Building a Profitable Home Service Business That Runs Without You with David Moerman

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're diving into building a profitable home service business that runs without you with David Moorman. Thanks for joining us today, David.

Yeah, Phil, this is going to be real fun, man. Yeah.

So David, I think you've been on the show the most out of any other guests three times and we're talking pre show. Like if you live near me, we'd probably be best friends and talking, hanging out every 100%.

100%, man. I, I agree with that.

Yeah. So, quick bio, David. David is author of get off the Truck, which is this new book that we're going to actually talk about today. And he's a CEO and founder of Home Service Business Coach, which He launched in 2020 and has helped hundreds of home service business owners grow a business that does not rely on them. He's also the prior owner of Revive Services, which he recently exited to focus on helping other home service businesses grow profitably without being on the truck. So David, with that, can you give us a quick bio? If you have not met David before from the podcast, can you just tell us a little bit about you?

Absolutely. I got my start, Phil, in home services. Actually painting my way through college. I joined on with a franchise called University First Class Painters. I door knocked my way to my first hundred thousand dollar year and then I graduated with a little certificate that said, Dave, you have a business Bachelor of Business Admin. And it literally like left, stayed under my bed for like 10 years and I just continued on in home services. I grew a second painting business in the franchise system. Then I started revive with $3,000, eight years. I scaled that up and this March actually exited that business. And then in 2020, home service business Coach was this little baby tiny coaching business that's now blossomed over the last five years. And I've dedicated the last three years, Phil, to writing this little bad boy. All three 33,000 words written by me, all out of a place of like me, my team having thousands of conversations with stuck contractors. I'm like, what if there was just a guidebook? Not a podcast, not a YouTube, just literally a guidebook. Practical. I don't think there's a single theory in the book, Phil. It's literally just like, all right, this is how you do this. Boom. So it's really like a guidebook for someone to really create freedom from their small business.

Yeah, I agree. I read the book and I was like, wow, this is pretty practical for anyone. And if you're listening. So most of our clients that we serve are like 1 to 10 million dollars, and they're probably off the truck at this point, but I'm pretty sure there's one truck that a lot of people are stuck on is the sales truck. And we see this, like, one to $5 million range is they're still the sales guy. And so one of the things that I pulled out, it was on page 120 that I wanted to ask you about specifically, like, how can people do this in their business? So if you are the salesperson in your business, Dave lays out this estimate process. And a lot of times I'm included. I have a sales process in my head, and I'm just good at sales because I can say the stuff. So this estimate process, there's eight parts, and I want to break it down for listeners and talk through building out an estimate process in your business so that you're not the only salesperson. So the first one is have a phone call. The second one is a greeting. The third one is a walk around. The fourth one is measure the project. The fifth one is photos. Six is write up. Seven is presentation, and then the eight is follow up. So, Dave, for your business and for this basic process you laid out, how do you coach people on building out a sales process? You're $1.52 million. You're the only sales guy in your business. How do you go about building this out?

Yeah, I think the owner, Phil, needs to first look at, like, where have they gotten out of their business before? And like you said, like, chances are they're already out of the truck. And how did that happen? They didn't just hire some random, like, savant that could magically do this stuff. There's probably a. There should be a backing of some kind of a playbook, some kind of a manual. You know, it's kind of old school, but a standard operating procedure. And so we usually get really good owners, get really good at building that stuff out for the field. But it's usually the marketing and the sales we keep right between our ears in our own noggin. And we think no one will sell as good as we can. Because sales, Phil, is like, you know this. It's the lifeblood of any business. It's that it's. In my book, nothing happens till someone makes a sale. And so we kind of put the company on our back for the first number of years for that first few million to go make those sales and get that traction. So how I would get it Going is just go back to grassroots. A very methodical, like that's the most simple eight process points I could put into place. So it's owner really needs to start, you know, documenting what they're doing from like they're doing all this stuff anyways. Like, when I would like Phil, I did over 3,000 in home estimates. Okay. For painting. I got pretty good at having a dog on my lap. And like when I turn up to a property, the last thing I'm talking about is painting. And I would shadow my estimators and they'd say like, how did you know about like the dog or the garden? And like I have this Rolodex of info that you could give me a sports team or this. And I can usually talk for like three to five minutes about. Or when my wife's like, hey, I have this like work party, you know, you don't have to. I'm like, no, I'm coming. Like, I want to meet everyone there and I want to learn about them. And so when you have like, how do you like put that down on paper? One is you get your reps in, but we had this standard sheet fill which showed like all different conversational points that you could bring up. And you start training your salesperson to be looking for those different items. So that's kind of one way in, in the rapport build. The other one is just like, I was really good at follow up in my estimates. I don't know if it's that I was born and raised in Canada. I'm not very pushy. So I'll make someone an offer. If they're like, phil, not right now. I'm not going to say like, oh, maybe we should have this one line or if we do this or I could discount, I'll be like, no problem. I take this super chill approach, which has always served me well in sales. But I would always say, okay, no worries. Mrs. Smith, you want to get another estimate? I'd actually do that for my own home. Is it cool with you if I follow up with you and say, you know, 48 hours time, what do you think? Two, three days? And we would set a time I would follow up. So I actually booked phil more than 50% of my go aheads on the follow up. So that's just one that I'd always drill in my sales team. The fortunes in the follow up. Same with coaching. We're a $10,000 package. Not, not a lot of people got that laying around in their, in their, under their mattress. So we'll say, no worries, we'll follow up with you. And you play this beautiful dance of follow up, which, which has worked really good. So that's just a few guiding principles of, of kind of how I would start to look at getting off the truck in my sales department.

Yeah. And I would say this, the follow up piece that you're mentioning. This is exactly what happened at my home service business. We were $3 million. Try to go to 5 million. The owner would go out and sell the big commercial jobs, but he's so busy and doing, running a business, how is he going to follow up with anyone? And that's the problem is that as a, as a business owner, if you are the salesperson, you know, you're not following up as good as you should and things are falling through the cracks and you don't have a system in place. And like, worst case, set up a follow up process where your CSR can at least follow up in 24 hours or 48 hours.

Yeah. One other thing I want to say, man, is just comes down to empowerment, right. A lot of the owners will pull out this like owner deal or like, you know, make this special and people love that. I'll share a quick story. I was at a hockey game last night, right? We took our little guy to this little local hockey game and one of the kids had this foam finger, right? And so I'm like, all right, Beckham on a foam finger. I'm like, let's go. I track down the girl who's selling them. You have to spin this wheel. It's $5 every spin and only one of them. I'm like, I'm never going to spin that thing. I'm like, how much? Just buy this foam finger, like how much to make this two year old's day at his hockey game? She's like, it's 20 bucks. I'm like, 20 bucks for this stupid. I'm like, 20 bucks to make this guy's day. She's like, it's 20 bucks. I'm like, okay, if she was just like, all right, let's split down the middle, let's do it for 10. But she had no decision making authority, so she didn't make a sale. And Beckham is like, whatever, we'll get some popcorn instead. But I'm just, I was sharing with my wife. She's like, well, what do you expect? Like that person doesn't have any power to make the decision. So if the owner can empower their salesperson to make key decisions and work people out Some kind of a special deal that builds so much goodwill and that's going to shoot sales through the roof.

Yeah, I agree. Empowering them and then giving them some type of incentive. So for example, with your csr, it's like, hey, if you do this rehash and you close one of them, then you will get 10 bucks x whatever and, and giving them something. So that way they want to follow the process and are incentivized to do it. And that solves your problem right there.

Yeah. And that's why I got into trades too, Phil. Sorry. It's just like I could sell my own way to my paycheck that I built that out. Even at Revive. Anyone who upsells anything on their job, we would give them a commission. Every time their review got done from their Service, they got $10 each. Here's the thing. If their names on that review, double the bonus pay. We paid for leads. We had our own leads channel in Slack. So I was very much building that role. We said 80% cleaning technician, 20% marketer, salesperson. And you got to build that through your whole company when you're small.

Yeah, for sure. And that right there can get you from a $1 million business to a $5 million business. It's just getting everyone that's bought in on growing the business. Because if you want to put a cap on someone's performance, put a cap on their pay. And if you take the top off, you can make as much money as you want and get a bunch of leads coming into business. So it's so good. I want to talk about this too because this is a big thing that people run into. And I mean this is $0 to $20 million plus. It's the structuring your week as a CEO and your days. And in the book you outline even just like, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, like what you'd be focusing on. But I want to, I want to hear from you, like, what are you doing? You know, one to ten million dollar businesses, what should you be doing? And how should you be structuring your day? So that way you can be focused on what actually matters.

Totally. So if you pick nothing up from the book and learn this concept, like Phil, people will come through and work with me for 12 months and, and I'll. We'll have a, like a post exit interview. It's like what's the biggest thing? A lot of times it's like mindset, but it's like, it's the time blocking. It's like how do you actually get so much done? Like for me, the last bit, I work like a really focused 30 hour workweek. And as I was running two businesses, I was doing like 40 to 45. Rarely was I like, oh my goodness, I'm doing 90 hours a week, like, go, go, go. I'm very structured how I go through my stuff. So for me, I found in 16 years of running home service businesses, the best estimate days just for my schedule as the owner was Tuesdays and Thursdays. And so when I was getting my painting business off the ground, um, I didn't go sell every single day of the week because you totally screw yourself over in a, in not multitasking, but actually switch tasking. And owners do this all the time. They're like, I gotta go drive 45 minutes to do a bid, then I gotta check on my guys, then I gotta go to another bid, then I gotta grab my kiddo from school, then I gotta go to this. And you're constantly like, okay, nothing got done today. You just ran this hamster. So for me, I try these really focused days in my schedule where I do set things each time. And so I would say for, for an owner, have a specific sales day, right? And if you want to get off the truck in sales, like, I would only be selling maybe one to two days a week. At that point I would have a really focused day around production. For me, that was always Monday because I knew all the boys came off the weekend. We'd have our team meeting, get everyone coffee, bagels, get everyone going. Then I'd go visit my office team. And from like 7:30 to noon, I was just booked with operations stuff. So it'd be absolutely a dumb idea to try to estimates on a Monday morning, in my opinion, because I knew our inbox would have 75 estimates over the weekend. It was just like crazy. So. And then Fridays, Friday mornings, Phil would always. I called them financial Fridays, 7 to 9am this little bad boy airplane mode. And I'm literally diagnosing our numbers from that whole week. What did we produce, what was our charge rate, what did we spend in marketing? I'd be going through our credit card statements, I'd be following everything methodically. And that was my time for finance. And like any owner, I don't like to schedule a lot of stuff late in a Friday afternoon because I know that's like, hurry up offense. Let's get stuff done for the weekend so I can try be present on, on the home front through the weekend. So if you can be like, if Any listener on this could be like 20% more robotic in their week and less like, go with the flow. I've been block scheduling for almost two decades now, and I've got so much done and I managed to remain present on the home front. So that's just like a few little tidbits. When it comes to time blocking. I think it's very powerful. And here's the last thing I'll say every week for time blocking. Me, I meet with my wife and say, all right, what do we got cooking this week? All right, well, we got this going on this night, this time I'm putting in my workout sessions. When am I hanging out with our little guy? And then from there I'll go do the business. And the last thing I'll say every week, don't over schedule it. I like to schedule 70% of my week. I leave 30% open when this thing rings and it's like, oh, boy, big problem. That's actually going to pull me for three, four hours while I made a bit of white space for stuff like that.

Yeah, I think having some type of a filter into your schedule, so that way your team knows, like, hey, you can schedule Dave for sales on these days, or you can schedule him for operational meetings these times. Then it's not just a whole blank slate and you have a whole bunch of hodgepodge. And then you can actually focus on what you're doing. Like if you're doing one to ones back to back to back one to ones this time, this day. And in the book you talked about, maybe it was a guy in your program about the CEO day on Fridays or something.

Yeah, Trey. Yeah.

So. So what? You know, what did he do on on Fridays? Or what was it?

You know what? He was actually planning a wedding. He was running two companies. He had like 18, 20 guys at the time. And he was just getting going with me. He said for me to do a CEO day, he actually had to go to a different state where his girlfriend's parents lived. And it was like an hour and a half drive. And he'd lock himself in that room Friday. And that was Trey's CEO Friday. And he basically took his landscaping business from like 400k and now they're doing like two and a half million bucks from doing that CEO Friday. And it's like. Like you get. You get hazed, Phil, from your guys for doing this. Right? Like, I would turn up and it's like, oh, there goes the boss. Like, what's he going to go do? It's like you're doing all this invisible work that nobody sees. But it's like what people see in public is what's been practiced in private. So many reps, like, you see, we both love sports, man. You see these athletes that are just iconic, right? It's like they're practicing in private. So I truly believe for a CEO to grow a company, like when someone grows their business to X amount and has all this freedom and income, I'm like, man, that person put the work in private. So really you're like weight room as a CEO or your treadmill is just like locking yourself in a room, being very analytical and starting to think high level about the business. And that's what traded. And I just think it's comical. It's comical in one sense and it's really smart in another. For someone that has kind of a squirrely brain, like I do and trade us, it's like, all right, I got to go to my fiance's parents house. Lock the door. That's physically what I need to do is. I don't know if it was being in a different state or a different house, but it. That worked really well for him.

Yeah, I think a lot of times. And I fell in this too. So I had 14 routes and I would go run routes with the guys just to like, you know, get out on the job site, see what it's like. And also I wanted them to know that I saw them and I felt that. But also there's a level of like imposter syndrome or maybe like feeling bad about yourself that like, I hope they don't think that I'm just like sitting on a beach kumbaya. And if I am, it's okay. But like, like, for me, I felt that a lot and it was like maybe for Trey or having an excuse to be like, hey, I gotta go over here and I'm gonna lock myself in this room. It like almost gave him permission to be able to focus on his business than like feeling bad about working in his business.

Totally. It's so well said. 1. One other fun thing Phil I found was actually bringing my updates as a CEO on the Monday morning meeting. So we'd start with. We'd read reviews first, then we'd move to safety, and then we move to any Kaizen points and like ways we've innovated the business for the third part of our meeting. And that's where I would stand up and say, I know you guys don't see me a lot, but I want to show you you Know a couple really key systems I built this week. And I'll pull my laptop and, and, and there's like 8, 10, 12 texts at that meeting. So it's like small enough you can do it and you don't need a big fancy slideshow. But that really showed, like open their eyes to be like, man, that's super cool. Like, guys, I built out this week reminders for customers to take their window screens out, to pick up all their dog crap and to deal with payment when the job's done. Like, we're going to stop having those issues at least negating them. Or like, oh my goodness, you have a reminder email to get the customer to move their patio furniture for jobs were pressure washing. Like, that's amazing. So all those things that invisible work, if you can slingshot that to the guys on the front line, it creates like so much goodwill. And then they're like, well, it's not that this guy's out chilling, but he's actually building stuff when we don't see him. And I think that helped me a lot because through revive, I was systematizing from 2018 to like 2024. So it was like six years of like doing this.

Yeah, I think having the transparency to show the guys and get them bought in that like I'm actually building stuff to help us. And especially if they have a performance pay component, like this is going to help you make more money and us more money and you be more efficient and less stressed, then it's. It makes all the sense in the world, like, go do that, Dave, so that you can help us. So I think it's good. I do want to ask you this one question. I don't know if you talked about this in the book, but something that a lot of guys struggle with is you get off the truck and you want to work on the business, but like, what the heck do you work on to actually grow? Like, what are you working on, Dave, all this time, right? Like, what are you.

There's a lot I call them, you know, my coach called them RGA revenue generating activities. I like to call them rainmaker activities. So anything that can actually grow the business, fill like ad revenue. So a lot of times, man, I like to say this too is focus on necessities, not optimization. So, you know, for you to comb through the font on your website or like see how many views your last Instagram post, like, those things are very small minutia optimizations. I'm talking about, you know, could you pull up on your CRM, see where the most revenue comes from, what neighborhoods? And let's pick the top five neighborhoods, and let's go build a marketing plan to get more of the neighbors around those ideal job sites. And so I would say, well, what's our inventory for lawn signs? Could we meet? Like, we're in Christmas light season right now. For a lot of our guys, it's like, man, just, you want more Christmas light jobs? Literally find the job you did last week, go and let the 20 neighbors around know that you're doing Christmas lights. You could get like three estimates from that and book one to two jobs. So that would be one example. Another one to to grow business would just be looking at, well, where are my jobs actually coming from? What is like the number one marketing channel that jobs are coming from, let's say? Oh, I get tons of word of mouth, right? Phil, you hear this a lot. Why don't you build some kind of a referral program? When someone refers you and you land a job, you automatically shoot them out. A gift card. We did a lot of Starbucks and Amazon gift cards. We found those were the most easy for our office team to send out to our customers. But others have done, you know, Texas Roadhouse, others have done, like, you. You name it. There should be something with a referral program as such. So there's all these ways that I look for, well, what would be like a simple single or double or triple that I could add to my top line? That stuff has to be born first in the mind of the CEO, and then the system's got to be built around it, and then it's got to be brought to the team for execution. So it's kind of like a. A three parter.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think if you can. You said the thing about optimization. What was it? Instead of focusing on optimization, focus on.

Yeah, Necessities. Necessities. Like what's major?

Exactly. Because a lot of times people get stuck in tinkering with this sounds like this or this looks like this. And I just did a video on this. There's four main drivers. So, like, if you're listening to this and you want four things to focus on is your booking rate. So I got this many leads and I booked this many jobs. Okay, how do you know how many leads you got? You got to find that number out and figure that thing out. Then what's your actual booking rate? How can you make that better call scripts, this kind of stuff. Then your estimate, close rate. So I did this many estimates and I closed this many Could I make that number better then your average ticket? How can I make my average ticket more? Could I add a nurture sequence in there? And the last one is your customer acquisition cost, which is. Could I find another channel to get customers at a less expensive rate that are going to produce more money through like a referral thing, like what you're talking about. But those four numbers, that's from Tommy Mello, who built a $200 million business, who's like, if you just focus on these four things and that's all you focus on, there's no way you can't grow your business.

Totally 100%, man. It's that. It's that simple. That's super well laid out.

Yeah. I want to talk about systems, because you laid out there is 10 systems on page 30 of your book.

Yep.

Do you by chance know any of these off the top of your head that would be impactful? You want me to rattle a couple.

Off that I see we're in chapter. Chapter, right? Is that where we are? Yeah. Yeah. So this book, this chapter, Phil is funny that I got the most feedback so far on chapter three right now for like, my goodness, like, finally something that's super, super simple. So if you. A few would be. Let's see if we can do this. There's 10. An inbound call script would be a really good one. Like, this was so Booking rate. Yeah, this would be so. This was so easy for me, man, because it. It. It was like back in 2017 when I got the business going, and it was so easy to build this for me because I'm like, I'm gonna build this company for the next bunch of years. I'm probably gonna have tens of thousands of phone calls come in. Why don't I just build a simple script that whoever. This one blows my mind. Why a service business owner hasn't created this yet? Cause it's like. It's a thing that's happening all the time. And another one now to run parallel would be like an online request script. So, like, oh, ding on jobber. It gets like, the ding goes on. How does that. And you can automate a lot of this stuff, but you should have a set process going. It. It literally baffles me why someone doesn't have an inbound call script. So that'd be like a first one to start on.

Yeah, the. This. The other one that was on here was a job site checklist.

Oh, huge. Yep, yep.

So when we talk about job site checklists, I. I can. I can't Even name. I can name a couple companies that have this, but most companies don't have this. Can you talk about, like, what should someone have on a job site checklist and how it can help them make more money?

Man, this was like, if you took all our operations, like, there's so many. But, like, for. For those of faith that are listening, this was almost like a bible, like a guidebook of, like, for production. Because every, like, your business is your baby, right? And people ask, well, how did you get off the truck in the first couple months? I'm like, how do you not get off it? Because there's so many other bigger things to do. But what gave me a lot of peace of mind was knowing that whatever crew I had had this 10 step process drilled into them. From everything from your calling on your way to where you're parking, you're assessing for hazards, how you're greeting the customer like it walked all the way through. So anytime, Phil, we all know the feeling. You get a callback or an email, it's usually on a Friday night, is like, hey, your crew is good. But bonk attach pictures, zip drive. I'm like, oh, man. So how. Oh, yeah, exactly how we knew that happened, we could always point back to a singular step in that 10 step and say, all right, number seven got missed. Or six. And it would help us provide coaching to our staff for like, obviously no one's perfect. Mrs. Smith has her concerns. Let's do a deep dive, talk about this, make a plan of action. And that really helped me a lot. We, we loved it. We had it in onboarding, we laminate it, we hung it up in our trucks, and we also brought it into our team meetings as well, like on the table. So we could actually have like a discussion point. So that, that was a huge one. It's a really key one. I help our members build as well, because I just. Whether it's window cleaning, roof washing, housewashing, whatever, this was great. And I will say one thing, Phil. I don't want to say I was lucky, but I was intentionally chose a service that you can train someone up. I don't want to say easily, but more easily than if I'm running like an H Vac or electric business right now. So, like, I will say that it kind of comes in that box of like, nice, simple business. You can have this checklist. But I still think the principle can be made and cascaded to these other, like, niches that a lot of your clients are in.

Yeah, I completely agree. The technical piece aside, you should have a just a normal way that everyone's showing up to the house and everyone is talking to the customer, documenting things. I think a really important thing for me as a business owner that if you're listening to this, the next time that someone makes a mistake in your business, before you go and fly off the handle at them, ask yourself, did you have a process for this? Is the process correct? Like, does it actually tell them to do this thing? And if those two boxes check, then you can ask them, well, why did you not do this? Did you not have the tools to do it? Did you not have the time to do it? Did you not know how to do it? It's a great way to work through and figure out, is it you're the problem since you don't have a process or what?

I'll share one more thing, Phil, because you know what I'm learning of you is like, there's two kinds of leaders. And I'm just curious your thoughts because you have the one owner that's like, freak out, raging. You have the other owner that's actually like me. And I think it might be like you that's like, can be more conflict averse and you're like, oh, another touch up. You know what, I'll just deal with it or kind of sweep it under the rub. It actually provided me a chance to like almost have some balls and provide some coaching and like, like when, when conflict averse leaders like us think we're like all being so harsh, it's like you're actually like, not. And so if you have that central resource you can bring into an alignment meeting and help coach your team members up. It really helped me get out of my shell from like being a better leader, holding better accountability versus just like, oh, you know what, another streaky window. Let's just like leave it or I'll run out and you know, go take care of it. And so it really helps like those conflict diverse leaders to like have some more accountability and like lead with a bit of a thicker skin.

Yeah, I agree. And I think, to be honest, I think it goes on both sides. Like if someone, if you keep having issues in your business and you keep flying off the handle or getting frustrated and you don't care about the conflict, but you want to fix the problem, then start with, do we have a process for this? Is the process correct? And then why did the person not do it? Opposed to usually we just go directly to the person and be like, hey, why did you not do this? It gives you A ground to like stand on and coach through. And. And if you, if you are conflict averse, then yes, it will give you a simple structure to be able to go back to the process for sure.

And it puts the like error on the process and not on the person. And that's like a huge thing too is like you never call a technician. Like, you're sloppy. It's like, no, like your crew performs sloppy work on that day does not mean you're a sloppy person. And so it puts it on like the process. Unless like, oh my gosh, like you're coming at me as a person, like, and then it turns into a hu things. So that, that's been beneficial too.

Yeah. And I'll give you one other pro tip on this, guys. I just had a jobber podcast come on this in your checklist. Put other things for them to look at to create upsell opportunities.

Nice.

Because let's say you do soft washing, but you also do gutter cleaning or other things. Like have them assess all of these things. So then at the end you can go to the customer and say, hey, so I took a look at all this stuff. Here's the areas of opportunity for your house and it's like almost like a diagnosis. Sales opportunity inside of your checklist.

Yeah. So good. Those are our favorite. Like, so we, we pivoted. Instead of trying to get our tech selling just in our business model, we tried to bring the sales as much as possible to the estimator on the front end. But how many times, Phil? We did two services bundled 10%, 3% or sorry, three bundled 15%. All we wanted was a $2,000 day. And like it's also like the area where our business had our flag planted in was like a lot of bigger jobs we could do. You know, two to $3,000 tickets, just taking care of everything for a homeowner. Like our sales team just love doing those package based prices. So I completely agree with that.

Nice. Well, that's actually the third system that I highlighted which was the pricing sheet.

Nice.

So a lot of times we talk to business owners and they're like, well, we could. We have to go out and diagnose. We target dispatch fee, this kind of thing. And that might be the case for your business. But can you talk about like how a pricing sheet has impacted your business and what, what it is or like how to build it?

Yeah, I mean again, in my business it was. This was built early on and I really wrestled, Phil. Like we, we had our biggest, like when I got I actually started revive, very intimidated to be honest. Shackshine had started a couple years earlier and they were ripping selling territories and so they put all their pricing up on their website. And I thought, well what if competitors see it? What? And this kind of small minded mindset and finds, I'd forget it. We put our pricing on our website and we also took our pricing sheet to our technicians and trained them that they could add on. Not too similar to you going through a drive through and getting food. Do you want that? Do you want fries with that? Do you want gutter cleaning with that? And so we, we paid ourselves our Texas sliding scale from 5 to 10% depending on what they were selling onto the job. And that was an awesome way that we could make our tickets bigger. And, and we saw fill in cleaning. Our tickets started around $350 when we got started. They grew all the way. When I exited, our average ticket was 1416, which is like really good for an exterior cleaning business because we packaged up so good. And I put the diagram in my book too showing like this for a roof, this for houses for and you package it up and, and so like these ideas to you and I don't seem like, wow, it's like mind blowing. But I think to a lot of entrepreneurs that get kind of stuck in their way, like the best way that I got our cash register to go Cha Ching without Dave was like pricing sheet everyone. This how you sell. Anyone can sell, anyone can add onto the job. And of course there were some that were a little bit underbid or overbid and you gotta be okay with having some bumps along the way. And for me, Phil, it's always been me more interested in achieving my vision of a grown company than me being more married to like not having any balls drop in the business. And so I, I, I don't know if it's my personality. I'm okay with problems, but you just need to be okay with signing up for that if you're truly gonna like build something bigger than yourself.

Yeah, this is another kaching like what you just said. It's just like if you don't have this in your business, you don't have a price sheet. Like how are people supposed to know the pricing? It's all in your brain. You don't have a sales SC the salesper. This is why you got to get this stuff documented. So that way you have a system and everyone is incentivized to make more money. So it's so good. And this actually leads me to the last thing That I put down here, which was your service manager. Katrina was dropping bars when I read this. She said, we don't aim to be the cheapest. We aim to be the best. I was like, oh, I wish I had that because I work at a duck company and every single person's like, well, such and such does it for this and such and such does it for that is almost like a componentized thing. Yeah, it's like, this is so good, man.

She, like, she changed my business, but also my life. Like, we actually bring her out to my summit every year in Vancouver and she's going to come this year with a new revive ownership team because it's just like she really changed my business from. I ran this like very like administrative, almost like, hey, let's go on email and like not pick up the phone. And she was like, no, Dave, we got to get to people. We changed our whole sales model from a virtual estimating, which was fine. We got our tickets up to like 850 bucks, quoting virtually. And over the last few years we went in person and I shared like how our average ticket blossomed from that. But whatever, like, especially. This is a really timely question, Phil, because in today's economy, usa, Canada, we're seeing it with all our guys across the board that customers are opting in a world of things seeming similar. They're going with the cheaper bid. And it's really disheartening. We're having some of our members, you know, they'll have resi customers that usually pay $2,000 for Christmas lights. Like, it's like, oh, whatever. And they're like getting price shop now and they're going with someone cheaper for 1200. And it's just like, why is this actually happening? And so it can be a really tough time to stand by your prices. But I also think you really want to make an effort to not like degrade your brand and end up in this, like, race to the bottom. And that can happen like very quickly in a matter of like a season in an owner's business to basically commoditize their brand almost down to nothing. So for me, obviously really good at night, knowing that our booking rate was about 45% and that is intentionally a little bit low. But there's a diagram in my book breaking out three different tiers of booking rates that you're not necessarily the best with a 70% booking rate if your prices are super cheap. So I chose to go upstream with our pricing, actually lose more jobs than we booked. But know that those jobs that we did book we could make like a 65% gross profit on which in our business was like, excellent. Because your pricing, I always say, is the whole foundation that you build your business on. Um, so you want to make sure that you nail that. So Katrina was like, in 2020, all these calls in like, oh, you're twice as much. You're three times. How could you. Who do you guys think you are? Like, all. Everything. We got it over the phone over email, and she just came up with that. With that term. And I. If anyone takes anything off this, talk to just plug that into your sales team. We don't aim to be the cheapest. We aim to be the best. It doesn't work for everyone, but it does shift how you think about the bids that a customer is collecting.

Yeah. And it helps the customer identify. Am I looking for the cheapest or am I looking for the best? I don't know. I never separated the two. And then they can decide based off of that, opposed to just price, price, price. And if they want the cheapest, we might not be the best fit. And it was just so good because I. It's just a good way to differentiate yourself just by labeling exactly what they're looking for. I didn't have this plan, but with Katrina, you said that she. She transformed your business, I guess.

Oh, yeah.

How did you find her? Like, is she like an integrator or GM or something? Or what is.

So, yeah, I'll share few things. So for me, Phil, anyone? I'm hiring outside of like core value fit, like, make sure that's nailed. The only thing I'm looking for is two words, and that's goal attainment. So if I asked you, Phil, tell me about a time in high school you set a goal and that we can have a four hour podcast. I can just tell you like, I did it. So Katrina, extremely goal oriented. She ran her own business. She actually managed a Starbucks for 10 years. Helped with a bunch of training. She then actually, she's a trained bus driver as well. She trained bus drivers, then she ran a dance studio and was the main owner's integrator. And so, like, what I do, Phil, when I interview people, I do a conversion call of like five minutes, maybe 10. And I remember I texted Katrina like earlier that day as I was closing up. I got her info. I'm like, hey, it's Dave with revive, like your resume. Let me know when you have 5, 10 minutes to chat on the phone. She texted me back. It was like right before dinner. And so like, not to be a hypocrite. I stick to my blog schedule, like really, really good. But I really need an office manager. I remember I was barbecuing. I told my wife, I'm like, hey babe, like I really got to take this call, like five, ten minutes. She's like, yeah, no worries. End up being like a 24 minute phone call. I still remember I missed, like I burnt all the food and I remember the call and I'm like, like I'm really good at getting off the phone, like really good. And I just stayed on and stayed on and I knew when I hung up I'm like, this person's going to be so good. Brought her in for a working interview, hired her. We ended up moving my current office manager to help me with marketing. Brought her in full time and she built out routes on jobber. She helped me build all of our automation and helped me rebuild our price books. She sat in on team meetings so she kind of locked in very quickly as integrator. And I had Steve running our cruise as production manager and Katrina we ascended to service manager. So much where we had the office team now reporting to her. And so I was really had Steve and Katrina as my right and left hand when I exited the business in March. And I went to the owner with like top ranking on Google. Everything systematized, you know, 8,000 in our jobber, no debt, great business. And I got two integrators and that, that was why I got so much interest on exiting the business. Was able to pass on. So she's still on today. You know, I sent her my book and you know, she hand and footprinted our little guy when he was born. So she's like, she's like become a friend which is like super cool.

Yeah, that's so awesome. Did she come from like indeed or something or just how did she.

She came often. Indeed. Yeah, she came off Indeed. And, and here's the thing, Phil. I always said I'm like, if I could just like not hire technicians but staff up an office, I would love it because we have a killer office manager ad. And that's where she came in on. We had over 200 applicants shortlisted her ended up hiring her. And so is just tradition growing my cleaning business. It was like 20 to 1, right? If I get like, you know, 10 applicants for technicians, I would get 20 times that in the office. It's just a funny thing. I don't know if it's where we are but you know, to pay someone $27 an hour plus upside to run your business. I even put her on profit share as well, because it was like I was growing coaching, I was being a dad. I was still overseeing Revive, but she was very much running with it and leading the team. So it's just to say the key quote in my book, if I had to, like, if you. If, like, gun to the head, like, get. What's the one thing? It's like, I would say the ultimate compliment as an entrepreneur is to be the least relevant person in your business. And I feel like I really achieved that with Revive, because I was able to put. If I. If there's only one chapter of the book you read, I'd say it's chapter six, because that's all I do in business is find great people, put them in place, and then coach them. And. And I never learned the skills to micromanage, and I never will. So I. I just feel like that's, like, the best thing you can do as a business owner.

Yeah, I love that, man. Well, great book if you want to get it. It's called get off the Truck. We'll put the link down below and really appreciate your time. Dave, any parting words or how can we get in touch with you or anything else you want to share?

Dude, I'd say just read the book. I mean, I've had so many people be like, how is this only 10 bucks? You should charge way more. I'm like, the end of the day. The point is to get my message out into the world. And so far, it's been getting great feedback. I think, Phil, you and I have read enough business books that have kind of put us to sleep or we get. You know, we were joking about this last call. Like, there's QR codes everywhere to join the. It's like the right people will find you and join your thing. Guys like Phil and I, we just put our stuff out into the world. And I think what's happening now is people buy into us for who we are and what we're doing, and they want to be part of what we're doing. And that's usually the 2% of readers. And for the other 98, they're like, this is just an amazing book. And so I've just been blown away, Phil, with the compliments and the Amazon reviews and people tagging me on social and being like, dude, this is just such a good book. So at this point, I'm probably not going to write another book for a while. This was three years, and I feel like this is just like my gift to the world of, like, take it, read it, and implement it, and it's just super practical.

Yeah. Awesome, man. Well, keep up the great work, and I'm sure I'll talk soon.

Thanks for having me on, brother. Yep.

See you, man.