Latest / Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes / How to Grow a $10,000,000 Home Service Business

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How to Grow a $10,000,000 Home Service Business · Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes

0:00
I started a lawn care business that did $75 million in revenue this year and was ranked in the top 100 landscaping businesses in the country.
0:09
And today I'm going to share with you what exactly
0:12
you can do to build a 10 million dollar home service business and i'm going to tell you these learnings from all my mistakes that i made and so if you're trying to go from a million dollars in annual revenue all the way to 10 million dollars in annual revenue these are exactly the things i would do and i have made every single one of these mistakes so hopefully you can avoid them save a lot of money and grow a 10 million dollar business all right the very first thing
0:38
Don't add services until your customer acquisition cost requires it.
0:44
You can always add a service and make sense of it because it will add more revenue in the short term.
0:49
But in the long term, it adds complexity.
0:51
It's harder to train technicians.
0:52
It's harder to train admin staff.
0:54
It's harder to train managers.
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And it adds a bunch of complexity that usually...
0:58
When you get to $2 or $3 million in annual revenue, you start realizing it's making the business so hard to run and you have to undo a bunch of services.
1:06
I believe that in home services, one of the biggest mistakes people make is they add too many services.
1:11
And they do it because customers are asking them to do the service and they're willing to give them money.
1:15
And at the beginning, you're just starving and you add more services.
1:19
And so if you're like, well, I'm a landscaper, all of a sudden you're doing bush trimming, you're doing pergolas, you're doing patios, you're doing walls, you're doing fire pits, you're doing mulch, you're doing flowers, you're doing hedges, you're doing everything.
1:30
And you ultimately have 10 or 15 different services you offer in one business.
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In my opinion, I don't offer one more service until my customer acquisition cost tells me I have to.
1:42
Customer acquisition costs, or CAC, as it's referred to, is the amount of money you have to spend to get one new customer.
1:49
You have to spend that money on ads to get one new customer.
1:53
First off, I've got to know that number.
1:55
But as I track that number, if it goes high enough, that is the only time, in my opinion, that a home service should add new services.
2:04
Now, in my opinion, there's just a few reasons or a few ways that your customer acquisition costs gets too high.
2:09
Number one, you stink at marketing and there's ways to solve that, get a good agency, hire someone that can do it right or learn that skill.
2:16
But the other ones are more common.
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Number two is your off season.
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You have some sort of seasonality in your home service business and your customer acquisition cost goes through the roof.
2:25
during your winter or during your off season.
2:28
And so it sometimes makes sense to add an additional service during that period of time.
2:32
For example, at Augusta Lawn Care, a lot of us during our winter season, that's when our leads drop off, our revenue drops off.
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And if we were to keep spending money on ads, our customer acquisition costs would five to 10X compared to the spring rush.
2:45
So we added Augusta Lights for all our owners at Augusta Lawn Care to be able to do Christmas lights.
2:51
Because at that time I can get a customer a lot cheaper for Christmas lights than I can for mowing, or treatments, or property cleanups, our core services.
3:00
So the only time to add a new service is when your customer acquisition cost is high, which a lot of times is in your off season.
3:07
Now the third reason why your customer acquisition cost might be really high,
3:11
is because you're in a really small market.
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So if you have 5,000 people that live in your local area and you have a $2 million business, the likelihood of getting a $10 million is very low because you already have control of so much of the market.
3:23
You already have them all as customers.
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And so the only way to really grow revenue is add more services and get more money from the existing customers that you have.
3:32
And so that's the only other reason why you should add services.
3:36
And I'm saying all of this because the vast majority of home service businesses add too many services, add way too much complexity.
3:43
And they never grow a business that can run without the owner or can scale because there's so much complexity when you start adding more services.
3:51
You add more services, you need to add more trucks.
3:54
You add more trucks, you need to have more shop space.
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When you have more shop space, you have more overhead.
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When you have more overhead, now all of a sudden you have no profit.
4:01
So there's like this vicious loop of training technicians more, training people on the phone more, training sales people more, simply because you've added more services.
4:09
So I wanna avoid adding more services at all costs.
4:13
And you're like, well, when is my customer acronym cost so high,
4:16
whether it be during the off season or I'm in a small market or I stink at marketing.
4:21
When does it make sense to add a new service?
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Give me a number.
4:23
Okay, I'll give you an equation.
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And if it goes over your head, just close your eyes and the feeling will soon pass.
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If your customer acquisition cost is more than one fourth of what you profit from the customer, that's when I would give you a pass to start adding other services.
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Okay, so let's do some math.
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If I make $1,000 of profit from a customer in the year, I don't wanna spend more than $250 to acquire that customer.
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And remember, that's in profit, $1,000 in profit.
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So that might be, let's just call it four or $5,000 in revenue, but let's just say it's $1,000 of profit that I make from the customer.
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I don't wanna spend more than one-fourth of that on customer acquisition cost.
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So I don't wanna have to spend more than $250 to get that customer that gives me $1,000 of profit.
5:13
Now let's take another example.
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Let's say you're doing mowing or a smaller service and you only make, let's call it $1,000 in revenue and it's $200 of profit.
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Again, I don't want to spend more than $50 customer acquisition costs to get those new customers in my business.
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Then that can be tough.
5:33
That can be tough.
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But during your off season, you're probably not going to get that.
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During this peak of spring rush, you're going to get that all day long.
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That's why you should spend most of your marketing dollars during that time.
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So again, I am trying to convince you to not add more services because the vast majority of people add services way too quickly.
5:49
And I should only be looking at my customer acquisition cost to determine whether or not I should add more services.
5:56
Number two, and don't get hung up on the math there.
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That is a dirty rule of thumb for you to determine whether or not your customer acquisition cost is too high and whether adding more services is even reasonable.
6:07
Because if you can get more customers for 30 or 40 bucks and you're making 500 or $1,000 of profit every single year from that customer, you should just keep doing that service.
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Don't keep adding other services and distracting yourself and diluting your marketing message because you have all these services instead of your main core service that you have a good customer acquisition cost.
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All right, number two.
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Don't build around a key person.
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Now, I am guilty of this.
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I offered 10% of Augusta Lawn Care to my first employee.
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That 10% today would be worth almost $5 million at last year's valuation.
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And the reason I almost made this mistake was because...
6:47
This is my first employee as a technician.
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And I thought, okay, he'll eventually become an operations manager, but I thought he was going to leave when I had like three or four employees.
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And I offered him 10% of the business if he would stay.
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And fortunately he rejected the offer and he ended up leaving.
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But the bottom line was I had built the business around him.
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And so the way that we did our services, what services we offered, what equipment we had, which trucks we had was all built around him.
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And this is a temptation or a trap that many fall into when you have a few employees.
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You get one all-star and you're like, I will do everything to keep this person.
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I will build the business around them.
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But it is very rare that an employee stays with you for 10 or 15 years.
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One thing that is for certain, if you're in business in 15 years, you will still be around.
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Build the business around you, your goals, and the vision you have for the business.
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And if you don't know what that vision is, get real good clarity on it so that when other people come along trying to give you their vision or what they want to happen in the business, you can say no.
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The likelihood that your best employee, your first or second, third employee that you just love so much, is going to be with you in 15 or 20 years is near zero.
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It's very rare.
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Don't build the entire business around them.
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Build it around what the goals of the organization are, the type of trucks you buy, the services you offer, the uniforms that you wear should be dictated by the systems and the vision of the business, not one key person.
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And honestly, a lot of times, the reason that you have that key person that everything hinges on is just because of a lack of systems.
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And that's what it was for me.
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I didn't have systems to keep people accountable.
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I didn't have pay for performance.
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So when he works so hard, like the equivalent of two or three people out in the field, I just do whatever he wanted.
8:33
Like if you want a different truck, if you want different type of,
8:36
of uniforms.
8:36
If you want, oh, you want to offer a new service?
8:39
Great, we'll do that.
8:40
I was building the business around a person because I didn't have the systems to go create great employees.
8:46
I didn't have the systems to create a great culture that other high performers could rise up inside the business.
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And so a huge note of caution is don't build the business around your employees.
8:57
As much as I care about them, I want them to have a great culture.
8:59
I want to listen to them.
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I want them to feel heard.
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I want to create systems that create
9:05
great talent, not taking great talent and then molding the whole business around it.
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Because if they leave, you're in a world of hurt.
9:12
And that happened to me.
9:13
That individual left.
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They are phenomenal.
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Best employee I've ever had in the field, bar none.
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However, I built the business around them and the business was hurt when they left because I had not created systems that aligned with the mission of the business.
9:26
They aligned with the mission of this person and what they wanted and their objectives.
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And I almost gave up a big chunk of the business to someone that ended up leaving.
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All right.
9:39
Third thing I would do differently if I was growing a $10 million business starting today, whether I was at a million or 100,000 in revenue, it doesn't matter.
9:47
If you want to get to 10 million, this is the third thing.
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Align the goals of the business with the employees.
9:55
You might know the goal you have for the business, whether it be monetarily or you're trying to do something for the community, jobs or something like that.
10:02
That's great.
10:02
All right.
10:03
But if your employees don't care about your goals, which most of them don't, they care about their own goals, which by human nature is totally normal,
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I need to align their goals with the business's goals.
10:15
And here's the thing, it is unlikely that you will take their goals and change their goals to match your goals.
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That will rarely happen.
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And almost every business owner, the reason you get so frustrated is you're like, why will they not work hard as hard as me?
10:28
Why will they not be efficient?
10:30
Why do they take all these breaks?
10:31
Why do they not make more profit?
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Why are they taking so long on this job?
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That's what you think.
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And the reason that you get so frustrated is because you're trying to take their goals and mold their goals and change their goals to match the businesses.
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And you're like, well, wait a second, Mike, you just said that you don't want to change the business's goals to match their goals.
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You're right.
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But right in between, there can be alignment.
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And that is, how can I make sure that the business's goals align with the goals of the employee?
11:00
So it's not like I am trying to change the business's goals to match theirs.
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I'm not trying to change their goals to match the goals of the business.
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I'm trying to ask, where is there some crossover and alignment between the goals of the business and the goals of the employee?
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And this is where money comes into play.
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Because most people show up for some reason,
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Because most employees to some degree, they're showing up for a paycheck.
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And yes, there's a lot of other things inside of a job.
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I get that.
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Benefits, culture, rank, position, skills, yes.
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But a lot of technicians specifically, they need money.
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Let's not try to shy away from that.
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And so if I can align the goals of the business financially with the goals of the employee financially and make sure that the harder they work, the more money they make, and the more money they make for the organization and for the business, the more money they make,
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then we're all winning.
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Then we can all speak the same language.
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This is what I call pay for performance or P for P. And I've created a book about this, a free course about this.
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But at the end of the day, if you are paying people based on how long they take, you should not be surprised that they take a long time to do menial tasks.
12:07
Cause you're incentivizing that the longer the job takes, the more money they make.
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Why not just align the incentives of the employee to be where they want to get the job done as fast as possible
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so they can make more money.
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They wanna do the job at a high quality standard so they make more money.
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And then by them doing that, you make more money.
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The business makes more money.
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And now we're all talking the same language.
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Cause they're getting paid by the hour and you're getting paid by the job.
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They're going as slow as possible because they make more money the longer the job takes.
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You want them to go as fast as possible because you make more money the shorter the job takes.
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Just align everything to where the faster they work, the more efficient they are, the more time they stop wasting,
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they make more money just the same way that the business makes more money.
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You could tie this into incentives around reviews or upsells or percentage of revenue, but give them some motivation that aligns the goals of the business with their own goals.
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And if you're like, well, they're not really money motivated, you've got to figure out a way
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whether it be stages of success, recognition, benefits, incentives, ways to figure out what their goals are using your one on one meetings with them and figure out how to create systems inside the business that align their goals with the goals of the organization, whether it be more upsells, more reviews, more revenue, whatever it might be.
13:25
We've got to think in terms of what are the goals of the employee and how can I make sure that when they show up to work every single day, they can accomplish those goals.
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by accomplishing the goals of the business and now we all speak the same language because now i want the job done efficiently as possible at a high quality standard and they do too because they make more money and they're able to achieve their goals and being able to connect how them making more money gets them closer to their goals in life is the job of the manager number four if i was what would i do differently if i was going for a million to ten million dollars is i would go all in on technology
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Okay, get yourself a CRM.
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make sure that it can talk to AI.
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So using what's called MCP access or APIs, you can now use an agent like Claude, ChatGPT, you name it, and just chat with the software without having to go in there and run spreadsheets and run reports and figure out which are my lowest performing customers and which services are most profitable.
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Now you just talk to your agent and because of the MCP or API access, it goes in there and it's connected.
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Think of an MCP access like a USB port.
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that connects to everything else inside the software.
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And so now, instead of having to run reports or do a bunch of price analysis and figuring things out, you just ask your agent a question and immediately, assuming that your CRM has an MCP or API, it should be able to give you really good relevant data.
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And that's the advantage of technology is to be able to actually know what's going on inside of your business.
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So when it comes to pricing, when it comes to which services to offer, which customers are your best customers, you actually know the data
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And the only way to really know that without spending tons of time or hiring an entire person for doing data analysis.
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Is to ensure that your software is AI enabled, that you can speak to your agent and through an MCP or OAuth or API access, get into your software and be able to give you all that data.
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Cause every single day inside of like homework, for example, a company that has 10 employees is having thousands of data points.
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contacts with customers, clocking in and out, putting notes on a job, completing jobs, doing upsells, sending invoices, sending estimates, thousands of data points every single day.
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And an MCP or API access allows you to extract all of that rich data and then be able to give you actionable advice inside your business.
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And it is incredible.
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And so I would go all in on technology.
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I would use credit cards on file.
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I would make sure that before someone ever does business with me, I have a card on file.
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They should never, I should never be setting foot on someone's property on a big project if they have not paid a deposit and have a card on file or an ACH on file.
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And I should never be waiting to get paid after a job is done.
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I should know that when the job is done, I can charge their card because they already have it on file.
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And I should make sure that I use technology to get that card on file during the estimate acceptance process.
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There shouldn't be a bunch of back and forth after someone accepts an estimate trying to get a card on file.
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It should be all baked into the process of estimate acceptance.
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Use technology, go all in on it.
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And if you're like, well, I don't believe in AI or technology.
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I'm not really good at this thing.
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Technology has disrupted every single industry.
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And it's coming for home services.
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And you either get on the bus and you ride the wave or you're going to be the one that gets left behind.
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You're like, oh, I'm going to stick to my old guns.
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Look at every big business today that's doing over $10 million in annual revenue.
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And they are embracing technology.
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They're embracing AI.
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They're embracing these ways of creating reports and using the data in their business to make really good decisions.
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And if you don't do that, you'll be left behind.
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And I don't say that to fear monger you.
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I say that to encourage you to ride the wave.
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Technology has always been a bolster.
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It has been a divider.
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It has allowed the haves to get more and the have nots to make less.
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And we can complain all day long that's not fair and that's not equal.
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But at the end of the day, technology will continue to get improved and those that use it will continue to win.
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And I want you to win.
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So use technology.
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Number five, be humble and learn from everyone.
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The thing that keeps most people around one to two, $3 million in annual revenue is they fail to learn skills.
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And I'll talk about which skill that is in just a second.
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But every single junction and stage of business is simply gaining a skill.
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The only thing that is separating you from where you're at today and where you want to go
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is skill acquisition.
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It is gaining more skills.
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So if you're trying to go from 100,000 to 500,000, you just lack the skill of marketing and sales.
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If you're trying to go from 500,000 to a million, two million, you just lack the skill of management and hiring and getting new talent and training them and making sure your technicians are happy and doing one-on-one meetings and being a good manager.
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And so the reason that most people will never acquire the skill is because they are too proud to realize that they lack in some area.
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And the thing that has served me the most is realizing that the only thing I need in life to grow my business, become a better leader, is more skills.
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In order to gain that skill, I must realize my deficiency and then humble myself that someone else has it and I can acquire it.
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So whether I need, I need to go get a coach, whether I need to listen to a podcast, a book, I need to get around in the right room, a conference, whatever it might be, bluecollarsummit.com.
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Let's go get around other contractors that are trying to improve themselves, get in the same room as other people and learn from them.
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That's the whole objective of skill acquisition is simply finding the person that already has the skill.
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There is someone else that knows Facebook ads.
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There is someone else that knows sales.
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There is someone else that knows marketing.
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There's someone else that knows all about this software thing and this AI thing.
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You just gotta go get that skill from them.
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If that means you gotta hire them, if that means you gotta hire a coach, if that means you gotta go to a conference, if that means you gotta listen to a podcast that you don't understand half of it, if it means going and talking to your competitors or going and shadowing other people in the industry, you gotta do whatever you can to gain skills.
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At all costs, I have paid thousands of dollars per hour to talk to people.
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All because there was a skill that I knew they had that I lacked and I needed to get it.
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Be humble and learn from everyone.
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People that are ahead of you, people that are behind you, people that are in different industries, people that are doing things completely in completely different industries.
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Not even like home service adjacent, just like completely different industries.
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Be able to learn from them, humble yourself and realize they know something that I don't because they build a bigger business.
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They know something that I don't because all their employees stay.
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They know something that I don't because every single time they get up in front of their team, everyone listens.
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They're not looking at the floor, they're not laughing at them, they're not saying negative things, they're listening.
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Like, there is something about that leader I need to acquire.
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But that takes humility.
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And most people are too proud to ever realize that other people have all the skills they need to get to where they wanna be at.
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Number six, treat employee acquisition like customer acquisition.
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So when we look at customer ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, et cetera, we all kind of figured out, hey, you gotta make sure that the customer knows how you're different than everyone else.
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And so we have a hook and then we have a meet and then you have CTAs inside of our ads.
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But yet somehow our job ads, when it comes to getting employees,
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They look like everyone else.
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There's no reason why anyone would think that your place of business offers any different compensation plan, any different type of benefit, how your culture is different, whether or not you add any career progression or ways to move up inside the company.
20:56
You advertise to your employees like the dumbest customers.
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The customers you do not want is how you're advertising to employees.
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Your job ads don't portray why your place of business is better.
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And guess what?
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I believe if you're watching this video,
21:11
You have an incredible business that people would want to work for, but the way that you advertise it stinks.
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I believe there are customers, and for some people, they're just so bad at advertising, they can't communicate that they're so much better than everyone of their competition.
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The same thing is true with employees, though.
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If you can't make it clear in a job ad why you're better than everyone else, the top talent that can have 10 job offers tomorrow
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How are they, why are they gonna come work for you?
21:40
Do you offer more money?
21:41
Do you offer some sort of benefits?
21:43
Do you allow the trucks to go home?
21:44
Do you allow flexible work schedules?
21:46
Do you have 10 fours?
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Or sorry, do you have four 10s versus five eights?
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Do you allow for flexible weekends?
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Do you have some sort of paid time off or benefit or healthcare?
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You've gotta ask yourself, why would someone want to work here when they're, if they were given 10 other options to work at my competitors?
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And if it's not clear in my ad, why would they apply to work for me?
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And if we treated our employees like our customers, we would do our onboarding process very differently.
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Think about it like this, a customer, you make sure you send them an email about when they're gonna be on the schedule.
22:20
You ask them for a review after their first service.
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You reach out to them, make sure they're doing good.
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You check up on them occasionally to make sure that they're satisfied.
22:28
You do a quality control check, you do upsells, you touch base with them during Christmas, you say, Happy Thanksgiving, appreciate you as a customer.
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And yet to our employees,
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You might have five or 10 employees, 15 employees, and you have thousands of customers.
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It is easier to find a new customer than it is finding a new employee, and yet we treat our employees like they're just expendable.
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We don't do any sort of onboarding.
22:51
We throw them in a truck, throw them a uniform, and say, good luck.
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We don't tell them about the culture of the business, how they can make more money, how they can get ahead.
22:57
We don't do the training, and then we just wonder why they fall flat on their face.
23:00
It's like getting a customer
23:02
into an ad it's like okay they're a good customer but then you never talk to them you never try to upsell them you never do a quality control check you never ask for a review you never nurture that relationship and the same way you would nurture the relationship with a customer you've got to nurture the relationship with an employee and so if you treat your employee acquisition like customer acquisition you would spend more time on creating the job posting
23:24
on the hiring and interview process, on the onboarding process, on the retention of that employee, making sure that you do one-on-ones and touch base with them just like you would a customer.
23:34
You would do the exact same thing with an employee if you treated customer acquisition the same way that you do employee acquisition.
23:43
All right, number seven.
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Again, these are things that I would do differently.
23:46
I have made all of these mistakes, so in no way, shape or form am I saying I'm better than anyone else.
23:50
I'm just saying that if I would have known this stuff, I could have built a $10 million business a lot faster.
23:57
Let's see if I can get that out there.
23:58
There we go.
23:59
Okay, so number seven.
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Build systems like Legos, not like concrete.
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When you're building a system and you're a solo operator, a system means I have inputs with predictable outputs.
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Realize that as you grow the business, the systems are going to have to change.
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As a solo operator, if I'm getting a phone call, that's my input.
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My output is I collect their lead information.
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I collect their phone number, their address, their email.
24:30
I get them set up inside my software.
24:31
Let's go.
24:32
As a solo operator, you might get one or two calls a day.
24:36
You say, well, I need that exact same system when I'm getting 100 calls a day.
24:39
You do.
24:40
You want the exact same call to come in, and the other side, you get the lead, input it into the contact information, into the software.
24:46
Awesome.
24:47
But the infrastructure around the system has to change.
24:51
Now you're gonna need an office space, potentially.
24:53
You're gonna need an office person.
24:54
You're gonna need some scripts.
24:55
You're gonna need a new phone software system that can handle 100 phone calls instead of one or two.
25:00
It's not your cell phone anymore, it's a separate software.
25:03
There are systems that don't change, but the infrastructure around the systems do have to change, meaning.
25:09
I want to make sure that I build my systems like Legos instead of concrete.
25:15
Here's an example.
25:17
If I have a whole bunch of these, I can build a process and a system and make it pretty large.
25:23
But then if I need to change it, I can quickly swap things in and out.
25:26
For example, if I'm building training for a technician, I want to ask myself instead of just saying, okay, there's two weeks of training and it's the same way every single time.
25:36
Realize that as the business grows, that's going to change.
25:39
you're gonna have generalists become specialists and the training needs to change.
25:43
And so instead of making this very solid concrete, like building this whole thing out of concrete, just one massive slab of concrete, instead of interchangeable parts, means that I'm inflexible to be able to grow the system with the business.
25:58
So as I grow systems, I'm trying to think about creating interchangeable parts of the system instead of a monolith that has to be reconstructed and demolished every single time I change the system.
26:09
Because as you grow the business, you will have to change your training systems.
26:13
You have to change your phone systems.
26:15
You have to change your software systems.
26:17
And so if I make the system and I spend time and energy and I'm a perfectionist and I spend 12 months trying to figure out the perfect system for training my team,
26:27
and I figured it out.
26:28
But by the time I figured it out, spending 12 months building the perfect concrete monolith of how training systems should work.
26:34
If I'm growing very quickly, and I doubled the size of the business from one million to $2 million in one year, it's likely that the system that was needed at the beginning of me starting the system versus the end at 2 million,
26:46
Very different.
26:47
And so I'm a big proponent when it comes to systems building to try to make interchangeable parts of a process that can be swapped in and out much easier than destroying and demolishing the entire thing.
27:01
Think about this a lot when it comes to training.
27:03
Technicians, people on the phone, your salespeople.
27:06
How can I make the training where it's interchangeable parts so that as the business grows and I change out my follow-up process, if I change out the type of trucks that we use, then I'm changing individual pieces of the training system, not removing and stripping out the entire thing, okay?
27:21
So, at the end of the day, build systems like Legos that can be interchangeable,
27:26
instead of concrete, a big old monolith that every 12 months you're like, scrap the entire thing.
27:32
You'll waste a lot of time, you'll waste a lot of energy.
27:34
It's very frustrating, instead of trying to think about your training and your systems as interchangeable parts.
27:40
Last but not least, you gotta learn leadership.
27:45
This is especially true once you go past a million.
27:48
on your path from 1 million to $10 million, it is not going to be the next marketing hack, the next tactic, the next Facebook ad, that's gonna give you the strategy required to go from 1 million to $10 million.
27:59
It's going to be learning the skill of leadership.
28:02
How can I become the leader that great managers want to work for?
28:06
How can I become the leader that the best technicians in my market, they wanna work for you?
28:12
Even though I might have the same pay, I might not have the best benefits, I might not have the best trucks, but at the end of the day,
28:18
technicians and employees stop working for their manager.
28:23
If you ask the reason why most people leave a job, it's not the money.
28:26
It's because of the manager.
28:28
It's because of the person that they were directly reporting to.
28:31
And so you've got to become the leader that attracts the best talent in your market.
28:35
The best operations manager wants to work for you and sticks with you for a long time.
28:39
The undisputed secret weapon of every great entrepreneur is the ability to attract a great team and then retain them for the long term.
28:48
Because there's so much trust that's built up that allows you to move faster, make decisions faster, because you trust each other.
28:54
There's not a bunch of change.
28:55
Every six months, you're bringing a new manager.
28:58
You're bringing a new salesperson.
28:59
We all know each other.
29:00
We have trust built up.
29:01
We can move really fast, and we can be extremely profitable because we're all on a team.
29:07
We know each other's weaknesses.
29:08
We know each other's strengths, and we retain the team.
29:12
But you can't retain a great team if you have not become a great leader.
29:16
This is why I built Home Service Boardroom is to be able to learn the skill of leadership.
29:20
If you can't control what you eat, how am I going to be able to then step in front of a bunch of guys and tell them that they need to control how they spend time on the job site and be disciplined and make sure you watch every single minute and be strict with them about how they're acting on a job site when I can't control the 24 inches between my desk and my mouth.
29:37
I can't control that I am 100 pounds overweight and lethargic every single afternoon, chugging down three bang energies in a Red Bull every single afternoon.
29:45
How can I be the leader that others want to follow, the best talent wants to follow, if there's these habits of communication.
29:53
I blow up, I am erratic, I'm undependable emotionally.
29:57
They come to me with a problem and I'm up and down.
30:00
I get mad, I freak out at people, I yell.
30:02
I say stupid stuff, like I'm just being blunt, that's just the way I am.
30:05
You will not be able to attract good talent.
30:08
You will not retain good talent.
30:10
The best employees don't wanna work for someone that blows up and is emotionally reactive.
30:15
And so learning the skill of leadership is the secret unlock to get you from a million to $10 million.
30:22
Learning the next marketing hack, sales opportunity, those are super valuable.
30:25
You will grow a bigger business.
30:27
It is so important to learn how to sell and learn how to market and advertise.
30:33
But by yourself and home services, you cannot build a $10 million business.
30:36
You need other people.
30:37
And ideally you bring other managers on that can help run the business when you're not there.
30:42
So you're not working 80 hours a week every single week of your life.
30:45
And instead you can rely on other people and they can rely on you.
30:49
But that doesn't happen without the skill of leadership.
30:51
And I have learned this the hard way, but the only way that I have been able to
30:56
get one inkling of the success I've had is because the leadership team and the managers around me have been with me for a very long time and I trust them and they trust me.
31:05
And that takes a huge amount of change on myself and it is not an organic thing to have the skill of leadership.
31:12
Especially if you come from a family that didn't have entrepreneurs and leaders and managers that you could look up to, you never saw good leadership exemplified.
31:20
If you came from a job with a dysfunctional boss, you've never seen what good looks like.
31:25
And so it is not an organic thing for most of us to be good leaders.
31:29
It's not an organic thing to know how to communicate with someone that's crying and they just had a breakup.
31:34
One of your technicians to, to deal with a manager that's going through divorce or be able to communicate to a team of people that hate your guts over a job.
31:42
That's gone south.
31:45
But at the end of the day, leadership is the unlocked to go from a million to 10 million and every entrepreneur in home services I've met that has an eight figure business, so 10 million plus.
31:56
You get around them and you want to follow them.
31:59
You want to listen.
32:00
There's something magnetic about them.
32:02
And that's what brings in great managers and great technicians.
32:05
And a team around them is what allows them to win.
32:08
The way they treat their team is a downstream effect of their own personal discipline.
32:13
Their own ability to be able to restrict the way they feel like they should want to respond.
32:16
But they don't.
32:17
Because they know that's not what a good leader does.
32:20
And so learning that skill.
32:22
Gaining that skill of leadership is the only thing that's required to go from a million to $10 million in annual revenue.