MBA2677 Extended Interview: The Million-Dollar Mindset: How David Royce Got Rich Ditching Passion for Problems

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium support, and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster, and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals today we have something very special for you. I sat down with David Royce, a serial entrepreneur that built a $500 million business. What kind of business? Pest control. Yep. Not sexy. Not the latest trend, not the latest thing that's out there in the market, but solving a real problem. For millions of people across America. We're talking about a real problem. Who wants pests? Who wants bugs and rats and all kinds of critters around their house? Your home is one of your biggest purchases in a lot of situations. Why do you want to ruin that experience with really bad pest control? Foreign. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. Before we jump in, can I get 30 seconds of your time? We love guiding you on your business journey and we want to help even more people build their dream businesses and lives. So if you could hit the Follow button on this podcast app, it would be greatly appreciated. It's completely free and it helps us out more than you know. Thanks. David really focused on solving a problem and he's going to walk us through his incredible journey of really focusing on building a valuable skill and being able to deploy it in any business, in any market. He shares with us how he got started with a summer job in sales and was horrible at it and learned how to get better at sales and then became the top salesman in his company. The same company that he then takes over its brand and starts his own business and then goes ahead and builds that into an incredible wealth generating vehicle. In this conversation, you're going to learn how to know what's important when it comes to one, selling more of your products and services. Two, understanding your customer. Three, understanding if you're solving a big enough pain in your business with your products and services, and then also how to systemize this so that you can expand and scale and grow your business. So not you're the only person that knows how to do this, right? That other people in your business know how to bring in customers, know how to serve these customers, and that way you're not doing all the work so that you can scale this business and make it something that is bigger than yourself. I don't want to share too much because I want you to learn directly from David. So without further ado, David Royce, the former founder and chairman of Aptif. David, so good, so good to have you here. I'm so excited to dive into your story, share your story with our audience, but also learn a little bit about how you got to where you are today, which is an incredible result, having incredible exit $500 million company, all the accolades we all want. But I love to pull back the curtain and kind of show the reality of what that life is. What is it like to get there, what is the journey like, but also like, what's your life like now? You know, maybe it's not as, as different as you thought it would be. But David, I want to just start off with the fact that you started in door to door sales. My dad was a salesman. I was growing up, right. He was a car salesman. And he used to tell me, if you know how to sell, you never go hungry. Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I definitely do. Right, because it doesn't matter what the product or what the widget is like, you're going to be able to sell something. So you can very easily transition that skill set to something else.

So what were you selling door to door?

So I had a friend approach me in college and he said, hey, last summer I made 25 grand in about three, three and a half months of work. Do you want to come out with us? We're going out to California. We kind of, you know, surf on the weekends and hang out. And I was like, okay, 25 grand. I'm currently working at a snowboard shop. You're making nine bucks an hour. Yeah, that sounds great. Whatever it is. We'll go do that. And I got there, and the truth is, I sucked. I was horrible. I sold the first five days, nothing. And then that weekend, I went and got a bunch of books from a Barnes and Noble and started studying sales. And the product we were selling was pest control services. And I didn't have pest control myself because I was in college. It wasn't a homeowner at the time, so it took a while to kind of build, you know, that credibility, that faith to understand, okay, this is something that's really needed. This is something most people do. And by the end of the summertime, after studying 90 minutes a day in sales, like, religiously every single day, I ended up being the top rookie in the company and of about 200 people.

So how much did you make that summer?

So I made 35 grand that first summer.

So you 10x what your buddy said, come out for three and a half. That's great.

Yeah. Yeah, he did. He had made 25,000, so that was kind of his pitch to me.

It's a good summer.

Yeah. I did better.

Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. I love this moment in history because, number one, what I love about sales is that you can't delude yourself. Like, you know you suck because you're not getting any sales. Like, the numbers don't lie. You know, in other fields, you can kind of, like, think that you're great. Like, I play basketball every Sunday, and there's people that show up and, like, you actually think you're good, but you suck, dude. So, like, sales is very objective, which is actually quite interesting. I love the fact that you went to Barnes and Nobles and started studying up. I actually went to. For those who don't know, Barnes and Nobles Bookstore. Right. And physical.

You gotta tell people now.

Right. I actually went to Barnes and Nobles, but I was a college student and I had very little cash. I actually just read the books in Barnes and Nobles. I just sat in the corner and read them. For me, it was it. My exit was a software company, so I accredit those times. And I'm so sorry to see Barnes and Nobles go because it was a great resource for some of us. But I want to dig in a little bit and learn a little bit more about how did you go from I'm horrible at something to I'm the top person in the company in sales in a short period of time? What were Some of the things that you focused on, yes.

It was less about, like, what does the service entail and what does the product do. It was more about skills like smiling, head nods, nonverbal communication, learning lines like option closes, ways to find, you know, just. Just different ways to be able to talk to people to kind of ease pressure. If they have some sort of an objection, come back around, maybe offer something additional, you know, that maybe didn't talk about that the service included prior. And so there's. There's so much to learn. Right. If it's truly your first time selling something, it's. It takes a bit to. To get the hang of it. Some people, maybe they're more natural because their. Their father was in sales. Yeah. You know, and so they. They just picked that up, you know, growing up around. Around their dad or their mom. But yeah, it was, it was. It was really hard at first. But one of the coolest things about it is it made me really work hard in the future also, because the next year, I actually became a sales manager. And I brought friends out that I had recruited to come sell with me. And I worked for a different company. The first year, I'd worked for $100 million pest control company. The next year I worked for a startup that only had one year in business. They're just barely starting out. They didn't have a training manual. And I asked my boss, I said, hey, do you mind if I write a training manual for my friends? I want them to do well. And he was really impressed that I took the initiative to do that. And then I really got into it. We started creating sales training videos and all this sort of thing. And then our sales team that year did twice as good as the one other location that he had.

Yeah.

And then he pitched me and said, you know what? I want you to be over the entire sales program in the future. I'm willing to open up more locations if you can recruit people, you know, train them and manage them. And so, yeah, by the end of my college summers, my last summer, I made 225 grand. And remember, that's like, you know, this is like 25 years ago.

So, yeah, 90s.

That's almost. That's like double in today's money.

Yeah, 100%. I love the fact that you brought this up because I wanted to get into your obsession with systems, your obsession with SOPs. We're obsessed in our company, so we document every single thing we do. As soon as I tell, you know, somebody, my team, do something, add it to the SOP put in our playbook. But when it comes to sales, a lot of people think it's sort of an art form. How much of sales is art and how much of it is science or just like, procedures and steps that you can follow?

You have to understand, like, the overall, like, what is the message?

Right?

And so I believe that maybe only 10% is the script, what you say, the vocabulary that you use.

Only 10% is what you say. I love this. Okay?

The other, you know, they've done studies on this. The other 60% ish is body language. It's nonverbal communication. Imagine you closed your ears and just what you can see, that's what it is. And then the additional, say 30% is para verbal communication. It's what you're saying, it's pausing, it's how fast are you going? It's how calm are you when you're delivering it? Is your pitch going up? You know, does it sound squeaky? All those types of things. And so what we did is we would record first. I, I, I wrote out the best sales script I could. You know, whittled it down because what I wanted our sales teams to do was to be able to focus on things like body language and the delivery of it. Because oftentimes people would come to me and they'd say, okay, I have this objection. I can't get over it. Can you tell me what you say as a rebuttal? And I would say the rebuttal, and they would say, dave, I use the exact same words you're using. That doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, I think it's how you say it and how you deliver it. It's not what you're saying. And so, for example, you could say I love you a thousand different ways just by changing the pitch of your voice. You could say, I love you, right? Or it could be I love you, like screaming. But it means something totally different simply because of both your paravobal and your nonverbal communication. And so we would actually record people. We would take out an iPhone. In fact, this is before iPhones. We actually had camcorders back then. And we record people put it up on a big screen TV so everybody could see it. And then what I do is I'd say, anybody that wants to say pause, just tell me to pause when you notice something that the individual can do to improve. And we call this putting on your armor. Because it's kind of scary if you've got like a sales team of 15 individuals and they're all going to tell you where you know how bad you are and where you need to improve. It's a little bit tough. So we just kind of go through little by little, you know, and it would start out like maybe the person looks a little timid, like they're kind of got deer in the headlights when they start out, or they're repeating the same word over and over again. They're frowning or they look frustrated when they're, you know, delivering it. So all those types of things, you, you can't see it unless you're in a mirror. You can do that. You can give your sales approach in front of a mirror, but ideally like get it recorded and then have people give you real honest feedback.

I love this. There's two things I want to talk about off what you just said. The first thing is even in fictional characters we see in the movie, this is so true. Like the ultimate sales movie or one of the popular sales movies, Glengarry Glen Ross. And the top salesman in this movie is Tony Romo, which is played by Al Pacino. And this guy's like super confident and cool. He's just having a, a drink with somebody at the bar and he's the one who closes all the sales. He's not Jack Lemmon's character who is really aggressive and just has this kind of sounds like he's selling and just sound that voice of, that tone of. He just sounds like he's just setting a script. I definitely agree. The fact that you know, your approach, your tone, just the vibe you're putting out there is going to make a big difference. Having said that, a lot of our listeners, a lot of the people that are part of the hundred dollar MBA, I would say 95% of them run online businesses where they sell online, they sell on a website, they sell via an app or whatever. They sell software, a course or a training or a service. And many of them, despite my nagging, don't have any video sales letters, don't have any one on one calls. They don't actually have a chance to sell face to face. Even if there's just one way where they're showing their face and explaining their product. How much are they losing out by just having copy on the page?

It's a great question. Statistically, it's going to be hard to say. I think it's even. It varies per product that you're trying to sell or service. But there's nothing that beats a face to face meeting, right? People can see you, you're Tangible, especially, like going out and, you know, having a meal, breaking bread together, talking, talking things over. Got to be careful not to be eating while you're trying to present. But when you're talking to somebody and you're smiling, you're head nodding, you're walking through it all. You can use your hands to gesture. It keeps people's attention for a lot longer. Whereas, you know, if they start reading something about the product, they may just kind of get bored. You know, I have adhd, so I don't know that I'd make it all the way through. I need somebody, like, walk me through it and get, you know, kind of sell me on the idea.

How important is it to be likable? Like, just be a person that people, like, enjoys their company. This guy's all right, you know, I'll give him a chance. Like, how much of that factors in.

I think what's important is that you speak the customer's language. And that goes all the way to the individual that's there, what their personality is. If you can find a way to somewhat match their personality. So we would go as far as even standing the way the person's standing at the doors.

Mirroring. Okay, yeah.

And maybe even talking a little bit. Like, if you're in Texas, you might have a little bit more of a draw, you know, as you talk, you know, or you might use the language, y', all, that kind of thing. So people like, people who are like them, they can relate quicker. And the faster you do that, we found that you only have about 10 seconds to really grab someone's attention. And from that point, you really. The very best salespeople, they know if they're gonna take the individual all the way through, say, the three to five minute approach, or if they're just gonna move on to the next door. Cause they don't believe the individual's gonna be interested.

That's incredible.

You don't have to. You don't have to close every single person. That's not what makes a great salesperson. A great salesperson is somebody that can identify, Okay, I have the ability to keep working this person through. They're listening to me. I have their attention. I feel like I've got a good chance to spend my time because your. Your time is limited. Right. When you're out the doors, you only have so much time in a day. Sales is a numbers game. You want to talk with the most potential customers that are actually going to transition and convert. I think that's a big secret. The first year individuals they want to close everybody. Right. They think that they could sell ice or they want to be able to sell ice to an Eskimo or whatever the phrase is. Yeah, that's just not great salesmanship.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

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So I mentioned my dad was a salesperson, and one of the things I learned from him was my job in sales is really to help my customer make a decision, to give them the information, to educate them. The worst thing is, like, ambiguity. Like, you want them either to say, yes, I want to buy, or no, this is not for me. That way you can move on. Right. How much is sales education? How much is it just being a consultant for the person across the screen or across the room?

Yeah, I think it's a lot of that. I think that you have to have the sensory acuity to be able to read that other individual and speak their language. Because if immediately you just, you can't relate and it feels awkward, it's not necessarily the product or the service. It might just be the individual, the messenger that's delivering it. So, for example, there's some places, like Texas is a great example in Dallas, Texas. We weren't the only company that was utilizing this form of marketing. There were other companies. And so someone might have somebody, every week in the summertime knock on their door and offer pest control services. You know, let them know, hey, we're taking care of your neighbors next door. If you guys want to get done, we'll do some sort of a discount for you. And what's amazing is you know that when you're out there as a salesperson, but you're hoping that you're going to be able to connect with them in a different way than the, maybe the last person, last competitor that stopped by to knock doors. So it's crazy. Like, let's say a dozen people knock on someone's home in a summer, but you're the one individual. It's because you were able to relate with that individual. They saw something in you. Sometimes timing is important, right? They, maybe their, their current provider is just not cutting it and they're seeing more bugs or they really like the last individual that stopped by and they thought, you know what, if Aptif comes by again, I'm going to give them a shot, you know, if my service provider can't do it. So sometimes it takes multiple, you know, multiple people to actually get it closed.

So it's interesting that you say that because like I was thinking like, okay, maybe you're making a better offer or maybe you're creating a circumstance where it's like a no brainer and they can't lose, you know. But a lot of it is timing, a lot of it is relating to each other, understanding what their needs are and then focusing on what those needs are and how you can solve them with your service. That's interesting. I find that very, very cool. So you are, you get your summer job, you're making bank, you're feeling good, you then go into this full time and work for this company and you build the sops for them, correct?

So I never worked full time. I just worked full time in the summer. It was a summer job to help, you know, get money to pay my way through college. And then when I was about to graduate, I went to my boss at my, I was studying finance in school. I was going to go to New York and do mergers and acquisitions. That was the goal. It was like the best job you could get coming out of school at the time. And he, I asked him for a letter of recommendation and I said, look, you know, I know I'm making a ton of money, I'm managing like 100 people in the summertime. I need you to write a killer letter of recommendation for me so that, you know, it's impressive to these investment banks, you know that I think between the finance and then, I also think all this sales experience, it's going to tee me up nicely for mergers and acquisitions. But you got to make it sound sexy because most people think of pest control and they're, you know, thinking blue collar, unsophisticated, that sort of thing. So he looks at me and he just goes, what, what are you doing? Yeah, what are you doing? He's like, you're in the top 1% of 1% in sales in this industry. You know it really well and you're going to go work 800 hour weeks for somebody else all year long. He's like, that just doesn't make sense to me. You should really go start your own business. So he was the first person that encouraged me to go start it. And I taken. I did undergrad in business and I had, you know, I've been thinking not so much about pest control, but, you know, if I did M and A initially, and then I went back to MBA school and then maybe I go start a business or I get into private equity. I've been thinking a lot about those different ideas. But then he told me, by the way, I'm going to sell my business. And I was like, wait, we just started, like, you know, four years ago. He's like, yeah, and I'm selling it for like 10 million bucks. And I'm like, huh, that's pretty quick. That's really nice to be able to have that. Be able to build a business that quickly and have an exit. And I thought, yeah, I thought, well, you know, if I go do it and I don't like it, I can go get an MBA and just, you know, go do something else after. So initially he had pitched me on just going and doing my own thing. And then he said, by the way, I'm selling my company. If you want the name Moxie from my company, you can, you can license it or have it or whatever, because, you know, Terminex is not going to buy that from me. And I thought, okay, well, there's probably a few people I could get to.

It was an asset sale I just grabbed.

Exactly. Yeah, it's just an asset deal. They just wanted the customer base and the corresponding technicians because really, there's no brand value. Right. Only been a business for four years. So I did that. I had about 300 grand saved. I said, hey, will you match how much I have and throw it in there? You know, give you 20, 30% of the business? And, you know, he said, that's fine. I don't want anything to do with the business. I want to be a silent partner and be totally out. He's like, but if you have a question, you can call me. And so, yeah, from time to time, I would call him and ask him questions about different things. And I had a really good foundation, number one, in the sense I understood finance. That already gives me a competitive advantage in an industry like pest control, you know, that you probably don't need a high school degree in, to be honest. Number two, I had worked at a large $100 million company, so I understood what that looked like, three I had. When you work at a small company, you know, you're kind of like the Jack of all trades. You learn a lot more. You know, things aren't siloed into.

Got a lot more possibilities.

Yeah, exactly. And then the last thing was, I asked him, I said, hey, what would you change about the company? What would you do to improve it if you actually had the time to do it? And he gave me a list of maybe three dozen things where he said, here's it. Here's where all my pain points are that I want to fix. And I thought, okay, this is a great list for me to go to work on and try to improve.

I love it. I love it. And there's so much about this story that really resonates with me because I often feel like this idea that gets pushed around on the Internet, especially on social media, about following your passion is really overrated. Like, this idea of the money will come if you just follow your passion. I'm a big believer that you should follow your value. Like, what value can you add to the marketplace? That's your competitive edge. No one really cares about how passionate you are about something. And what you're passionate about may not be what the market wants, and that's a reality a lot of people face. And then they. They don't do well, and then they quit entrepreneurship altogether. What's your advice to people that are on that fence? Or like, oh, I want to follow my passion, but I'm not sure if people actually want what I want to sell. Maybe I should just think about the skills I can offer. What advice do you give somebody? Let's say they're in the second season of life. They're 35. They're maybe stuck in a job they don't like, and they want to do their own thing.

Yeah, that's a tricky one, right? I've heard one person say that, you know, people who tell you to follow your passion, it's because they're already rich now they're. Now they're following their passions after. And, you know, they can afford. Enjoyable. Right? But if your goal is, how do I make money? But then also, how. How can I get passionate? What I would say is, follow what you're good at first. So a lot of people will ask me, how do I.

How.

How do you get rich? Or how do you build a business? And like Seneca said that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Right. So the first thing I'd say is, go prepare. Go learn how to identify. It's amazing. What you can do with Google or ChatGPT these days, you can get on there and just ask what are the best businesses to start, the easiest ones, highest profit margins, all of that sort of thing. So do your due diligence initially to figure out what might be great. The second thing is go get experience in that industry. Go try it. Because if you want to mitigate your risk, that's one of the big keys, right? If you look at entrepreneurship, they say that 80% of businesses fail in five years and maybe 95% are out in 10 years. However, franchises are totally different, right? If I go purchase franchise rights somewhere, I have an 80% chance of success. The odds absolutely flip. And so now I mitigated that risk and you had the experience. And then the third reason, how to prepare to find the right business opportunity. The third item would be develop a competitive advantage. So go get experience and know whether you even like the industry and whether it's something you can do. But what I found is people love what they do well, right? And I was not passionate about pest control in the beginning, but I was passionate about sales. And then I stepped ladder and said, okay, now I'm going to be passionate about sales management. Now I'm going to be passionate about recruiting. And then it transferred into operations, and then it transferred into building an executive team and core values and really cool amenities for everybody and headquarters. And so you can expand what you become passionate about. So it's kind of like reverse engineered a little bit in terms of what you want and work backwards. And I think you'll find that passion because passion, in my mind, it's a lot like lust in a relationship. Like it's really fun and exciting that first year, but eventually glove chemicals wear off and then you're kind of stuck with each other and you got to figure out how to work, make it work. And. And I think love really is about commitment instead. It's not just lust. So let's maybe kind of get you into it initially, but it's the commitment that keeps a marriage together for a long period of time. And same thing, it's more of a choice. You have to become obsessive about it too in order to keep it going. You gotta keep fanny that flame and all that sort of thing.

So much value here. And I definitely agree with you about the skill part. Like if you're good at something or people tell you that you're good at something, you should double, triple down on that. Because in my experience, like for example, I was a school teacher for 12 years before I became a full time entrepreneur, I side hustled for 10 years and I was teaching. So anything I do that involves taking a complex idea and breaking it down to something easier, which was my livelihood, Like, I don't get a paycheck if my students don't pass, right? Like, if enough of them fail, I'm in jeopardy of my job. My job was on the line to make sure I do this right. So anything in business that requires me to do that, I do well in, whether it's the podcast, whether it's, you know, the program, whether it's public speaking and it's fun to do well, Like, a lot of people get it. Like, when you're winning, you'll get passionate about winning. You know, like when things just are easier. Like, and it's so much easier to run a business where you're pushing the boulder down the hill rather than up the hill. And speaking of that point, I want to get into, you know, you were in pest control. How much is your product and in terms of like solving a big pain point, important in your business? Like, a lot of people, they sell really good products, but they're not like really compelling things that they need to have or they must have or it's causing a lot of pain and you solve that pain. Like, no one wants pests. Someone wants rats and bugs around their house, you know, like immediately. Like, I need to solve this problem, right? So how much is a painful problem to be solved important in business? Yeah.

So I knocked 60,000 doors when I went out and sold for four summers, right? So I had a lot of great feedback from people in terms of what they wanted. And because we originally started with, you know, door to door sales and eventually expanded into digital marketing and other forms of marketing, I was very focused on what the customer wanted and how we could sell more if we offered different things. So we listened to them. But customers were looking for a more eco conscious service. When we got to the home, there were spiderwebs and things up on the window sills or the eaves. And we were like, hey, we can actually take these down for you. When I first started, nobody was really doing that. There were only a couple companies that were doing it. It was immediately something we could spot and show the customer that even if they had a pest control service, hey, they're not getting this done. We can take care of all this for you. The customers are like, oh, that's great. Just one less thing I have to do. Another thing was the yard structural pest control. Was it's primarily around the home and there's different licenses for it. So you have a license for the home, you have a license for the yard. You have a license sometimes for different insects or different rodents. And customers were like, well, I'm getting the home done. But even the largest companies, they didn't do the yard. And we're like, that's a huge, huge mission. We can do the yard and we can charge even more as a result. People don't want to go to like a Home Depot or a Lowe's here and, you know, have to go get product and do it on their own. That's the whole reason they're paying somebody else to do it. You know, they don't want to store pesticides inside the home. You know, that's a potential danger. If you have kids at home, you don't want them getting into it.

Totally.

So we really tried to listen. That was one of our competitive advantages. We weren't just great at sales. We were really great at building out a premium service to be able to say, oh, well, what about this? Or hey, how about this? We could can offer this and that. And it helped us to switch over more and more customers to our service.

I love it. And the fact that pest control is reoccurring, like it's a reoccurring business because, you know, you need to up your protection and make sure that you're kind of vigilant. A lot of people don't understand, like the home is the biggest asset for most people, the biggest purchase, you know, so spending on your home is not a big ask. You know, most people are willing to do that. And I love this approach of figuring out what other problems they have, what other issues do they want to avoid and solving them for you. Quick story. When I was in university, my dad told me, you got to get a sales job. So just at least you know how to sell. Right. Because I was into it and I was, you know, doing tech support and I took a sales job, phone sales for mci, which was long distance phone. Back in the day, they went out of business, I remember. Yeah. And my job was to get people to switch from whatever they have to mci. And I was having a really hard time knowing how to approach this. And then I was watching some of the top salespeople and they really just focused on how I can be of value to this person. Right. So I changed the way I approached my call. Instead of most people would call and say, hi, is this Nancy Smith? Hey, Nancy Smith, I'm calling From MCI or new long distance. That script was really dangerous, right? It really was like, almost like instant hang up. So what I would do, I would just say, hey, is this Nancy Smith? Hey, Nancy, I'm Omar. I'm calling from a new phone company that's in your area. I want to see if we can save you up to a hundred dollars a month. If we can't, no problem. But if you can bring them, it'll pull up your bill. Do you have your bill from last month? And then she would be like, oh, this, this sounds like something I want to be on the call for. Like, this is something that I'm going to save a hundred bucks. Hell yeah. Right? And I'm like. And then later like, yep, this is a new company called mci. We're trying to be competitive and save you some money. Oh, it looks like we could save you $85. Would you like to switch over? I can just pass you on to my rep. And they should be like, yep, perfect. And there was so much easier when it was just like, I'm trying to give something rather than take something. Like, I'm trying to take your business. I want you to share a few of your favorite techniques when it comes to. What do you say? How do you approach somebody to solve a problem or maybe discover a problem they have that you could solve?

Yeah. So typically, when I got to a door, the first thing I did, you know, you always present yourself, give them your name and who you're with so they have an idea. It helps also kind of decrease the intensity of what's going on. And then I would let them know. Cause we're already out in the neighborhood. We're taking care of multiple neighbors. And the idea is, if we can get you on the same route, we'll give you the service for half price. We'll work a deal for you because we're already gonna be here. And that's kind of the initial pitch. And then they kind of will look at you and they'll. They'll either give you like, all right, keep going. Or, you know, they'll say something. And some people, you know, they'll also give you kind of the quick objection, like, oh, no, no, it's no, no, thank you. You know, just try to get you off the doorstep. That's really like a half. No, it's not a no way. Because that's kind of the normal reaction most people give to any door to door salesperson that shows they want to.

Get back to their TV show or whatever. Yeah, right.

Because you stepped in at a time, they just weren't thinking you were going to be there. But if you can immediately talk, say, you know, one of the reasons your neighbors over here switched, you know, it's mainly these eaves, the spiderwebs and the wasp nests up here. And so you give them something to start looking at, to see visually and to talk about. And then you can talk about the yard and how you treat the yard, you know, and if there's ants or there's some sort of a pest that's been there. And I, I can. You can also ask, oh, so what, what have you guys been seeing, you know, and what's, what's really important to you? Or you have a service, they're kind of doing this and this. Something your other neighbor really liked is we also do this and we do that, and it just gives them more information and they're thinking, oh, my company doesn't do that. Okay. There is a reason why other people switch over, because it's just not as complete. Well, I want that too. I'd really like to have that. And if I can get it for half off and they're already here, that's a great time to do it. There's urgency. All right, I'll give you a shot. Why not? It's also really important to ask for it. You know, at the end, I would usually always close with an option sale. So we're going to be here tomorrow and the next day. Would tomorrow or the next day, maybe around 5 o' clock work best for you? And so the, the option, both options are in my best interest and. Right. It's in the customer's best interest because you're trying to help them make a decision. And if, if you say it with confidence, oftentimes they'll just follow that confidence and go, yeah, why not? We'll give you a shot.

Right? And I love this approach of like, I'm coming to you with something that you need. Like, I'm not trying to push something on you. I'm actually, you know, you got to solve this problem here, man. You know, like. Or ma', am, you know, so like. And I love this idea of like, giving them the options. A lot of people don't understand that when people are on the receiving end of a sales conversation, they need things to be clear. It's very confusing to them. So just having the options of, like, you could consider, continue with what you have and not have this and this and this, or you can get half off and come with us. And I'M gonna make it easy because I'll be back tomorrow. Like, those clear options is just easier. So easy to say yes to this because there's no effort required. You know, the friction is so low. I often wonder how much do we do this in our day to day websites, sales letters, videos, even on a call to action, like on free content. Like, you know, if you want somebody to subscribe to their YouTube channel or something like that, you know, think that these options need to be clear. How do you make it simple for somebody to understand that you can either continue in your mediocre or suffering ways or you can either have a better life or have a better result? Yeah.

So I think no matter what you're doing, right, whatever profession you're in, you have to be persuading. You can be a schoolteacher, you can be a doctor, you can be in sales, whatever it might be. You also could be a parent, you could be a religious leader, whatever it is. You're constantly trying to persuade people. You know, there's, there's so many books out there, probably not a lot of people go, well, I'm not in sales, I shouldn't go read a sales book. But this is, this is the reason why, right? You're trying to convince your children to, you know, be good human beings.

Right.

To do certain things that's in their best interest. And how do you deliver that? How can you be just a little bit more persuasive? And so learning those techniques, it's not just valuable in your job per se, but it's valuable at home and with friends and everybody. It's a universal, like, truth that works.

Yeah, we're chuckling a little bit here because previously we're talking about this. My dad used to do this all the time. He used to convince me of, like, staying home and not going out. And I would be sold on it. I'd be like, yeah, he's right, we should do this. And then later I realized, oh, he just sold me. And I use that in my profession as a teacher. You mentioned teaching. A period of my teaching career, I taught in Dubai. For those who don't know, the UAE is less than 50 years old, so there's no real culture of education. A lot of the parents of the students I was teaching never went to school. They were illiterate. So the students really didn't understand the idea of like doing homework and why they have to do it. There's also the overarching fact that no matter what happens, they're going to be okay. The UE Nationals are quite wealthy. I always say the worst thing that's going to happen to them is they're going to get a promotion.

But.

But I used to use guilt. I know this sounds crazy, I know people are gonna hate me and put in the comments, but I used to use guilt all the time with my students because that worked in that culture, because they respect authority, they respect their elders. So I used to be like, oh, Muhammad, why didn't you do your homework today? I thought we were buddies. I thought that, like, you know, you make me proud. And he'd be like, yeah, you're right. You know, like you got to use everything you got in your disposal. You know, like you can't just like. And it depends on who you're talking to. That wouldn't work with somebody, with one of my clients. But, but the point is, is that like, I definitely agree with this fact that you have to spend some time getting to know your customer and understanding what they need in your journey in building your business and, you know, making it a half a billion dollar company. How much did you spend on learning more about your customer, understanding what makes them tick, understanding their problems, whether it's conversations, whether it's research. Tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, so, so much of our research was initially me going out in the doors and talking to people. But you know, we would do surveys with all of our customers. We'd ask them what else can we do? And we just constantly, you know, take surveys, take all the data, clump it into different piles and decide, okay, we've got a lot of people asking for this. Let's look into this and see how profitable is it. Can we do it? Well, first, because we're very committed to wanting to deliver a great service and be a premium brand. And we thought if we can't do it well, let's not have it be our thing. Like, for example, we really wanted to be at the in n out burger of pest control. And by saying that I wanted, we wanted to keep it fairly simple and not. There's a lot of things you can do in pest control. You can get into termites, you can get into commercial services, you can get a fumigation and all this other, you know, wildlife.

And we're in laws.

Yeah, it's like we really want to be great with families and kids and, you know, focus on residences, you know, and if some commercial comes our way, as long as it's basic commercial commercial, we're totally fine. We'll take that on. But we're not going to go do fast food restaurants or something, you know, where it's really intense and it requires a different level of service. We're always looking for new ways to improve and become a premium. You know, one of the, one of the big ones was mosquitoes, you know, and our sales reps, they constantly would tell us what people were looking for. We would do surveys with all of our employees and ask them. And I think that's one of the trickiest parts as you get bigger and bigger. So Aptiv was my fourth company. It and as you get higher and higher up the chain, you know what, I'm really just talking to the executive team and maybe some regional managers at that point. You have to find a way to funnel up all these epiphanies of genius down at the base level. Most of the best ideas come from those in the front lines. And so you've gotta get incentivize them. And so some ways we incentivize them in the past, it's like, hey, 500 bucks or a thousand bucks for any idea that we get. And then we implement it company wide. We pay them, but we'd also give them company wide recognition, you know, and create some sort of a hero story out of it.

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Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. I want to just kind of take a shot in the dark here. I'm going to ask you if this is right. I'm on the right plane of thinking. You built an incredible company that got acquired that changed your life and changed everything about you. Everything you've learned along the way because of some big things. Number one, you know how to sell. You know how to have a conversation with somebody and find out how you can help them. Two, you're selling a product that people actually want and need. Three, you're doing it in a way that is low friction. So it's like once they make a decision, there's no work for them. Like, they don't have to get out and get the gloves. Gloves and do it themselves. The implementation of getting what they want, the solution is easy. And then lastly, you have built systems for your business so that you can scale, so that anybody could pick up the system and do exactly what and repeat over and over the winning formula that you've discovered or learned throughout your system. Am I missing anything?

I also think the industry I chose was really wise. I found something where you could have 20% profit margins. It was not very competitive. One of the jokes I say is that there's not a lot of MBAs running into pest control, you know, and so, you know, if you have some basic business background that gives you a leg up, you know, and if you're really committed to being the top 1% of 1%, it's a little bit easier.

Right?

Like, I wouldn't be very good at playing in the NBA. I'm only 6 foot 4. I'm not, you know, in that. In that range. And I, you know, I wasn't in varsity basketball or whatever else. And you have to know what your strengths are, are. So, yeah, I mean, I could probably give you a dozen other ways, you know, that it made sense for me at the time. I just happened to go to byu. Yeah, BYU has a lot of return missionaries. And they don't realize it, but they're actually really good at sales.

Great salespeople.

When they're out there, it's more about the resilience they have. You know, when they knock door to door, they get rejected way more than pest control. So when, by the time we brought them into pest control, it's like, wow, this is a lot easier. You know, I can have, you know, two or three sales a day as opposed to zero for like a whole month, you know, and hopefully get a couple of baptisms over the course of the whole mission. So finding the right people, building a culture around that, whatever you have around you, I think it's important to look and go, what can I do with what I have? What with the card hand that I've been dealt y and then working from there. But you got to know if you got a good hand.

When we first met, David, one of the things that got me really excited to have this conversation is that you seem somebody that just loves business. Like, I love business as well. Like, I love the game of business. I love solving problems. I love seeing how far I can take something. I love seeing results for my customers, whatever it might be. And I've heard you mention that, you know, that in a previous podcast episode, that you see business as a game. It's your sport of choice. What is your scoreboard? How do you know that you're winning in business?

So over time I've learned that's really different for everybody. Right. For me personally, I loved growth. And you know, you have all your different KPIs that you come with to manage the success of the business. Those are probably the best indicators of how well you're doing, you know, and some of that can be your growth percentage, it can be your profit margin, it can be, you know, your efficiencies, that sort of thing. But also, are you building a really great company culture? You know, is it led by core values? Is it something people are excited about? How is your employee retention? You know, are your sales numbers truly better than the other competitors out there that are also selling? So, for example, when we had people switch over to our company from another company the previous year, they would sell 70% more sales with us that, that next summer.

Right.

Than they did with their prior competitor. And so things like that, to me, I always wanted. The company was always a reflection of me. It took me a long time to pull my reputation outside of the business of reputation, you know, even enough to sell it. And I think you just gotta love what you do. For me, I love growing. Like if, if you're not growing, you're dying, right? It's a pretty common phrase in business. You know, it's like you can't stand still or you're actually moving backwards and you can't ever rest on your loyals, no matter how big you get. Otherwise you become a dinosaur. I always joke that there's a startup, a scale up and a screw up. Yeah, right. And you don't want to get that screw up phase, right. You constantly have to be scaling and growing or eventually you'll fall into it.

Yeah, yeah.

And we all see there's plenty of business out there right now. We could name off the tops of our heads where it's like, you know what? These guys got big and they just, they're resting on their laurels, you know, it's just kind of a cash cow to them. They're not interested in being the next hot thing or the front runner of their industry. And for me, I always want to be a front runner.

And I think that's an important point because when I speak to my non entrepreneurial friends or family members, they just don't understand that that's how it is. Like, you got to keep growing or you will die. A lot of people just look at like Bezos, for example, and they're like, this guy is so greedy. He's constantly eating up the market. Like he doesn't have a choice. Like he has to. Otherwise he's going to be Bradley, he's going to be Kaldor, he's going to be like, you know, Kmart, who downsized. So, like, it's very interesting that, you know, as entrepreneurs we have to understand that it's not about greed, it's about how do I continue to serve my customers at a greater scale better than anybody else. And that's a really strong point that you're making here. And I love the fact that you pointed out that this is different for everybody. Some people want a lifestyle business, some people want growth, some people want. They have the vision where I'm going to nose to the grindstone for the next five years because I'm going to sell this company for X amount of value. Speaking of which, I want to learn about your experience of selling your last company. That transition of this is not me anymore. What do I do with my time? What does my life mean to me now? How do I get fulfillment? Right? Because I sold my software company almost like a year and a half ago and I had a moment where I was just like, okay, I'm not the webinar guy anymore. Okay, what am I now? Now that I have all these options, it's almost like before it was easy because I had one option, like just build this business, you know. So what was your experience like when you sold and now you have all these options and now you have all this time and you have to rediscover who David Royce is.

So when we started this fourth company, my goal was to build the first unicorn in pest control. And it's funny how goals work, right? Because you have one goal when you started, and it was life changing. When I sold my first business. I've got an NDA, but Forbes said I sold it for $13 million. That was life changing to me. Like, it was incredible. Like I could have probably invested that and, you know, lived a very reasonable life, you know, or modest lifestyle and, you know, not worked again. Then, you know, it's okay, well, what's next, you know, how do we expand not just from, say, Southern California, but how do we go into four states and then nine states and then, you know, 34 states. And so you're constantly kicking the goalposts back further and further. Nothing's ever enough. I've learned. It's, it's almost like this endless search of how big can we go? It's like, why do you climb a mountain? I don't know, because it's there. This, this idea and you know, the idea of building a unicorn. I have an NDA for this company too. But the average, I could tell you that the average pest control company sells for one to three times revenues. And we were at 500 million. So you can kind of do the math. And I would say that it's not as great as you would think. And a lot of people are like, what are you talking about? Like, you made all this money. Like you're not just set, like you do whatever you want. And the thing that you really take away. And looking back at my 20 year journey in the pest control industry, it's the discipline that you hone, it is the character that you build. It is all the knowledge and learnings, those are like the real reward. And that's what's the most satisfying. If I go back, if you asked me when, where was I happiest, I was actually happiest in the earliest years when I had no idea what was going to happen, if we were really going to pull it off. I almost bankrupt my company the first year because we sold way more than we should have. And the, the, you have to pay the commissions out before all the revenue comes in. But it was so much fun because you're just constantly learning, right? Your mind is like expanding. And for me, the reason I ultimately sold, I was just, I was kind of bored, like I wasn't learning anything new. And again, like I have to be growing or I'm dying. And I felt like we've become the third largest pest control company, a residential, residential, pest control company, and probably the world. And I don't know that there's much more for me to do here. I'm probably good and I'm curious, you know, for me what the next chapter is. I've kind of look at my life like that was the first act in a play. And I'm trying to figure out what Act 2 is. You know, I tend to think it's going to be something more creative or philanthropic, but I'm just taking time to be really quiet, relax and think. You know, I bought a new home, I'm remodeling it, going to kind of do that and have some fun. I enjoy the creativity that's involved in architecture. I've always loved it. And then from that point I'll just, I'll go figure it out. But it is weird in the sense that all those dopamine hits like you're no longer this machine of productivity. But I was definitely weaning myself off of that. The first dozen years when I was CEO, it was really, really intense. And I was working 14, 16 hour days. It worked great because my wife was also a securities fraud litigator and she was working, you know, crazy hours like that too. And so it worked for us. Probably not a great fit for everybody. Towards the end, I became chairman with Aptiv. And then slowly I went down to like a 40 hour work week, down to like a 30 hour week work, 20 hour work week, and then was able to sell the business because I had built a great team that could continue with the business, that I didn't have to stay with it.

I love it. And what about in terms of like what you want to do in terms of fulfilling for lost time? You work. I know when you build a business, like you're building a business and you're working so hard and you're growing it, are there things that you went back to? You're like, hey, I want to pick up, you know, a new hobby, a new sport. Maybe I want to do some charity work. What are some of the things that you are so happy you get to do now?

Yeah, I think, I think maybe the next phase is probably something more creative or philanthropic. I love helping entrepreneurs. You know, I would love to find a way to inspire other entrepreneurs who are young or give them some sort of help, get a skill set on the creative side. Like right now I'm building a new house. That's been really fun. I've always loved architecture. It's kind of like, hey, we're going to build a house we're probably going to be in for the rest of our lives. So I've been spending time doing that, but just kind of taking things really slow, trying to get to a really quiet place to think about what's really important to me. Because now it maybe isn't so much about the money. It's. But it can be about another form of passion that maybe I am excited about or maybe it is more passion driven as opposed to financially driven. Maybe that was just the first act of my life and I'm working on the second act and maybe there's a third act later too. I don't know.

How much did this experience shape who you are As a person personally, like the whole growth of your business, selling it, all the lessons you learned, how have you changed as a person when.

You do something for 20 years? You know, you, I would say you definitely have the grooves that you've built and, and working 14, 16 hour days for a decade and also learning how to scale something nationwide. There's the discipline that I gained in doing that and the knowledge, I think it is for a lot, a large part who I am. And like I mentioned earlier, it's hard cause you have to separate your reputation from the business. But you put so much of your blood, sweat and tears into the business like it is, you think it is you. But it took a while for me to slowly wean myself off it, wean myself off all the dopamine hits on a daily basis. Right. You feel like this animal of productivity when you're going through it. And so yeah, it's, it's funny to just sit still for a second. It's tough, honestly. Like you kind of have to learn what was that like before you really got intense.

So when I sold my software company, Nicole, I, you know, exited and it was an interesting time in my life because I, I didn't grow up for money. Both my parents were immigrants. They worked hard, you know, they provided enough for us, but we didn't have abundant wealth where we're, what do I do with money? A lot of people don't understand that when you have some money, when you have some wealth, when you have just excess, that's a problem. You need to figure out what to do with that money. You can't just have it sitting in the bank. You have to invest it. You have to figure out how you can save money on taxes. There's a whole different game once you have some money. So was that a learning curve for you? What are some things that you had to learn the hard way? Or maybe some things that you realize, okay, now that I'm not building wealth and I, how do I stay rich? Right. How do I keep my money and make sure that I don't go back to square one?

Yeah, you know, I think I took the same passion, you know, that I developed over time and worked it into that where I got really excited about investing. And you know, I interviewed probably three dozen different money managers and constantly was looking and ultimately I found Iconic, which I think is the most amazing firm. And the full thesis and strategy and everything that they do is incredible. But yeah, I look at investing very much like an endowment, where half of my investments are going to be in alternatives, probably private equity, venture capital, real estate, secondaries, co investments, that sort of thing. And then the other half, primarily s and P500, a little bit of bonds or fixed income. But it's nice because I don't necessarily need a lot of it to live. You know, I can just put it in there, thinking long term and just let it grow.

Is there such a thing of, like, having too much money? Maybe there's like a point of diminishing returns. There's like, hey, if I can do it all over again, I would make X amount of money. And that's all I need to really live passively and invest. And I don't actually need, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you agree with that? Do you think that that's something that you think about sometimes?

Sure. Like, for me, like, I did question, like, okay, I've been. I put 20 years into this. Do I keep going more? Because then I can make, you know, several billion or however much, you know, it just never ends. And at some point I was like, look, I have enough. Like, I. I can't spend all this. I'm going to give it away when I die. I don't want to create trust funders. That's just not something I ever subscribe to. And so I think that it could be really cool if you are accumulating it. There are ways to go. Yeah, it would be great if I had more. Kind of like Warren Buffett. He was always focused on keeping the majority of it because he could grow it better than, you know, most other people could. And then he's going to give it all away at the end. So, same thing. Like, I'm passionate about that and I don't mind having what I have. But yeah, I do think you have to have some sort of a limit if you want to be happy. I don't think you're there to master money. The money's not there to master you.

Ooh, good point. One of the things that you mentioned is this Warren Buffett, and he's really good at what he does. And you know, one of the things I find fascinating about a story is he is the perfect example of doing something consistently for a long time and really showing the power of compounding. You know, a lot of people don't know this, but he didn't become a millionaire until 60 or something, you know, like. And from 60 to 84, whatever he is right now, 85, he became one of the richest men in the world. Over $85 billion of net worth. All that kind of stuff. So, like, compounding is one of those concepts that is hard to visualize, hard to understand. It's hard to, to grasp. You did the same thing for 20 years. You were consistent. You put your time into there, you put all your effort into basically one bucket. And then now you're diversifying, obviously with your wealth. But, but how much is consistency and perseverance attributed to your success?

Yeah, I mean, I had a professor tell me once that, you know, the richest people, the wealthiest, the ones who have accumulated the most wealthy, the reason they did so is because they were very, just focused and they were able to stick it out in one industry, become really good at one thing and just keep growing and growing based on that talent. And for the most part, I think he's right. You know, every once in a while you, you hit a really great, you know, tech company or something and there's venture capital in it and it just can expand like crazy. And in five, 10 years you've got this massive network that's worth billions. But the reality is most, most businesses aren't like that. And so, yeah, that's the exception. Yeah, it takes time, you know, and those, those businesses are obviously more risky too. There's a lot more risk involved versus having some sort of a, you know, kind of tried and true, going into a more of a traditional business model and just working at it and scaling.

So, David, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed getting to know you even better. One of the things I want to kind of wrap up on and leave our audience thinking about is for those who are just getting started, who maybe are side hustling or have a concept for their business and they're about to make their first dollar. When I even ask this question, I get excited. I feel like, man, what a great time to be. It's like you're going to get to enjoy a TV series that is absolutely amazing, you know, like, and I already watched it. So what advice would you give someone who's just starting out, who's just like, doesn't know what they don't know and just wants to go for it?

Oh, gosh. There's so many, like, ways to mitigate risk in my mind. So one is like the power of proximity. Find other people who've done what you've done and then emulate, right? Like, find other entrepreneurs. Build out a network of other people if you can, who've done something. If you're going into like a traditional business model, go get experience. Find people who have done that maybe there's even like a manager or somebody else that you can talk to in the future to ask advice from as you go out and start your own thing. Develop that competitive advantage. Make sure there's something that's special about you where you're solving a really unique pain point or maybe some additional pain points that the other firms aren't doing.

Yeah.

And get educated. Make sure you learn how to identify what a great opportunity is from the beginning. Man, I wish I grew up in today, like today's age, right? I wish I was in college right now because I would probably realize how less important college is. It's more about having fun and probably building a network of friends as opposed to the information that's there. Because there's so much information online now, right? Like you, all these, all the different business podcasts that are out there, all the YouTube videos, the ways to learn how to set up a business, how to scale or, you know, the systems and processes. It's. It's incredible. Before I used to go to college thinking, okay, well, they have a library and the teachers are going to teach me and they're the ones with the access to the knowledge. Learning is a lifetime process, like, especially in business, in businesses changing faster today than it ever has before. Like, you've got to stay on top of stuff. You've got to get on AI if you're not like audit and using it and utilizing it in your business yet. So reading is like a really big thing for me. I read a couple books every month. I would say leaders are readers. You know, it's, you've got, you got to keep reading up on things. So study, research and make it fun. I hope, I hope it's exciting to you to research because that's part of being an entrepreneur. It's being solution oriented, constantly solving things, knowing where to go. It's not so much whether you have the information or not from yourself, where you learned it, but can you learn it from somewhere else and save yourself the dumb tax of, you know, making a mistake that you didn't have to make if you just had the knowledge prior or had talked to another entrepreneur who had already made those mistakes.

I love that, David. I love these two points, like surround yourself with people that you know, you aspire to be around your network as well as constantly learning and constantly growing. I think the one common factor I found in very successful entrepreneurs is that they love to learn new things. They love to go grow, they love to invest in themselves. When we sold the webinar Ninja I had some time on my hands now. And I love being a beginner and learning something new. Like I got into poker and I love just learning the game and understanding strategy and understanding like, how much is this is luck and how much is this skill and how can I reduce the amount of percentage of luck over time and all that kind of stuff. And like, even though I'm losing sometimes and I'm failing and I'm making stupid mistakes, I'm enjoying the process of being a beginner again. I'm enjoying the process of, of learning and being like, oh, I thought I was, I thought I knew everything last week. Now I realize I don't know anything that whole process. I love the fact that you're encouraging people to read and read more books. I think that a book is one of the best values you can get. I mean, for 10, 15, $20, you're learning somebody's life story, you're learning how they did it. And it's crazy that that's even available to us. And when you were mentioning like, I wish I was around today and growing up today, I often think, what did my parents think about me when I was growing up? Like, oh, you had Barnes and Nobles. We didn't have Barnes and Nobles. So I guess we all get our fair share or fair crack at success. So, David, thanks so much for your time. This has been a pleasure. I love the fact that you are dedicating your time to help other people and sharing your experiences, sharing what you've learned along the way. Thank you again and I can't wait to see what you work on next.

Hey, thanks so much for the opportunity. I'll end with just one thing. When I was growing, I was struggling with trying to figure out how do you build a company culture? That's amazing. And Tony Hsieh wrote this book, Delivering Happiness that just like I almost went back to getting executive MBA from Wharton just to figure out how to scale, you know, nationally this, this big. And the, the teachings in that book were so incredible. And I actually flew out to Zappos multiple times to go through their headquarters and learn all about it because they had so many great customer service oriented ideals and KPIs and that sort of thing. And I met Tony at a cultural conference. They actually will host three days where you can go in and they'll teach you a lot of their secrets in terms of, you know, how they really become customer centric. And I asked him, I had a chance to talk to him multiple times and he goes, or I asked him How. Why are you doing what you're doing? I don't get it. Like, all of this stuff is. These are competitive advantages that make you great. Why would you just give it away to everybody? And he goes, well, I just think the world would be a better place if we all operated this way. And it hit me, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm really selfish, you know, and it's. I didn't want to give back at that point in my life. And so I think if you've had some success, you know, pay it forward, just like Tony did, to the rest of the world.

Rest in peace, Tony. Oh, man, that's a great story. I love it. You mentioned you love reading books. I just read a book recently called Unreasonable Hospitality. Have you read it?

Oh, Will Godara.

I love it. That's my.

That's my favorite. That's my favorite book right now that I finished.

We're going to be doing an episode on it. But it's in light of Tony's philosophies and, you know, delighting your customer and going above and beyond. And there's not enough of that. There's not enough of that in the world where it's like, I actually want to show my customers I care and that I want them to have an incredible experience. So I love that we're on the same page there. But thanks again, David. It's been amazing chatting and I'll definitely link up to all your resources and your LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff in a moment. But thanks again, David.

Awesome. Thank you.

What a great conversation. I mean, we've got into everything from entrepreneurship to sales to marketing to strategy to management development to business culture to scaling exponentially growth systems, processes, all that stuff. So feel free to re listen to this episode to grab more nuggets that you may have missed because you're maybe jotting down notes or thinking about what he's saying. This was incredible. I mean, David built a team of 6,500 people to run his pest control company. He is now unequivocally financially free and giving back and showing up on shows like this so that he can provide the knowledge and experiences that he had to to people that are getting started or growing their business that are listening today. Today's company, Aptiv, ranks as the number three largest residential pest control service out of more than 20,000 competitors. That's not an accident. That's because what David shared with you today works. So please take it to heart and start implementing, even if it's just one thing that you picked up today. We're going to put the links in the show notes of this episode. 100mba.net mba2677 but you can check out David on his LinkedIn. Just search David Royce. Follow him so that you can continue to learn from him. If you're still with me here in this episode. Thank you so much for making it all the way to the end. You're a completionist, you're a doer. I love that about you. That's why we're in this community together. That's why we're here together. And that's why I continue to do this. Because I love serving people that get things done that want to learn, that want to grow. So like I mentioned before, all the things you learned from David were great. But just think about what is the one thing that you learned from him that kind of switched things on for you and what can you do to really implement and move forward and move closer to what you want in your business? Even if it's just one action item. Like, maybe I need to know my customers a little bit better. Maybe I should send out a survey. Maybe I need to get better at face to face sales. Maybe I should talk to my customers or even close a few sales on Zoom or even in person. So just take one action to move forward and I guarantee you'll feel better about yourself, you'll feel better about your business. And I'm telling you, it won't hurt. It will help and it will help you compound those actions into something great. A great business, a great life. And of course, what we're looking for is building something that is impacting other people. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to to this podcast, Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. And it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

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