Jeff Dudan
speaker
309 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jeff Dudan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So their ability to recover anything that they got into a service business is usually very attainable.
First of all, Undercover Boss likes to work in franchising because it's easier for an employee of a franchisee not to know who the CEO is. So they do a lot in franchising and they had somebody that dropped out. A lot of people turned them down. The contracts are like three inches. So, I mean, there's a lot of legal. So I'm going to go out and no matter what happens, you're going to record it all.
And the first time I'm going to see the show is when it plays in front of 7 million people. on national television and I have no say. And they're like, yeah, that's right. So a lot of people are, they're afraid of it. If there's not an immediate compelling reason to say no, your answer should always be yes. When you're an entrepreneur.
Now you could say, well, you know, the things you say no to blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, in an opportunity like this, you can't buy that kind of press. So they had to drop out and they like, if you can film in two weeks and get through the contracts. So what they do is they come out, they do a sizzle reel about four hours of filming. They put together what they think.
They send it to CBS. CBS turns down nine out of 10 of them. You got to make it through that round. And then you got to make it through contracting. And then you got to be willing to give away X number of dollars on the show. It's your money. And it's a big number. And then you got to commit to going and wherever and whenever. So that was how it happened. And then the experience was amazing.
And I would never tell how they do the show, even though my confidentiality is long since up. I don't want to ruin it for them, but let me just tell you, I mean, at first people start sniffing out that is this undercover boss? But the production of it is such that they do a great job creating the scenario where these very real conversations can happen. And the conversations are all real.
They really are. Now, how they get those out on time, whatever, that's their little secret sauce. But it is exhausting. The more drama, the better. So if they can wake me up early and say, we want to shoot you getting out of bed and pretending to call your wife and blah, blah, blah. And then they'll take you for an hour and stand you in the rain before you shoot and ask you questions. Yeah.
And then they'll take you at lunch and do the same thing. Then they'll take you after the shoot and do the same thing. Then they'll keep you up till 10. Over the course of time, they're trying to see if they can break you a little bit, I think. Now, that's not what they said, but it was clear that they're really trying to get soundbites.
And I went into with the approach, the saying, the only way that I can have control over what's said is only say things that I'm comfortable with them using. And by the way, you can probably tell by now, the filter between my brain and my mouth is paper thin. And it's like a coffee filter that's been used. So 75% of the things that popped into my head, I'm just like, you're not going to say that.
You're just not going to say that. Because it would have been, they would have put it together in such a way that would have made great television, but it would have made me look like, you know, the worse you look, the probably better it is. So what happened is we did five segments. I got busted twice. They threw out one that I got busted.
And they said at the end of it, they said, you know, you have four segments that are so good. Usually they have to go film an extra three minutes at a dog park because they don't have enough content. They said, you have five segments that people would kill to have. And as a result of that, we had a very positive show. And it was very emotional. We had great outcomes with the people that were on it.
One of the ladies, Danielle, Half the stuff that happened to her and her family, they didn't even show. I mean, they have a psychologist waiting offstage after the reveal and all that, but she really needed the help. She had kids and a special needs child, and the husband was no longer alive for a
really horrible reason and it was just and they were getting ready to be homeless you know and she calls her daughter on the phone like after the show and she's on speakerphone and and the daughter's like you mean we're not going to have troubles anymore they were getting ready to lose their place they were living and she ended up we set her up as a remote call center person so she could work from home take care of her special needs child who was near the place where she needed to get him care and
They had never been on a vacation, so they rented a van and they drove California. That's all they wanted. We're like, we're going to send you here. And they're like, no, just rent us a van and give us the money. We're going to drive around California together as a family. We're going to see that. She was a top performer. And for two years in the call center, we paid her rent.
We covered her rent so she didn't have living expenses. And at the end of it, two years almost to the day, she ended up getting married and buying a home, which was her goal. So the whole goal was to set her up with income and reduce her expenses so she could save for a down payment on a house and also give her that stability of W-2 so she could qualify for a loan. And it just worked.
And she was great. And she was a top performer. And so that's when it goes well. And that's what it's all about.
People can't make decisions against a framework that they've never seen. The first thing I did was I got into Vistage in 2009. I had an incredible mentor who had built Husqvarna North America from $29 million to $530 million through a dealership network. So he was the perfect coach for me. And then at some point I got into something called YPO, which you're probably familiar with.
And I got into YPO. And as I moved up through leadership in YPO and I got into a bigger room, I realized that everybody in there had sold a business and that it wasn't that scary and that your identity and your role could be separate. My whole identity was wrapped up in two, really three identities, the founder and CEO of AdvantiClean, father, husband, and coach. So That was it.
But the ability to say, you know, I've been running this business for 24 years and 11 months. We're one of the largest, what I would consider high quality assets at that point in time that was available for the market because private equity had come in and really gone through the home service space and acquired a lot of businesses. There just wasn't a lot of inventory out there at the time.
So now we're in a space where maybe the demand is exceeding the supply. Multiples were high. I was 50. We were comfortable. We didn't need the money necessarily. But I also knew that the company needed to go through a real investment. It needed some change. It needed some life pumped into it. And
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