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Owned and Operated kicks off its new LEGENDS series, focusing on the stories of the home service industry’s most successful entrepreneurs. John Wilson and Jack Carr are joined by special guest Tommy Mello, founder and CEO of A1 Garage, which operates in over 20 states, with over 50 locations.
The talk with Tommy covers his insistence on a strong company culture, how partnerships drove his company to new milestones, and the reasons why networking in the home service space is so important to constant business growth and success. Tommy also discusses his most recent book, ‘Elevate’, creating a business where everyone wins through employee growth, and his upcoming Freedom 2024 home service event in San Diego, CA.
Service Scalers can help figure out your PPC, SEO, and even LSA. Right now they’re running a special $99 digital marketing audit where they’ll take a look under the hood of your marketing, tell you what’s working, and where you can optimize.
Schedule today: https://www.servicescalers.com/audit
Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: https://x.com/WilsonCompanies
Jack Carr: https://x.com/thehvacjack
Episode Guest:
Tommy Mello: https://x.com/realtommymello
Freedom 2024 Event Information:
https://get.homeservicefreedom.com/freedom-event-2024
The Home Service Expert Podcast:
https://homeserviceexpert.com/podcast
Special Thanks to Avoca AI Coaching and Training
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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
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Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
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Owned and Operated LEGENDS Tommy Mello Transcript
Tommy Mello: My biggest competitor is when I look in the mirror. Don't say no to me. Tell me what you would need to hit my deadlines.
Tommy Mello: What do you do for a living? Because I'm going to go open up in your market. The same shit you're doing in crush. We don't go off a gut. We go off of what the facts are. Let the hustler in you die. No longer are you a hustler. You're a business owner. It's focused on the people and growth.
John Wilson: So you're spending a ton of money on marketing and you don't know if it's working. So my friends over at service scalers, they're dropping this special promo for a 99 digital marketing audit. So that's going to cover your PPC, your SEO. Your LSA, and what they do is they just open the hood and they take a look.
John Wilson: They tell you what's working. What's not working, what could be optimized and all the big areas for improvement, check out the link below to schedule your digital marketing audit or head service scalers. com.
John Wilson: Welcome back to owned and operated today on the show. We've got Tommy Mello. Tommy hardly needs an introduction, but Tommy's the founder and CEO of a one garage, and we're just stoked to have you on here today, Tommy.
John Wilson: So, welcome to the show.
Tommy Mello: Thanks for having me.
John Wilson: Yeah, dude, this is going to be good. I would love it. If you just I'm sure everyone knows a lot about your journey. I would love it if you just gave folks a little bit of like where A1's at today, that way we could set the stage for what we're about to talk about.
Tommy Mello: Yeah. We partnered with a private equity, an amazing group. I think PE’s got a bad name. That happened at the end of 2022, we're 16 months in. And I was just thinking about this earlier. And I think it's the best move I've ever made, no regrets. And I know there's so many people, nine out of 10 will tell you they made the wrong move.
Tommy Mello: They got the wrong partner that just, they don't like being an employee, whatever it is, but this group is amazing. I really like the guys we're working with. I was always thinking, How do we get this company to 100 million of EBITDA? How do we get it to 120 million of EBITDA? And now there's a new target as of the last two weeks.
Tommy Mello: It's 200 million of EBITDA before I make my next turn. I don't think we'll have a problem hitting 70 million. We're paced for about 55. Without acquisitions or greenfield or going into any type of commercial. We've got two LOIs in place. We're green fielding into three markets. We're going to roll out commercial and a couple other opportunities.
Tommy Mello: So I will tell you at every size company, you've never made it. There's a new circumstance, new challenges, but they're not the same as it used to be. It used to be is the guy's going to come to work sober. Is this guy even going to show up today? Is the truck going to break down? Are enough calls going to come in today?
Tommy Mello: That's thank God. Those are like fight or flight issues. Now it's like, why is there a cancellation rate up in this market? What's our capacity planning look like for the end, going into Q3, things like that, we're really focused, not only the bottom line, but the culture.
Tommy Mello: I think as you grow a culture is a really fancy buzzword, but it's so important as you grow. And the company I work with Cortec, they're so focused on founder operated companies. And I got the honor of speaking at their big Cortec meeting. I was the only founder of 130 of their investors. And I just went on stage for 10 minutes and told stories and.
Tommy Mello: I'm the only one in that group that got a standing applause because all I did is speak from my heart and I'm just a guy from Detroit. My mom and dad got a divorce when I was seven. I wouldn't consider myself lower class, we had new clothes for the start of the school year, but it was tough.
Tommy Mello: My mom worked her ass off. The point of that is if I could do it, anybody could do it. I'm just very curious. I still got a lot of humility, super humble, and I don't care how successful you become the minute you forget where you came from. You forget what it was like to bust those tables. You start disrespecting people is the day that everything will change.
Tommy Mello: And Jesus Christ put me here. And if I don't, and I'm not going to make this all about, my faith, but. I know he could take it away just as quick as he granted it.
John Wilson: You're solving problems that are big and that are interesting. And I think you're solving problems that everybody thinks they want to solve. They probably don't want to when they actually get there, but they at least think they want to solve. How many states are you guys in now?
Tommy Mello: We're out of a state that I was in. We're in 21 states.
John Wilson: On that path to your goal, target EBITDA, is that all 50 states or 48 continental?
Tommy Mello: No.
Tommy Mello: That's I'll be in 48 states when we're at 2 billion of EBITDA. And there's a clear path to get there. The market cap of garage doors won't allow us to get there. But what I have that no one else has is I'm in more homes than any HVAC plumbing, electrical, roofing, shopping. Probably take the big three of all of them combined and I'm in more homes.
Tommy Mello: So I've got more access to more clients. There's three ways to make money, get more clients, sell your clients more or keep them coming back more frequently. The number two is charge your customers more because I could sell more. I'm only selling garage doors right now. Wait till I open it up.
Tommy Mello: And I don't want to too many people help me in the HVAC plumbing industry to shit. But there's still a world of products that just the front door lock to, if you're putting a myQ system on the garage door, put one in the garage on the entry door to the garage and on the front door, there, there's a world of opportunity.
Tommy Mello: I'm, it just came out that the garage door for the seventh year in a row is the number one ROI in the home, but with all that considered and said there's no number two. And I'm not being cocky. If you look at the garage door industry, you'd be like, man, I want to get in the garage door industry. Yeah.
Tommy Mello: No, you don't. Look, if I went into HVAC plumbing, electrical flooring, gutters, windows, Flooring like ticket size matters. And that's why I got to run 20, 000 jobs a month. And the operation we need to have to run that is it's two decades in the making. And everybody says if he could do it, I can, you can just plan on, by the year 2040, you might have some
John Wilson: decent, can you break down the garage door, like in whatever size you want to break this thing down in, but what's the differentiator between garage door and plumbing HVC electric?
Tommy Mello: HVAC number one. And plumbing and electric, you could have a warehouse full of parts for everything and you can fix it the same day or the next day. Garage door is a special order. Most of the time there's the U factor R value polystyrene, polyurethane, hollow back, there's vinyl back, there's different radius of track, there's different dimensions, different colors, different windows sets, there's different patterns on it, a lot of the time you got to special order it. So that alone creates problems. So that's a big factor. Number two is there's no licensing to get into garage stores. You don't need any special certification. So it's easier for me to find techs and train them, but it's easier for someone to cross the border and start, Pablo's Garage door company.
Tommy Mello: We really got to differentiate ourselves. The next thing is we could buy a garage door a few years ago for 400. Whereas a front door would cost us five grand. Garage doors were held in the eighties till COVID. It was like, wait a minute. You could buy a garage door for cheaper than you could buy one window for.
Tommy Mello: So finally they're getting smarter and the industry as a whole needs to move up and start, stop selling to Chuck in a trucks.
John Wilson: So that's like manufacturing was selling like a wholesaler was 400.
Tommy Mello: Yeah. And my plan is, listen, I hope they raise the prices. They continue to raise the prices. If I have my way, once we get big enough, I'll get with the right P company.
Tommy Mello: At a massive level, we could work in Washington, D. C. To pass regulations that not just because it is dangerous. There's lawsuits all the time with garage doors. It should be a skilled set that you could have that. You need a licensed contractor because I'm willing to get through. I already am licensed in every market.
Tommy Mello: We make sure to get licensed, but it's just really low barriers of entry. And the more barriers I think. The better because it keeps out some of the spammy trash. You got that. And then garage drawers and locksmiths are the two largest spammed industries on Google in North America by far. So they've got like these advanced verifications, but there's still so much spam because you don't need a lot of skilled labor.
Tommy Mello: You get in and out and you could extract money from a client and you can never find that guy again. So an HVAC, you gotta get up on the roof. You got to have a crane pull it off and you've got to like. You gotta mess with electricity. It's easier to spam. And so is like blower vent, the blow the vents and like that stuff's pretty spammy too.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. Gut cleaning. Yeah. Someone just told me earlier today, I'd never even heard about this extra layer of Google, the advanced verification. I just found out about that like a few hours ago and yeah, it was locksmiths and and garage doors. Yeah. So like, how does that even work?
Tommy Mello: For example. If I was to my GVP or GMB or my LSA or my PBC, you got to call somebody.
Tommy Mello: First of all, you got to go through Pinkerton, which is the background checks. And then you got to go and you get on the phone and you show that you've got a real building. They check your signage on Google meet. They check your electric bill. They want to see a business card. They want to see your truck that is wrapped.
Tommy Mello: They want to see the plates with the registration to the business name. They want to see all this stuff. Now there's ways that people are spamming it, but it's going to catch up to them. It's like that stuff, but that's, and then a lot of times they'll flag miscellaneous GMBs, take them down and then you've got to re verify it.
Tommy Mello: You get a postcard sent back and a lot of times you got to use the video to re verify so, you know We've had it happen enough where we've got a whole filing system and a whole process because all of our shits legitimate But there's a lot of differences I mean I would tell everybody out here Go demand driven and pest control is demand driven because you're not gonna allow scorpions to just go all over your house But if you're gonna do like floor coatings It's great when the economy is good, but you got to ask yourself, the one thing that was really attractive is that when your garage door is broken, your car stuck, you're calling somebody.
Tommy Mello: And the great news about our company is we could do service or we could do door sales in a bad economy. We still got the demand for service. And I think that's really attractive to private equity.
John Wilson: What does average ticket look like in garage doors?
Tommy Mello: I mean, a good company. Most garage door companies are hovering between three and 700.
Tommy Mello: We're. A little over a grand that includes zeros. That includes door sales.
John Wilson: Okay. So that's holistic average ticket.
Jack Carr: Are there lots of options to you? You mentioned some of the different garage doors. Do you view in HVAC and plumbing? We were able to offer lots of different options, upgrades.
Jack Carr: Do you have that in the garage door industry?
Tommy Mello: Yeah, we've got our we've got it with springs, rollers, cables. We've got it with garage doors. Typically on a garage door, we'll give six options. One star through five star on our signature package. Then we've got three different cycles for our springs, 10, cycle springs, our 80, 000 cycle springs are trademarked.
Tommy Mello: Doesn't mean someone can't get a version of them, but if you're comparing apples to apples, we sell oranges and I like that about us. And a lot of people don't want to spend the money to do this stuff we've done to differentiate ourselves. Most of these trolls on the internet, especially on Facebook are losers.
Tommy Mello: And they'll never make money. And they brag about how their truck's not wrapped and they brag about how they charge less and they're busy and they're living at their mom's house. They don't have a business. Their wife's working for free, their daughter's working for free. And they complain that the price are too high when they shit on their employees and no one's allowed to make money.
Tommy Mello: They got to stay in an apartment. They got to drive a used truck and they'll never put their kids in a school zone. They just, they think, Oh my God, they charge a lot of money. I watched them live in poverty. And never have a real business. Then when they turn 65, they can't sell it because it's a pile of garbage and I'll pay them 10 grand for their phone number because that's what their business worth.
John Wilson: Yeah. We deal with, yeah we deal with a lot of the same thing…
Jack Carr: Across industries.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. That wouldn't go across industries. Yeah. I appreciate the primer on garage doors. I wanted to dive a little bit into sort of the mid stage of the journey of your growth. So obviously, you gave us an idea of where you're at now, which is awesome.
John Wilson: What I wanted to focus on is what did that, what did a one look like between 20 million and a hundred? What were the key decisions that got you there? I've got some questions to get in here too, but that's where I'd love to start here. So can you give me a year range? When were you guys doing 20?
Tommy Mello: Let's just be very careful here for the audience. And let me just make a statement. Nobody cares about your revenue. When you walk in a room and you beat your chest and bragging about revenue. Revenues for vanity, profits for sanity. When you get into a real room of smart people, they'll talk about profit and EBITDA.
Tommy Mello: Anybody that inflates the two and gets them confused. No one gives two shits how much revenue you're doing. They care about your profit because if you're not making profit, you'll be out of business. I've seen a hundred million dollar companies go bankrupt overnight. So I want to be very clear because I thought when I walked in a room, I high fived everybody and I said, Oh, how much revenue are you doing?
Tommy Mello: And now I'm like, listen, how much profit because we're at 25 percent of the bottom line. We'll be at 30.
John Wilson: How do you drive that? How do you drive that culture? That sounds like something you're driving throughout the company. Like, how are you driving that culture throughout the company?
Tommy Mello: When I was more unsophisticated and a little more immature about the business, I used to think if I grow revenue, I could always turn the dials to grow profit.
Tommy Mello: There was a few close calls on it and make some tough decisions we could talk about later. But now everybody's bonused on EBITDA and because now we've got a sponsor behind us, I'm not making any drastic, crazy things that, Hey, I'm going to go with my instincts and go put a million dollars out of EBITDA into this market.
Tommy Mello: But really where do. All my c-suite VP and direct reports where are they making their money? They're making their money from the outcome of the business. They've got either profit units or equity rolled. So even if we don't hit our bonus for one year they're looking at the big picture.
Tommy Mello: And I did this on the deal before, so you asked about, so $17 million. I think this is important, if I could just go off on a tangent about what happened at 17 million.
Jack Carr: Yeah. Of course.
Tommy Mello: 17 million is when I got onto ServiceTitan. I started my podcast. And I met Al Levy, the seven power of contract.
Tommy Mello: And Al Levy walked in my office and said, let me see your manuals. And moral of the story, we went through a lot of things together. And he said, I'd like to work with you, but you're going to have to really listen to me. He was very adamant. He saw the entrepreneur, the ADHD, the shiny lights in every direction.
Tommy Mello: And he said, you need to be focused. And if you're going to work with me, I'm going to be very hard on you. You're going to have to stay disciplined. And I said, you have my word. So we sat in a room at my last office with me, Adam, Brian and Al and we built the first 10 manuals with the first three were the technician CSR and dispatcher and then we built the installer.
Tommy Mello: We built processes performance pay. We restructured the way the building was where the layout was. We literally had a process for taking inventory, using tools. What happens if your truck breaks down? How do you get PTO? Are you allowed to have facial hair? How's your uniform expected to be? Then we read 10 pages a day.
Tommy Mello: Each technician had to read it out loud in front of us and sign off on each page. And then we started answering questions. When you asked is, I think there's a page maybe 67 in your manual where you could learn more about that. And if there was a question that came up more than three times in a month, it got added to the manual.
Tommy Mello: So we started to be more methodical. Number two we really put an emphasis around financing I should say, the finance side of the business. And it was only. Three years ago where I got the right CFO and I think that's the biggest issue with most businesses. They don't have any financial. I think that's the last thing people get a grasp on.
Tommy Mello: And they say, as long as there's enough money in the bank to pay the bills, we're doing good. And we could take some money out at the end of the year. I think people get confused with the fact that they feel like they're making money and they pay themselves 300 grand a year. And when I ask you, how much money does your business make?
Tommy Mello: It's not how much you pay yourself. Cause I pay myself 350, 000 a year plus bonus. The business still makes 25 percent after that. And I think people need to understand after you pay yourself. a very healthy amount of money, the business still needs to make 15 percent or more. And that's the small businesses out there that think, Oh, I made 300 grand last year.
Tommy Mello: No, you didn't. You paid yourself 150. Your business made 150 and you shouldn't extract money out of the business early. You should reinvest it. You shouldn't go flip houses or buy a bar or reinvest in your buddy's business. You should put it back in service. Titan's a big deal. Cause we found the right CRM.
Tommy Mello: We got on Al Levy's manuals, the seven power contractor. Those of you that don't know, I need to read it. And we started to be very deliberate about standard operating procedures, checklists, and manuals. I started to create processes instead of being firefighters. And Al Levy told me, he goes, Tommy, when I get done with you, this business is going to be very vanilla.
Tommy Mello: It's going to be very boring. You're going to be walking in here and you're not going to be running. You're not going to be running out here, putting out fires like you are today. He goes, you're one of the best firefighters I've ever met. You could run every position in this company with your eyes closed.
Tommy Mello: You know how to do everything. You put out the fires with the customers. You handle payroll issues. You got HR things, you know exactly what to do, where the parts are, how to fix everything. But you're the only one that could do all this. The world of the business revolves around you and that's not how it should be.
Tommy Mello: So we built the management, then we built. Depth charts, and basically what we did said is a CSI could be a dispatcher and vice versa and a technician could do an install and vice versa. We figured out the org chart wasn't And he taught me instead of hiring somebody and building a box around the person, build the box and find the right person to fit in that box.
Tommy Mello: So there was a lot of things that came from Al and Service Titan and then fast forward to 30 million dollars. Al took a picture, black and white, of my van and he showed it to me. And this is the fifth time he brought this up and he circles things and he goes, What do you even do? Look at your van. He goes, I still don't think it's right.
Tommy Mello: And it was my picture, my real picture on the side. And he said, I just, I'm not in love with it, Tommy. Then I said, okay, what do you want me to do about it? He goes, listen, there's one guy at this time. He was a partner in zoom drain and Ken Goodrich had approached me at the same time and said, call Dan Antonelli.
Tommy Mello: And he said, call Dan Antonelli with kick charge and little lo and behold, I'm already 30, 35 million. I couldn't tell you the exact number. It was risky. Like you're going to rebrand the company. It changed the logo and said, I'm going to give you the best look ever. And it was crazy. After I got rebranded.
Tommy Mello: Our price is doubled because people wanted to pay a premium and our positioning in the marketplace change. And people wanted to work for us and people stop quitting as easy. The turnover rate went down. Like the marketing dollars went so much further because people were typing in a one garage or a service rather than garage repair Phoenix.
Tommy Mello: And so all these things happened. And then, as things started to get larger, we really started focusing on the little things that most people like, what are we paying a merchant fees. Why are we paying? We've got three trucks sitting on the side. Those aren't being used. That's 1, 400 a month.
Tommy Mello: That's, that's 4, 200 a month. What are we using wax cards for gas? Because half the technicians were filling up their wife's tank. And these little things that our CFO helped us find. It was like, it was crazy because you've got five people doing AR. Why do you have AR? We've got to teach our installers to collect every single time.
Tommy Mello: So we started finding this droves of money every corner. But the one thing that I'd say I have that very few CEOs have is I'm obsessed with marketing and that's my favorite thing. I love sales and I'm a culture guy. There's different types of CFO CEOs that have a CFO background and they're good at finding things that my CFO finds.
Tommy Mello: I'm a leader and I show up and I lead by example and I got a lot of respect because I had these technicians. I've lived in their shoes. I don't think it's an advantage that I've done the work. It's an advantage that I know where they've come from and I know what it means to work in this in the cold or the heat and notice like to be driven around by a dispatcher and dispatchers making mistakes and CSR is not getting data accuracy right.
Tommy Mello: So those are some of the things that have had to happen. To get us to this level.
John Wilson: When do you feel, you talked about the rebrand and that, and your marketing focus, at what point do you feel like you really dialed in on your Legion?
Tommy Mello: Here's what's funny. If I go back eight years. I had a room, a very skinny room that we built in our warehouse, and there had to be 12 people in there, we were only doing SEO.
Tommy Mello: We were link building, we were building content, we were, it was like we were obsessed with mobile optimization. There was this thing a long time ago called MobileGadget, and if your phone didn't load on mobile, You were going to get deranked on Google. At a very early age, I was obsessed with reviews.
Tommy Mello: I was obsessed with video testimonials. I was obsessed with social media, just getting reviews on social with Yelp, with Angie, you name it. I was doing it on Yellabook, BBB. I was building citation sites. I was obsessed with Google at an early time because the yellow book had died right when I started. So fortunately I became obsessed with this reputation and getting found on Google.
Tommy Mello: But attribution 2017, before 2017, I was on call cap and it's a great software to help you get attribution. If you fill out where every lead comes from with call tracking a service site, and I could just. Click a report and I know exactly, let me just pull up this page right here as GMB, LSA, PPC, green, yellow, red, every single market, what they're doing, what's going on with it.
Tommy Mello: I've got, this is a report of all the reviews I got and what the status is in that market. My reporting today, we met with the PE company, 130 pages of reporting. And that was four hours long. And I know how long my average hold time is. I know how long it takes to book a phone call.
Tommy Mello: I know the average CSR, how many calls they book per day. I know exactly how much dispatching we're doing for dollars, how much move up revenue we're doing. I know exactly how many workers comps claims we had last month. I've got my report of all of last month, what we did. Most people say by the 10th. I get mine by the 4th.
Tommy Mello: I do believe the reporting side of it. Most people barely know what's in their bank account. I know exactly how many injuries we had last month. I know exactly how many calls we take on average. I know exactly, we're at 6 minutes and 10 seconds to book a phone call last month. And I know we gotta approve that.
Tommy Mello: I know on average we're at 2 minutes and 13 minutes, 2 minutes and 13 seconds to answer a form fill lead. And I gotta get that under a minute. People are like, I just need more leads, but their call booking rate sucks. Their conversion rate sucks. Their opportunity job average sucks. Like the data will set you free.
Tommy Mello: And most people are looking at the wrong data. I don't believe in data. If I were to ask you what's your booking rate, you'd say probably around 90%. Mine's 87. 4%. And I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt, there's checks and balances. So I don't believe anybody's even managing. They don't know what to manage and what gets measured gets managed.
Tommy Mello: And I don't think people are paying attention to the details. And I don't think they need to know like I know. And trust me, there's 800 people here. The fact that I know these things is pretty crazy, but this is all we look at. This is how we make decisions. We don't go off a whim. We don't go off a gut feeling.
Tommy Mello: We don't go off, an emotion. We go off of what the facts are. And I feel like so many small business owners are like, I think I should do this. If I walked into your business, spent three months with you, I'd say, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is what needs to be done. This is the biggest hole in the boat.
Tommy Mello: We need to fix this first. And I think people don't know what to do on Mondays. They walk in and they go I got a lot of work to do. You're very busy doing minimum wage tasks, not doing the 80, 20, the 20 percent that's actually making an impact in the business. And if you're even doing your own emails, even at 5 million, that's a 15 hour, 15 an hour, 20 an hour job.
Tommy Mello: I'd like for you to write down everything you do on a daily basis. And I'd like for you to figure out how much you make per hour. And if you could hire somebody to do that job at less than you make per hour,
John Wilson: When do you feel like you got a handle on your unit economics like you have now?
Tommy Mello: So we had a really good foundation, but when we partnered with the PE guys, it's freaking insane.
John Wilson: They next leveled it.
Tommy Mello: Dude, listen, these guys are not a company. Cortex is not a company that just comes in and says, how are we doing? They come in and they got an expectation of the data and they will peel the data apart. And they're so good at what they do. I called Doug after our call and I go, dude, how the hell do you do this stuff?
Tommy Mello: It's so impressive. He pulls, I said, you can pull a needle out of a haystack, man. And he's asking, and all they do is ask the right questions. We became obsessed with data almost too much. I think the power BI tools were using Rilla voice. We're using chirp for automations. Now.
Tommy Mello: It's I will tell you this sounds really bad, but give me one year. Because we're renegotiating with our vendors, the power of the eyes getting more sophisticated. The AI is getting more sophisticated, the machine learning, the dispatch pro the things we're doing, give me one year and there will be no reason why I can't take over every market on the planet because I got the best pricing.
Tommy Mello: I got the best booking rate. I got the best conversion rate. I've got the best economies of scales. I'm getting trucks at a better price. I could . And I'm willing to break even in a market to take market share. So I just, I think what you're gonna see over the next five to 10 years and there's really nobody in HVAC even close to us.
Tommy Mello: If I was in HVAC and, I know Ken Haynes and Ken Goodrich and Leland Smith and all these guys, the, the pioneers of the trades. They might disagree with me, but I think I could crush anybody. I just think everybody's lucky that I'm doing garage doors. And I know that sounds cocky, but I think my team, I think we're, I know what these guys do.
Tommy Mello: I know their numbers. I just think we're using we're a software company now that does garage doors.
John Wilson: Yeah. The data must be huge.
Tommy Mello: We're investing a lot of money to forward develop chirp for the automations that fires straight off of things that people aren't even. Thinking they're talking about our turnover program is just light years ahead of anybody in our industry.
Tommy Mello: And, we, one of my buddies called me recently and he's I think I figured out something to Google that very few people know. And I'm like, what do you know about Google that I don't know? And I'm and he goes Google wants unique content posted onto the GVP page from service to, and I built an automation.
Tommy Mello: And he's could I just give it a shot on six of your locations? He goes, I'll give you the six one free. And I'm like, sure. What is it going to cost? He's a couple grand a month. I'm like, we'll give it a shot. I'm like, if it works and he's a smart guy, his name's Kellen. And we go golfing and he helped me get onto Yelp and really dominate Yelp.
Tommy Mello: So I took them seriously, but I'm like, Google's kind of my thing. Within two months, we were doubling the phone calls in those areas. And we've got a lot of Google locations and my VP of marketing goes, Holy shit. We need to get every location on this software. Like it's all he talked about for two weeks.
Tommy Mello: I had a buddy Tyler that called me up and he goes, dude, I was spending 22 percent on marketing and I can't figure it out. And I looked and. His second listing wasn't even showing up. He worked with Callan. Within two weeks, his marketing was down under 10%. Because it was so many phone calls. I talked to a guy right now.
Tommy Mello: That's a 200 million of EBITDA. He was telling me all of his ROAS and his cost of marketing per campaign. And this is their CI or their chief marketing officer. And his name's John Thornton. And he says, if you're not taking advantage of Google organic and optimizing your GMBs. sucked in everything else.
Tommy Mello: But he said, that's 40 percent of my leads and people are not even optimizing their GMB or focused on what their Google rankings are. If I went to any company. You go to Ahrefs, Ahrefs website checker, type in A1Garage. any other company. And I don't think anybody's going to come close to us.
Jack Carr: Do you guys still to this day focus quite a bit on SEO though?
Tommy Mello: Let's put it this way. My number one thing this year to focus on is SEO. More than GMB, LSA, PPC, more than ValPAC, more than referral marketing, more than any other thing is SEO. It's a gold mine. Where do people go to research? If you want to know anything about what's better, Lennox or train or Goodman, if you type in my HVAC units, not blowing cold what air quality do we got to worry about disease and viruses?
Tommy Mello: If you're not coming up, people do research before they spend 15, 000. Where do you think they go? Do you think they go to Angie? You think they go to PPC? Or do you think they go to the web and try to do a little bit of research? And they might, for me, it's a visual sale. They might go to the house or they might go to a, what's that photo site? Pinterest.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Tommy Mello: And so there's a lot of things that are SEO house and Pinterest and different sites like that. Yeah. But. All I would say is anybody that's yeah, SEO is dead. What city are you in? And what do you do for a living? Because I'm going to go open up in your market, the same shit you're doing and crush you.
John Wilson: How much of the SEO is on page versus local, like GBP, which one's the bigger focus at the moment for you?
Tommy Mello: Google My Business. GMB is always been a top focus. I lost my way. I got spoiled. We were always building links. We've got links and I've got a whole link strategy. That, that works very well.
Tommy Mello: Anytime we donate to a YSO or the baseball league or do the cancer society, I say, listen, you need to put us on your website and I want a little excerpt and I get a link and some of them are edu, we do scholarships. So like you've got a good link strategy, but I haven't done as much onsite. So when I said my next focus, my entire focus is going to be making the website.
Tommy Mello: More for the researchers, more for when people are comparing things and best. I think one, one of the tips out there for the small guys is join the BBB for no other reason than it's the best citation site to validate that you're a good business and Google loves the BBB. It just says you're serious about your business.
Tommy Mello: Cause you're paying a grand for the BBB. Now, none of us, 20 years ago, the BBB was important and it was a big deal and people were like, dude, nobody looks at the BBB, but the thing is, Google looks at it. It says that you're a real business and you're found in the BBB, and I still believe in going to things like BNI groups.
Tommy Mello: We don't do it as much in as many markets as, but I used to go to BNI groups every week and when you're smaller, you got to do that. You gotta do the networking and meet the people.
John Wilson: When do you think like marketing took off for you? What size of a business were you where this really became dominant force?
John Wilson: A few months ago, we got our call center on Avoca. And Avoca is a AI call center solution for home service companies just like me, and probably just like you. They have a couple different products, but the one that we like the most is their coach product, which listens to every single phone call and runs it through a rubric.
John Wilson: to help our call takers improve. And this is a really big deal because we take hundreds, sometimes thousands of phone calls every single day and it's just too much for our trainers and managers and leads to keep up with and effectively train. So it lets us do ride alongs on almost every single call every day.
John Wilson: Click on the link below to go to Avoca and make sure you use the promo code OWNED for a special discount.
Tommy Mello: I've always been pretty good at getting leads. I know that Chief Revenue Officer and Angie, I'm always two steps ahead in marketing. I say for me. I could get as many leads as I wanted in any industry.
Tommy Mello: I believe my biggest problem was high booking rate, high conversion rate, and high average tickets. So sales was secondary to marketing for me. And as you could tell, I'm on a lot of stages. I speak in a service Titan event every year. I wrote two books. My podcast is number 14 in the, in North America for business, not for home service.
Tommy Mello: So I've done a great job of marketing myself. And because of that, people come to me. I mean, just today, GoodLeap had called me, the CRO at GoodLeap, and asked me if I want to get involved in a newer product, and we are going to get involved in it. So I can tell you that I think marketing is more important than sales, but sales and giving the customer the right experience and leaving them say, damn, I've never, Felt like this after a company and it's not me out there anymore.
Tommy Mello: So we got to train well, we've got to have checks and balances. That's why Rilla voice is so important to our company. The fact now I know my call center, what they're doing, because I can listen to those calls. Now I can listen to the whole experience of what the customer feels like when we're there with the client.
John Wilson: When did you onboard with Rilla? Sorry, curious, take a step back. What is Rilla Voice for people who don't know?
Tommy Mello: So Rilla Voice is a AI tool that if you put your cell phone or tablet out, there's, I think, 38 States that you don't need consent to record both parties in 12 States, you need to get permission.
Tommy Mello: So in the 12 States, like Florida, New York, California, you got to be very careful. You got to get permission, but it allows you to record the conversation and it picks up. Tonality it picks up. Did you ask an open ended question? Did you tell the company story? Did you follow the sales specifications of your business?
Tommy Mello: And the coolest thing is guys get a lot by just listening to themselves. They're like, Oh my God. They're like, I sound like that. Depends. So when they hear themselves, and then it tells you the words per minute you're talking and who talked more, our top 10 percent of our technicians talk far less than the clients.
Tommy Mello: They ask open ended questions. They show the price or the investment. In monthly payments, instead of giving the total price, they tell the company story after they give the price. They slow down when they give the price. Rilla Voice tells us all that data. And by the way, Rilla Voice is not cheap, but here's the deal.
Tommy Mello: If I close one job or upsell one customer. And I hate the word upsell, but I said it. If I give the customer more options,
Tommy Mello: Better options, then it pays for itself and what I love the most about everything I'm talking about is everybody that's listening. And this is a stat that I can almost guarantee 1 percent is actually going to do the stuff I'm saying.
Tommy Mello: Only the 1% ers. And I'm the 1 percent that actually did it. I'm the 1 percent that went to ghetto. I'm the 1 percent that went to service champions. I'm the 1 percent to go see Keegan's business and went to go see the company in Michigan, doing over a hundred million and went all over the country to search out these answers.
Tommy Mello: And I'm the one that went home and did everything they told me to do. And there's a lot of people listening. They're spraying and praying. They're hoping one day, one day, what if today could be day one? What if you actually took action on half the shit I'm talking about? A lot of people are going to take notes.
Tommy Mello: They're going to say, they're going to put it in their phone. They're going to say, I need to do this. And it never gets done. I'm going to say, yeah, I knew I needed to do that. You knew you needed to do it a year ago. You just never did it. And you wonder why you need more leads. No, you need to book more phone calls and you need to take advantage of every lead you run.
Tommy Mello: And you need to be focused on the right things.
John Wilson: We're the biggest in our market and people get. Like most of my competitors follow me and we have not a huge audience, but it's big, 50 to 80, 000 followers across all of the stuff, like readers and listeners and all that stuff. And it's yeah, people are like, why are you sharing everything?
John Wilson: I'm like, fuck are they going to do? They're not going to do anything. They subscribe to my newsletter and I still watch them not do the shit that I'm telling them to do. That I passed them when they were 10 times my size and now I'm three times theirs and they're still not going to do it. And I'm getting on the playbook in my fucking Friday newsletter.
John Wilson: Like here it is.
Tommy Mello: My whole C suite and VP level, they all came into my office and they said, what the hell are you doing? They're like, you're giving up all of our secrets. And I go, I don't have a lot of secrets guys. Here's what I tell people. Guess what? You want to have a six pack, low calories, watch your macros, you want a calorie deficiency, eat a lot of protein.
Tommy Mello: And then work out, just do a little bit of cardio. Within three months, your abs will start showing. No one has a six pack. They know what they're looking for this magic pill, this magic diet, I, 45 companies upstairs in this exact building six years ago. And I said, how many of you guys. For a door and an opener, I want a nice door and a nice opener.
Tommy Mello: Let's say our cost back then was, I said, 1, 500. How many people here are charging 7, 500? And everybody looked around, and I said, what about six grand? Put your hand up. And one guy was like, yeah, 5, 800. And he, one other guy goes, how do you sleep at night? And I said, wait a minute, let me ask another question.
Tommy Mello: How many of you guys have a billboard? On the majority of every corner. How many of you guys have brand new trucks and are on service type? How many of you guys have insurance in a 401k and PTO? How many of you guys can afford to leave the HVAC unit? Very cold in the summer. I go, how many of you guys are in multiple States?
Tommy Mello: I go, there's no hands. How do you sleep at night? Knowing your shit on you're shitting on your employees. You say you're giving your customer a good deal. So you can take advantage of your employees. And every person in that room shook my hand that day. They said, I'm raising my prices. And I said, raising your prices, unless you raise your customer service is not the answer.
Tommy Mello: Unless you take care of your people is not the answer. It's not just raising your prices. It's raising the entire company up and caring about the people leaders eat last, and you got to take care of the people first, because if you take care of them, they'll take care of you. What's more important, my employees or my clients, my employees, my coworkers are way more important because they're the ones that are showing up for my clients.
Tommy Mello: If they feel neglected, they're going to neglect my clients. So without great people. And without a great place, people, when you leave a company after 40 years, they bake a cake. They take you out to drink beers and do shots. They celebrate there's balloons. Why don't we do that? When people come in, why don't we put out the red carpet and invite their wife in?
Tommy Mello: special. Here's what we do. We say, here's what you're going to do the next two weeks. You're going out with my best guy. Then you're on the road forever. In football, I play two a days. We practice twice a day, five days a week to play one game. But in, for some reason in business, we say you're going to practice for two weeks, then you're in the game forever.
Tommy Mello: And you're going to practice on every client's house. Why is that? It's ass backwards and it's not how I run this business.
John Wilson: We're in the, we're in the topic. You I saw something the other day about a seven week onboarding. So obviously I think that's what you're working towards here. What does training look like post onboarding?
John Wilson: Obviously seven weeks, like you're going to turn anybody into a rock star in seven weeks, which is awesome.
Tommy Mello: It's eight weeks.
John Wilson: Eight weeks. All right. That's even better. So what happens post onboarding to make sure that continues?
Tommy Mello: Here's what they have access to after eight weeks. Number one, they're going to get polished for the first month.
Tommy Mello: So nine, 12, you're working with another person was you need the help because you're finding your own way. Now you're on your own. Number two, you've got access to the market acceleration technician training. So I'll send a guy out there to help you. Number three, you could come back to Phoenix at any time.
Tommy Mello: And I pay you really good money to come back to Phoenix. You can do a ride along. You get paid 250 bucks a day to do a ride along whenever you want. You get a morning mojo called Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. You get an hour long Thursday meeting hour and a half once a month called the bring the fire meeting.
Tommy Mello: You get a virtual product special meeting. To learn all the tricks and tips on how to do a turnover on Wednesdays. You got access to Rilla Voice and a scorecard of the top technicians at every single KPI. And you can listen to every single one of their calls. The smart people are listening to the snippets.
Tommy Mello: And we say, here's what you need to know how they're number one at that KPI. The next thing you have access to is you get two one on ones every single month. And we let you do the presenting. And we focus on your goals, your dreams, what you want out of life. And so you better come wanting more out of life than anybody that you know, because here's the deal.
Tommy Mello: You're going to break the family tree. That all the lineage changes with you. This is when everything comes true. Everything is going to go right. If you want it bad or not, you better have your goals written down. We better understand. You better dream bigger than you ever dreamed before. I don't want to hear you want a house.
Tommy Mello: I want to hear you want 10 houses. I don't want to hear you want to take the kids to Florida. To go to Disney world. I want you to say, I want to go on a private plane first class in the penthouse and cut every single line. Cause if you want more, we'll give it to you. If you're just like, Oh, I'm okay with food on the plate.
Tommy Mello: Okay. Go find another job. You can work for our competitor because I need people with drive that are competitive, that like to win aspire to be number one. That's what's written on this spot. You can't read it, but aspire to be number one, winning core values right here, everywhere around this building.
Tommy Mello: We brought everything Dan Antonelli did within the building. We feel the brand. We live the brand. We're not just a one garage or service or a one from day one, baby.
Jack Carr: Do you find that the media company actually helps drive that culture in the business?
Tommy Mello: Yeah. Yeah. Half the people said they came because of me, half the people in my training program, I do every orientation.
Tommy Mello: This is the orientation slides that I go through for four hours with every single group. I'm the one at graduation at every single one, but I sign off on everybody's certificate. Their family members join when they graduate. There's a red carpet. We do a champagne toast afterwards that we treat people like this is your new career.
Tommy Mello: Not here's your job. Go do this.
Tommy Mello: were excited. You chose us. And a lot of people are just like, Hey, the old saying is this guy drives up to his company and the guy walks out and goes, Holy shit, that's a Ferrari. He goes, I love that car. And the owner goes listen, you work hard.
Tommy Mello: You persevere. You show up, you work overtime if you need to. You do everything right at this job, I'll drive a new one next year. And I like to build a way for our people to get that Ferrari.
John Wilson: What's the highest earner make?
Tommy Mello: I got a few guys that are gonna do over 300. I got a couple dozen guys that do over 200.
Tommy Mello: If you don't make over 100 as a technician or installer, there's a problem with you. If you can't make six figures, by the way, six figures, you get your vehicle PTO, you get all the benefits, the insurance of pet insurance, we pay for half of your Aflac. Yeah.
Jack Carr: Did you say pet insurance?
Tommy Mello: Yeah. I got two dogs.
Tommy Mello: I added that.
Jack Carr: That's awesome.
John Wilson: That's a great benefit. That's a funny one. Yeah.
Tommy Mello: It comes with dental. It comes with. The whole shebang, you get paid training. A lot of people say you got to go to a school and then we'll hire you after you get done with training. We pay people to come into this career, which is really odd.
Tommy Mello: I got these people coming out of the woodwork coming into our industry thinking they're going to beat us and I'm like. Wait, how? We come from PE. You're gonna buy a bunch of companies and try to mash the EBITDA together. It's not integrated. You don't have economies of scale. You try to keep a founder under five million dollars of EBITDA and have them get along with another founder?
Tommy Mello: Their mindset's too small. They've never figured it out. And they're like, we're just like you, Tommy. We're just like you. And I'm like maybe you are. But maybe you need another ten years. Because maybe you're just like I was when I was at that size. And you got to understand. I was worse than most of these guys.
Tommy Mello: I was picking parts out of a dumpster, trying to get refurbished parts. 2008, 2009, I was doing whatever I could to survive. I'm not saying I'm better than anybody, but I've made a lot of mistakes. I think that's probably my best skills. I'm the largest failure in the room. I just fail. I fail all the time, but I fall fast and I get back up.
Tommy Mello: A lot of people, they're afraid to fail. They're afraid to try. They want everything to be perfect. They want everything to be timed perfectly. I'm like, let's go ahead and shit the bed and get back up. And we are going to lose a lot, but in the process of losing, we're going to learn from this and it's going to be one metaphoric scar, metaphorically speaking, a scar or a bruise that we're not going to make the same mistake twice.
Tommy Mello: And I make calculated risks more than anybody I know. And I run at things and to a detriment is at times, but at least I could say been there, done that. And that's why I have. Probably a hundred years experience to the guy having 40 that never made any mistakes. It's just comfortable. I never am comfortable.
Tommy Mello: I'm never comfortable. I'm, I celebrate our wins. And then I flipped the page and say, it's a new day. Even when we sold for a crazy amount of money, I said, great, let's drink champagne. Broke out a Magnum bottle shared with the 25 millionaires we created. And I said, now let's go. People say, my mom says, when's enough, when's enough, Tommy.
Tommy Mello: And I say, when is Tiger Woods won four majors in a row. Did he quit golfing after that? This is my passion. This is what I love to do. That's what I meant to do. And so far, this is God's plan. And I'm going to, I'm going to share it with the world and I'm going to create a lot of millionaires. And I want my legacy to be something where by knowing Tommy and shaking his hand, he kept his word, he honored his word and my life changed for the better by knowing him.
Tommy Mello: And if that's the case, then I'm winning.
John Wilson: It sounds like compelling vision and obviously you've proven it out. Beyond vision, it's sounds like impressive track record. Obviously executives were comped into the deal. What did that look like?
Tommy Mello: I want to say 2019. I did. Equity incentive program.
Tommy Mello: How it works is I paid 300 grand to Foley, which is a great lawyer firm. And we set a threshold of what the business was worth. And I was very generous. I almost couldn't get away with this low of a number, but I put it at 50 million and the multiples, I put a low multiple for 2015, which through COVID, the multiples went through the roof.
Tommy Mello: The 50 million was mine. And then let's say you got 1 percent of the company and let's say we were worth 200 million. So you take 1 percent of 150 million, you got 1. 5 million. I did a pool of 30 percent and I ended up giving away 20 percent up to that point of selling. So out of the case, people got, some of them got tons of money.
Tommy Mello: Some of them got a million. I think the lowest amount I gave was like 1. 2 million. And a lot of people that were with me from the beginning got quite a bit more than that. And I only allowed four or five people to roll the intricate people because the PE company didn't want a lot of people to roll.
Tommy Mello: They wanted to use profit units. It's a new mechanism under PE that they use 10 percent above and beyond the best over a three X return. And it's complicated to explain this, but the main thing is I knew I had great people. We were at a big company size, we were, More than 10 million of EBITDA.
Tommy Mello: And I think if you're going to go around handing equity out, the only people you hand equity out to is to attract and keep telling. So a COO, a CFO, your marketing person, and maybe if you're, maybe possibly a couple of people that are running different markets if you're in multiple markets, but you just don't go throwing it out.
Tommy Mello: I think I was over generous because they're not going to make as much. A lot of people won't make as much money on the, this turn as they did on the first turn, but they're loyal as hell. They're not going anywhere and they trust me. And they're going to make more money than they would make anywhere else because everyone else talks.
Tommy Mello: They've never done it. They never give any money. They don't have. They don't have a goal of see equity is worth nothing unless you sell. It doesn't really give ownership. It's not like I'm doing profit sharing. It doesn't give them any say of what the decisions are. What it does is when the turn of control changes, they make money.
Tommy Mello: And I had a CFO that we left. With he was at an ESOP for 15 years and I gave him just, I let him vest for one year on a five year vesting period. The check I gave him was more than he got for 15 years in his ESOP, which was 550 grand. He got more than that from me.
John Wilson: That's wild.
Tommy Mello: And all of a sudden, everybody was rolling in the same direction.
Tommy Mello: Spring at the goal I put out. And they were self pleasing. It was crazy. It was crazy. How quick we grew when everybody knew the goal, they knew the deadline, they knew what we were running towards and they knew what needed to happen. And when everybody's invested. Like that with knowing the outcome, Oh man you're on a, you're on a speedboat, you're on a rocket ship.
John Wilson: Some of the key people, the people, the COO, the CFO, the marketing, how early in your growth were they hired?
Tommy Mello: Adam started in 2014 and my mama stepped out of Oregon for me since 2010 and it was the Tommy show. And I met Adam and he's a friend of a friend and he's just a really smart guy with a finance degree.
Tommy Mello: And he became my COO. He started out as a general manager. I made a lot of mistakes. I incentivized him the wrong way. I incentivized him to save money instead of growth. But Adam is still one of my best friends, but we had to make some shifts a couple of years ago. And Luke is a guy that understands service Titan.
Tommy Mello: He's very good in Excel and he's a great leader and he the biggest thing about Luke is he's willing to grow. And typically now I'm going to put somebody in the leadership positions that have been where I want to go. But the fact that Luke can learn so quick and not make the same mistake twice is what makes them so valuable.
Tommy Mello: My CFO has already worked for bigger companies than us. And he's a genius. And my VP of marketing came from massive companies. He managed 7 billion company, home service is quite a bit different than most industries. We rely on different things. Yeah. He worked for Meritage, which is a large home, home They do new construction.
Tommy Mello: So their tickets are larger. So we run more transactions than most companies are used to. And there's a lot going on here. People are just like, Oh, I'm going to buy a few companies and roll them up. I'm like what's your greenfield? What's your growth? The thing is people don't really understand multiples like I do.
Tommy Mello: Cause they know a lot about a lot of different industries. I know the outcome. I know I'm friends with all the investment bankers and now versus three or four years ago, I The company needs to be all the same tools, all the same trucks, economies of scale. It doesn't need the same name, but it needs, I can put any tech in any market, the same, I can fly any tech to any market.
Tommy Mello: They can run the job, same price book, same software, same call center, same dispatchers, everything's the same and it's fully integrated. And our pace of growth is outperforming any other industry. So I know we're going to be worth a ton of the next turn. And I love how these guys, 92 people or no, 82 people saw our SIP, which is basically our folder of how our company, all the major accomplishments of where we're headed, where we're trying to, and what the last five years looked like.
Tommy Mello: And so the cat was out or the cat was out of the bag, whatever they say. So a lot of these guys said, man, we want to go in and do this. Be the next big player. Like HVAC, there's a lot of players. And all I would say is I hope they grow. I hope they come in and do well because they know I'm going to buy them at a discount because I look at the people that are a competition and I smile because none of them bother me.
Tommy Mello: Nobody's a threat. Nobody even, my biggest competitor is when I look in the mirror of, am I going to make the right decisions? There's no other people don't understand that they look at everybody else. They focus on other companies. I'm too focused on winning. Losers focused on winners and winners focused on winning.
John Wilson: If you were going to give a message as we start to wrap up here to aspiring entrepreneurs, trying to break that nine figure mark, what would you hand out?
Tommy Mello: I got a couple of quotes and then I'll just chat about it for a minute. But number one is the magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding.
Tommy Mello: The second thing I would say is you could continue to stay in your bed and dream, but Or you can wake up and chase your dreams. And there's no better time than today. And what I can tell you guys is be very curious and be doers, be implementers. Don't take notes. When I'm at a seminar and someone says something, I'm setting something on my calendar, texting somebody to get going on it.
Tommy Mello: I don't wait. I don't put my notes under my pillow and hope the note fairy is going to come grant them. A lot of people make notes and they're like, we need to do this. And we need to do this. And this was on the agenda. It's on the docket. We're going to get started in Q3. It's dude, I'm starting now.
Tommy Mello: And I put pressure and people say, listen, there's no way we can get it done in that time. And I say, if I gave you 10 million and a hundred people, could you get it done? And they say yeah, I'm like, what do you need to get it done? My money's no option and resources are no option. Don't say no to me.
Tommy Mello: Tell me what you would need to hit my deadlines because money's not even an obstacle anymore. So I think the best thing you could do. The best thing you could do is go visit a shop that's doing three times what you're doing and ask a lot of questions, buy them lunch, read their books, listen to their podcasts, and show up with gratitude and ask a lot of questions.
Tommy Mello: Be humble. Don't tell them how great you are. Show up as a field mouse, just peeking you're in, in there and be very humble. And don't brag about anything you're doing. Just take a lot of notes, ask a lot of great questions. And don't say, Oh man, John, I'm exactly like you. No, let's just say, listen, I just admire your business.
Tommy Mello: And one day I aspire to be more like this business and like you. And if you would take me under your wing and just give me a few pointers, I won't bother you. If I could chat with you once a quarter, that'd be great. I, that's why I do shop tours, Tommy Mello dot com forward slash shop. I had four or five companies in here yesterday.
Tommy Mello: And I gave him two hours of time because people open their doors to me. And that's the least I could do is pay it forward. So go out there, be a student for life. Readers are leaders. If you're not reading, you're losing. I recommend a new book that just came out. It's called, what should we do? Uncle Joe Cressara wrote the book, buy back your time.
Tommy Mello: By Dan Martell is phenomenal. If you're still mowing the lawn, unless you love mowing the lawn, what are you doing? What are you doing? Like your business needs you. Your family needs you. Don't take your cell phone out when you're at dinner with your kids and put it on the table, turn your phone off and be where your feet are.
Tommy Mello: Spend quality time when you're at home, be at home. When you're at work, be all in and be focused. Remember this. Race horses wear blinders. If you go to the Kentucky Derby, they are all wearing blinders. They're focused on winning the race. It's noisy. There's stuff being thrown out of the racetrack. There's a good book by Gary Keller called The One Thing.
Tommy Mello: Focus on the one thing you need to get done. And I know I just threw out a lot of information, but man, it's like focus, focus. Don't divest out of your business, reinvest and watch it. I told my buddy a long time ago, my first book, I wrote this down, Dave Carson. I said, man, I like to put my in a lot of baskets.
Tommy Mello: He said, Tommy, can you imagine if you put all your eggs in one basket, how quick that basket would overflow? And man, he was right. He was exactly right. And I think everybody's got a side hustle. Let the hustler in, you die, let them die today. No longer are you a hustler. You're a business owner that's focused on the people and growth, and you're focused on profitability and the hustler needed to die.
Tommy Mello: And you let that person die and you focus, or else you're going to have regrets. You're going to wake up in 20 years and say, man, I listened to the podcast. I heard what to do and I'm not perfect. You're going to say, man, you wake up one day and you're like, no regrets. Don't let that happen to you.
John Wilson: Laser focus.
John Wilson: It's what's going to do it. I think you've demonstrated it too, in a couple of different ways today. I think was interesting knowing leads. You talked about this the other day when you and I were talking. Speaking, but yeah, knowing leads, knowing that you got 40 additional leads from a new marketing source, knowing your unit economics, understanding your call center metrics.
John Wilson: I think that's like a by product of being obsessed in a good way, obsessed, fanatically obsessed with the thing that matters, the thing that moves the needle. So I think you've done a good job of you said it, but you've also like really demonstrated it pretty well over the last hour.
Tommy Mello: I want to say one last thing here that people always ask me, how do you find the right? How do you know what's working? And I, if I want to know that, if I want to figure out Angie's list, you know what I do, I go on Angie's list. I find the number one HVAC or roofing company, and then I call them up and they take my phone call and then I go visit them for a day, I'm sending my whole team out to a company in Memphis on June 3rd, that I just did a shop tour and I was impressed, I'm also going to Morris Jenkins two months later to figure out capacity planning.
Tommy Mello: And the thing is, if I want to find out what's working, you want to find out how to get to the top of Google, search a different industry, the best industry. And go talk to that person. Don't go to all these people on all these Facebook groups of what they say they do. Success leaves clues. They're right in front of you.
Tommy Mello: So all you gotta do is do the work and then ask the questions. If you want to learn how to be at the top of a house or Pinterest or YouTube, go find the company that's already doing it. Don't go to the consultants that hasn't done it in 10 years because those who can't do in the real world, teach, find somebody that's actually in today's world.
Tommy Mello: Doing it on this algorithm that's already a proven success. And I think a lot of people, they go, Oh, who's got all the answers and they're praying and they're, do just do some searches, find the number one and then go ask questions.
John Wilson: Yeah. I think this is your biased action. You talked about earlier, just yeah, get off your ass and do it.
Tommy Mello: And the one percenters, I hope somebody is going to call me from this podcast in a year and say the biggest thing, and I can't help. I know I'm dragging on, but you're never going to be happy. Unless you're happy when you look in the mirror, if you don't smile and you don't feel great and you don't think you're your best self and you don't show up with your family.
Tommy Mello: So many people put all the emphasis on business, but they're drinking soda all day and they're drinking all the energy drinks and they're eating like shit and processed food. They don't have and they go it's easy for you to say no, it's not like I, I've worked just as hard as anybody.
Tommy Mello: I'm a better delegator than most. But I think when you look in the mirror and you're not proud of yourself, if you don't walk in a room and say, I'm the baddest ass dude that ever walked. And, but, be humble about it. If you could be, I go in a room and I smile. I walk
John Wilson: in a room like that and be humble, dude.
Tommy Mello: Tommy's here. Yeah. Yeah. But I still feel like, man, when I don't feel like you play me in a game of cribbage or Euchre or bags or pool or whatever you want to play golf. I don't walk in thinking I'm going to lose. And if I do lose, I'm going to be obsessed in how to win. And guess what? I'm going to, Adam used to beat me at ping pong.
Tommy Mello: So I went and got, went and seen a ping pong coach because I got sick of losing. And why would I practice my own way when there's somebody other than to teach me and say five years of my time?
John Wilson: Yeah. You can finally beat Adam. Did you beat him?
Tommy Mello: The story goes like this. Me and Adam used to play every day in the summer for an hour.
John Wilson: Like brainstorming or like working through your thoughts of the day or what was
Tommy Mello: just being called?
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. I'm imagining like. My president and I, we take laps and we like, I'm going to do ping pong probably now. That's funny. But we just take a lap and Hey what happened today? What was the debrief basically?
Tommy Mello: We just, we talk shit. There would be all the tradies watching us and whatever, I went and saw this ping pong coach and he's the best West of the Mississippi. Like he was a champion. He's got five tables, different paddles. He says, what's your goal? When I said, I don't want to be a champion.
Tommy Mello: I just want to beat one guy. And he goes, tell me his serve. Tell me where he stands. Tell me his weak points. And all we did for a month, every day, I'd go there for an hour. So me and Adam hadn't played in a while. And I said, Adam, you want to play a game of ping pong? And he's sure. And he's I'm going to beat the shit out of you.
Tommy Mello: And I used to keep up, but like he beat me four out of five. And today was different. I unzipped the paddle.
John Wilson: Oh yeah. Very
Tommy Mello: slowly. Then I go, where'd you get that? And I said, I picked it up. I threw the ball up and I sideswiped it and the ball hit the thing and just goes off the table and he goes, where'd you learn that?
Tommy Mello: And I go, somebody has been practicing and then he served it and I slugged it back. And he's holy shit. And all of a sudden he played a different game and he's very good. He was taking it easy on me for those couple of years. But, and then I started winning a lot more, it's, if you don't use that, I still beat most people, but that's the way I am, man.
Tommy Mello: I just, if I played my grandma passed away, but if I was playing my grandma, I wanted to beat her ass. It wasn't like I'm just playing for fun. It's not how I play. I play to win everything.
John Wilson: Fun is winning. So that makes sense.
Tommy Mello: That's my dad's doing. My dad made me, my dad used to Shove it in my face every time he won.
Tommy Mello: I was a sore loser growing up. I'm still not quite as bad as I was. I used to be like thrown out of a meet in wrestling, but if I lose, I can't stand it, but I'm better than I was. But I just, that's why I got this bracelet on aspire to be number one is because if you're not winning, shake and bake.
Tommy Mello: But. I just, I enjoy people that like to be at the top and they're competitive and they had to practice doing something. If you played the trumpet every day, that's great enough for me. Like you practiced every day to get better at something you had a passion. And if I can build this into your new passion of winning at a one, then we're all going to win together.
Tommy Mello: And if you're winning, I'm winning. That's why I'm okay with guys making 300 grand because they're making 300, 000, I know I'm winning. Cause that's how they'll build the performance bay.
John Wilson: I appreciate you. I appreciate you coming on and spend some time with us today, man. This was good. I feel like I got to know you better.
John Wilson: Obviously I got to know A1 better. This was cool. I'm like, I'm going to come out and sell some, I'm going to sling some garage doors. It sounds like a good time. Cincinnati
Tommy Mello: needs garage doors, baby.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way. If people want to catch up with you, where can they find you?
Tommy Mello: You should Facebook.
Tommy Mello: It's free. It's home service expert. I think there's a lot of really great people, a lot of different dynamics there. Tommy Mello dot com. I'm on Tik TOK, Instagram, LinkedIn X any type of social media you follow, you can find all my stuff on there. And then I do have a newsletter. It's free for the first few months.
Tommy Mello: I don't make any money off of it. It takes a lot of time. There's no marketing in it. I'm not selling anything in it. It's Tommy Mello dot com forward slash news, any WS. And then we got the event coming up that I promise is going to blow people's minds. We got Jocko. Yeah. We got Ellen Rohr. We got Darius Livers.
Tommy Mello: We got Sebastian with Rilla Voice, who's the AI expert. Yeah. And I've got Shawn Michael Crain, who's 3% body fat, just a machine. Just every part of your life and business, I think you'll learn a lot. It's , September 25th through the 27th in San Diego. If you go to freedomevent.com, this is something, I don't know if anybody's done events, but you don't make money in events.
Tommy Mello: This isn't something where this isn't a great rich, I'm already pretty doing pretty well, so this is really a way. Of giving back and that and this is a way of me connecting with more people and I feel like my superpower is my network and yeah, your network is your net worth. And if I could get to know more people, I don't care if you're big or small, I don't care if you're black, white, Cuban or Asian, old, young, male, female.
Tommy Mello: I don't give 2 shits. I care about networking with you and we can work together. And I'm sure there's some stuff, that I don't know. And if we figure out how to work together, the Rolodex becomes bigger and you network with more people, we're all going to win. And that's why I wrote the book, elevate, build a business where everybody wins.
Tommy Mello: And I truly believe our customers, our vendors, I get to win whether the coworkers get to win. Everybody should win.
John Wilson: Thanks for sharing it, man. And we'll add the we'll add the links to that stuff in the show notes. People want to check it out. Freedom of event sounds awesome. Thanks for coming on today, Tommy.
John Wilson: This was an awesome look into your mindset, into you and into A1 Garage. So this was awesome. I appreciate you taking the time.
Tommy Mello: I had a blast. Appreciate you guys hearing me rant.
John Wilson: Thanks, Tommy. All right, everybody tuned in next for our next episode of Owned and Operated.
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