Daryl
speaker
360 appearances
8 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 22 Jan
Daryl’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You focus on what I'm telling you and you implement these things or we're not going to work together.
And I said, you know, all right, Al. I used to start talking. He'd be like, stop. Let me finish. And I'm like, and we said it. We built manual after manual. And when things went wrong, he said, it's not in the manual. Put it in the manual. And he goes, you're not reading the manual every week. Go back to that. Two years into it, he showed me a picture of my truck. He took a picture.
He put it in black and white. He goes, what pops out to you that you're a garage door company? You got Angie's List, Yelp, the BBB. He goes, you got eight things you do, rollers, cables, bearings, crash doors, bottom rubber. He goes, this is really bad. He goes, your brand sucks. He goes, your stickers don't look like your billboards.
literally your signatures are all different when anybody emails me. He goes, every single thing, your valve pack looks nothing like your clipper. There's no coordination at all. I said, so what do you want me to do? We're $40 million. He goes, I want you to rebrand. He goes, you called Dan Antonelli with kick charge. And I called Dan Antonelli. He's like, it's going to be 40 grand.
I'm like, I'm already successful. And Dan goes, I'm telling you right now, let me just build you a brand. I said, can my face be on the side of the truck? Because it already was. And there's a whole reason, a story behind that. And he's like, these colors suck. The whole schematic sucks. And Dan built a new brand. We jumped. We became the most, we attracted affluent clients.
My guys still tell me the stories when they showed up in that van with the right, oh, by the way, all my shirts were different colors. They were just golf shirts with a logo. Al Levy said it's going to be all black from now on. These don't fade. Al Levy did this. And I owe him a lot, man. I owe him a lot. And dude, everything changed. The conversion rate went up. We started becoming a brand.
People started higher average tickets. They knew we were the best. They said, I know you guys aren't the cheapest, but you'll be here the same day and you'll cover your warranty. Everything changed. And it Al did not know the financial world, so he called Alan Rohr. And they taught us a lot about finance, but I didn't have the right CFO. That was the other game changer, getting the right CFO.
Boom, bottom line, bottom line, bottom line, bottom line. Now we're at 25% of the bottom line because of that side. And by the way, I'm not the best at balance sheets today. I got a master's degree in business.
Oh, we lived a long time because I always blamed it. We're growing, we're growing, we're growing. I'm reinvesting in the company. I literally told everybody, yeah, who cares about the bottom line? We're growing. We're putting it back in. That's what I hear a lot of people say.
Yeah, we're putting it back in. We're putting it back in. And Al goes, one day I called Al and I said, I've got a home equity line to make payroll. And he saw me writing checks for my home equity line back to make payroll. What year is this? This is 2018, 2019. Crazy. And I would never trim the fat. I say, we're going to need these guys. And he says, Tommy, he goes, I'm pretty worried.
And Adam comes to me and he goes, I'm pretty worried. And, uh, It was, I didn't realize people were stealing a lot of the parts. I didn't realize that we were totaling trucks left and right. I didn't realize any of these things. There was no, my insurance, I was double paying on leases. Nobody told me. And they were keeping the money.
I mean, literally, I had guys stealing, doing side jobs left and right. The business was not, it was just, there was a shadow that I couldn't see.
And we fixed it. We started printing money. Keegan actually came into town, and he looks, and I got all my financials of every market. And he starts highlighting stuff, and he looks at me. And he goes, Tommy, you need to close four markets today. And I go, dude, this is just past management. Like, I could turn it around. And he goes, Tommy, look at me.
You need to close these markets, do a relocation package. I'm going to show you how to do it. They need to close today. You are bleeding so bad.
You would be at 19.8% if you close these four markets. I closed them that day. I mean, you talk about what could go wrong, Murphy's Law. I've had it hit me on the face a thousand times, but here's the deal. I'm glad it all happened because I'll never make those mistakes again, ever. Like the lessons were not only hard, they were almost impossible. But I never wanted to quit.
I never said, dude, I don't want to go to work today. Like I'm done. I was a fighter. And I mean, a lot of people, you guys know this story. You're three feet from gold. You're one step away, one decision away, one hire away from just making it through. But some people give up.
And you'll get there, but you're going to be like in a nursing home.
He didn't jump in and do the work, which is so easy to do.
And then I find myself saying, I want you guys to go build me a plan. Give me three options. I want you to give me the SWOT analysis on each of them. And maybe I'll put a little curveball in there. And I'd like to see this and this. I like plan two, but let's bring. plan three, this piece to plan two. Absolutely. You do the work. You guys make plenty of money.
You got an equity incentive program, which is profit units. It doesn't need to be me anymore. I want to walk in a room and be like, there's no freaking way I can keep up with Chris and Daryl. These guys are just so much better at this one thing. that there are people in this company that I'm like, I don't stand a chance.
Showing 161–180 of 360 · page 9 of 18
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