Scaling an unscalable home service business to over $3m+ With Chris Lalomia

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're going to be discussing how to scale an unscalable home service business to over $3 million with Chris Lomia. Thanks so much for joining us today, Chris.

Hey, Phil. Looking forward to it. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah, for sure. So Chris is the owner of the trusted toolbox, a $3 million plus handyman company. They have 15 handymen, and he also has a remodeling division as well. And with a background in corporate leadership engineering, he leveraged his expertise to scale his business and build a strong brand in the home service industry and in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia. And as an author, speaker, and business owner, Chris is here to share his insights on leadership, customer experience and business growth to help other entrepreneurs succeed in the trades. So, Chris, can you tell us, like, how did you get into construction? You're in engineering, doing all this stuff. Like, how did you start a handyman company?

Yeah, it's actually even worse than that. I actually was in financial services working for a bank here in Atlanta, running the commercial loan operations department and reporting. But I've always wanted to run my own business. So in 2006, I started thinking about ideas in 2007, sort of laying the plans out for it, but decided that the handyman business would be something that was. At the time, I didn't think 2008 was going to be a recession.

Right.

But I thought it would be something that people were going to start gravitating towards because they're doing less and less in the homes themselves and they needed a good quality handyman. So what I try to do is I've implemented the professional spin on a traditional handyman.

Wow. So were you swinging a hammer or how did you get, like, how did you get started?

Yeah, so I sold my Mercedes, I bought two trucks, I wrapped them, and I hired one guy and I was the other guy. So, yes, in the beginning I was. I wore all the hats, I answered the phones, I did the estimates, I did some of the work. But by, towards the end of the year, I really stopped swinging the hammer after about a year and a half or two every once in a while. And today I don't do anything really. In fact, everybody in my company will attest to that.

Yeah, well, that's the, that's the thing. I think as, as you grow your business, you have to take off the hustler hat and you have to become the leader. And it's two different mindset shifts of like, what does that look like from a day to day of doing stuff? Which I think a lot of people fall into that trap.

Yeah, that absolutely is the problem, you know, they talk about in the e myth is that you're the technician, the manager, or the visionary. And for me, I was really stuck in the manager role for a long time because I wasn't the best technician. But in the manager role, what I was really good at was sales. I was good at managing the people that did the work. But again, it's always. Those were always bottlenecks as we tried to scale.

Yeah. So. So you, you said that it was hard to get out of that manager position. How did you get to the divisionary where you're not doing anything, but you're actually like setting the vision?

Right. It's. It's been an evolution. I've been at it now for 16 years.

Yeah.

And when you look at the. The arc, it's not linear. Definitely not linear in terms of profit, I can promise you. But what it was is not linear in terms of adding people to the staff. So what I did was I worked until it hurt too much and I realized I was the bottleneck and then I would go hire a position. So I've hired an operations manager. I hired a scheduler when the operations manager couldn't handle the scheduling. I now have a sales manager. And now at this point, to be the true visionary of Athens and Atlanta and begin to do stuff like this, I've hired a general manager here in Atlanta.

Yeah. That's awesome. And there's a really great book called buy back your time from Dan Martell. And he talks about a lot of business owners hire for growth. They think, oh, if I just hire another sales guy, if I take on this big marketing budget and that kind of stuff, that's going to grow you. And really it's about buying back your time with what. Where do I. Where's my limit at? And then I don't like doing this. So let me hire someone so then I can go do something else that I really enjoy and grow the business.

Yep. Yeah, that's a great point. Sometimes just throwing money at things is not the best way to go.

Yeah.

Promise you that one too.

Yeah. So. So one of the big things was obviously you scaled this handyman business, which to people listening there that are in the home service trades. Handyman is a million things. Right. Like someone comes out to like fix something random here. Plug, clog this toilet. Unclog this toilet. Like what? How do you scale this? And like what were we? What is that? How did it, how did it come about?

Yeah. So I've had people ask me, would you do it all over again? And I keep saying no because I wish I was just an H VAC service. Yeah, I wish I was just doing garage doors. I wish I was just an electrician. And I say just, just, just. Because those are all obviously skilled trades.

Yeah.

With my handyman, the, the issue is, and we, you know, this has been the same discussion has been going on since the 50s, is that nobody's getting into the trades anymore. Right. It literally. There was an article in 1959 saying how people were getting out of the trade. So it's a, it's a time immortal question. Here's the problem. I can't train my guys to become handymen. They have to know how to get around the house. Drywall, carpentry, minor plumbing, minor electrical, exterior trim repair, siding repair, deck work, hanging doors, windows. I mean, it's just a lot of stuff which makes us very valuable to a customer and keeps us going back to people. Our Repeat business is 40%. But I can't just hire a 21 year old who has carpentry skills and say, now you're going to become a handyman, because he may or may not know. It's just, you have to have some of that experiences so you know what to do. So the scaling part has been really difficult. And the issue that you have is that it's a people problem. All right, let's get the sales up. All right, the sales are up. All right, let's fulfill those sales. Now I gotta go find good guys. And if they're good at what they do, they really don't need my company. But what I do is I invite my lone wolf to come into our wolf pack and let their inner artists shine. And we talk about that. So those two analogies, if you're on your own, you can hunt and, and do all your stuff yourself. You know, I get referrals, I do good work. I don't need to work for a company. But if you come together in our company, you get, you can actually start to make more and not have to work extra hours doing the billing and the invoicing and doing the sales that they don't like doing anyway. So the scaling has been multi. Tiered.

Okay, so do you have guys that are jack of all trades or are you more when you're optimizing your routes because you have 15 routes, presumably, is it like, hey, okay, these are mostly our electric stuff. This is mostly our, this kind of stuff. And you're putting guys on those routes based off that.

So we do what we call skill based routing. And so what we do is we analyze and ask them to in the beginning rate themselves in all the different work that we do and we put them into different sections. Then we evaluate them and how they do while they work during their training period with us or on their onboarding sessions. Then what we do is we try to route the right person to the right job. I got a guy who can build the most exquisite cabinets and bookcases ever. But don't ask him to set a toilet and don't ask him to paint it because he will take three times as long as anybody else.

Right, yeah, that makes sense. I think that's something that a lot of home service business owners, as they're scaling and they start getting more techs and routes, it's really optimizing it for the specific services that you're offering. Don't just run people to different jobs all over the place because that's not an efficient way to run your business.

Yeah, I just actually got done talking with another handyman company who has no regard for route optimization and says, hey, I'll just put the guys on the windshield. And I'm telling you, I said, I said, man, that is a recipe for disaster. I said, too much windshield time for my technicians. Too many deep dark thoughts happen, man. We just, we want to get them to the job and get them productive. So there is some route optimization you need to do if you want to be able to scale and have guys stay with you.

Yeah, absolutely. So how, how did you do pricing? Because that seems like a really challenging one. If it's like hourly or skill based or project based, what does that look like?

Yeah, this is a really, a tough one. That's the other problem. I wish I had the rate book again. They're trying to make great books, but it just doesn't work. So what we do is we do have a system and we use our CRM system to help us with pricing. Typically what we're doing now is we're pricing in the half day or full day for the smaller jobs. Or we'll have an estimator go look at it and he will price by the job. We really have gotten away from the hourly pricing. Our hourly price doesn't sound too good and scares people away. But they really love our half day rate, which works for all of us because again, less windshield time, more activity, more money for everybody.

Yeah, I love That I think breaking it up into time blocks for those types of things, it. It makes it much more appetizing. Then they're not trying to get your guy out of there in two hours or something to not pay an extra hour. And this whole back and forth thing, it's just like they're here. Let him do his thing. He's going to be here for the day or half day.

Yep. And so that's where we really. In fact, that's where I'm really hammering our advertising is around. Handyman for a day. Handyman for a half day.

Yeah. I love it. I mean, my wife has a whole list of stuff for me to do, and I'm like, I just need a handyman to come do like six things.

So that's right.

I think that's exact. That's it.

So you get it knocked out. You get to have your weekend back. She's happy because she's been asking to do this stuff for six months. And you're like, yeah, yeah, I'll get to it. So it's. That's been a really good service for us here in the Atlanta and the Athens area.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. So your guys are in the house. You know when you're first starting out and. And doing stuff, and then people say, well, hey, do you do kitchens? Do you do bath? Do you this. And you're like, I think we do. I don't know. How did that progression come about?

Yeah. So I've been at the remodeling business now for 10 years, and it's been a. It's been a slog, to be honest. I. It's different than handyman again, for their home services that are just doing garages, garage doors, or electrical or plumbing. Just think about that now. If you took on garage shelving and floors, it's a different animal than it was just doing garage doors. You think it's in the garage. You think it's the same. And so that's what I found is that it really is not. And then the sales cycle on that is a lot different as well. Yeah. And I. I'm. Here's the good and bad part. I'm really good at selling it. I'm really crappy at teaching it.

Yeah.

So that's been, for us, been the thing. But what we were trying to do and what I've always tried to do is in our slower periods, I would have bigger projects where I could put my handyman in there to keep them busy. And what we found out is that that doesn't really work for us. What works better is having dedicated subs that do baths and kitchens, tile work, plumbing, demo, cabinet setting. It's just better to have the subs.

Yeah. And then on the subs, then you have a project manager who's running these bigger projects for you. And then you can kind of have the best of both worlds, the handyman side, giving leads, hopefully, for these big projects. And then that's kind of the thought process, correct?

Yeah. And just analyzing it. I actually put a lot of advertising into remodeling two years ago, and what I found out now, two years later, is that most of my remodeling jobs come from handyman. They come from repeat customers who go, hey, man, I really loved your service. I love the way you guys show up. You're professional. You communicated with us before. You texted us 30 minutes ahead of schedule. Your guys gave us a plan. We want to use remodeling and follow that same process, which we do.

Yeah. So what kind of stuff are you doing for. To keep those recurring, like email marketing? Are you sending out postcards, tech, like, any of that kind of stuff?

Man. It's funny, I was talking to another handyman consultant in our world, and all he had to do is tell this guy who's a single handyman is to send everybody an email in his email list and say, I got a special, and he'll keep himself busy. I'm like, no, duh. I mean, what the heck? So I send out. I have 17,000 people in my database right now. We send out 17,000 emails every month.

Perfect.

With a video of me talking about something that's important to them in that month. It might be, you know, in the winter months, weather stripping and taking care of the wind, drafts and everything else is going in the summer months or the spring, you know, talking about your deck and your exterior. So we talk about things that are engaging to them. And my open rate on my emails is 47%.

Wow.

And that's. That obviously kicks the crap out of the industry average, but it's of course. So we stay in touch with them on that all the time. And that's. That's been really big.

Okay. So for business owners listening to this, two things to unpack here. First, people always ask me, well, what do I send to people? You mentioned having a monthly theme of things that they should be thinking about. It's cold. Your pipes need, you know, need to be winterized, whatever that sounds like. So do January, February, March, April every single month. And then come up with a theme that you're going to talk about for that month. Then you take it a step further where you actually record a video about that and send it out to them and you get 47% over. So this is the big thing. If you spend money on advertising to get in front of 10,000 people that already know, like, and trust you. If you get 50% open rates on your email, you basically did that every single month.

And it doesn't cost a lot.

Exactly.

So, yeah, almost nothing. I mean, I use constant contact, so I pay for that. I do have a lady who helps me shine it up, make it look nice.

Good.

But that money is the biggest and easiest roi, especially when you talk about buying your time back. Sure, I can go out there and do networking, but. And I do. But this is, it's just easy peasy.

Yeah, man, that's so great. I love it. And, and turning the handyman people into remodeling stuff or other handyman jobs and keeping. No wonder 40% of your people are going to be repeat. That's, it's, that's the snowball that keeps spinning and then you just add fuel on the fire with new customers.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Talked about texting 30 minutes before. What does your customer experience look like? Because it sounds like you have a great customer experience. Like they book a meeting, do they get any type of text, emails, anything like that? Like, what does that look like all the way to the end?

Yeah. So you can call or you can go to our website and schedule an estimate service. You can also request a technician service. Now, I don't book technician services just yet because I want to make sure I can control that route optimization. Right?

Yeah.

And also control who I'm sending. But here's how it looks like. So you go and set up an appointment online or talk to us. You will get a confirmation email and it will say, hey, the day of the job, an hour ahead of time, you're going to get a text message from our system. You're going to get a call and, or a text from our technician in Route 30 minutes ahead. When he shows up, then he's going to explain what he's about to do. Get you to sign something. And we sign tablets because we want people committed to what we're doing to make sure we're on the same page. Yeah. The big thing is you want to set that customer expectation so that you can exceed it. Think about it for a minute. Right. When somebody calls to get your, your hot water heater fix, and I know it's water heater. And all the plumbers always make fun of me for that. Let's say you're going to go get that. You got to get that fixed or replaced. The customers don't really know what to expect, but you do. And you know that you're gonna have to turn off the water to the house. You know, you're gonna have to drain the water heater. You know, you're gonna have to install a new water heater and probably some new fittings and maybe even have to do an expansion tank. You know that. But you didn't tell them that. And you come back to them and they say, well, why is my. Why is my water out of my house? And you're like, well, how else do you think I was going to do it? Well, you know that. But they don't know.

They don't.

Yeah. So how can you exceed their expectation? You tell them, hey, you're probably gonn water for a couple hours. Hey, when we're done, we're gonna have to bleed those things back out because they're probably gonna start snap, crackling and popping on you. It's going to take a couple hours for the hot water to come back. And I'm going to look at everything. There might be some things we need to do to bring it up to code because things have changed and it might be a little bit more money. And you say that up front when, that when you come to them and say, yeah, this is what it's going to be. They don't go, oh, they go, you know, you did say it was coming.

Yeah. I think over communicating with the customer builds so much trust with the company of itself and then also to your point, exceeding their expectations. They told me what they're going to do. They did it. There's no big, oh, my gosh, I didn't know about that. Why didn't you tell me? It's like, no, I did tell you.

Right? Yeah, that's a big part. So that's what our customer experience looks like. When you're done, we walk the job with the customer. We want them to be there. If they're not, we take pictures of what we've done and we make sure that they see it because we want them bought into it. Because at any one point in time, the only two people who know what was done are going to be the people on site, Whether it's the person actually making the purchase and paying for it or it's a tenant or it's, let's say it's the wife, but the husband's going to pay or the husband's there and the wife has the checkbook, whatever it's going to be. You got to make sure you get the person in front of you committed to saying, yep, you did what I thought you were going to do. Thank you.

Yeah, I love that. That's. That is a great customer journey, for sure. I think that if people are not texting their customers, educating them beforehand, they're missing the ball on so many great touch points. One really cool one that I found is on that initial, like lead up the text and stuff. You could even say, hey, if you're curious, make sure that you have our technician look at X, Y and Z. Or right now this thing's really popular. Basically kind of giving them an upsell opportunity inside of the home through that confirmation process.

Funny you should bring it up, Phil. You're now the second person this week who said I should be doing more of that. So back to scaling back to always learning. Been at this for 16 years. You're right. I'm going to start doing it. I'm trying to figure out what we're going to do right now. We're actually have a meeting later today to talk about it.

Oh, well, there you go. It's. It's in the H Vac world. It's like, hey, while they're there, you want them to take a look at your hot water heater or whatever else and it gives your. It's basically like teeing up your technician to be able to upsell inside of the home.

Yep, it's good.

So how did you come up to the decision? You know, you're running Atlanta. I'm presuming it's profitable, and you're like, oh, my gosh, I should go and take this somewhere else. How did that decision come about?

So everybody. I shouldn't say everybody. A lot of times I meet with a lot of other business owners. You know, whether I'm doing speaking engagements or here locally, if I'm networking with others, people say, oh, are you going to franchise? Or maybe you are a franchise. The answer is I've investigated and I decided not to do the franchise. Okay. I'm going to expand on my own.

Yeah.

And then I'm going to look for partners in the H Vac plumbing and electrical world who want to take this concept and put it into their company and see if we can't take it to other markets. But I picked Athens because it became such a big growth market. That's where the University of Georgia is. And that's what it's also becoming a big growth area for people who want to move away from its city of Atlanta and can commute to the northern area of Atlanta. So I saw the growth opportunity there, and it's there. So it's working pretty well for us.

Yeah. So you were run in Atlanta. I. You were running a profitable thing. And then did you, like, buy another office over there or another warehouse and like, get new guys and all that and start the whole thing?

Guys, yeah. So as a matter of fact, yeah, we've got a flexible office space we use. We did it kind of bootstrap. We're learning on how to grow that market. I've got three guys going there now. I've had to seed it with money and with advertising, so it's cost me some money.

Yeah.

This is the year they're supposed to be paying me back.

Yeah.

So we're, we're making strides there, but it was all seeing the market and also learning how to run it when I wasn't there every day to prove that I could run this and, and have somebody else run it outside of a franchise model and do it my way. And last year, we're, we're. We're getting there. We're not there yet. Just like anything I want, I want it to be better, but that's where we learned.

Yeah.

Wow.

Are there any specific numbers that you look at on a day to day, like, like call booking rate or average ticket or any reporting or even not day to day, but weekly or monthly that you're like, hey, any business that's trying to get to 3 million, 5 million, whatever, they should be looking at this stuff.

Yeah. So excuse me, I'm. I'm not looking at the daily numbers as much anymore. Back to the scaling. Yeah, daily. If I'm looking to scale, it starts with those phone calls. So the question you got to ask yourself one is, is how do I make my phone ring, how do I make the email, how do I work with the customer where they want to work with? So I got to know I'm getting those leads in there. You could stare at Google all day long if you wanted to. I highly recommend not doing that. I would say a weekly is the way to go. Weekly tells you about trends, and monthly definitely tells you about macro trends, because three weeks makes a trend for me. If I see three weeks of lead volume going down, I know we got a problem unless I know it's that time of year. So January in my business is usually pretty slow. People are coming off the holidays, it's colder in Atlanta even. It's a, even though it's a 12 month season that I can work in, people are still cold and not working. So you want to look at leads number two, you want to look at utilization. How many guys are on the road, how many trucks are rolling, how many trucks are bringing in. And you want to look at revenue by week, by truck. And then when I look at that, you know, just put those, those images of those trucks up there. You want to see how many dollars got brought in from that truck, this truck and that because that tells you utilization.

Yeah.

Now I've gone all over the place, man. I, like I said, I'm an engineer by training. I am spreadsheet jockey. I was on spreadsheets before they were even called spreadsheets. I mean you can overanalyze this, but I would tell you is that, get the data in, look at it weekly. That's leads, that's calls, emails, chats, whatever you guys do, most of us are still calls. You want to look at how much money your truck brings in every week to make sure that's going on. And then you absolutely want to look at how much AR you've got. Because I should be, I should be zero. Yeah, I should be getting sick at the time I'm done. And I still have people who slow pay and I've still had to chase people down. I still have lost money because I could not get them chased down enough. Wow, we gotta watch that because that one's an absolute. It's just a suck. And the other thing I do look at is you got to figure out how to make those leads work. And so marketing, now that's something you want to look at because if you're not doing any because you're, I can't tell how many people said, oh, Chris, you just get one real estate agent, you're going to be set for life. Oh, you get, you get one neighborhood and they're going to keep you busy all year long. I'm like, bring it. But it doesn't happen like that.

Yeah, I got 15 people to keep busy all year long.

That's right. And one neighborhood and one real estate agent doesn't do it. And it never works like that. So you've got to be advertised, you've got to put yourself out there. Easiest way, your Google my business page, you don't. In fact, I would tell you if you don't have a website right now, shame on you. But if you don't you got to have Google my business, you got to have a website. Just that's the bare minimum. That's just the cost of doing business, man.

Yeah, of course you're not going to get to a million dollars without a website or Google business profile. There's no way.

No. Yeah, and I still say business. Whatever.

Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Google my business.

They keep changing the stupid names, but yeah, and you want to be looking at the trends. I mean that's the other thing. This is to time date it, right? This is January in 2025. End of 2024 was the first year Google's search share went down since they started. Why? I don't know, but I've heard it's AI so we gotta be on lookout for that right there. People are going to the chats and asking chat and claude and all the other chats out there, the bots if you will, in the AI world. So you gotta be doing some marketing. You have to.

Yeah. So I interviewed Neil Patel on, on the podcast about this search everywhere optimization. It's no longer just search engine optimization, it's search everywhere. And to your point, yeah, Google's losing its, its share and how can you set your company up? And the, the number one thing he said was to build a solid brand because that's what these language learning models identify as great companies, is what is a good brand. And the number one way you can do that is by getting Google reviews and building a solid brand off of their platforms.

Well, that's great because again, back to scaling, we just got to our thousandth Google review, which I'm thrilled, just so excited because when I first started Google wasn't around, so I. But to get to the thousand, that definitely has meant a lot. And our rating is obviously very good. 4.7.

So do you all do automated text or email or how are you getting reviews?

Yeah, I love you ask that question. Hey, how do you get, how do you guys get the.