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Successful Life Podcast
The Successful Life Podcast, hosted by Corey Berrier, is a globally recognized show that ranks in the top 2% of podcasts worldwide. It offers expert insights tailored for contractors, focusing on business strategies, sales skills development, and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the industry.
Successful Life Podcast
Mastering Trades and Business Growth - Todd Liles’ Journey and Insights
In this episode of the Successful Life podcast, host Corey Berrier welcomes Todd Liles, founder of Service Excellence. Todd shares his remarkable journey, from his teenage years working in the trades, to becoming an influential figure in business consulting, coaching, and counseling for tradespeople. He delves into the distinctions between coaching, consulting, and counseling, and their unique impacts on businesses. Todd also recounts his early career challenges and successes, emphasizing the importance of building customer relationships and proactive mentoring in business growth. From personal anecdotes to professional advice, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to excel in the trades and business landscape.
https://coreyberrier.gumroad.com/l/gqhapd
https://www.audible.com/pd/9-Simple-Steps-to-Sell-More-ht-Audiobook/B0D4SJYD4Q?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Steps-Sell-More-Stereotypes-ebook/dp/B0BRNSFYG6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1OSB7HX6FQMHS&keywords=corey+berrier&qid=1674232549&sprefix=%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreysalescoach/
Welcome to the Successful Life Podcast. I'm your host, Corey Barrier, and I'm here with Todd Liles. What's?
Speaker 2:up brother. Hey Corey, how's it going, man? Thanks for having me on the show, yeah man Looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:So, todd, tell me. For the folks that may not know who you are, which I'm sure that's few and far between just give us a quick background on you and what you're doing and in the trades and all that good stuff.
Speaker 2:background on you and what you're doing and in the trades and all that good stuff. I'll give you the fast rundown. I started working in the trades when I was 14, and I did that to get out of cutting wood in the piney woods of Mississippi. So I've been doing. I've been in the trades and in about since I was 14, started doing air conditioning with my name on an actual business card somewhere around the age of 21, outside of college.
Speaker 2:Early days was a trainer, back when clockwork home services was PSI, sgi, the franchises. After about a year and a half I became the director of training, which was awesome, and then I moved out to Austin, texas, and I think I was maybe 28. I was a 15% partner in an air conditioning and plumbing business and served up my three-year non-compete and then I started Service Excellence. So that's what I do today. I'm 46 years old. This business is basically the same age as my 14-year-old daughter and I love it. Man, this is what I'm supposed to do is do business consulting, coaching, counseling, training for the tradespeople. So there you go, man. That's my quick rundown.
Speaker 1:I love it. That's great. I love that you threw the word counseling in there, because, boy, doesn't that ring true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll hit you with three things that we do, and these are things that I have learned. I felt them before. I was able to codify them in words, and then by listening to other business coaches. And when this coach says, I'm a coach, this is what I do. And this coach says, well, I'm a consultant, this is what I do. And then this coach says, well, I'm a counselor, this is what I do. And I'm over here thinking to myself, well, I'm a trainer, I don't. Where are the division lines? And then one day it came together.
Speaker 2:I was listening to this guy that's a coach of really high-end professionals and and he said that he is a coach, he's not a consultant. And I said what does that mean to you? He said, well, a coach is someone who actually already works with a high-level producer that is already capable, but they may get stuck in their own headspace. And he goes I'm a coach, I don't work with anyone that hasn't got their life figured out yet. I work with people that are already successful, helping them reach their highest level of contribution. And I'm like I love that, thank you. Thank you for that. I get that. That makes a lot of sense to me. That's why people like Tiger Woods have coaches, michael Jordan has coaches. They're already great, but they just are always trying to get better.
Speaker 2:All right, so then, what about the world of consulting? That means different things to different people, but to me, this is my definition of a consultant. A consultant is someone who is teaching you something that either A you didn't know, or they're giving you, or helping you enhance a skill that you didn't have or needs great improvement. You don't have it mastered yet. So when we say consulting, for us, that can mean business consulting, which you can substitute training in for that word. Okay, it could be leadership, it could be sales, it could be CSR. And then, when you go into counseling, there is a decent amount of conversations that myself and my coaches and you've got to keep in mind we're a team of 14 here at Service Excellence that they have to have with people to where they're not in the right mind space, whether or not someone quit on them or what have you Perhaps, maybe an employee died, which has happened Now, granted, we totally understand the limitations of our counseling skill set, but there are some things that we can counsel people through, many things.
Speaker 2:And then there are some things where we got to recognize like, okay, this is outside of our boundary, we need to get you in touch with the right professional. But what we understand is that, as the role of counselor, we're meant to restore. So we're going to take these three codifications Counselors bring someone into a restoration point so that they can take the next step. Consulting takes someone and gives them tools and resources, information that they didn't have or wasn't executing well. And coaching takes someone who is already performing at a good or high level and helps them elevate it even further.
Speaker 2:So we are all three and understand that, as we are all three and there's 14 of us here we are not all equal in skill set. Some of our coaches are going to be able to coach 20 plus million dollar operations and some are not ready for that. They're ready for the three to five, and that's okay, because as we are growing our companies, we're also growing our coaches, and we're never putting a coach in a place they shouldn't be. So we have to take into mind both sides of the skill sets. All right, there you go, brother. That's how we see things here at Service Excellence.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. So I think lots of times and you're right, I think that, again, I never really heard the counseling portion of it, but it does completely make sense. I do think the lines get blurred sometimes between the coach and the consulting, and I think, for me, I look at consulting very similar to you, but I'm introducing something that they're not aware of, like the AI stuff that you know you and I have talked about. Like a lot of guys are not aware of that, so you would consult them on how to use it, so on and so forth, but that wouldn't be a long-term coaching conversation, because here's the thing, here's how you do it. Coaching, in my, my opinion, would be more of it's a weekly thing, like you're working to get towards a goal and get better, which I think is basically what to a degree.
Speaker 2:Well, and so. So that's a that's a fascinating thing as well, because if you start attaching it to time frames and timelines, well, if you start attaching it to timeframes and timelines, well, if you start in the counseling role, the interesting thing about counseling role is that, for us, we shouldn't be in the long-term counseling business. We need to be in the short-term counseling business. Yes, you had a rough week, but let's right the ship of the mind, let's get back on track, let's go to work, and I think that's a really good way for our coaches and I'm using our coaches to describe the position at our company, even though I just qualified three categories. Right, but in the world of counseling, if someone is having to have constant and consistent counseling, then either it is an emotional state that we are not capable of handling, or they have a life crisis that business coaching isn't going to get them out of. So we have to be mindful of that. So we don't want to be in relationships to where we are acting like your weekly counselor. If it's happening a couple times a year, that's just normal life. Of course, when you're blue and depressed, talk to us, pick up the phone, give us a call. We'll be your buddy, we'll pump you up, but that's not what it is.
Speaker 2:Now, when we go into the world of consulting and I think we are actually really great consultants and I think one of the sort of defining things about what makes us a great consultant is that you can look at what we do for people and it's not necessarily like an affinity group, like A. We do charge more money than an X-Star or an Airtime does, or Praxis. And, by the way, I'm pro best practice groups. It's interesting to me how some of the groups and some of the people that are in the groups look at us like oh, you're a competitor, aren't you? No, actually we're doing many different things. I'm very pro best practice groups. That's not what we are. We are a consulting firm, which often means we will consult somebody through their current scenario and in a couple of years we've done our job. It isn't necessarily a forever relationship, although we do have clients that have been with us a long time, and that's in part because they have moved into more of a coaching role where they value us, they want us in their life, they do like that. We are continually pushing them and making them better.
Speaker 2:Now, that's an internal problem that we have that we graduate ourselves out, because if a guy comes in and he's doing $3 million, corey, and he's like all I ever wanted to do was five, and we get them to five in a year or two, well that's a great way to get fired and that's okay. I'm okay with getting fired if they've accomplished their goal and they're making a million dollars and they're in a small community and they're done with us. Well, that's a sad day. We hate to see it happen, but it happens. Ideally, what would occur is that we find companies that have mindsets of wanting to be 20, 30, 40, 50 million, and I never thought this way.
Speaker 2:This is a new way for me thinking, because I come from a really small town of 50,000 people and I sometimes had these really small thoughts of wow, wouldn't it be amazing to have a $5 million business that's putting out $800 to a million dollars in profit? What more do you need? And a lot of our clients have those small thoughts and there's nothing wrong with that at all. We can help you do that. But at the same token, it'd be really cool to get someone doing a million that wants to do 20 million, and because that journey is going to take a longer, and then we have a client a lot longer by the time they get to 20, we can move into that coaching role. Are you already pretty good? Let's keep slapping the ball on this thing.
Speaker 2:Anyway, there you go.
Speaker 2:That's full transparency. By the way, that's without. That's showing the understandings of our pros and cons as a business and not being ashamed to say them, which I think a lot of businesses would be ashamed to admit where they're at. But there's no shame in it to me, because it's the difference in having a doctor that you see when you're sick versus having a wellness doctor. I only see my family doctor once a year and almost never in between because I don't get sick. I see my wellness doctor every six months. Their same goals are the same but the approach to service is different, because my wellness doctor needs to see my blood every six months to see what's going on, to up or down my vitamins, right? My family doctor annual physical, and if I'm not sick any time in between he doesn't need to see me. My family doctor annual physical, and if I'm not sick anytime in between he doesn't need to see me. So there's just different connections in business, and now you have a little bit more understanding as to what we do as a company.
Speaker 1:So what happens when a company comes to you in a reactive state of mind? Reactive in what way? So reactive in that? I'll give you a quick example COVID's over. We saw these massive numbers during COVID, and now we've just dropped down from 22 million down to 16 million, and they don't know what to do there. So that's what I mean by reactive. Maybe that's something they could have prevented if they would have gone to the wellness doctor every six months, opposed to coming to the doctor once every four years well, let's unpack the covid one first and then we'll go back and look at some other things.
Speaker 2:And the reason why I want to do that is COVID was probably once in a generational sort of event and when it happened I think everybody thought it was going to be an overall negative thing. I think everybody thought that COVID was going to be the thing that was going to destroy businesses. And granted, it did destroy a lot of food industry business, but in the world of heating and air conditioning it didn't take very long until they were termed. I forget what the term is, but basically critical services I forgot what the language is that you use?
Speaker 2:And people were home. The government was encouraging businesses to keep their people. Don't lay them off. They rolled out a lot of reasons to do that with the pay protection plan, so money was flowing. By the way, I'm still absolutely convinced and I'm only going to make this statement quickly. I'm convinced that the hyperinflation that we realized today actually started in that last period of Trump's time in office, when he kicked out a lot of these initial benefits and people were at home and companies got greedy and like, oh, they're spending money, let's charge more. And I think that snowball hasn't stopped yet. So, by the way, I'm not blaming Trump or anyone else, or Biden. I'm not making a political statement. I'm making a statement of economics. I think that's what kicked off hyperinflation, but we benefited from that right.
Speaker 2:So now here's the reason I said I want to address that and why it's different. It's because when you have a period of time where people are home and people know this, they've heard this conversation before but when all this work is being done, you are sucking out a certain amount of business out of the market and what people didn't account for and it blows me away it's like why would you not account for? This is what that's going to mean in the following years, because if you were meant to have grown by 4% or 5% each year, and one year you grew by 30%. And you did that because you bought a business awesome. If you did that because you did some amazing marketing approach that gained you market share over your competition awesome. You might be able to keep counting on growth. But if it happened because god handed it to you on a silver platter and there wasn't more new business that was made, you just got a over fraction of the business, then a good consultant like us would say you shouldn't expect that next year. And, by the way, I did that for one of our clients and it wasn't related to COVID. It was related to a massive storm event and they had this huge explosion. And I'm like guys, this is a 100-year storm. You're building your budget next year as though you have another 100-year storm. Call up the distributors, ask how much roofing material has gone out Austin-wide, compare that to previous years and you will have an estimation of the tidal wave that's coming back out and therefore you need to go down in your boat.
Speaker 2:Well, they don't want to hear that and sometimes, in the role of consulting. If you're being a good consultant, you actually tell people what they don't want to hear. Our job is to tell them in a way that they recognize the wisdom and that we don't get fired. Corey, I'll tell you half of the people that we lose fire us because they don't like sound wisdom, like no, I don't want to hear that. It's like I know you want me to be a yes man and just tell you what you want to hear and then all we're doing is delaying your unhappy nature. Or do you want to hear what you need to hear and make a business plan to adjust? So COVID is different. Covid's not normal. Covid was an opportunity that we didn't know was going to be such a great opportunity. So that would be the first thing I would say related to your question.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's just pure economics. You sucked a lot of the opportunity out. What was the second part of the question?
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know, but let me re. So what I was really referring to, I think, Todd, is when you get somebody, there's two types of people. You got a proactive guy that says, hey, I want to make sure I, yeah, not reactive guy that says, hey, yeah, not reactive. But the reactive guy, I imagine, is going to be much more of a challenge, time-wise, resource-wise, for you all, because he's in reactive mode and so therefore, it's I think, yeah, it's bound to take up more of your. It's like getting a cheap customer. That's a great way I can put it right. It's like getting the cheapest guy that's bound to take up more of your. It's like getting a cheap customer. That's a great way I can put it right. It's like getting the cheapest guy that's going to buy your system. He's always going to be the biggest pain in your ass.
Speaker 2:Well, I can address that. It obviously is not uncommon that we have people call us that's reactive, because something's happened in their business where they feel a little pain and they're looking for either a solution or a finger right on a point of finger at something. It's human nature. I totally get it when a, when a, when a potential client calls in and they're in reactive mode. I want to know a few things. What's, what's prompted the phone call today? What are you? What are you hoping to achieve? A few things what's prompted the phone call today? What are you hoping to achieve? What will make this conversation a great conversation where, if you walk away with these two or three things, you're going to say this was worth having time on the phone with Todd or one of the coaches.
Speaker 2:And when they begin to tell me things like well, we've been flat for the last two or three years, we haven't really grown, we're doing all right, but we haven't really grown, and I'll ask questions like well, what things have you tried in the past? Who have you listened to? How did those relationships go? I actually don't want to find answers where people are beating up other people, because what I have found is that companies that are going to be successful may have dips in the road, because we all do but the ones that are constantly pointing the finger and it's always someone else's fault they're going to do that with us too. I don't want them. I don't want a finger pointer. I don't want to blame her. I don't want someone who hasn't gotten to the place to accept the reality that we are here to help them, but it's their company. So to the reactive guy, when they say something like hey, I know I need to train, I just I don't want to. I don't want to touch it. These technicians are a mess, and why don't you just do it and I'm going to leave the room? No, I don't want to be. I don't want to be connected with you. Why do we want your headache? Because you don't want to get involved? We want to train your technicians, we want to do a great job with them. We want to train your coaches, your CSRs, your salespeople. But if what you're telling me is that they don't want it, you don't want it, you just want us to make them want it, nah, that's not going to work. I would rather work with you for three or four months and get your head fixed before I ever touch your people. So that's one of the other sort of warning signs.
Speaker 2:When you say reactive, I'm actually thinking about something slightly different. It's like I'm okay with reactive if the reactive is for the right reason. Business is down. But I believe it can be better. I just need help. I'm looking for someone to help. That's okay. Reactive to me, business is down. I don't want to do any of the work anymore. I'm worn out. Can you help me? Will you be in the meeting or have a manager in the meeting? Will you reinforce what we teach? Will you take what we do on a Monday or Tuesday and practice it with your people a couple days a week, realizing that's part of the gig? Okay, sure, we'll help. No business is down.
Speaker 2:If I don't get this thing righted tomorrow, I'm going to close the doors, which will typically lead me to a few other conversations, which is resource conversation, and for me, resources are three essential things. Tell me about leadership, tell me about the time that you have in front of you as a runway, and tell me about the resources that you have in terms of capital. What do you have? What can you get? Capital is actually the least worrisome of all of those things and really honestly so is time the most critical is leadership If we've got fairly decent leadership in place, or if we need to enhance the leadership. If you've got great leadership in place, that gives you more runway of time. It also gives you more runway of money, because they're making smart decisions with money. But if you've got really terrible leadership in place, it's going to take a lot more time. So you better have deep resources. So I want to evaluate their three resources and if they come to me completely resource poor, then the question becomes what can we do with what they have to get the biggest bang? And if I walk away going well, we can't, then we don't want them as a client again.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that we do, corey, that I'm not sure that other companies do, is that we actually, before we tell someone they can join us, we will do an estimation of ROI, and part of the estimation of ROI is we base what we know. Our averages are what we're capable of getting in an environment in about six months, and we know quickly the dials that we can turn and pay for ourself and then some. Again, here's a problem with that, though. We're so good at that and I've almost thinking this is a trap of our own business that I got to figure out how to resolve. We're so good at fixing average tickets and boosting revenue on service calls that you have.
Speaker 2:That can be like a quick fix. It can almost be like an addiction drug to where it's like oh, you gave me that crack. And then those first three, six months, what's the next piece of crack? There is no more crack. Now comes the hard work. We righted the shit. We stopped you from bleeding. The gains that you're going to make now are going to be substantially slower over the next two or three years, are going to be built around leadership.
Speaker 2:I don't want to do that. Well, I don't want to work with those type of people either, but it really is a weird thing when you're mission driven, where you're like I know that this person is not hearing what I'm saying. We tell them all these things. I know they're not hearing me. I know they want that quick hit and in six months they're going to be right back into the other problems because they're going to have spent the money that they've made.
Speaker 2:Sounds like I'm really talking trash about business owners, and I'm not. I'm telling you what I have come to realize after let's see, I got into this 30, 21, I'm 40. So, after, wow, 25 years 25 years in this professional industry what I have come to realize about the way that business owners that are reactive, that chase shiny objects, that don't button down and do the base things which, by the way, this is one of the reasons why I don't know who Alex Hermosi got his influences and mentorships from, but I love that young man. He's in his 30s. He's far more successful than probably almost anyone listening to this show and if you listen to the stuff he says, he just spits the truth.
Speaker 2:Don't expect things. One of the things that he had said recently was like if you want to be successful, you need to commit to doing something for a long time and not chase shiny objects. If only half the people that ever called us would take that piece of advice. Buckle down and do this consistently for the next three years, before you ever hop on social media and listen to the next screaming head shooting money into the air with a money gun, wearing gold chains and white sneakers, telling you how easy it is. Yeah, yeah, check, check the receipts all those people to see how easy it really was. Check ask someone who knows something.
Speaker 1:See what's up yeah, man, that's great, that's great. So I want to segue for a second and ask you about and I want to my timeline may be off, but you can correct it because you're going to know what I'm talking about here you, when you I think it's when you joined the hvac company the 15 percent right?
Speaker 2:I believe that's when it was I was here in austin with will hawkins air and drain rescue. Okay so what?
Speaker 1:how old were?
Speaker 2:you then. I think I was 28. I think I was there from 28 to like 31 so maybe this was the previous job whenever.
Speaker 1:Maybe it was when you joined your for. Maybe it was when you started selling hvac and I was 21 for service, first in west monroe, louisiana so I want you to tell me the story about how many leads they gave you walking in and that whole process, if you would.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that was Mike Bellissimo. And Mike found me because I worked for a brief stint of time at an environmental testing company. They did a lot of commercial services and we tested some of the environmental aspects of the industrial paper mill in West Monroe, louisiana. And I won't give you all of the details about what caught Mike's attention, but, needless to say, I caught his attention and he said man, you could sell air conditioning. And what he told me is I have a million-dollar business, I've got this million-dollar business, I've had it for 18 years and I really need someone to come in and grow it and take care of our clients. To me, I'm thinking, that means I'm going to take care of the current million dollar clients and also grow beyond that. And we were talking like, hey, what's the position? And the position was essentially sales. He called it a marketing analyst. He likes titles, big title guy and I was going to get somewhere between 10% to 6% commission and I was going to be in charge of commissions because I was going to get the price of every job and I'm going, that's cool.
Speaker 2:So on day one I walk in there and I'm like Mike, I'm ready to take care of the customers. Let. So on day one I walk in there and I'm like, mike, I'm ready to take care of the customers, let me get the customer list. And he reached underneath the counter and he dropped the yellow pages, boom on the desktop. And he goes they're right there. And I was like, yeah, okay, yeah, that's the new prospects. What about the current list? And he goes those are my customers. I spent 18 years building those customers. Those are my customers. Those, what I mean. That's not what I signed up for, right? I'm not saying all these things. This is what I'm thinking. What I said was okay, well, is there a marketing budget? He reached into his pocket and he had a. I want to think it was like $32 and 46 cents. I remember it wasn't much. It was enough to get like a cheap pair of shoes. He threw it onto the table and it's like there, go buy some shoes, knock on some doors. So I was like, oh, yeah, right, right, true story, true story. And I did, I did, I started hustling and it wasn't a very fast return. It wasn't like next week I had sold this massive air conditioning system.
Speaker 2:I started calling people that I knew from the environmental world, and Benny Bean was one of my first contacts at Bastrop City. He was running the US filter division, which basically it's their sewage control. They were subbing it out to US filters and he gave me an opportunity and he introduced me to the public works director. The public works director introduced me to the mayor and over a long period of nurturing I ended up having the entire city of Bastrop, the entire parish of Morehouse, and it was almost a million-dollar client amongst all the contacts. But it took a long time and in addition to that, because I almost got fired at least I thought I almost got fired he took me to breakfast and I thought he was going to fire me because I'm like, oh, this is it, this is the conversation, I'm going to get fired.
Speaker 2:But he actually gave me one of my greatest learning lessons that day because he said Todd, what do you think I should do with you? I said well, mike, I guess you should fire me. I'm not really selling much of anything. And he just looked over at me and he said Todd, all you got to do is take care of the customer. If you take care of the customer, the money will follow. And I listened to that and he goes how do you think you can take care of the customer? I said, mike, honestly, right now I don't know enough about what I'm doing to really have a great conversation. I can't spot things. I'll tell you what, though, and we had industrial commercial services guys. These are the best air conditioning technicians in the world. They're working on centrifugal I can't even say it, big commercial grade heating and air conditioning systems, centrifugal. We're working on rack systems inside of, like Walmarts and these things. So I said, I'll tell you what. I'll volunteer my nights and I'll volunteer my weekends. Let me just work for free, let me learn what I'm doing, and I'll invest in my own education as I go along.
Speaker 2:This was early, by the way. This was probably, I said, six months. It was probably like three months. It didn't take me long to get to that point, and I was dude. I was dragging water hoses, I was running for pipe wrenches, I was doing absolutely everything on this planet, but I wasn't just doing grunt work, I was learning and I was digging and I was finding out how to do things, and, man, I earned those guys respect, and I got pretty damn skilled. I ended up teaching myself, over the period of that time, their AutoCAD. I drew controls for an environmental system contract that we won. No one showed me how to do that shit. I just dug in and figured it out and it was cool man. It started working.
Speaker 2:I started doing several million of dollars additional in sales. I still priced out every job. I still job costed everything, and so I learned cost of sales, which was basically how much did my equipment cost, how much did my subs cost, how much did the install cost? And Mike gave me the right to price everything up to 10% and I think, when this is part of my old Mississippi poor way of thinking, what would have it been? An extra 5% to the total cost? Nothing, but I didn't think that way.
Speaker 2:So I think that by the time I was doing like a $3 million in sales. I think my average commission was somewhere between $6 million and $4 million and I was submitting my own commissions. By the way, I was job costing every single one and I would do them all out and say here's my commission. They were making more money. I was making plenty. That's a lot of money in the early 2000s at 20-something years of age, so I was doing just fine, but yeah, so I've always loved heating and air conditioning, plumbing, electrical roofing. I've always loved sales. It's been a passion of mine and I've just turned it into a lifelong career. So always been good to me, man.
Speaker 1:Well, I wanted you to share that story because there are certainly younger people that listen to this show and I understand what you mean by opening a phone book, because, my God, I've had to do that. I've had to do it way early probably same time frame as you're talking about because that's just how you had to sell back in the day. You didn't have the Internet, you didn't have Google Lead, you didn't have any of that stuff. You had to open the phone book and just dial I didn't even use the phone book that much.
Speaker 2:You, I'll tell you exactly what I did because I was listening to tom hopkins and zig ziglar. I had those guys like on repeat. I pried the door open in my very small circle of influence. I had a really small circle of influence and I went to that small circle and I expanded that small circle of influence and I went to that small circle and I expanded that small circle and I expanded that small circle and that worked really well for me. Now I knocked on plenty of doors but I never placed phone calls.
Speaker 2:I can remember doing this with rack room shoes, like walking into a rack room shoes and it was hot, and I walk up to the counter and I'm wearing my service first shirt and we were working on a building next door and you always up to the counter and I'm wearing my service first shirt and we were working on a building next door and you always got to give a people, someone, a reason for being there. So I'd walk into these stores where we'd go do services, right, and I'd go hey, we're fixing the air conditioning next door and I thought I'd walk in here to check out some shoes. But it's hot in here and they'll go oh God, it's hot. And literally once I gave them a reason. I'm next door working on the air conditioning system. I thought I'd come in here and check out some shoes and I'll go, you know, if it's hot, if it's not, it doesn't matter. Always find the reason. I say, hey, give me the name of the person that's responsible at corporate for the air conditioning systems here. And they would. These managers of the stores would go back and they would come back with the business card and usually there had been notes written on it. It was stained, it had been bent over. You could tell by the use of that business card how often they've had to place those phone calls. And they would put it in my hand and I'd go oh, this is great. Well, I'll tell you what I'm going to. Let them know that we came by. Here's my card. Do me a favor, give them a call today. Let them know I'm going to be calling on Wednesday. I had a schedule to where I prospected three days a week and I wrote proposals two days a week. So this is a little town. This is Westboro, louisiana, guys. You can look it up. But it was not long until I had almost all of the business in that little city and then it started growing.
Speaker 2:It got to the point that I met the guy on the golf course, ben Shields. If I had my phone here, I could call him a Jackson Shields, pardon me. Ben is his direct employee, ben, and I would play golf and I'm like hey man, I really want, really want, to get all the air conditioning and the rack systems at Walmart. He goes, I'll introduce you to Jackson. So I get on the phone with Jackson and Jackson's like yeah, ben's been talking about how nice a guy you are and all that. He goes, we could give you a shot. But there's one big problem here and I'm like what's that? He goes, this whole rack system is all Carlisle system and there ain't no way that carrier is going to sign off on this unless your boys are trained by them, and that's hard to get them to do it. I said so. What you're saying, jackson, is that if Carlisle will train our guys, we could get the contract. He goes, absolutely. I said all right, do you got my back on this? He goes, I got your back on this, but you're not going to get them. This is what I did.
Speaker 2:I got the phone number from Jackson to the guy in Syracuse, new York, straight to his desk Role play with me. This is going to be a very short role play. You just be him. His name's Bob. Okay, ring, hello, it's Bob. Hey, bob, this is Todd with Service First down in West Monroe, louisiana.
Speaker 2:I'm calling because Jackson Shields, jackson Regional Manager, over Walmart from Florida all the way to Texas. He and I were talking they want to give us the contracts, but he said that we need to get you to come out here and train our guys in West Monroe. So I just wanted you to get your calendar out and see when you could fly down. Well, todd, I don't know that that I'm gonna be able to do that. Cory, that's not what he said. He got his calendar out and gave me two dates. Amazing, it was not hard. We think shit's hard. It wasn't hard. I just need you to tell me when you're. When you get your calendar out, he goes. Hang on, flip, flip. He gave me two dates. I booked him, said great, I'll have my guys here, I'll organize it. We got a training room at the International Paper Mill. I said this is where you're going to be. He flew out. He trained us. We got the deal. We started doing the Walmart rack systems from Arkansas to Texas, to Mississippi, louisiana and the outer tips of Florida. This company is still growing like gangbusters. So just sales, man, just sales.
Speaker 2:I called up Jackson, said Jackson. He said yes, here's the date. Listen, I told him you gave us the business. I didn't tell him it was contingent. If he calls you, just tell him we're all good, no problem, that's what happened. So do I feel like I was being unethical? No, because he said he'd give us the work if we could get trained. Right, all right, cool, well, let me see if I can get this guy to. I don't want to call up the guy and be like well, I know you're really busy and just skip all that. Jackson said he wants to give us the contract, but we got to be trained by you. That's 100% the truth. Open up your calendar. Can you tell me what the dates are? Done?
Speaker 1:he flew out and trained our guys and when somebody's busy, like this guy, he appreciates that you didn't waste his time with a bunch of him hauling and 100 no different than you would or I would somebody calls. Just get to the point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I sometimes forget. The young me didn't know enough, and that was good, I knew the objective. The 46-year-old me sometimes knows too much, and the same thing happens to technicians. They wonder sometimes why a young kid can go to our class and be out selling them in a week. Uh, because they just they don't, they just do what they're told yeah, so it with in sandler.
Speaker 1:They call this I can't remember what they call it but they tell a story about a guy that was working in, let's call it, a lowe's hardware and he was selling uh, I can't even remember what it was. He was selling something pretty simple and this guy was knocking it out of the park. Knocking it out of the park, and then they sent him to training and he said man, I'm really going to be able to knock it out of the park now he gets back to the store and now he's got all this product knowledge and what does he do? He starts product benefit and dumping all over the customer sales go straight down, which is exactly what you're talking about yeah, he.
Speaker 2:Just he talked about too much stuff. Man, listen, one of the first times I did ride-alongs for electrical, it was a. It wasn't a mr sparky, it was something similar. That was like mr electric or something. It was all in the SGI family, though, and I was there doing a multi-day training system, teaching them their approach, and at the end of all this, we were going to do ride-alongs and I was going to watch and they were going to critique how things went.
Speaker 2:Well, the guy got to the front door and he knocked on the door and in a moment of panic, he got behind me. He like stepped behind me, he pushed me forward and he said you do it. And then the door opened. He was terrified. So he was here, he knocked, he stepped back, he got behind me, he pushed me, he said you do it, and I just went. Right. I just went.
Speaker 2:Now, I know nothing about electrical, but I knew well I shouldn't say I knew nothing about electrical. I've grown up around the trades my whole life. I knew enough to do what we call press play, and I set the tone, and when it was time to figure out what was going on, normally you would invite the homeowner to go with you. I did not. I gave them materials to look at and when we were shown where the area was and we go in there I said okay. I said now here's the gig. You threw me in the middle of this. This is totally fine, but you still have to do the diagnostic. You do all the diagnostic, from top to bottom. And he did like half the diagnostic and he's ready to do options. I said we're not done yet.
Speaker 2:He's like what do you mean? We're not done yet? I said we got to get in the attic and we got to go in the crawl space and then we got to look at the panel. He's like we got to do all that. I'm like all of that, that's what we say by a whole house inspection. Now, I'm not an electrician, but I know we've not done that yet. Let's keep going. So we did the whole inspection and then I had him unpack everything and, man, they probably thought that was the most thorough inspection of their life because of how long it took. I was just getting educated. What does this mean? What does that do? How does it work? That's too much. Give me a little bit less. Okay, all right, good, good, now will you help me out If I say something that's wrong, stop me.
Speaker 2:We don't want to tell them anything wrong. I'm okay with being embarrassed, I ain't got to know everything. In fact, when we go back in there, I'm going to introduce you as the expert and that I'm teaching you the communication side, but you've got a lot more years of experience than I do. Okay, all right, great. And we ended up selling the panel job and a bunch of work and we got in the car.
Speaker 2:He's like I'm amazed, man, how'd you do that? And I'm like what do you mean? How do I do that? I've been telling you for two days how to do it. It's not hard. It's like it's not hard and it's ethical, because did we find one problem in that house? That wasn't a major issue. He's like no, no, they need to take care of everything. I'm like did I have any like magic words? He's like no, you didn't say anything that sounded hard or smart. You just told him what was going on. I'm like, yeah, but I told him you were gonna stop here at this outlet and leave that's right all I asked you to do was do a real full inspection.
Speaker 2:And through the inspection because when we got to the panel, I'm like, hey, whip out your test gear what do you see here? The panel was overheating. He didn't know it was over, he would never have known, right, right. But then he felt all like this panel, why is the panel overheating? We started looking like, oh crap, we find this thing and that thing, and this thing and that thing.
Speaker 1:Let's give them some options so it's funny you say that when I was working I was the sales manager at a local company here and when I first started I wanted to know what the competition was doing. So I called out six companies to my house. I have an older system, so it wasn't like it was a far cry from a reasonable reason to call them out. And out of the six guys and thank God, the sixth one worked for me he didn't know he was coming out to my house until he walked through the front door, but I made him go through the whole thing, but he's the only one that went in my crawl space. And this is what he said.
Speaker 1:He said I'm just curious, did anybody mention your the ducks? And I said, well, yeah, a couple of them. He said let me show you a picture here. I said okay. He said you see all these cobwebs? He said that's the cobwebs that I had to clear out to go under your house. He said so whatever they told you was not correct, because nobody's been under your house, because there wouldn't be cobwebs there if they would. And it was like, if you think about that, like no question and I'm not saying this because he's my guy, but like out of six guys. There's no question who I'm buying from, even if they're more expensive, because now he's discredited all the other five completely yeah, yeah, and that's the ideal scenario and that's the type of client that we want.
Speaker 2:I will tell you, I had an almost identical experience, except this time it was raccoons in the attic, and literally to the point that when I went up in the attic they had this really tiny little opening right there in the middle of their living room a small house in Austin and I poked my head in and there was a raccoon staring at me and I'm going, and I just brought my phone up and I've got a picture of this raccoon with its eyes glowing, and then it takes off and I showed them all those things and they still didn't care that no one had caught that. All they cared about was the lowest price To which I go. Sometimes they're not your customer, they're not your customer, they're not your client. That was one of those moments where it's like, oh well, these people. Okay, that's all right, we're going to move on, we're going to go to the next one.
Speaker 1:But that's just the game. It's just the game. You're not going to get 100% of the customers, for whatever reason, but you still have to put forth a hundred percent of the effort when you go to that house, because that's the only way that you know that you have a chance, because most guys are not going to put in a hundred percent effort.
Speaker 2:That's right, there's no question of that. You got to give it your best. I don't even want to say you got to give it a hundred percent effort. And now you're going to be like wait well, wait a minute what? And I'm going to tell you what I mean by that. Effort is a byproduct of the relationship that you have with the client, and this is going to be something that many people haven't heard, but they know it's true and they have felt it, and I'm going to give you an example of this.
Speaker 2:I started working with my good friend, alan O'Neill at Abacus in their very early days and in the beginning. These guys are still giving it their best, their best in terms of best inspection, et cetera. They've always done a really great job of that. But the effort that they had to put out in the early stages was substantially harder than the effort that they had to start putting out like two or three years later. And I witnessed it firsthand, where I would go with technicians that were not as skilled as some of the ones in that first year, and those technicians would produce, on average, the like or better result. And I can tell you what happened was not that the homeowner became tougher. It was that the homeowner became easier because the brand of Abacus continued to grow in fame and popularity and reputation, that many people were pre-sold before the technician even walked through the door. And what I was dealing with in that first year that I had mentioned to you was, literally we were just getting started. We were less than a year in business and in that first year of business the effort was way outsized and outpaced compared to the effort by the year three. And that's one of the things that we go. We should never not give it our best diagnostic, best communication, best, et cetera. But what I will tell any company that is willing to listen and really pay attention is that when you focus on your relationship, building out your brand, it actually does get easier. It gets easier to get calls, it gets easier to close calls.
Speaker 2:Momentum builds momentum. When your momentum's high, all things are good. Momentum can make you look like you're better and smarter than you are. So, circling all the way back to when you said, what about when someone is reactive Oftentimes and COVID, if we just go full back circle on this, oftentimes what's really going on is they've lost their momentum and they want it back.
Speaker 2:But momentum isn't something that comes back quickly without large exertions of resources. Momentum is like a rocket accelerating. The bigger the rocket, the more fuel it takes to burn to get it going again. You can still get that acceleration if you burn the fuel slowly, and in often cases burning the fuel slowly, just like when you're going somewhere in your car, is actually more efficient. In the long run You'll get to the same speed. You'll get there and then you'll have more resources to keep going. But again I go back to resources. If you've got fuel at the wazoo, let's burn, baby burn, but let's do it with the right techniques. If you've got limited fuel, let's burn it appropriately. So I hope you don't mind me inserting that thought, but effort is scaled upon momentum.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes sense. And I do agree with you that, no matter how much effort you put in, you have to build a relationship. Even if you're a newer company, it's even more important to build that relationship with the customer, and lots of times that just means you've got to spend just a little bit more time with them. You've got to listen to what they're saying. You, you got to spend just a little bit more time with them. You got to listen to what they're saying. You got to pay attention. You really got to hear what they're not saying. Also, because they're not going to come out and say exactly what they want from you.
Speaker 1:Right, homeowners will beat around the bush. This is not abnormal. People just don't come out and say this is exactly what I want you to do. So, well, I'm looking for this, I'm looking for that. But you got to find out what the real reason why you're there is. And the real reason is probably because maybe the guy's wife is up his ass because it's hot in the bedroom. But you got to figure out that's the reason why you're there, right? And if you don't figure out that pain point, it's hard to move the needle sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, that's a fact. It's the awareness of the problem, the spoken and the unspoken one. That's right, 100%.
Speaker 1:Well, Todd, I know we're getting close on time. My friend, this has been a great conversation. If somebody, whoever's listening to this, would like to get a hold of you and inquire about your services, where would they go about doing that?
Speaker 2:It's easy to find us. You can Google my name, todd Lyles L-I-L-E-S. You can Google service excellence. I feel very confident that those two words are going to bring us up. Okay, perfect.
Speaker 1:Well, my friend, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you. Hey, my pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 2:You got it.
