If This Video Found You...It's Time To Lock In for 2026

If this video found you, it's time to lock in for this year. Not motivation, a reset. I built a $50 million lawn care business by doing what most people avoid: obsession, discomfort, quitting the right things, playing a different game. These mindset shifts helped me grow Homeworkz software by 49% last year. In this video, I'll break down 8 keys that will decide whether this will be your breakout year or another plateau. And if this feels extreme or not for you, that's the point. This isn't for everyone. Let's get into it. Number 1, embrace obsessions. People call them passions until they work. Success is encouraged until attained. What I've found throughout my career is that people will cheer for you on your way up, meaning when you're in the hole, when you're trying to get ahead, when everything is against you, and you say you want to accomplish big things, people are going to cheer for you and they're going to be on your, on your side. Once you actually get out of the hole and you actually conquer the mountain and are successful, usually they'll want to tear you down. Most people are okay with you winning as long as it is less than them, as long as you're below them. So once you surpass them, they feel threatened and they can feel a sense of insecurity. You have to ask yourself, which of the two evils would you rather prefer? Because both ways stink. Either A, you are in the hole, you have not achieved your goals, and people are cheering for you, or B, you have attained your goals and yet other— the people that you might love or are friends with actually are trying to tear you down. Personally, I would rather attain the goals that I have rather than have the outward expressions of encouragement from those around me. So you've got to choose which one you want to be. When I was in college, I started college when I was young. I was 13 years old, and I remember my first quarter, one of my professors pulled me aside and I was doing an elective. It was like some sort of philosophy class. Honestly, this guy is 70 years old. He sat me down and said, hey, I think you're making the wrong decision. I think that you should enjoy your teenage years. You don't need to do this. And I was trying to be honest. I'm like, look, like my family's not pushing me. No one's pushing me to do this. I want to be here and I want to learn. And I'm— I was bored through all my primary grades of school because, like, I wanted to learn more. And yet he was just telling me, I think you're making a mistake. I think you should reconsider. I think you should take some time off. I think you just, once you finish high school stuff, just like take some time, travel, etc. And you know what? Maybe he was right. In another parallel universe, a different life, maybe there's something that I missed out on. However, I will say this: when you go for big things, there will be people that are constantly average pulling you back to being closer to them, in part because a lot of them have insecurities around seeing someone close to them win and succeed because it makes them look bad. So if you're waking up early, 4 o'clock, you're working out, you're trying to lose weight, you're trying to read books, self-improve, listen to audiobooks and podcasts, most of the time they're cool with you like trying to win. But once you start winning, now all of a sudden there's a target on your back and they will try to tear you down. But you've got to choose which of those you want to be. The person that's in the hole with everyone cheering, go, go, go, and they're on your side because you're the underdog, or actually achieving your goals. And once you've done that, people will try to pull you back. So when I was with that professor, I just realized like, hey, my goals and this person's goals do not align because I don't want to be 70 years old teaching the same class that I started my career in. And that's what he had done. He literally taught at the college for over 30 years the exact same class. And I didn't want to do that. And so I just realized that we had different goals. And because we had different goals, the things that I needed to do to achieve the success that I wanted would be very different than his prescription. Number 2, a man without a mission rots. We told young men to follow their passion and not build skills. Now they have debt, low wages, useless degrees. Anger is rational. Now, I think a lot of times it's very easy as someone gets older to look back on the previous generation and call them lazy, entitled, especially when people riot or they protest, et cetera. But when you look at what we were telling people for the past 20 and 30 years, leading up to 2020, that if you just went to college, that you will get a good job. Just go to college for 4 to 8 years, come on the other side with a piece of paper, we will walk you down an aisle, we will clap for you, and then on the other side, there'll be a good job that will pay for you and for your family to be able to achieve the middle-class American dream where you can buy a house. Now, all of that's falling apart. And so there are people that are angry. And if you're in the boat of feeling angry, I would just step aside for a moment and ask you to realize that by being angry and deploying your anger towards some politician or towards the government or taxes or the fact that you have student loans is not a good use of your time. I would throw all of that time and energy towards actually gaining skills. Unfortunately, we were sold a bill of goods. I'm 30 years old right now. I was sold this bill of goods. And that is that if you go to college, you will gain skills and those skills will be able to increase your earning potential. And for a lot of us, we realize That's not true. And I went to school from when I was 13 years old, like college and university, Western Washington University. I went to college from 13 to 18 and I got my pre-med degree. I was going to go become a doctor, dropped out and ended up getting my MBA, my Master's in Business Administration at night. And so technically from 13 to 20, I was in college and university. And I was told that if you do those things, that is the safe option. By the time I hit 20, I realized that I was making far more than my professors if I just deployed 100% of my energy towards something that would allow me to give discretionary effort. Because 40 hours a week wasn't going to cut it. It wasn't going to get me out of my situation. And the jobs that I was getting, because I sold insurance, I sold gym memberships, and I sold personal training. I had other jobs, but I could not actually get ahead with just 40 hours a week. I needed something. Like everyone asks, like, why did you get into entrepreneurship? It was simple. It was like the math wasn't mathing with me making $15 an hour. And I realized that I would have to work 80 to 90 hours. And if I was going to gain skills, probably more, doing things that I wouldn't get paid for at night. If you're in this situation, I am sympathetic to this because I spent so many years in college. I spent every dollar from 13 to 20 to be able to pay my tuition so I wouldn't have any debt. And I understand if you have to live on campus or you have to eat on campus at the dining hall, that you might have additional debts, and that's horrible. It's going to follow you when you try to get, whether it be a job or rent or get a house or get a car. And I understand the inclination to get angry over this, but find a mission and deploy all the anger towards something that you're really passionate about. Throw your time and your energy into it. It could be business. It could be your church. It could be your family. It could be a relationship. Ideally, it has nothing to do with money. Now, when people hear me say, like, find a mission that has nothing to do with money, they immediately point fingers at everything I talk about. Like, why do you talk so much about money? Because the mission is fueled by money. If you're going to have a great relationship and be able to spend time with your spouse, you're going to need the money to be able to afford the house and the car and all the other aspects of building that family. If you want to donate to a church or a cause that you believe in, these are things that require money. And so my goal personally is to make home service business owners rich. That's my mission. However, I need money to fuel that mission. We've got to buy these cameras. We have to have this facility, this studio. We're giving 100,000 of these books away. If you just run the math on that, my goodness, like in 2026, 100,000 books, we reach $35 per book on Amazon. We make like $0.22. So multiply by 100,000, you come into a very big number. That takes a lot of money in order to have the impact that I'm really passionate about. The mission of making home service business owners rich comes with a cost, and I need to make money. And all the free courses that we make, and we travel the country for free doing the Turnaround Show. That doesn't cost the owners anything. So I need money. So we have Home Service Web Design. We have HomeWorks, the software. All these things make money in order to fuel the mission. And so if right now you feel jilted or that you've been sold a bill of goods, that you were supposed to go to college and now you're out of college with a piece of paper that does you no good, it is very easy to get angry. And I understand where you're coming from, but channel all of that towards finding a mission. And it doesn't have to be your own. It could be the mission of someone else. You're like, they have a mission that I can believe in. I can get behind that. And if you can find that person to put all your energy towards it, you can actually pay down that debt in a much more safe way than even going and starting your own thing. Everyone believes somehow that we need to all be entrepreneurs and all start a business, when in reality you just need a mission that gets you out of bed and allows you to be able to deploy discretionary effort, allows you to be able to get in the shower and think about ideas and then take action on that day. The ability to be able to learn skills from other people that are far ahead of you and be able to implement it in your daily life and the constant push towards improvement. That's all that's required. So find someone or find a mission of your own and then make money to fuel that mission and then starve every single other thing that deploys and takes away any sort of energy from that goal. And so if you're trying to gain money in order to have a house, it's like, okay, great. That means we're not having a nice car. That means that we're not eating out. That means that we're not having a bunch of subscriptions. We're not having 5 different streaming services. We're going to starve everything else out in order for the mission that we have, because in order to achieve the mission, we need the fuel of money. And just make sure that the mission you have allows you to channel all the anger that you might have towards the economy or a politician or your parents or your past or the things that you've been through and the trauma that you've gone through and just channel it towards making something productive. It's time to lock in before the spring rush. And when it comes to locking in, you want to be able to rely on something to hold your business strong, just like this chain. That's why at HomeWorks, we have the logo of the chain because the 3 links in every home service business: sales, operations, and admin. So before the spring rush gets super hot and you have leads coming in like crazy, make sure you're set up inside of a software like HomeWorks that can take your business to the next level and allow you to scale this spring. Go check it out today. Go to home.works. Number 3, if your 2026 goals don't demand discomfort, they're just preferences with good branding. Now, I recently saw someone's goals they had written out for the year, and trust me, I'm all for just even writing down the goals. That's a starting point. When I saw them, my immediate thought was, man, their 2026 is going to look a lot like their 2025 because the things that they were writing out was really more or less just a checklist of things they needed to get done. And like, this is what you were supposed to be doing all along. Achieving the goal is not the goal. Making progress is the goal. And so you will make more progress if you change behavior and make sacrifices. And so it's like, well, I wrote these goals, I got to hit them. Okay. Is hitting the goal and checking that off the box and saying you achieved that actually the objective of writing down your goals? No, it is to see change. It is to get closer towards the mission that you have. And so I would rather put goals that are going to push me to actually change my behavior. Because if you say, hey, I'm going to go from $50,000 this year to $65,000, that's a 30% increase in pay. That's just going to happen overnight. And if you're just going to expect from yourself the same things that you did last year, you're going to probably get closer to $50,000 than $65,000. To increase your pay by 30%, you will have to change behavior. And in order to change behavior, you will likely have to have goals large enough to be able to actually have a meaningful impact on your schedule and on your life. And when it comes to changing behavior and making sacrifices, I've always thought about this one quote. And when I was young, I actually printed this off on like 8.5 by 11 sheets and I plastered it across my bedroom wall. At the time, I didn't even know you can make banners. I just literally on Microsoft Word, Probably like Windows 98. I printed them all off on a whole bunch of 8.5 by 11s and then just taped it all together. And it said, sacrifice or regret, you choose. Because every goal costs something. You either pay with sacrifice or you pay with regret. Sacrifice is temporary, regret compounds. Choose wisely. I always thought about the fact, and whenever it got hard, 'cause like, 13, 14, 15 years old, I was in college and I put all my energy towards organic chemistry and biochemistry and all aspects of biology and all these topics and reading textbooks. And I would just spend hours and hours doing this and honing a skill that now I don't use. However, what it taught me was I will have to sacrifice how I feel, sacrifice what I want to do, and that that sacrifice is temporary for the ultimate end-all of the payout. Now, the payout you could, to be debated, that degree didn't do me a whole lot of good. But in my opinion, a lot of times the aspects of school and structured education isn't necessarily the outcome of the degree or the certificate. It's just honing the skill of sacrificing temporarily in order to achieve anything, because that's a skill that can absolutely set you up for success down the road, because failure to do that will cause regret. I would just much rather sacrifice now and have a temporary period of time, 5, 10 years, if you're growing a business, you will sacrifice a lot of things. You will sacrifice time with friends. You will sacrifice your sleep. You will sacrifice things that feel good. You will sacrifice a lot. But if you can take 5 or 10 years and sacrifice, you could spend the rest of your life changing your entire lineage and your family tree because of the business that you've built. And even if you're not a business owner, just The ability to be able to break out of constantly being in minimum wage jobs where you're turning every 6 to 12 months, but finally lock in on a career, gain skills, and be able to really level up both your earning power and your skill set. That is something that is underrated and something that simply takes sacrifice. Sacrificing the shiny next job, sacrificing the weekends when you really are bored of doing the same thing. Like recently, I gave a really nice watch to one of the members here on the team, Lee, who'd done sales. And he's worked with me for 8 or 9 years, but he started mowing grass, started mowing grass, and then he started— he became the project manager and then he became the estimator and then he became the general manager and then he became the regional manager and then he became the VP of sales for the entire franchise over the course of 8 or 9 years. The thing that I really think about Lee and I'll just throw this in here, when I bought the watch, I thought the thing that makes Lee unique is his ability to just constantly do the exact same thing same thing over and over and over again. The part that he has to sacrifice is the itch of doing new things. Because when you do sales, you're saying the exact same script, you're overcoming the exact same objections, you're selling the exact same product. And he's done that for years. That skill of sacrificing now so that one day you don't look back and regret because you went after this next shiny thing is a skill worth having. Whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, a parent, or any sort of leader, the ability to take some small period of time and sacrifice now for the ultimate outcome of helping other people in the long term is a sacrifice worth taking, in my opinion. Number 4, quitting is a skill. Weak people quit pain. Strong people quit distractions. Now, back in 2020, I actually closed down a business. And I had started it up. It was probably in operation about 6 months. I started these things called Ketosis Cups, where it was like, it's kind of like a Reese's Cup, but it was keto. There was no sugar inside of it. And it actually did decent. I launched the website, launched social media. We sold almost 50,000 of them. And then in January of 2020, we were supposed to go launch at a food expo, like a national, international food expo. And we had a booth planned. We had banners. I had team members ready to go. Everything was ready to go for this massive launch of our product. And we had already sold about 50,000 of them through different keto subscription boxes, also direct from our website through Shopify. In January 2020, all of a sudden COVID hit and all of a sudden we realized the distribution was gonna come screeching to a halt. They canceled the massive show and we had just finished, I think, packaging like 20,000 boxes. And the next week I realized what was gonna happen with COVID And then I realized what was gonna happen with the supply chain and all the shipping. I'm like, we quit. We just stopped because I knew it couldn't distract me from the ultimate big business that we were in, which was Augusta. And that was the year at the time when I started Ketosis Cups, we had zero locations. At the time I quit Ketosis Cups, I think we had about 11 locations. But if I would have kept growing that, maybe it could have been a big business. Who knows? Maybe I would have sold it. Maybe. But ultimately, if it would have kept going, it would have distracted me from the main thing. And so sometimes quitting is looked at as a failure because quitting is ultimately the only way to lose in business. So many times when it comes to knowing you need to quit something, it's actually our pride that keeps us from quitting. So we don't have to confess that we lost. We actually failed at something. And so I remember late— it was like late January 2020. I'm like, this is just taking off. It's starting to do pretty good. The margins are thin. I'm not like the top 1% food entrepreneur. But I know what I'm doing with this lawn care thing. And I remember we were going to close the whole thing and I ended up having to pay for that. It was like $10,000 that we paid for that booth and everything at that expo. And I'm like, look, we're just going to pay it because they pushed it off like 6 months. We are not going to pursue this anymore. The reason I say this is because so oftentimes pride keeps us in a state of plateau. In order to be able to reach out and grab something, you have to let go of the thing you're currently doing. But what so many people do is they're constantly grasping at the business opportunity, but they're holding on to little tiny things that they just are unwilling to take the pride and the ego hit of saying, I quit, I'm stopped, I'm done. And so, so often at times, including myself, I will talk about never quitting. You get hit down, just get back up and keep going because ultimately failure only comes down to when you quit. However, if you keep pride and hold onto something when you know you need to cut it, when you know you just need to let it die, it'll keep you from the bigger thing. And I see business owners a lot of times in home services add a new service. They'll go all in on it. They'll tell their team all about it. They've gone to a conference, they've read a book, they heard someone in a podcast interview talk about the certain service. So they add it and it adds like 5, 10, 15% of revenue. And they know a year later they should just cut it. They're like, man, it didn't really take off. It adds complexity to the business. I still have to be very involved with it. It's hard to systematize. It's a bit of a pain to keep making this training for my team because it's not really the main thing we do. They should just quit on that new service they added, but that would signal that they were wrong. It would signal that to their team. It'd signal that to their employees. It'd signal that to their customers. It'd signal that to their family, their competitors. And so they just keep doing it. The 5% or 10% of revenue that's not doing anything for your business, but it's ultimately keeping you distracted. And so they keep throwing good money, good time, good energy after bad when they should just quit it. Just quit the little trickle of stream of income that if you just completely put a dam there and all the little trickles that are off the side of the main river, just dam them up and allow the river to run strong and focus all your time and attention on the main thing. And I did it with ketosis cups, and that's what allowed Augusta Lawn Care to grow to over 200 locations. That allowed me to focus on the software because I realized the problems and I realized that I was probably in the top few percentage points of people in home services and in the lawn care industry. So I just focused all my time and attention on that instead of being a food entrepreneur. And so I see people trying to get involved in real estate. I see people trying to offer like random other services under the guise of seasonality because like the one time I talk about in the book, the one time that I say, you know, can offer more services is to fill the off-season. But guess what? That's what ketosis cups was. I just figured I could have all of my team. This is what we did. There's pictures of us, literally 10, 15 of us making tens of thousands of ketosis cups. Why? Because I was like, oh, December, January, February, that's our slow season for the mowing season. And then I can just do production manual labor of like boxing and stirring. It's all like backend work and they just need their food certificate, food handling certificate. I can throw them in the backend of a a bakery commercial kitchen, and we're off to the races. So I was also trying to solve the off-season problem for my business, and it was a complete distraction. So quit fast. Cut it off. Don't— like, who cares about your pride and ego? No one will remember that little loss on your balance sheet, that little loss to your ego in 5 years when the ultimate big business that you're building has doubled and tripled in size. Number 5, do what your competitor isn't willing to do. That is the moat. In home services, very few of us actually have a real moat, a competitive advantage that prevents any of our competition from doing what we're doing. It's very rare. It's entry-level. It is basic services, is low barrier to entry. But if you're able to do things that none of your competitors are willing to do, that becomes the moat, not the actual service that you do, not the software that you use, not the employees that you hire. But if you're willing to do what no one else is willing to do, and they will not be able to cross the moat and accomplish the castle. I've always talked about how so oftentimes we try to build the castle, build the castle, build the business. I was like, let's just focus on the moat. Because if you focus on the moat first and make it defensible, then when you build the castle, you can put all your time and energy into it because it's defendable. Like, no one can come kill it. No one can come conquer the castle if I have a moat. So many of us are looking for technology. We're looking for some new piece of equipment, some new fancy whizbang way of doing things. So we constantly like reading books, listen to podcasts. We're always looking for the hack. That's building the castle when it's like, no, the moat is simply being willing to do what no one else is willing to do. Back when, a few years ago, when I started a location from scratch at Augusta Lawn Care and for 30 days launched it and we got it to where it was able to do $30,000 a month in annual— in monthly revenue. And we were booked out like 4 weeks when I left. The thing that got me started, though, was me standing on the hood of my truck with a sign that asked people if they wanted a quote for mowing. And about 1 per hour, I would get an estimate. And like, that's, that's horrible. Well, if I can close 1 out of 2, that means for every 2 hours of me standing there, I was able to get a quote or a paid, paid job, actually, because a quote an hour, 50% of my close. I knew that if I stood there for 2 hours, I'd get a customer. No one else was willing to do that. In fact, like the security guard ended up coming and say, hey, you can't be here because I was at this great intersection right where people would drive in this really nice strip mall. And I was like, it was perfect location, perfect spot for people to pull over next to me. And so I'm like, "Okay, that stinks." So what did I do? We went to a mall. I went to a mall and held a sign. We did door hangers. I literally ran half a marathon in a day delivering door hangers. These are things that most people are not willing to do. And what we do is we simply look for the thing that's easy and is convenient instead of the thing that no one else is wanting to do. And they just put it in the corner like, "Oh no, I would never like run half a marathon delivering door hangers. I would never stand on the hood of my truck." and wave a sign. And trust me, I'm not perfect. It was not easy. I had to take— it took me like 30 to 40 minutes just to warm up to holding the sign next to the road. Okay, finally I got someone. Okay, great. Got a little more confidence. Then I get on the hood. Oh, this is tough. Like all the social pressure in the world. So I put on sunglasses just so I wouldn't have eye contact with people driving by because it's not easy. But that's what no one else is willing to do. And if that's all you have, when you're getting started and you're trying to grow the business, lean into it. The only unique selling proposition you have is that you will show up in places that your competitors will not stoop to be at, then be there. And so whether it be on the hood of a truck, whether it be on a door hanger, like I would never do door hangers, we do Facebook and Google Ads. Fine, that's what your competitors can do, but you can make a moat around the thing that everyone remembers 'cause no one else was willing to do the door hangers. You can get customers for $30, $40 when everyone's like, oh no, we're gonna do online ads only. Great, $100 cost per lead. This is the difference between The winners and those that are simply settling for the average profit margin. And when people look at the average in this industry, it's because there have been average inputs. So if I'm going to look at the average output or profit margin or revenue in your territory or in your local market or your competitors, great. I'm not comparing myself to them because I have different levels of input. And if I'm willing to do things that they are not willing to do, I will be able to overperform and outperform them in my market. Now, when it comes to doing what your competitor is not willing to do, I talked a lot about like just your effort, like just brute force, but also when it comes to your offer, what you're actually offering customers, you want to be able to offer them something that no one else can offer them. And so like, I'll give you an example from my businesses. At Augusta Lawn Care, owners inside of the franchise can leave at any time without any penalty and they can take their customers. No other franchise does that. Also, they can get their initial franchise fee back to them either at 5 years or 10 years. Also, we have never raised the flat monthly fee. We don't have a royalty. We have a flat monthly fee and we've never raised that to existing owners. All the things I just mentioned there, no other franchisor has ever done or ever will do. That is my moat. That is what makes us different is because we're willing to do something that no one else is willing to touch. And a lot of times the reason they're not willing to do it is because they want to sell it to private equity. And private equity would not want everyone to have a backdoor to be able to leave the company. Same thing is true with software. So at HomeWorks, all right, we give a money-back guarantee for 365 days. I just want you to look at any software, not just home service CRMs. I want you to look at any software service that offers a money-back guarantee for 1 year. And we guarantee that you will grow your revenue by 10% or you will grow your profit by at least 10%. No one else will do this. And so when I talk about doing what your competitors are not willing to do, it's not only brute effort and sacrifice and getting on the hood of a truck and waving a sign. It is making the offer so good to the customer No one else can match it because the level of service and care that you have for the customer is just better than everyone else. Number 6, give more than you take. It's strategy, not charity. Okay, so a few years ago, I was faced with a bit of a dilemma and I gave away all the courses for Landscape Business Course, for MBA for Entrepreneurs, for the Turnaround Course, from my online workshop or on the off-season. Everything I gave away for free. The part that I did not share with anyone is the amount that I made the year before I gave away everything for free was more than my adjusted gross income on my tax return from the year prior. So it was January that we did it. I looked at my tax return for the previous year and all the money I'd made from the courses was more than my adjusted gross income, meaning that if the year prior I had just not charged for my courses, I would have lost money big time the year before. So it was very scary giving away everything. And at the time it funded almost everything on the media team. We now have like 12, 13 people full-time on the media team, some remote, some in-person. It costs a lot because it's over $1.6 million last year we spent on the media team. All of that was funded in the past by content courses, all the stuff that I did online and even the books. We actually made a little bit of money on them and I decided we're going to give everything away for free. Recently, we did the book launch and we're going to give 100,000 copies of this book away in 2026. Again, if you do the math on that, the book's $35 on Amazon. We make about $0.22 if you buy the hardcover copy on Amazon. So you can quickly do the math of us printing this bad boy hardcover, all full color, all of this. It's more like a textbook style. Just multiply it by 100,000. You come up all of a sudden, there's a big number. What we're doing, it's not because it's charity. It's not because I'm Mother Teresa. It's because I believe that you give more than you take. I believe this is the fundamental cornerstone of every great community is that you just give and you give and you give and you don't even have to ask. You don't have to take anything from the community because the community will ask you for something to buy from you. They want to give you the resources for you to give more. Ultimately, the past few years, the growth that I've experienced, whether it be online or the businesses, has come from this one thing. As you give, not even having a clear strategy of exactly how this is going to work out financially. For example, with the book, we not only just like send the book out, like we, we cover the shipping. It's not like, hey, donate these books and then, you know, you're going to have to— if you go to the course, you can watch the entire course, you get the PDF for free, you get the physical book shipped to you, and I cover the shipping. And you also get the free— the audiobook is free. So like the months and months that I put into this, I put probably 6 months of work into all the stuff that goes into this. If you combine all of it full time, it was a course of a lot longer than that. But like if you just— if I worked on it just exclusively, probably 6 months of effort and all of it will be given away for free. And you're like, well, how does that make sense for me? I don't do courses. I don't do videos. Reciprocity is when you give away all your secrets and then you charge for implementation. You gain trust with your audience. You gain trust with your customers. You become an authority in your marketplace. And so this is how social media is so powerful for home service businesses. You can tell in your local market from this phone on social media, your customers and your market and the 5,000, 10,000 people that you're trying to target exactly how to do what you do every day. If you are doing furnaces, HVAC, you can show them how to do a tune-up. You can show them how to change out a filter. You can show them all the inefficiencies that might be happening on their furnace that they can fix themselves. And then you show them how to do it. And everyone freaks out and is very concerned by, oh my word, they're just going to do it themselves for free. No, because the vast majority of people realize that if you can do it and you're sharing that with everyone, that you are the authority. You know what you're talking about. You've demonstrated that you know exactly how to solve their problem. And for people that have money and people that want to get it done faster, they're willing to pay for implementation. So give away all your secrets. Tell people how to fix things in their house, how to adjust the sprinkler head, how to switch out the sprinkler head, how to adjust the controller, how to optimize the spray on the sprinkler head. All these things, just show them how to do it and you will gain authority. And yes, 10% of people are going to be like, oh, thank you very much. I will go do that myself. I don't have to pay that person. Awesome. And in doing that, they will then go fix their problem, save a bunch of money, and all of the goodwill will come back to you. They'll refer people to you. And when anyone talks about sprinklers in this case, they will mention your name. But 90% of people will not want to go fix their sprinklers and will not be interested in saving the $10 or $15 or $20 and have to spend an entire day trying to figure it out because they bought the wrong screw or the wrong nozzle. So they'll just pay you and they'll be happy to do it. And they'll be happy to pay a premium because you have a brand. And so you gain trust and you gain a brand when you give away everything you know and you give away so much value that people from the outside are like, are you sure? This actually just happened the other day inside of our leadership team. We made a video and I posted it publicly. And one of the leaders was like, are we sure we want to be talking about this like publicly? This is like, Stuff that's taken us years to figure out. And I said, just the fact that we asked this question proves to me that we're on the right track. And that's where I would push you towards. Give so much that you ask yourself, is this too much? Like, am I giving away everything I know, everything I've done? Am I sharing too many numbers with my team? Am I opening up the books too much? If that's the questions you're asking, you're on the right path because to gain the trust of your team, with your market and with the people that you want to do business with. And to gain that brand and that authority, you're going to have to give away everything. And I think it's the cornerstone of every great community. Every organization is giving more than you take. A great community, whether it be a church or a mastermind or a franchise or a Facebook group, if you have more takers than you have givers, ultimately the entire organization will collapse. It is happening right now inside the United States of America. We all are figuring out how— what we can take away from the government, what we can take away from each other, what we can take away from the collective instead of what we can contribute. And that's the first step of an eroding and failing empire. Number 7: Measure, wait, decide, execute, and then measure again. So this is a cycle I always think about. It really comes down to thinking about data-driven decisions instead of using emotion and feeling. One thing that I've always chuckled about is that if you look at squirrels, they don't usually go in packs. Like you don't have a squirrel and like 20 of them. And when one of them goes this way, they all 20 go this way. It's not like geese. Geese, like, there's a leader and we all follow the leader and we fly thousands of miles. That doesn't happen with squirrels. You might see a couple over an area, but if there's like something, you know, comes crashing, a rock goes their way, they all go different directions. They don't really have leadership or travel in packs. And if you want to be a great leader, if you want to be someone that is known for executing well, it's going to mean that you don't be a squirrel. And a squirrel gets caught up in every little distraction. And it goes from one thing to the next and very quickly changes direction. Like they're all over the place. And if that's been your leadership style, there's really no surprise as to why you can't attract great talent and why they won't stay with you for a long time. Because no one wants to follow a squirrel. People will follow the goose that says, I'm going to fly 2,000 miles. Do you want to come along? And all of a sudden they got hundreds of geese following after them. When we think about this 4-step process, measure. So I need data. I'm not going by feelings here. I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna take some time, I'm gonna let things settle, I'm gonna continue to track the data, and then I'll make a decision, and then I will execute. And then after I execute, I will repeat the process again and measure what I executed on to see if it actually changed the behavior and changed the data. Something I'm reminded of at HomeWorks, we created this feature on tips, and I thought for sure this was gonna double or triple the amount of tips that we were getting because we made the flow so much better. We followed this process. We measured, then we waited, then we decided, executed. And when I went back to measure again, we realized it hardly moved the needle of the amount of tips that was being given. It looked better. It was so much better looking on a mobile device, but we used that information till on the next time we measured, waited, decided, and executed. I spent a little more time on the wait part, and that is we're going to rebuild this infrastructure. And we took almost an entire year building the backend and rebuilding at HomeWorks so we could accurately measure this one part. And that is once we change the estimate acceptance flow, we wanted to make sure it was optimized dramatically for a mobile device and that every single step of the process pushed them towards accepting the job. If they tried to get off track and push them back into accepting the job. So if they said, oh no, I want to decline the job, it's like, hey, well, you got to give us a reason why. And it's going to try to push them back and you can call them back with another offer or give them a discount. You can push them back towards accepting the job. Everything was optimized over and over in designs and meetings for months on how to increase the close rate. That was like the north star. Star that we were measuring. And when we launched it, within a matter of a month, we were able to measure that on average between 30% and 80% increase in the close rate of all members of Copilot, which is now Homeworks. Once we released the feature, we measured again all the data, and the close rate for all members inside of Homeworks was increased by 30% to 80%. So assume you had like a 50% increase. That would take you from a 30% close rate to a 45% close rate. That'd be a 50% increase in close rate. 30% to 80% increase simply because of this one feature. But it took a year to make sure we could follow this process, which is we're going to measure, which is what's the close rate of our current members? Let's wait. Let's see. Is it cyclical? Is it seasonal? Okay, great. Let's nail that down. Then we got to make sure that we actually can make sure we measure this after. So we decided, okay, This is what we gotta change. We're gonna mobile first this thing 'cause 80% of estimates are accepted on this mobile device. We're focused 100% on this. So everything's gotta be executed against that. Then we executed it and we redid the code and we redid the database, everything on the backend. And when we released, it was nailed and increased the close rate by 30 to 80%. I'm someone that like loves speed. One thing I have learned in the past couple years is do not rush decisions or changing direction. And that's what the squirrel does. He rushes decisions. Like, if you throw a rock, it's like, it's like, which way should I go? And it's just like all over the place, constantly changing directions, frustrates your team and usually keeps you solo. That's why the squirrel is usually by themself. They don't have a team. They don't have other people following them. They're not a leader. The same is true with entrepreneurs that are constantly chasing shiny things, constantly changing directions, constantly coming to the office like, we're going to add this new service. All right, we're changing this new process. Okay, this new system's in place. You're a squirrel and you will have to add measurement and waiting before the decision and the execution in order to be able to attract the caliber of team you want. And I have been very privileged in the past couple of years to attract phenomenal talent, but it's because I had to slow down at the measurement and the waiting phase before making decisions. The only part in that process where speed is important is execution. Everything else should be done with care, and careful consideration. That is feedback from members, feedback from the team, surveys, data collection, and take your time and slow down. You only need to make a few changes in the business per year, but if you execute well on them because you have the measurement and because you've waited and seen what happens to the data over the course of time, your decision will be clear and then your execution can be faster. Number 8, develop a healthy contempt for being average. This is why I think it is very scary and dangerous to have industry norms or industry comparisons, because I don't want to have average close rates. The average close rate in this industry is 30%. Says who? The average home service business owner doesn't answer their phone. The average home service business owner literally takes days to get back to customers, doesn't get back to estimate request forms. Takes weeks, doesn't even follow up, doesn't show up to meetings, is always late. That's what you're comparing yourself against, like an average customer acquisition cost. Okay. The average home service business owner cannot set up tracking for anything on their Facebook ads. So yes, their customer acquisition cost will be a lot higher. Average churn. Well, yeah, the average person doesn't show up to meetings, so of course their churn is going to be higher. They never answer the phone. Their admin can't get back to people for 3 or 4 days. Of course, churn is going to be higher. The average pay, like, oh, this is entry-level position in this industry. We have just, you know, really You know, bottom of the barrel labor. Well, you're comparing yourself to average pay. The average business that can only pay their employees a little bit above minimum wage, why not do pay for performance? Like, yes. Is that hard? Yes. The average person won't do it. I know that for a fact because there's literally a few hundred people that have ever even implemented pay for performance correctly on the software. But average is not instituting pay for performance. It is, let's just go along with what the average rate in our market is for the average hourly rate that all our competitors are charging. And then, yes, You will be average. And you wonder why we have average levels of profit, average levels of commitment from our team because we have average levels of pay and average profit margin. We're always comparing ourselves to the average. And this bleeds into your personal life. You start having an average relationship, you know, an average marriage, the average health. Like, the average health in this country is that you will die of a heart attack because you are obese. I don't want this and I don't want this for you. A lot of times when I say have this healthy mistrust and spite for being average. A lot of times people will confuse this with bitterness to other people that are average. Because by definition, if the average, the majority is going into what the minority or the top 1%, 5% is doing in your industry or even personally in your personal life, like most people don't have a six-pack. Most people don't have $1 million. There are more people with $1 million than a six-pack. So if you're like, I want to have both, you realize you are in the top, like, half a percentage of the entire population. And so do not compare yourself, if that's your goal, to anything average. You, by definition, have to be outside of the average. Alex Hormozi always talks about to be exceptional, you will have to be, by definition, the exception, not the average. That does not mean that I need to be bitter to my family, to my friends, or to those that have smaller goals. They can be successful achieving less than what I am trying to achieve. But it just so happens that my goals are larger. Does that make me better? No. Does that somehow mean that I can't be around them or spend time with them or love them or care for them? No. It doesn't mean you have to be bitter, but have this contempt for anything that says average. Society will constantly push you to the average. If you look on like some of the stuff that I post is a little extreme around like working hard, putting lots of hours, etc. But the comments will always push you towards the average. If you follow what other people say, you will always become the 50th percentile. Because everyone above you will push down and everyone below you will push you up and eventually you'll get in the middle. In the middle of the road is where nothing happens. It's the median. I want to go in one direction. I want to choose the sides that I'm going. And if you want to work hard, put your head down and become the top 1-2% economically, you will have to sacrifice and you have to do inordinate amounts of work and effort that is not considered average and that other people will judge you for. But to be exceptional, you have to be by definition the exception, and that is not average. So these are the 8 things to focus on so you can lock in this year. If you want 14 brutal truths every home service business owner must know, check this video out right here.