The Home Service Expert Podcast
Q&A With Tommy - Refining Training Programs to Recruit and Retain A-Players
Fri, 22 Nov 2024
Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and Elevate, and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $200 million-plus home service business with over 700 employees in 22 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy answers your biggest questions about business intelligence, employee accountability, development programs...
Chapter 1: What is the importance of keeping commitments in business?
Then we're going to put them in a space where everybody sees it and you're accountable to your brothers and sisters of the company. And what is called, and Robert Cheney talked a lot about it, is commitment. this idea of being committed to what you say you're going to do. And I said, hey, guys, I need you to keep your commitments.
Not to me, not to your brothers and sisters in the company, but to yourself. You created this goal. You said you were going to do it. And then I'm tying those commitments, not just KPIs back to the company, but back to what it means for you. How much money are you going to make? Are you really setting goals for yourself, for your physical, for your faith, for your family?
for your future knowledge. And another thing I said at this meeting is I'm gonna work on me a lot harder so I can help you.
Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Chapter 2: How can accountability improve team performance?
Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299.
And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right.
Welcome back to the Q&A section of the Home Service Expert Podcast. I'm in San Diego. Bree's birthday was yesterday. She's 26 and we are going to rock and roll. We've got a wedding later tonight. Should be great. So lots of things to discuss today. I'm going to start out with just saying last week we had a internal meeting of all the marketing companies we work with in
including our own marketing team, the first thing I started with was, what are we responsible for? What are you responsible for? And we discussed a lot about accountability. We were making commitments to one another on what we were responsible. Who's responsible for what? We need to make sure we're booking every call. We need to make sure we're hiring for capacity planning.
We needed to make sure that we're using Dispatch Pro properly. We're writing big tickets on every job. They're responsible for a lot. And I told them, like Tom Howard told me, is, listen, if I had to fire my own mom for the best thing for the company, I would do that. I'd make sure she had a lot of money and lives her best life. But I'm making decisions based on what's good for the company.
And if a vendor does not fit in right, they're not good for the company. And so we're going to this next level of tracking. And we're working on the latest algorithms of Google. And there's a lot of things that we're responsible for as a company, like getting reviews, not just from Google, but from Yelp, Nextdoor, the BBB. Some of our vendors allow you to get reviews.
We need to make sure we're getting reviews on there. We need to make sure they're everywhere and often with pictures in them. The craziest thing I've been hearing lately is everybody's been like, telling me like they think they're going to make their next best hire and change the company. And here's my best advice.
Instead of pointing your two index fingers out at people, start pointing your thumbs at yourself. Literally, I think that you got to be accountable to what you're working on. You got to stay accountable. And I've never been more passionate about A1 Garage Door service. We've got so many meetings coming up to define the future of the business.
And 2025 is going to be a massive year, just breaking every single goal I've thought possible. It's never good enough for me. You know, I was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday, and actually it was Aaron Gaynor. You guys know who he is. And he said, when we get 360 reviews, especially owners, It's never good enough. Like you always want more. You're always looking for the next best thing.
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Chapter 3: What strategies help recruit A-players effectively?
So we use something called Power BI. There's another thing called Domo. There's grow.com. Those are three softwares where they pull in all the information into one dashboard that I can view. And actually, all the data, by the way, means nothing if you don't act on it.
So when you look at your data, and this is what happened with General Electric, because a lot of my team at the Tommy Mello Ventures came from GE. They get all these fancy reports, but they didn't do anything with them. It was like more reports, more reports, more reports. You've got to have a report that you glance at and build action steps of what to do about the big holes with the data.
So we're pulling in things from UKG, all about trying to learn about what's the turnover rate? When are the anniversaries and birthdays? What's the healthcare? There's all these KPIs that come out of that intact. I've never logged in. My CFO does all of that. And my, uh, you know, Leanne, which is a financial planning and analysis.
I got three people now with that and they're dissecting the numbers, but I'm getting a feed from that. And then service time, there's a lot of feeds. So I say a data aggregator is a big one. So Simon says, Hey Tommy, I watched a few of your shop tours and looks like you use apprenticeship stages.
You please walk through your training framework stages and what assessments and outcome trainings need to compete and move through the process to graduation. If you have any resources or people to look into, that would be great. So we're rebuilding the way we bring people in. A lot more personality profiles. We're checking every reference. We're really looking for unicorns now.
That's what we're going to be doing is all unicorns. So we're rebuilding all the technology and the process in which we get people and the different places. We're building this ultimate attribution. So first is get the right people. A lot of times they're not at Indeed Glassdoor as a recruiter. I want to be able to get in front of hundreds of A players a day and pick the cream of the crop.
And I'm willing to pay people a lot more than I've ever been. I'm willing to give them a lot to come on board because I got to shift the them to come to us, but it's going to be paid throughout the first year. So get the right people on first. Next thing is they do ride-alongs and they do training within their own market for a month. And they're trying to learn. We're trying to learn about them.
Do they show up on time? Are they sober? Are they scrolling on their phone the whole time? Do they smoke? Is their car messy? All these things. The first month is more of a trial, but they're learning the basics of garage tours. When they fly to Phoenix, they got to do this comprehensive test to find out how much they've learned. They get a bone
And then we're looking for them to learn three things that Al taught us. Technical, operational, and sales. And I hate the word sales because it's just really making the right offers to the right customers at the right time. We're teaching them gross close rate, how to sell financing, how to park in the right spots.
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Chapter 4: How do you measure revenue potential in a market?
If you're not booking 92%, if you don't have a high-ass average ticket, if you don't have a brilliant high conversion rate, if you're not have attribution perfectly figured out and your prices aren't at the top of the market, Everyone tries to do a service agreement. Tom Howard will tell you out of every client on service 10, he's only been able to find two that has monetized them correctly.
Everybody talks about it, but very few people could figure it out. So I wouldn't, it's kind of like, Ooh, I need a dream manager program. Ooh, I need that cool train you will program. Ooh, I need to do all this stuff. I think the main thing you need to do is have a good org chart manual, standard operating procedures. Figure out your price book.
Use your CRM like it's meant to be used, hopefully service type. I think get everything else dialed in. Make sure you've got new trucks. Make sure you understand how depreciation works. Make sure you go through Dan Antonelli for kick charge. Get the brand right. Get the SEO started. Get reviews coming in every day. Service agreements should be the very last thing.
And I know A1's been selling them. I think we've got 70,000 members now. It's a massive, massive amount of money coming in each week, each month, I should say. We charge $12.95 or $13.95, $12 or $13.95 a month. And we got work to do. And it's not an easy task. I think it could be a great one. if done properly, but I wouldn't focus on it until everything else is done right.
All right, now I got a lot of questions here. Let's see what we got. Does your performance pay for installers vary from service sales tax? Of course it does. Technicians got a scorecard that are based on average ticket, believe it or not. And that goes into conversion rate. We do look at memberships. We look at, did you use financing? Because financing tickets are higher.
We look at callback ratio and your average review. We pay a lot of attention to the scorecard and then they get a percentage of the total minus the parts. That's also how they move up in the company. There's three levels they can move up.
And then if they want to turn into a traveling tech with Matt team or on the verse team, or they want to move to a product specialist, they have to have the right scorecard. Then we look at turnover rate. Obviously we call that gross close. For installers, we do sold hours. So we look at a job and we give them kind of at a benefit of the doubt, this takes two hours, we'll give them an extra hour.
And then there's an opportunity to still sell if you're an installer and they get a higher See, the technician already sold everything. So if the installer goes behind him and sells more, we pay quite a bit more on that.
We're trying to incentivize Deco hardware, surge protectors, little things, adding a strut, an oversized bottom rubber, anything we can get the installers, but they just don't like to sell. Only like two of them out of like the 50 I got sell. So it's built like a mechanic with sold hours.
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Chapter 5: What should be considered before implementing service agreements?
Well, listen, this last few months, I've been getting testimonials from all my guys, my top guys. I've been getting their wives involved. You got to create a funnel. to get great people. Go onto your website. One of the things we're redoing is how can you apply here? It's massive.
On your ads, are you putting, we're hiring and have a QR code and say, if you know anybody looking for a great job, we're hiring. Just a little thing on all your marketing. Are you getting reviews on Indeed and Glassdoor? Because that's where your future employees, which I consider coworkers, go to find you. You know, these things are important and I don't think people take it very seriously.
You've got to figure out how to build a funnel and make sure there's a high conversion rate. Just like your marketing dollars, you need attribution. You need to find out how quick it is to respond to an application. Same things happen for employee leads. You got to look at it the same way as marketing leads. Listen, guys, I got Brie sitting here. We got a wedding later.
I got to get going, you know. The first thing they wanted to do was cancel this. And I'm like, we don't cancel the Q&As. It's an amazing group of people. And it wasn't being canceled for long term, just, hey, we're on kind of a trip, kind of a vacation. But it's a Friday. It's a workday. So here we are. I hope you guys get value. I want you to understand one thing.
When you go to the doctor and I go to the doctor and Bill goes to the doctor and Gina goes to the doctor and Rebecca goes to the doctor. Most likely the doctor is giving a different prescription depending on how you're feeling, you know, your age, how much you're working out, what your diet's like. Each and every one of you need a little bit of a different prescription.
Some of the things I say holistically, you need reviews, you need to get an oral chart, you need manuals, you need to get on the right CRM. I recommend new trucks with the right branding. But I don't have a one size fits all. The last thing I want to do is give you advice that might hurt your reputation. Or like I was talking about my buddy that did EOS, ruin your business.
I like to tell you that this is all generic. I'll tell you this. I was talking to Jim Leslie earlier. Jim Leslie, if you go to homeservicefreedom.com and just fill out a form there and talk to Jim. Jim's really good. He's worked with me at A1. He was my CMO. He just gives you these little things to turn. And he doesn't charge to just have a conversation. I think we should do a webinar.
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Chapter 6: How does performance pay impact employee motivation?
I think we should do a webinar each month of how these things are applied and where to start at the right time. But HSF, we're doing a lot of cool stuff, man. I'm going to be hiring fractional CFOs, getting you guys focused on profit, making sure you've got a plan to get reviews, building API hooks, getting the things like PinParrot and the other 80 vendors we have that we get you guys rebates.
I don't know if you guys understand, but just the program, you get my newsletter, you get the rebates on all the vendors we use. Another thing I wanted to say is I don't take a paycheck from HSF. I hope you guys understand I get paid zero. I hire more people to help your business.
And the facts are down the road, most likely the people that do the program and are successful that do all the right stuff and show up to the meetings I'm going to invest in. I mean, for me, it's a way to find out who's real or not. A lot of people, they talk the talk. They got all the ideas in the world.
Not a person on here out of the hundred on here right now don't have great ideas and thoughts. Very few of you do the work. Very few of you show up. Very few of you implement. So when I find somebody that's an expert implementer, I want to do business with them. So I hope you guys have a great day. I hope you have a great weekend. I hope you guys, I know there's a lot of issues.
This is a tough economy. We're going through an election. Interest rates are dropping. I think next year is going to be a great year. So appreciate you guys. If you guys have any more questions, I didn't get to all of them and I apologize. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash questions and leave them there and I'll get to them on the next round. You guys have a fantastic day.
Appreciate you. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization.
It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book.
Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.
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