enterprise value of hitting that is several hundreds of millions of dollars. So I could afford to give somebody, you know, 10 people and I can afford to pay a few million dollars.

A month when it comes to kind of putting those incentives out for someone. Let's assume now that this individual comes back and says, well, money's not my motivating factor. I'm trying to have work, life balance or other aspects of life I'm trying to optimize for when do you actually have to then say okay, you have to step aside or I'm going to replace you with an outside hire that might not be culturally as congruent with the current team, but I have to have these skills as we grow the company.

Yeah, you know, first and foremost, what I would say is, is the leadership team has to be like. For my, my cfo, first thing he wanted to do was get a really good controller. Next thing he knew is to bring on an FP and a financial planning and analysis. Now, there's three people in fpa, so once you hit a certain level of the caliber of person that knows how to bring on the help, you're saying they're working too hard. And Most of my CFOs that I've worked with in the past would have to work 10 times harder. This guy knew how to build the team underneath him, and he knew how to build the AR specialist and the payroll specialist. He knew exactly what to do to where it didn't rely on him. I think that's a great skill set of a leader, is understanding how to build a team. Now, Luke, our coo, never ran a company this size, so he's out there learning with, kind of with me. And I don't think anybody, you know, not a lot of people have run a company that's going to be $100 million in EBITDA right around the corner in the rolling 12 at home service. So it's not like there's like these guys who could just go, yeah. And some of them will tell you it's all the same, but it's not. We're running, you know, 20, 25,000 transaction a month, different homeowners. And I got to tell you what I feel like we could do. I was with my CFO yesterday for two hours and I said, pull out your calculator. And I said, Put 50,000. And I said, I think we could get a lot of other verticals. I will prove this out, whether it's windows, front doors, smart home stuff, EV chargers, hot water heaters, water purity, many splits in the garage. I said, there's. There's more than enough opportunities. And every single one of these things has a much higher average ticket. So I said, let's say we get our average ticket to $20,000, which is kind of crazy high. So you got 50,000 jobs a month, which is two and a half X where we're at. You're really increasing the average ticket. We ring the bell, go public. So what is that number you got there? He goes, I don't think it's right. I said, no, it's right. Does it say 108 billion? Because that would be our valuation at 25% to the bottom line. And he goes, yeah, it does say 108 billion. And I said, well, that's the future. And it's hard to comprehend a garage door company. These numbers and most of the. I'll tell you this, I don't think I'll have the same team, but I'm the visionary. It's my job to see. It's my job. Like, I gave him all the figures. Like, I haven't been doing those figures every day for the last six months just to be able to show people. And they're like, dude, that's not realistic. And I'm like, what would have to be true in order for that to be realistic? We have to be able to go into different verticals. We'd have to do this. We'd have to have the supreme training, supreme recruiting, everything we have now on steroids, basically. There's no reason we shouldn't and can't get there. Let's say we flop. We only hit 10% of that goal. It's still $11 billion company. It's not bad. It's not like, oh man, God, we really suck.

You know, how do you deal with someone that might say, hey, the Tommy goal, the $108 billion is unrealistic. The timelines are putting on are simply, you know, they're whimsical, like, and it's never going to work. And here's the 10,000 reasons why. And they might seem okay with the $10 billion version, but not the hundred billion dollar version. They're not willing to potentially put in the extra hours on themselves to make the effort required to gain those skills. How would you kind of mentor or foster that in a leader?

No one has heard this goal except for a few people at the company. Company. And I don't have a timeline of that goal.

As the, as the CEO, it's my job to paint a vision and to be thinking five to 10 years down the road. I don't want them thinking more than two years away. It's just, it's not realistic. I don't need them thinking about that. Two years is, is appropriate amount of time.

You know, I, I've always started out by showing them where we're at today. Showing them by just increasing this by 5%, increasing this, drawing these many leads, getting this much less turnover. Like, I bring the facts. I don't like, make stuff up. I bring the math with me. And we whiteboard and sometimes I've got it in a pivot table that we just drew up real quick. And I say, listen, if we, if we just take our conversion rate, for example, our call booking rate is about 89%. 89.2. We drive that to 94%. Our cancellation rate the last three months have been 12%. We drive that below 5% for every percent on each of those. And I just picked up, if you listened 5 and 12, there's 7 points. And then I picked up another 5 on the booking rate. So that's 12 points. There's 2.3 million per point.

So I just picked up about $25 million. Now you increase the average ticket with a lot more training and the tools we're using, like these numbers that I do are not complicated. I just show, listen, we don't need to move the earth. We need to do this a little bit. This a little bit, this a little bit, this a little bit. And it comes to this grand, profound number. And so if they don't believe me, I mean, a lot of it doesn't fall on them. Like the average ticket does not fall on the CSR and the dispatch manager, like that falls on someone. So I just say, just own this piece and this whole customer journey.

And I, you know, here's the thing, it's getting easier. People say, when's enough enough? I'm like, man, it's just, it's getting easier every week. It's get like the caliber of people's going up the software. I'm a big, big, big, big, big believer. And who has the best technology is going to win overall. And I don't think there's anybody that comes close to what we're building and what we've already built because we got scale. I think that's why we're going to be able to get over 30% of the bottom line. Not because we're doing anything wrong. It's because your CSR could take 15 calls a day, Mike. It takes 65 calls a day. You know, you know, you look at the dispatch, the dispatch software is doing it automatically. I don't have to have dispatch. The same amount of dispatchers I used to have. People are like, man, he must be charging a lot. No, I've got options. I could do it. I could do a builder grade option for you and I can make it very economical. It doesn't mean I need to charge a ton of money. It means I need to be way more efficient with the way we do.

Things when it comes to increasing that ticket value. Kind of stepping back to the individual contractor now, maybe at a smaller size. What are some of the things you're doing in terms of upselling and cross selling? Obviously using the Software. But how much of that is pre sale, post sale? What's your current focus? I know you could tack this from 10,000 angles of where in the client lifecycle you can upsell or cross sell. But currently, as we speak now, what's sort of your main focus on moving those numbers in that client life cycle?

Number one is.

Not leaving with a zero. The customer, the client called us out like I want to earn their business. Number two is not give the farm away, not lead with discounts. And this idea of pre suasion calling on the way, offering something. I want my clients to ask the person answered the phone, were they related to the owner? Because that's how good they were. When the technician shows up, I want to say, are you, are you the guy on the side of the truck? Because I've never been treated this way by anybody. I want the questions that I used to get in the garage when I used to answer the phones. Are you the owner? Because people ask me that every day. Are you the owner? That was before my pitch was on the side of the truck. So, you know, another quick thing is, look, get the job started. What'd they call you out for? I mean, listen, even in landscaping, this works. You know, I got a lot of other opportunities for you. This is, I gave you what you wanted and I noticed this, this and this. And this is what I'd be telling my mom. So start the work.

And then, yeah, you know, look, I've got the most buying power in the world when it comes to garage doors. There's no one that has higher amount of buying power in residential garage door, in the residential garage door industry. So I buy better and people might think they got a great deal. I'm sure there's people going to listen to this podcast probably in the garage industry industry, great big competitors of mine. And maybe they are buying better, but I don't think it's possible. And it's something that. Because it's something that I handle myself. And I think buying right is a big, big deal. And I don't just ask them to take a haircut on the products. I asked them to train us how to sell the best product mix that makes them the most amount of money. So the reason why they could afford to give me better pricing is because I'm making them the most money. I'm not selling crappy things that they make no margin on. The more complicated the door, the more profit they make. And then I ask them to train us on how to sell those products so they're willing to do more for me because I've got the best product mix in the game.

Sending back to kind of like the industry as a whole. Since we've kind of became acquainted the last few years, and I remember right after we got to know each other for the first time and we met you had kind of started your first for a into private equity, taking on partners, acquisitions. And now this has become a very big part of your brand and what you're doing with the. Even the home service side of things. I wanted to address the viewer that might be thinking about that. Maybe they have a business that's doing 2, 3, 5, $10 million in annual revenue. They're trying to look for either a private equity partner to be able to continue scaling or even sell their business. What's some of the things to be weary of? If as a home service business owner, when private equity or someone's trying to roll up venture capital, you know, this money is moving into home services, what's some of the things you'd be thinking like as a business owner in home services?

Yeah. So I just came out with a podcast on the Home Service Expert, all about private equity. I had.

Eric Van Dam and Rob Parker. Rob Park's on there and I can tell you that. I'm sorry, Rob Parker. Anyways, long day. Private equity is the most amazing thing on the planet if they're established and if they've got a concrete plan. But it's a nightmare for most small business owners. In fact, a general rule of thumb is if the owner is not $5 million of EBITDA or more, they need to leave because they are going to hold the company back. Now, I know this because I know the smartest guys in H Vac.

One of my great buddies, he explained this like, the operator of the business thinks too small and they don't understand. Now, by the way, private equity has no idea how to build these companies. They have no idea how to talk to blue collar people. They have no idea to hire them. They have no idea that, you know, maybe you weren't raised with your mom, maybe you were picked on as a kid.

But they don't know how to do it. They, they act like they do. They act like they're going to roll all this stuff up. You find one great PE company that doesn't, that never worked in blue collar industry. They say, we're just going to roll up all these companies. None of them do it. They realize, oh, everyone's quitting because we don't treat them with respect. We don't know how to walk in and get them motivated. These guys never. They've always had a chef their whole life. I said, hey, I had a chef, too. His name was Chef Boyardee. You know, you look at these guys that come in and they just think, oh, we're smarter. And they're good at financial engineering. So you got to pick a partner. First thing I would tell you is pick somebody that, that has a tried and true record. You go out and you meet the partners they've had. And by the way, I would never sell 100%. Private equity, very rarely does not make a fortune. That's why they raise debt. And I wouldn't go with a young PE company either. Somebody that just came out of the woodwork because without a tried and true record, because they don't know how to really consolidate debt. They don't get the terms. You know.

You'Re taking a much bigger gamble if you're going to roll equity. If I wasn't rolling equity, you know, I still care about my employees, though. But if I just wanted the best ROI for my family, you know, I'd probably go with a more newer PE company that's just someone new on the market trying to prove their name.

But you got to prepare. Let's just say you're a $5 million landscaping company doing a million dollars of EBITDA. That's 20%.

Hopefully you at least.

Like I would pay to get audited financials. I would do my own quality of earnings internally. I make sure I'm on accrual accounting. I mean, these are like 101 basics. Because if your accounting is a nightmare, you're. They're going to be able to literally take advantage of you. Like, you could ask for a premium. If everything's organized, you got your sip. It's. It's organ. Like, you look at it and like, wow, this person's got their financial act together. They know where their marketing dollars. They have attribution. They understand everything about their business, the way it runs. They've got efficiencies here, here, and here. Like so many people, they decide they want to sell, but their business is a wreck. They don't know. They're like. They only know what the amount of money in the bank account is. They don't really understand taxes. They don't understand profitability. They don't understand the income statement and the balance sheet. Interesting. The P and L. All I would tell you is, look, just. Just plan on taking a big haircut. If you don't understand those Stuff and you're not prepared. Like, we had a professional company come in and we spent $650,000 on a study. It's called the Parthenon is the company that did a study of our industry. We were able to say we're the largest, biggest, best thing in garage doors. And in the process, we did a formal process and, you know, about 90 companies looked at us. I think 42 bid on us. And I'm glad I went to Cortech because they're a great partner. I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't imagine it could have gone any better than the way it's gone so far.

Awesome. I want to give you 10 back 10 minutes of your day back. But before I do, one last question, somewhat selfishly, I want to ask you this question. I've passed 10 million in revenue. I'm on my way to 100. What kind of advice would you give to someone like myself? You've gone through this phase, going from 10 million up to $100 million. Marker. We have a little over 150 locations inside of Augusta Longcare as a franchise. We have software behind it that we're selling publicly. Our goal is to IPO one day. What would you tell probably 10 years ago, you're in similar shoes that I am now. That was required to get from 10 million to 100 million.

Well, here's something that you might not think about, but it's easier to grow a big market and triple it than it is to make a tiny market get the same size as your big markets. So it's just easier. It's easier to train because you got more people. Everything's easier. You got more trucks on the road. You get the job so there's less drive time. So you double down more in your bigger markets. It seems like counterintuitive. You want to grow your small ones to be. But mostly it's because of finding your best management and, and invest in those markets the most. Usually those are already the biggest ones. You know, when you're creating a budget, don't just say, okay, we didn't hit budget here. We already had budget here. So let's move the marketing money this way. That's a huge mistake. You want to, if you're getting the right calls at the right number, continue to pour into this. It doesn't matter if it doesn't hit your budget. Make it grow way past the budget. It's not a failure. Mostly people quit their boss, not the company. So usually the smaller markets just don't have the Right, the right people. I always say this. It takes one or two A plus players to build a market. We're in 43 markets. If you want to get. You look at all my $10 million markets. There's a couple all stars in that market that prove every day that it's possible. What else would I tell myself? You know, I'll tell you what really started making me take off. After I hired al levy in 2017 and got on the right software, I got into the right rooms. I was always the smallest company. The places I was going, I never, I strategically only went to $100 million companies. That's it. And I saw how they were positioned. I saw the things I liked, I saw the things I hated. But that's the only way I knew, like I was around it so much. It's who I became and it was easy. And you know, another thing I tell you is don't chase revenue. Chase EBITDA. Back when I was south of 20 million, I would always get excited about revenue. Even though you should never ever, ever fall below 10% of profitability ever. I don't care how fast you're trying to grow revenue. Profit is healthy. It needs to be there. You need to have money in the bank. So what I would tell you is, look, we're shooting for 30% and it's crazy because people, I used to say you can't have both. You can't have massive revenue growth and massive profitability. I believe you got to make decisions in a way. The other thing I'll tell you, Mike, this is a big one, is I used to get ideas that were very concrete, great ideas. And I used to hire for my ideas. And what I figured out is just test it, test it in one market. Like be very, very efficient. Do not have people that don't have a full time job, hire consultants, hire 1099 more than you hire new people for the company and then recruit those consultants to come work for you. After they got six months of proving they can handle it. Like that's what's really interesting is a lot of people, they start hiring all these people, they got this massive org chart. Like the way we're able to maintain over 20% of the bottom line is we're very, very careful. Every time we hire somebody, we're getting or top grading somebody, we're getting rid of somebody. If you're not hitting 15, that means you're not healthy.

If you're trying to double revenue every year, I still think you got to be north 10% profitability 10% of revenue. What else? You know, I would tell you that the most important thing I, I believe in a company.

I do think your VP of marketing is what, what makes the world go around. But I also think the cfo with the data of accounts receivable and understanding capex expenditures, renegotiating insurance, keeping an eye on, you know, there's so many things my CFO has done well and I got very fortunate. But most people don't have a good CFO. I'd say 90% of the businesses I've seen ran really well. They're still missing a cfo. They're missing the gangster cfo, the one that knows like more than anybody and that person will make you so much money. It's incredible because most of us understand how to drive leads, most of us understand how to hire people and train them. The CFO is always a missing picture that. Did you know that.

If you own your trucks and you like we, we lease to own, we own them and then we lease back and then we own it after like five years that it doesn't hit your EBITDA like the trucks the way but if you lease it, it's a direct charge, the direct expense and now you, it does hit your ebitda. And like I didn't know that. My CFO explained that to me. And what's really cool is right now I know things that most company like right now we are less than 70% utilization rate on our vehicles, which means we've got 30% which means we probably got 100 vehicles not being driven every day. Which is okay. Which is a good thing because if I get my efficiency up to 80 Viper, I never want to get past 90 because I want extra vehicles if something happens to a vehicle. But these are things I know how many for every single day, every single month. I know how much my first job started on time within a five hour or not 15 minute window because I, we are investing $200,000 right now into a deeper analysis of a software that does capacity planning. Because I don't want to have to hire more people. I want to increase capacity to the fullest extent first. So you know, it sounds like to me what you're going to struggle with is getting the right people on the bus. And you know, this chemistry that we have among leaders is so very important. And what I've learned is to talk last. I've learned that it needs to be their idea. This is the last piece of advice that I've learned a lot about this last probably Two years is nobody wants to follow you unless they're involved.

So I do. I do. A lot of times where I'll take different people on my C suite out to dinner, tell them the direction I want to take on an idea or the direction of the company, and I need them to tear it apart. I need them to tell me everything wrong with it, but I need them to figure out a way to make it work. But give me. Here's where we're headed to the top of the mountain. There's eight different ways. Which way do you guys want to take? And if I get them all bought in one on one, when we do it in a group, we've already had these conversations. We worked through it all. Now I say, yeah, Mike had this idea, Jim had this idea, Rachel added this to it, which was absolutely phenomenal. But now it's like, because if it's my idea, it used to be my idea. A decade ago, all my ideas we ran with. Then I realized there's animosity. There's no. There's no stake in the outcome. They're like, yeah, people have pride when it's their idea. They're like, we gotta make this work. So don't let it be your ideas all the time. If you want to take in a direction, say, what do you think? How can we make this better? Even though you might have exactly what you guys need to do, let them and say, well, what if we did this? Oh, I like that. Keep doing that and start to guide them because then it becomes their idea and that's so important.

Awesome. Well, thank you for your time, Tommy. I wanted to say thank you for. On behalf of the whole home service industry. I still remember listening to the podcast when I only had one location and we were just getting started. I remember being at a camp one time and then scrambling away. Cause I didn't really care about playing basketball or anything. I just wanted to listen to the book when he first launched it, Home Service Millionaire. And so I want to say thank you for everything that you've done for the home service industry. Anything that you wanted to kind of promote or things coming up that you wanted to talk about.

Well, we do. The one thing I will say is, like, I was explaining. I. I've had a lot of opportunities to go visit a lot of successful shops. And so if anybody wants to come visit tommy mellow.com forward/shop, come do a tour, you know, I really. It's our way of giving back. I don't charge for that stuff. I'd really appreciate it to get as many people as possible. Bring, bring a few key players on your team and, you know, I'm here to answer questions. I'll be part of it. You'll see our training center. You'll see the way we do things here. So way for me to kind of brag on my people. And I think that that's really important is to get them involved and make them feel like they built this thing because I didn't build it. I mean, look, I've had a lot of great ideas, but they, they've done the hard work and they deserve a spotlight. Also, Tommy Mello.com has all my social media. So if you're on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or, you know, any of the social. If you want to follow, I, I try to put out a lot of content. That's something we're really focused on. And the last thing I want to say is, don't live my dream. A lot of people come in here and I feel like they're trying to live my dream. A lot of business owners are like, I just want to do what you said, 100 million or 200 million or whatever. And I'm like, well, do me a favor. Just get a notepad. Get it somewhere in a dark, dark area, you know, somewhere outside and just peaceful. And write down what you want your life to look like every year from here on out. If you want to buy a beautiful house, if you want this, you want this, you want this.

You want to help out your family. Because here's the deal. Some people's goals is going to take 15 to 20 years. And that's if everything goes right. And by that time, their kids are grown up, they're out of the house. They never were able to spend time with them at Disney World.

By that time, their parents might be gone, hopefully in heaven, right? By that time, you know, I just, I'd say, listen, have a dream. And personally, I think you should have it. In less than five years.

When you learn how to do a deal and go through a process, it changes everything. It changes everything in your life. But now you got this money, right? You got this money. And don't think that money doesn't work for you. Don't think that money's not working hard. Every house I've bought has gone up, up, up, up, up. Every single thing I put money into has done very, very, very, very, very good. In fact, I got in the market in March of 2023s P500. You guys could look at March of 2023 and where it's at, I mean, it's been working harder than I could ever work. So a lot of times when people do a deal, they're like, well, what about the money? I'm like, all. All that money, that. That pot of gold works for you too. Plus, you got the money still in the company working, and people forget about that. So. And I keep saying last thing, but, Mike, family, faith, fitness are just as important as finance. So a lot of us, we build this life around this finance. But family, faith and fitness, just. Just make sure to include those other three on top of your fitness and your plan for your business and your monetary goals.

Fantastic. Well, thank you for your time, Tommy. I'll let you go and I'll make sure we get this out probably the next week or so, and I'll probably.

Thanks, man. It's great to see you. I've been thinking a lot about you.