The Home Service Expert Podcast
The Homegrown Advantage: Why Training From Scratch Beats Hiring Experience
Fri, 17 Jan 2025
Chris Lee and Daryl Kelly are long-time business partners and entrepreneurs, known for co-founding Solgen Power, a solar energy company that rapidly scaled to over $200 million in revenue through innovative sales strategies and operational excellence. In this episode, we talked about scaling operations, maintaining margins, long-term partnerships, home-grown talent development...
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
don't price yourself to impress others. Right. And that goes for what you pay and what you charge. Right. Cause the exact equivalent, what you charge, if you're trying to be the cheapest, all you're doing is trying to buy them by discounting, right. To get the next customer and they will go for the next person. That's that much cheaper about price. You made it about price.
And the same thing goes for employees, right? Like, as you said, like when you make it all about compensation from a financial, they'll go for the next 10 bucks or whatever else. And it's like, that is one thing that so many people get wrong, pricing their product correctly and paying their people correctly and realizing that you compensate way more than just monetarily.
Chapter 2: How do you compensate employees beyond salary?
You can compensate them in culture and opportunity. So much. Yeah.
so much value 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
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, guys, we're doing a double podcast here. Chris Lee and Daryl Kelly are here. We've got the founder podcast. He's the home service expert.
We actually just rebranded.
What is it now?
Next level pros, baby. Next level pros. Let's go. Come on.
So I'll just do an intro. You guys know I've got the garage door business. Things are going really, really well. I don't care what size you get to. There's new challenges. People are like, man, I'd love to be where Tommy's at. But it comes through two decades of failure. And still, the anxiety and stress. Luckily, I can take it on the chin. It doesn't really affect me.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do entrepreneurs face in growth?
We all had shirts on our backs and food on the table and good loving family or whatnot, but they've all built something pretty, pretty amazing. It's interesting what you're talking about. The whole premise of our new show with Next Level Pros is that no matter where you're at, there's always the next level. You always have the ability to level up.
And frankly, success and happiness come from when you are leveling up. When you're plateauing or leveling down, no matter how much money, how much success you've had...
that's stressful another truth you spoke was um problems right i remember thinking i'm not good at business because i can't get rid of these problems and then i went to a tony robbins business mastery event and one of the biggest takeaways was you always have a new set of problems as you grow new set of opportunities new set of problems and those are always changing once i understood that it changed everything for me did your outlook yeah
You know, I just played a video to my entire company, 800 people. And it's called Bring the Fire. We do it once a month. And the video, I took 13 minutes, made it into three. Giuseppe edited it. And it said, everyone wants a great life. You want to fall in love. You want a great sex life. You want to have your faith. You want to have the best body.
You want the red seat apart when you walk in the room. But what heart are you willing to accept? What struggle are you willing to accept? Because studies show over and over again, None of these things come without their obstacles. Everybody wants the views. No one wants to take the hike. Absolutely. And not a lot of people are cut out for this.
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Chapter 4: How to build a strong business partnership?
Everybody says, I'm going to quit my nine to five because I want to be an entrepreneur. But that comes through. The number one word that comes to mind is delayed gratification. People want the possessions. They want to show off to their friends. They want to keep up with the Joneses. One of my best things is you will never save money.
If you can't save money at $50,000 a year, good luck at 200, 300. Money really does become... When they say money is not the... The love of money is the root of all evil. But the fact is that people secretly love money. They love the attention. They love the Ferraris. They love showing out to their friends. In fact... I'm getting in the best shape of my life.
I love walking in and people being like, what the hell is going on? But the main thing though, is I feel incredible. Like literally, like I feel like I could, I could take on the world. And this thing about faith, fitness and family, I always had the finance figured out, but I was missing the other three. And I was not only off balance, but I was like really tilted to one side.
And now I'm just trying to fix it. And I'm, the more I work on me,
literally the more i work on me the better i am for everybody yeah it's pretty crazy how like everything really you know trickles over to one discipline always trickles over the other right like when you especially when you start getting your fitness in check and your relationships in check right like that helps you be a better influencer on the side of the business right or in your society or whatever maybe and like that's
That's really, I mean, the culture that we've always been about in creating, like when we were creating SoulGen, it was always like focusing on the whole human approach. And if we can actually develop these people more than just their financial aspect, more than just a paycheck, right? Like help me better spiritually, help me be better physically or whatnot.
Like the loyal, the trust that was built within our organization is absolutely incredible. So, I mean, I think that's probably one of the biggest keys that most business and entrepreneurs miss, right? Like they're just about solving financial problems rather than the other aspects.
How did you guys, you know, I'm curious, you guys, you basically said you guys are like soulmates. I mean, when you guys started in business, tell me a little bit about your relationship. Who handles what?
How'd you guys grew together? So it's interesting. We always refer to, well, I refer to Daryl as my work wife. Right. Like we have to figure out how to work together the same way I have to work with my wife. Just no sex. Right. And it's been interesting. We've known each other for a long time. We first met when I was, I think, 13. Daryl was 15. His oldest brother married my oldest sister. Wow.
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Chapter 5: What is the importance of culture in business?
We got two alphas just, just, and so Daryl has some alpha in him. It's just not as crazy as me. And so I think some of the struggles over the time is like, I steal a lot of the limelight, right? I'm the loud one. I'm the crazy one in the room. Even though Daryl, like if I'm out of the room, Daryl is loud and crazy. Just, you know, it's, it's hard to compete with a Tommy or.
I think, I think what's good is, is like work with people like you. It's like, you guys are very extreme. And like that, it's like an edge that you get from someone like you guys. Right.
And so for me, like, I feel like I have a lot of ambition, a lot of drive, a lot of vision, but I feel like with Chris, it gives me like that edge, that little bit more craziness that you just don't get from anyone else. And I think that's what I've been able to benefit from is like keeping Chris in a position where he's always like a little crazy in his thoughts and his ideas. Oh, the dreams.
I'll tell you what, when I'm talking to my team, they're like, what's up dude like you don't dream like anybody i'm dreaming like forget the solar system forget our galaxy i'm dreaming about like every galaxy like they're like wait a minute why aren't you happy we just set a record record day record week record month record quarter And I'm like, I am happy. I really am. And I don't show it right.
And literally, Luke, my COO, talked to me yesterday. He's like, a lot of people take you. They don't know you like I know you. And you just bug in and you say, what's going on here? And I say, you're right. I should say, download me on this. Catch me up. And I always take the technician side because literally I'm a technician at heart.
Seven years in the field before I owned the company, but I was also the tech. And I'm like, my dreams are not that crazy. And I told the guys I was talking to yesterday, I said, For some reason, most of my dreams come true. It's like I manifest them, I reverse engineer them. And it's hard to work with people like us.
It's very, very, very hard because they're like... We rub people raw in a wrong... Oh, yeah. And we're very rare. And it's bad. It could be very, very toxic. And it's important that we recognize this because coming from a place of gratitude is hard sometimes because this is... I'm always driving forward because I'm like, who cares if we fall? Get back up. And everybody's like, it's not time.
We're not ready. I'm like, I don't care. But here's what I've learned recently. What if I sat with each one of my direct reports and went through and made it their idea and actually got their buy-in? And when we sit in a room together, they say, yeah, we've talked about this. It's go time. Rather than just saying, hey, I got an idea. Let's go. They're like, you get a lot of ideas.
So I got to be careful to pull one off and put one in.
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Chapter 6: How do you develop home-grown talent?
Oh, yeah.
And so I feel like a lot of times I'm like, no, no, no, no. Or the other part of it is like, I'll institute or I'll put in a place, a new policy, right? And because Chris is such a loud voice, everyone thinks Chris is the one behind everything. And so he always gets like the blame.
Oh, yeah, dude. I don't know if you've ever experienced this. But yeah, in our organization, right? If something doesn't go right, it's my fault. Yeah.
It's a great position for me to be in. I'm never wrong.
That doesn't happen with me because I've kind of shielded myself and say, listen, guys, I'm not going to do the firing. I'm not going to put together. I stay away from things, but I'm like, I always say I live on Mars and I'm looking at the volcanoes, the earthquakes, the hurricanes, and I zoom in, but I zoom back out pretty quick. I'm not afraid to top grade.
In fact, I had a meeting with my COO three weeks ago, took him to my house. And I said, listen, man, I'm going to be quite frank. You're the bottleneck in this business right now. You got 10 direct reports. I want to whiteboard with you. I said, how many people are you micromanaging? I said, then we need to top grade those. I said, you might be better as a chief revenue officer.
And I wasn't a threat. I said, you're in it to win it, right? I said, your best talent is creating revenue. You're the best sales guy on the team. You understand the best way to communicate these things to the techs. And he said, dude, he like said, I'm going to go to work and I will have a plan within two weeks. And he shifted all kinds of things.
Yeah.
And he did the work. And luckily, I have people like that on my team I can be really honest with. Right. Because I can't do that with everybody. They'd be broken.
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Chapter 7: What are the keys to scaling a business effectively?
17.
17. So it's kind of been your thing for a very long time, right? Like the one thing saying no to pretty much everything along the way.
I said yes to too many things, but I realized that's an ADHD thing. And I think all of us have that entrepreneurial. And we say, man, that guy's flipping houses. I could do that. And then you take away from the one thing paying you the most. Because there's times that you say, we have the power to do anything we put our minds to. But what if we stayed focused on the one thing?
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I think there's so many different paths to success, not one person, right? Like I can't line my path to success and say like, this is the reason why for you or me or whatnot.
And so like you 17 years for us, it was like, we said yes to so many different things, so many different industries, so many different ideas for so many years until it was like, all right, let's take everything that we've learned, concentrate it into one and just go. Yeah. And it's amazing to your point, right?
When you can say no to everything and yes to just one thing and just go deep and wide, it's incredible what you can accomplish in a very short period of time.
The question I have for you, what were some of the paradigm shifts that transformed you from where you started to who you are today in your business?
Well, the number one thing is it's very rare you meet an entrepreneur that actually learns from their mistakes and doesn't make the same mistake twice. I was able to reflect and be like, that was dumb. And so many people, like the biggest thing by far is I've kind of put my arms in the air 150 times over again and said, I need help.
And I have this ability to go find the best of the best and I pay up. I don't discount. I buy like I want to be bought from. So I've got, right now I've got seven consultants I work with. And some of them are speaking coaches. I got the trainer. You know, I just say, like I was on this podcast about two weeks ago in Vegas. And the guy says, I feel like you're in a time machine.
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Chapter 8: How do you maintain margins while growing?
Absolutely. That's the fear is like, what if I hire this guy and he takes my whole team and he starts to, I don't have that gene in me. Like, I'm not worried if I train them. What if they leave? What if they stay? So I think the number one thing that's changed dramatically is I started becoming an avid reader. I started a podcast seven years ago. I started asking for help. Success leaves clues.
I asked service team, who has the best conversion rate in HVAC? I fly my ass out there and visit them. I said, who has the best booking rate? Flew out to Memphis, Tennessee two months ago, visited them.
Who are you asking these questions to?
I'll go to Service Titan because they're my CRM and they've got the data. They'll make an introduction if the person allows us. They got to say, sure, you can share my data and tell them I'm the best. They take my phone calls usually. If I want to find out who's the best at SEO, I'll search roofing repair Phoenix or HVAC repair Phoenix. And then I'll see who's ranking organically, number one.
I'll do a couple of things, AH refs. I'll say, how the hell do they do this? I'll knock on their door. I'll buy them all lunch. I'll say, can I talk to your VP of marketing? And they'll say, yes, because I say, I'm not going to compete with you. I want to help you guys. We could be referral partners. And I come from a place of what's in it for them.
And that's my superpower is like, I'm relentless. I don't care if you say no to me. You're going to say yes eventually.
I think that's such a key to anybody that's listening to this show right now. Like the relentless pursuit of education, improvement, right? Like not settling with where you're at and just always looking for that next edge, that next ability to level up. Who knows more than me, right? Like I think the thing that I suffered from most in my first business that failed was
was thinking I knew everything and not going to other people for help, right? Like that's where I struggled in my 20s, right? I just thought I knew everything. I was pretty intelligent, high IQ, successful in everything that I had done up until that point. And I was like, because of it, When things were hard, I didn't go to anybody else. I just tried dealing with it.
Instead of going to a Tommy or a Daryl and being like, dude, help me. I don't know what to do in this type of situation. Or how do I get through this? How do I improve? Whatever it may be. I think that's probably one of the most key things to anybody that's been successful.
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