Fetching Millions: How Tom Howard Builds and Sells Companies Without Ego

Ever wonder what's holding back your business growth? The answer might be staring back at you in the mirror.

Tom Howard, owner of multiple successful HVAC and plumbing companies and ServiceTitan executive, delivers a masterclass in ego-free leadership that transformed struggling businesses into multi-million dollar enterprises. His refreshingly blunt perspective challenges conventional wisdom: "You can be right or you can be rich. You get to pick one, but not both."

Howard's approach to leadership is revolutionary yet practical. Rather than micromanaging, he advocates giving managers clear boundaries, financial targets, and then stepping aside. "I own probably eight different companies right now and then I work full-time at Service Titan as an executive. I can't do that if I don't have people that can run it." This philosophy creates true accountability and ownership throughout the organization.

Perhaps most compelling is Howard's urgent message about AI adoption in trades businesses. "The AI revolution is going to be massive... AI is the opposite [of the Industrial Revolution]. It's giving these massive tools to the guy sitting on his laptop with an internet connection in his basement." He shares mind-blowing examples of AI automating call centers, creating training materials, and developing marketing content - all happening now, not in some distant future.

Howard also distinguishes between belief and faith in business - a subtle but crucial difference. "It's one thing to believe something works; it's another to have enough faith to fully implement it." This insight explains why many businesses fail to execute proven strategies.

Ready to remove your ego, embrace AI, and build a business that thrives even when you're not there? This episode is your blueprint. Check out Tom's book "Fetching Millions" on Amazon or visit howarddeals.com for his free acquisition guide.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Tom Howard and Fetching Millions
• 5:20 Ego: The Deal Killer
• 12:40 Letting Leaders Lead
• 23:54 The AI Revolution in Business
• 34:14 Building Faith in Business
• 51:56 Struggles Make You Stronger
• 57:56 Faith vs. Belief in Business

Transcript

Corey Berrier: 1:03

welcome to the successful life podcast. I'm your host, Corey Berrier, and I'm here with my man, Tom Howard. What's up, brother? Hey, how's it going? Good, man, good to see you. So, toTom, I'm excited about having this conversation with you, and really most people I'm sure know who you are, but if you just want to give a quick bio of who you are in the part you play at ServiceTitan and some of the companies that you run, that'd be awesome.

Tom Howard: 1:28

Yeah, I own air conditioning and plumbing shops mostly in California, nevada and Arizona and one well one in Australia, and I was an early user of ServiceTitan and ServiceTitan asked me to go work there in like 2019. I started january 2020 and I just advise them on things that we should build and things we shouldn't. Try to represent the contractors best I can on what contractors would want at server side perfect.

Corey Berrier: 2:02

so you just written a book called Fetching Millions, right? And from what I understand and I apologize, I have not had a chance we booked this so quickly. I have not had a chance to read it, but from what I understand, it's a step-by-step guide on basically closing deals effectively. Is that right?

Tom Howard: 2:22

Yeah, so it's not really a step-by-step guide. It's a step-by-step on what we did on this particular one and we've closed a lot of them. I've got another. I've got a website called howarddealscom. If you go on there, I got an acquisition guide that has like a bunch of things. It's free, you just put your email in and it'll email you the whole thing and a bunch of videos.

Tom Howard: 2:43

Talk like Ken Goodrich about things that he did in acquisitions and he's really the guy that taught me most of what I know about doing small acquisitions in this industry. I don't typically I'm not a PE guy that goes around buying $100 million and $200 million shops and go around buying small things and put them together and trying to make a strong company out of it. So if you're looking for that step-by-step guide, that acquisition guide is there. But this book is more about one deal that really the stars aligned for us. We did really well.

Tom Howard: 3:15

We went in and we bought a few companies, put them together that were losing money, turn them into making money, and then sold it 16 months later and we bought it for basically nothing and we sold it for a lot. It was definitely EBITDA was six million dollars in EBITDA by the time we finished on the trailing 12 months and I can't say because of an NDA, and so I had to take it out of the book. The company that bought us and forced on a DA but it was websites will tell you that multiples were anywhere between eight and 12 X at the time. So that's public information, and we were six million EBITDA.

Corey Berrier: 4:00

So you can do the math on what we sold for Bunch of money. That's awesome, dude. So the biggest thing I think the first place I want to go today is one of the things that stuck out when I did a summary of the book is you talk about ego in the book a lot and how ego really doesn't have a place in the sales process, and I 100% agree with you. 100%, and I 100% agree with you, a hundred percent In fact. Ego, in my opinion, will kill a deal faster than it will create a relationship for sure. So talk to me a little bit about that. What made you write about ego?

Tom Howard: 4:41

It's in all things, it's everything. It's not only in a sale, in a home. But when you're trying to run your business or you're trying to acquire a business, let's say you're not even acquiring a business and we've talked, you know, mentioned a few things about acquiring. But let's just say you're trying to run your business and you're the owner and you've got a GM or you've got a service manager that has an idea and you think that idea is stupid and you just want to shut it down. That's hamstringing your business A lot of times. You want to take credit for your business, you want to be right, all that stuff. I tell people you got two options you can be right or you can be rich. You get to pick one, but not both. And the reality is that at Fetchatech we had an issue where you know I put it in the book I said that team made that company. That wasn't like I went in there and fixed the sales process and fix this and fix that. I had a team that they all got equity in the business and they all came in and brought their parts and they just made things happen. I had a team that they all got equity in the business and they all came in and brought their parts and they just made things happen. And one of those people was the general manager, who was Dennis Thompson.

Tom Howard: 5:52

And when I got there that particular company Jerry Finney was owning it and Dennis Thompson was the GM and Jerry wanted me to basically get a part of that business to help it grow. And I love Dennis. I looked at it. I was like man, dennis is a great GM and but I noticed that the company's losing money and it's not doing well and I noticed that a lot of his ideas just weren't getting implemented. I thought maybe Dennis just isn't getting implementing, but it seems like he is. It seems like the way he's doing it. He's implementing stuff and it's not sticking. Like why wouldn't it stick? And I went in there and found out that whenever he would implement something, if Jerry, who used to own it, all the employees knew him and they would just call Jerry and complain to Jerry and Jerry would say, well, you don't need to do that, you don't need to do this, and so then they would just undermine the GM and then nothing would get done.

Tom Howard: 6:49

And when I finally figured that out, I called Jerry and told him the situation and said, you can't be talking to these people, like, don't even take their call. If they have, like, a safety concern or they want to whistleblow on something and they think we're doing something illegal or whatever else, they have my phone number, they can call me, but that's it. If the GM asks you to do something and you don't like the new CSR process or you don't like the new tech process, you don't like the new dispatch routine tough, because I think in a lot of these businesses you have to put your ego aside and you have to put the GM in charge Then the other issue is I can guarantee you a lot of these businesses, you have to put your ego aside and you have to put the GM in charge. Then the other issue is I can guarantee you, a lot of your listeners are thinking, well, yeah, but what if he's going to run into the ground? Okay, well, I don't let a GM just do whatever they want. I tell them hey, you've got these boundaries, which is you can't do anything illegal, you can't do anything unethical and and you can't do anything that infringes on people's safety, right. So, and then, outside of that, you have a target hit. Here's the gross margin budget, here's the revenue budget. Here's numbers you have to hit.

Tom Howard: 7:54

Outside of that, it's on you, because what happens is, if you don't get out of their way at that point and let them be them one, they're not going to feel like they own the budget, because at some point they're going to say, oh well, you told me I couldn't do this. You took away my. I want to do this and you wouldn't let me. So look at this, look the budget. We didn't hit the budget. But if I get out of the way and let you do whatever you're going to do and we don't hit budget, there's one person whose fault it is and I can go back to them and say, look, you had clear guidelines, you knew everything. You could make any decision you wanted to, and there were some decisions I didn't agree with, but I let you do them anyway and it fails, it's on you. Or hey, you made decisions I didn't agree with and you succeeded. Good for you.

Tom Howard: 8:45

Either way, your bonus is paid based on whether or not you hit budget, and if you don't have budget, that's on you. I don't if you give him a bonus based on whether or not he or she hits budget and then you go in and start messing with things and your ego gets in the way and you want to prove that you're right and everything else. Now he's not even incentivized by the incentive because he's like it doesn't matter anyway. I'm not in control of what happens in this company. The owner is, and that's it. So ego. If you're buying a company, selling an air conditioner, doing whatever or just running your existing company, you've got to put your ego aside and let the team do what they're going to do and succeed.

Tom Howard: 10:05

I run, I don't run them. I own probably eight different companies right now and then I work full-time at Service Titan as an executive. I can't do that if I don't have people that can run it. And people come to me and they're like, oh my gosh, you must just figure out how to hire great people. I'm hiring from the same pool, you are. What's the difference between how I can have eight companies running and you can't? The difference is I guide them, direct them and get the hell out of the way and let them get the credit for the work that they do, and they're happy to do it at that point. But I'm going to coach them. I'm going to say, hey, this is what I would do. That's what I would do. And they don't want to follow it? Fine, and I'm going to coach them. I'm going to say, hey, this is what I would do, that's what I would do. And they don't want to follow it? Fine, but it's their budget.

Corey Berrier: 10:49

And if they don't hit it then we might need to make a change. So that's it, tom. It's not an uncommon thing in our industry to hear the owner and I get it. It's their baby. I understand that their heartstrings are tied to it, but often I've seen in my time in the trades which only been about five years now the owner does hamstring the team by interjecting themselves, not allowing the team to do their job and trying to control every single thing. That goes on. It's only one dude like. It's one guy trying to control all these pieces and wondering why it's falling apart, but can't get out of his own way yeah, it's a constant thing and it just is what it is.

Tom Howard: 11:44

And a lot of times that owner I get this too. I hear a lot of owners say well, that guy doesn't think like an owner, he doesn't think like I do, he doesn't put in the effort I do, blah, blah. As soon as he starts acting like an owner, I'll start treating him like one. And I usually ask them a question, because I used to consult for companies, right and say, okay, well, this general manager that you're mad that he doesn't think like an owner. Let me ask you something. This is what I said Do you want, or the service manager, or the plumbing manager, or the dispatch manager, whatever Dispatcher man? They're not showing up and they're not putting in the extra time. They're the dispatch manager and they need to think like an owner. And then they'll get there and blah blah. I'll say, okay, does your dispatch manager? Do they get a bonus based on each month, based on whether or not the company makes a profit or their department makes a profit or the department hits their numbers? And that's the thing I don't like putting the dispatch manager giving them incentive based on whether or not the company makes a profit. I like it if the dispatch manager, let's say the call center manager, I like to see how many calls they actually booked, because that's the thing they can control. I try to bonus them all based on what they can control. I bonus the plumbing manager based on the gross margin of the plumbing department, cause that's what he or she can control.

Tom Howard: 13:04

Anyway, I said, do you get extra pay based on how their performances are? Like, well, no, like an owner does. Cause an owner, if the company makes a profit, the owner gets extra money. Right, like, yeah, I'm like, but your dispatch manager, your plumbing manager, they don't know. They see your financials every month, see the profits. No, okay, well, an owner would right. They said, yeah, okay, have you given them any training on those financials, on, like, what revenue is, gross cost of sale, gross margin, overhead, net profit, anything? No, okay, well, an owner should have that information, right, yeah, okay.

Tom Howard: 13:40

So you don't give them the incentive that an owner has, you don't give them the knowledge that an owner has, you don't give them the financials that an owner has. And then you wonder why they're not thinking like an owner. Do you blame them? You're paying them for their time. When you pay people for their time, you get performance, or sorry. If you pay people for their time, you get performance, or sorry, you get. If you pay people for their time, you get their time. They come in, they freaking, punch a clock and they leave. If you pay people for performance, you get performance every time. And so it's like dude, give them incentives based on their performance, give them the budget, give them everything, but I can't give them my financials.

Tom Howard: 14:26

They'll think I'm making like $2 million a year and I'm like bro, they think you're making 10 right now. Give them the financials. It'll shock them, right? They literally think if you sell an air conditioner for 15 grand, that you're pocketing like 13,000 of it. Yeah, like every time. Yeah, like every time. Yeah, they have no idea that you lost money last month. They have no idea that you're barely squeaking by. Who cares? My whole company. If the warehouse guy wants to see the P&L from last month, we'll show it to him and we give them understanding of like.

Tom Howard: 14:59

This is just five things Revenue, cost of sale, gross margin, overhead, net profit. Just if you can understand those five things, you're good. Revenue, cost of sale, gross margin, overhead, net profit and or EBITDA, whatever you want to call it profit, but anyway, give them an understanding of that. Then show them I don't care, all the whole company, that's not anything. Everyone's afraid. Like well, what if they show my competitors who cares? I work for Service Titan right now. It's a publicly traded company. Look at CR Financials the whole freaking world every three months. What does it do for them? Nothing. It absolutely benefits them Nothing.

Tom Howard: 15:36

You hiding your financials as small minded, stupid, freaking, like that's. Like that's the mentality of a freaking person that stands on the side of the street selling lemonade. That's the level of business person you are when you're afraid to show your freaking financials. I made $6 today. I don't want anyone to know. Like, shut up, show your financials, you freaking moron, and quit pretending like it's some kind of thing that like oh, my competitors can hold this, they'll know stuff. Who cares if, honestly, if the Fetch-A-Tech book, I, my competitors, get ahold of this, they'll know stuff. Who cares if, honestly, if the Fetch a Tech book, I want to publish all the financials for the whole thing, but because of NDAs and things, I can't. So when Lee sells, I'm not going to sign an NDA on it, I'm going to publish everything. I don't care. Everyone sees it Like it doesn't matter at all. Be realistic and show them what's going on and say this is where we're at in our company and that's it, like it doesn't matter.

Corey Berrier: 16:29

So it ties back to where we started, which is ego. Whether it's ego that I don't want you to know that we lost money, or ego that we're making too much money, or ego that, whatever it is, but it really ties back to some form of ego that's ego as well, because when people are afraid, a lot of times they're afraid to show their financials, because they're afraid to show that they really don't make any money that's right.

Corey Berrier: 16:52

100, yeah, I agree, so all right. So service titan has a ton of automations these days, so would you say that the automations are making people lazier or better?

Tom Howard: 17:10

It just depends. It depends on who you are. If you're a lazy person, it'll make you lazier. If you're a hard driving person, it'll make you better. So it's yeah, I I got.

Tom Howard: 17:26

I know multiple friends right. I know friends that are like really hard driving, really ambitious, everything else. If I gave them a million dollars they'd turn into two million. I have friends and family that are not hard driving, not ambitious, and just lazy. And if I gave them a million dollars, they'd turn it to zero in a heartbeat, just being more lazy. And if I gave them a million dollars, they'd turn it to zero in a heartbeat, just being more lazy, like that's just money.

Tom Howard: 17:49

Money makes you more of whatever you are, and I think technology can make you more of whatever you are as well. So anyway, I think I look at these service line automations and that kind of stuff, like some people, there's nothing wrong with it Sometimes they just want to automate so that they can just relax more and go sit on a beach. If I look at Mello Tommy Mello, you give him an automation or something like that, he's going to use it to 10x his business and work harder. It's just there's just different kinds of people in this world, and it just depends on who you are.

Corey Berrier: 18:23

Are you seeing that more folks are coming around to AI and using more automations? I know that AI has been around for a few years now and there's a bunch of different ways that you can use AI and I just wonder, like, because technologically our industry is fairly behind the times, or it was behind the times with a lot of different industries, so are you seeing more people coming around to this and using it more, and what are you seeing them using it for?

Tom Howard: 18:57

Yeah, so with AI, we talk about this a lot at Service Titan and what's going on. If you come to Pantheon this year, it's in September. I don't know when this podcast is going to air, but they'll be releasing a lot of stuff that is AI-enabled and has it built in. The truth is that AI as far as that term, ai is not going to be a thing in probably a few years, because the truth is AI is going to be integrated into everything we do and it's not going to be called Service Titan, ai or whatever. It's just going to be called Service Titan and AI has to be built into all of it. Everything, all your programming, every app you have on your phone, in the next five years is probably going to have some piece of AI integrated. Right now it's early stages of software, trying to get AI products built and make them work. And the speed development of AI is lightning fast and Vahe made a good point last year while he was on stage. He said at Pantheon he said the speed of development that you see today is the slowest it ever will be, because it will always get faster from here on out. And it's crazy to watch now and it's crazy to watch. It's hard right now for some products to be.

Tom Howard: 20:49

We use lace ai for some call center tracking stuff and at first we only had it for like some overflow calls when our csrs couldn't handle the volume, and that was cool.

Tom Howard: 21:01

But we got it dialed in more, and dialed in more, and dialed in more until it took several months. We got to the point where we could just leave it on all day and take everything Morning, night, daytime, whatever and we were supposed to hire like 10 CSRs for the summer to get to volume and we just didn't have to hire them. We saw the CSRs we were, but then we could use our AI agent to book them and at the time our booking agent was named Ashley and we got two five-star reviews on Google citing how great Ashley was on the phone. And it's hilarious because Ashley's not even human and it took us a while to get there. And what's happening is it's going to continue to get better and easier and easier to implement. You're not going to have to spend months and months dialing it in, like we had to, at least, and so AI is going to become it's just going to become part of life and All right.

Corey Berrier: 21:58

So you're in California, right, and you say that, or you're in multiple States, but let's just use california as an example. So do you think that let's and let's talk about that the call center ai? There's several products out there. I'm a, I'm pro ai call centers because I believe that I do believe it's the future. So do you think it's regional? Here's what I'm asking. So the zoom drain that I work at is in a very rural like it's in a very rural area, and so somewhere like california, I would imagine this would probably be a little bit easier to implement. So what do you? What have you seen? Or have you seen anything across the country where this is done better in certain places, or is it done about the same?

Tom Howard: 22:52

No, it's the same and it's. I hear a lot of stuff like in rural areas it's not that big of a thing and they're freaked out because, oh, it won't sound like my people, they won't know my area, blah, blah. No, AI is getting smarter and smarter, Just so you know our call booking rate, the same to AI.

Tom Howard: 23:16

The only reason we're not on ServiceTitan's contact center pro yet is because we signed a contract with same to AI. But we'll be on contact center pro, which has all the booking function, everything else right in service titan, right in your call center. Same day I had a higher call booking rate than about half of our csrs. So and they're answering the call in the day, at the night, whatever, doesn't matter. And so when I've got an offshore call center as well, that I'm like I have to look at it and think, okay, we're keeping them there and that kind of thing for now and especially because they can handle all the weird use cases. But right now AI can probably book 90% of our calls, if we wanted it to, and they can book the entire call. Then server side and dispatch pro can take over and dispatch the call and send the guy to the job site. So it's literally a completely automated booking and everything and dispatching and you just bypass most of the office. It's just what it is.

Corey Berrier: 24:21

It's what it is, yeah, is what it is. Now what it is, yeah, and I think it. I think it's. Look, it's no different than you call it. You lose your luggage at the airport. You got to go through some sort of ai system that's nowhere near, probably, as smart as what you're talking about and certainly not as intuitive. So I think it's just transitioning people from that human experience and I think what at least my experience has been, you're going to get better answers. They're going to be faster, they're going to be more concise, because you can train the AI to answer literally any question that you throw at it, just about.

Tom Howard: 24:58

Just so you know, this morning well, not this morning I will tell you this this so when I first got into call booking, we were testing it and we had the agent on the phone and it was me and a plumber sitting next to me that spoke Spanish and from a different company actually. And we said, hey, what can we do? Now? They told us that the diagnostic was going to be $99 to get the tech out to the house, to be $99 to get the tech out to the house. That was the fee for the company. It was a fake demo, right, but it was trained to negotiate down to $74 and could not go below $74. And we said, okay, so we make a phone call to the bot and we said, hey, our air conditioner is broken, it's not cooling, whatever. Can you send someone out? And says oh yeah, we have a $99 diagnostic fee and this is what we do. Blah, blah, blah and try to build value. And we said, well, 99 bucks, are you kidding me? And the guy next to me says are you going to throw in a Rolex with that? For, crying out loud, she said no, sir, we don't, we don't available right now. Blah, blah, blah, really trying to sell me on it and we were throwing out like Rolex and weird things and all this stuff at it that we could and we kept negotiating down and it finally got down to $74, right, and we couldn't obviously get it below 74 bucks and we kept saying, oh my gosh, like what if could you come out? What if we booked out, like three days out, so you guys have more time, and whatever, could you give me an even cheaper price or all these things? And it had no problem speaking to me as a human and it even totally sounded normal. Well then, the plumber next to me spoke spanish. He starts speaking to it and trying to negotiate in Spanish. Same call right Immediately, the AI agent switches over to Spanish and starts negotiating. And I'm like, and we started talking and I started realizing.

Tom Howard: 26:57

At that point I asked the founder of Same Day AI. I said, hey, how many languages does this do? He said it's just Spanish and English right now, but he said we can load any language in the future. And I started realizing, when are you going to have a CSR in the future that speaks 50 languages off the top of their head fluently? You're not. The speed and the cost and everything else is unbelievable, and if you start thinking about how big of a deal this is and where this is going, you can either get on the bandwagon now or you can. You know you're going to be looking like the person in the 90s that said, yeah, we're just going to wait until this internet fad is over. And I can't believe people use this email. You have to type a name and then at, and then this weird stuff Like who's going to use email, like it's just ridiculous. To think about that now and to think that we're not going to be using AI voice agents in the future is hilarious, like it's nothing. Now the question is when do you implement it in your company? When is the technology far enough along to make sense? Well, I'm telling you. Month by month it goes by. Ai is developing so fast that every six months is like an eternity. It's like a lifetime, right?

Tom Howard: 28:10

I watched a demo on a product for server side this morning that has AI built in and, as much as I'm forward thinking, I was blown away. It's being released at Pantheon. I was literally. I literally grabbed my chest when I saw it.

Tom Howard: 28:23

I couldn't believe and the things that they were doing and how they were talking to it, what it was saying and how it was responding and I was thrown all kinds of questions at it and I can't go into what it is, but I'm like holy cow and there's like four or five things that are releasing at Pantheon that will just are shocking. Some of the stuff is just like blow your mind, awesome, that you think is 20 years out, but it's really like happening right now and being released. And I literally asked the person. I said can you do this at least today? And they said yeah, and so they're implementing it and then they'll release it at Pantheon. Ai is definitely right now. The little bots that you're seeing being built and that kind of stuff is cute, but like being built into real products and being totally interwoven in everything you do is like happening right now.

Corey Berrier: 29:12

Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you one of the things that I've used it most recently for, and I've done a bunch of different things with it. So do you know what I say? Ai agent. Do you know what I mean by that? Yeah, all right. So there's a company and it's called Replit. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but essentially, I can go in and tell Replit I want to build a sales training for my technicians and I want to cover these certain things, and then I want to put in. I just drop in all the services that we offer and I ask it to give it to me. In layman's terms, and as I'm doing all this, it just goes and it just builds the entire site and it's got drop-down boxes. It's got layman's terms. It's ridiculous, and I can do that in about a half an hour.

Tom Howard: 30:07

Yeah, just so you know, when I released my book, it went to number one in five categories on Amazon number one bestseller in five categories, including entrepreneurship and service industry, which are both very hard to become number one in Within a week and a half, because that happened a week and a half later. There are two books that are used Tom Howard's methods from fetching millions for blah blah and it's a workbook. Yeah, and somebody I don't know who it was they obviously are infringing on my copyright and everything else. They took my book, dumped it into ai. I say make a step-by-step workbook out of this and published it a week and a half later, published on Amazon live. Like I don't, it might've been a week, it's something less than a week and a half, I don't know what it is, but that fast, right now they have AI that basically I can take my entire CSR manual and all my training manuals at least and dump it into there and it will make videos, training videos for everything in minutes based on what's in the manual. And I'm just. This is just cute little things to start Like.

Tom Howard: 31:22

The way you use Amazon Alexa or Google Gemini or whatever in the future is going to be mind-blowing in what you can do, and the thing is it's like even the service industry, in my opinion. I've talked to Vahe before about it and he said Tom, I did, I drove it. I got a Tesla 10 years ago and it could pretty much drive itself on the highway. At the time he said if you told me that 10 years from now we'd still be driving our own cars, I would have told you that you're an idiot he's like.

Tom Howard: 31:56

So the truth is, the technology has been there for a long time. It's taking a while to implement, and the same thing is going to happen with our companies. The technology is there or it's getting there right now. Very quickly, in the next six months, it's going to be mind-blowing. Whether or not you implement it is what matters, and that's going to determine who wins over the next 10 years. Do you think it's 10? Oh, way less. With AI stuff it's less, but I can guarantee you people that aren't implementing anything with AI and want to resist it, in 10 years they will definitely be out of business. There's no way.

Corey Berrier: 32:33

It's probably a lot less than that.

Tom Howard: 32:35

They're definitely declining in revenue over the next few years.

Corey Berrier: 32:40

Unequivocally, without a doubt. In fact, and I feel bad I say I feel bad so many people are just not trusting, for various reasons, and a lot of them are very good reasons the guys that are not implementing this, they are going to be out of business, and that really sucks, because I'm sure there's a lot of great companies out there that would thrive if they just would open their mind a little bit to some of these things. Maybe not even all of them, but some of them, because the bigger guys that are jumping onto this maybe not even the bigger guys they're going to surpass these smaller guys by leaps and bounds and it's nuts, absolutely nuts. So what would you say to the guy maybe listening to this that just doesn't know where to start? What would you tell him to start?

Tom Howard: 33:38

Well, first thing is that, especially for the small guys, this revolution that's happening right now. We've had some big revolutions in history. The Industrial Revolution was a huge one. The AI revolution is going to be massive, but this is not about the big guy having the advantage. In fact, it's quite the opposite. During the Industrial Revolution, you had to invest a lot of money to build these factories and everything else and whatever. Ai is the opposite. It's giving these massive tools to the guy sitting on his laptop with an internet connection in his basement. You can literally.

Tom Howard: 34:20

The big companies are the ones that have to worry right now and have to work harder, and they have to implement AI fast because right now, if they don't, the little guys. We have website builders. Now in AI, they can build your entire website and everything else in 10 seconds, which used to take months to build. Yeah, that's right. The guy that used to have $50,000 to spend on a website had a huge advantage over the guy that was trying to like build his thing on Squarespace on a weekend at his house. It just doesn't look that good and the SEO is not optimized and everything else. Now they're on even playing field. It doesn't matter if you have 50 grand because you can build something over here. Now Dan and Tonelli would get on here and say, well, yeah, we'd like graphic design to be better in this and that, sure, but you've got. You can go a long way with AI, with working out of your off your laptop and just making things happen. Like I said, I got two guys that made two books based off of mine in a week and a half. I don't know how long it would take me to make those books and get them published if I wasn't using AI. And now I'm thinking, gosh, I'm behind the times. I should have made workbooks for my book and I could have at least validated them and make sure they're real. Anyway, so I want people to know this is your opportunity to move forward. Go out there, take some classes. You can buy them online for like a hundred bucks. Watch what's available, watch what happens, talk to people that are doing it and get excited about it. Get into it.

Tom Howard: 35:49

The first time I made a what do you call it? A graphic using AI and chat GPT, I was blown away. And now that's ages old and now it's like a nothing thing. And I used to. I thought, oh my gosh, I used to have to pay a graphic designer thousands and thousands of dollars to get this, and it was just a simple thing that I wanted to put on a slide a service item presentation, and I would have had to call our graphic design team to do something and say we don't have enough time for your stupid dinky slide, for your one slide presentation. And so I just punched it into ChatGPT and bam, it pops out this amazing.

Tom Howard: 36:23

I was heading up the Australia Service Titan initiative and it it's service Titan, it's Australia, it's contractors. So I just told it to have like a kangaroo, dressed up like a Titan holding a wrench, and it did and it looks amazing. It looked like a real kangaroo in Australia, all decked out with like service Titan gear and the helmet and everything, and just like I was like this is amazing. It took 10 seconds and maybe a couple minutes for for AI to process it and then I put it into the slide and I'm like you realize what that would have taken and now we do so many things that are far beyond that. It's only six months. Like I said, in AI development is huge. So just take the time, invest the resource, invest some time and a little bit of money I'm talking like $100, $200 in like a class and to figure out what you got going on and then use it and go start building.

Corey Berrier: 37:13

Yeah, and I'll tell you, one of the things that I found is don't overthink it, like don't overcomplicate the process of learning about just something as simple as ChatGPT. If you don't know, you can just ask it what it is you don't know and it'll give you the answers, and then you can load those answers in and you just keep iterating. And I've heard a lot of people say that AI is making us dumber. I agree with that to a degree, but what I've found is that it gives me a look into things that I have no idea about in a millisecond. Like I'm not a plumber, I'm not a HVAC technician, but guess what? I can answer any question that you ask me. I don't care what it is.

Corey Berrier: 38:03

Well here's the thing.

Tom Howard: 38:05

Cars make us fatter, Fair enough. I don't have to walk to the store. I don't have to walk to all these places. I get in a car. I can be lazy and I'm going to go to the grocery store and pick up some milk and drive home. You go to some remote village in Africa where they got to walk freaking 20 miles to the well to pick up some water and bring it back. I can tell you that plumbing makes you fatter. I can tell you that plumbing makes you fatter. I can tell you the car makes you fatter and all that stuff. But if I had a trade with that person that has to go fetch the water from the well every day, I'll take the car and the plumbing every day, Every day.

Tom Howard: 38:42

What technology does is it makes life easier for us. That's right. And we sit here complaining about technology while and we complain about it while we're on our phone, posting it on Facebook and Instagram and that kind of stuff, and it's hilarious to me. And so we could talk about how AI makes us dumber. But guess what? I promise you that in the next couple of years, you will not want to live without AI. There's no freaking chance, because it's going to get better in technology. That's the point. Of technology is to make life easier for people and more efficient. So it's going to happen.

Corey Berrier: 39:20

I totally agree with you. So one of the things I always like to I enjoy asking people. We've all been through struggles. I enjoy asking people. We've all been through struggles Mine's been with alcohol and other substances and well, really those two things primarily. And I don't know if that's a part of your story and I'm not really asking if it is, but I would like to know. There's been a time when you were struggling. There's been a time when maybe you didn't know if you were going to make payroll, as a simple example. Or maybe there was a time when you thought the doors were going to close and it was the 11th hour and you just really didn't know what to do. Can you walk me through one of those times and tell me a little bit about that?

Tom Howard: 40:08

I'll put up about my life a little bit. I'll just tell you right now. So when it comes to drugs and alcohol, I've had one alcoholic beverage in my life and it was on accident. It was actually while I was in Australia with some Australian contractors. I didn't know that sparkling cider in Australia actually has alcohol in it and I was like man, this stuff tastes like crap. It was actually one of the contractors, brad Hall from Ken Hall. He said well, it has alcohol in it. I thought you didn't drink. I said yeah, and so I've been fortunate not to have that.

Tom Howard: 40:39

I have no desire to drink. I've never really had a desire, I've never gotten into it and I've never had a desire to do any drugs that weren't prescribed to me by a doctor, and luckily I don't. I've taken pain pills before, but they don't do anything for me except reduce pain a little bit. So I don't know. I can't get excited about that either. Boring life really, and the reality was I wasn't even religious most of my life. So I don't run into those struggles and I think you can avoid a lot of struggles in life with just avoiding peer pressure and other kind of stuff and not doing things just because other people want you to do it. But there's some struggles in life and you mentioned some of them that I don't care how good you are, you're not, you can't avoid them. No one took a sip of cancer and got addicted to it. Right, that's right. There's some struggles that we bring on ourselves, but a lot of them that just you're just going to have them. And outside of bodily ailments like cancer, whatever, dementia or all these things that you can get that are no fault of your own, in business we have a lot of struggles. That part of becoming a solid business owner is getting through those struggles.

Tom Howard: 42:08

I remember a a time where I was talking to the head of my church in the area and each year I had we tried, we were finally getting wealthier and had some a little money, and I didn't want my kids to be spoiled, rotten. So we limited the amount of presents we get our kids for Christmas and said, okay, this is it. It was three things that they're allowed to get for Christmas. We're not going to go. When I was young, my parents would they'd like mortgage their house to try to just make Christmas have like a bazillion presents under the tree, and I really agree with that. So we'd go and we'd say, hey, we want to make it really good for another family. We try to pick one family per year and the bishop tells us the family name. And well, I took a name to him and said, hey, this is the family that I was going to help Do you know of, do you think it's a good idea to help them, or do you think someone else in the ward would in the area, would like to, would need it more?

Tom Howard: 43:14

And he told me. He said, tom, you're more than welcome to help that family and that family is struggling. I said, yeah, and he said, but he said your struggles made you who you are and the struggles they're going through right now are going to be for their benefit. So if you want to take away their struggle, it's going to hurt them. I have other families that are going through struggles right now that are not going to help them and they really need it. So if it were me, I would go to these other families that really they're just destitute and there's nothing. They just had a massive hardship happen. It was no fault of their own and they really just, they just need help. And I said, okay, I'll do that If you think it's a good idea, cause he knows the situation these people, cause they're coming to him asking for money and whatever else. And so I did and I thought to myself. He said, he told me. He said your struggles made you who you are and my struggles made me who I am, and I wouldn't want to take those struggles from that family, because he knew the specific situation of that family that I was talking about.

Tom Howard: 44:24

And I think in business, I look at myself now and there's a lot of problems that I'm having right now Lawsuits that are coming up, employees threatening to do things, employees that did illegal things that we caught and had to terminate them over stuff. That is just things that would crush me when I was $3 million in revenue or when I was $1.6 million in revenue when I got the company. Now we're 100 and that company will probably do about 150 million in revenue this year. And if I hadn't gone through all those struggles when I was smaller, one at a time, the struggles that I'm having now would crush me. And so I have to look back and think my gosh, the times I was afraid that I wouldn't make payroll, the times, whatever the times where you know people were threatening me with lawsuits, whatever.

Tom Howard: 45:18

I literally to this day have not lost a wage and hour lawsuit, which is huge in California. I'm probably going to have to settle one here pretty soon, but that'll be the first time I have to settle one. But I've got things coming at me right now stacking on my shoulders. It's just no big deal and I realized, gosh, there's plenty of times where I have had to get through it and I've always gotten through it and things have come out Okay. And the stronger you are and the more you learn and the more you spend Investing in yourself and the more education you get, and all that stuff makes it easier to manage these struggles and it's critical. It's just part of being a business owner.

Corey Berrier: 46:03

So well said. Yeah, so well said. I don't think anybody's answered it quite like that, but you're 100% correct. But I don't even know. I have looked at it in my own life and I know that I wouldn't be where I am today without those struggles and I wouldn't have the opportunities that I have if I hadn't have gone through things, and it also affords me the ability to help other people in the same spot that I was in, and so that's a really good. That was a really good answer. Yeah, that was spot on and I agree with you wholeheartedly. So it's interesting because a lot of people feel like, well, who, if they are struggling and maybe they're listening to this right now and they feel like, well, I just need a break. Sometimes you've got to create your own break. Sometimes you just got to buckle down and you just got to get your shit together.

Tom Howard: 46:54

Yeah, there's multiple times where I got. You know I had huge growth rates. I had a 40% CAGR, which is a compounded annual growth rate. Those are average for like 10 years. That just so you know. Like growing 10% a year consistently is pretty darn good. Yeah, growing 40% a year is astronomical. What people don't know is that sometimes I had years where I grew 87. Sometimes I had years where I grew five percent, ten percent and sometimes it's just I knew the company was outgrowing me and I needed time to get my shit together, yeah, and get things right first, before I kept growing again.

Tom Howard: 47:36

And One of the best books I read on this is called the messy middle and it's about the guy that made the company called be hands that sold to what is it called? I think they sold to Adobe. And he said look, everyone hears that I started my company and then I sold it for 180 million dollars to Adobe. And he said look, everyone hears that I started my company and then I sold it for $180 million to Adobe. He said they think that that was like a trajectory I started it, I went up and I sold it. He said the reality is you don't know about the messy middle, I almost went bankrupt several times. I almost didn't make payroll, I had people threatening to sue me, I had all this stuff and I was just going through hell for a long time and then we sold for 180 million, and so the messy middle is all about the messy middle and all the stuff that goes wrong and the struggles that he had.

Corey Berrier: 48:30

So is your, would it be? Well, I won't assume, but my guess is that your faith does have something to do with getting through some of those struggles. I know it is for me.

Tom Howard: 48:41

Yeah, well, here's the funny thing is like people talk about faith a lot and there's, and they get. I want to write an article. I haven't done it yet. I should just write a book and I call using the F word in the office the proper use of the F word in the office and the F word is really faith Cause, like you can't say faith or whatever in an office setting, but the reality is it's ridiculous because even if you're not religious, you need faith every day to make it through the day.

Tom Howard: 49:15

You wouldn't go out to your car and turn the key on unless you had faith that there's gas in the tank. You don't know that someone didn't siphon the gas out of your tank last night. You don't know that, like someone didn't come steal your gas tank out from under it to try to make some money, you don't know that, like someone didn't try to steal your catalytic converter overnight nothing. You just got to have faith that that there's probably some gas in the tank. You don't even you have to have faith that the phone's going to ring tomorrow. You have to have faith like faith is things hoped for which are not seen, which are true, right. So like you got to have faith in these things.

Tom Howard: 49:49

Now, my religion and I'm a member of the church Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints and my religions talks a lot about how to grow faith and that kind of thing. So do I bring religion into it in my mind? Yeah, am I preaching my religion at my company? No, I try to live it. I'll cuss sometimes. I didn't grow up in my religion, so you just heard me say shit earlier on the thing. It's an old, old habits die hard. But the reality is, when I'm sitting here thinking about it, I take that religious perspective. One of the things that we talk about from the religious side is that faith is it grows. Like faith, you can't just wake up in the morning and decide I'm going to have faith, right. Like you can't wake up in the morning and say I'm going to have faith, that my phone's going to ring today, right, because the reality is you can say that, but do you actually believe it and does it cause action? And it's hard because people say and I think this is important to talk about on this podcast I had to ask what's the difference between belief and faith?

Tom Howard: 50:54

And my buddy that was teaching me the gospel at the time and he said look, let me ask you a question. He said he told me a story. He said there's a giant canyon and on one side of the canyon there's this place where you could dig up some gemstones, and on the other side of the canyon is the processing facility. Now the gemstones immediately start to degrade and go bad within 24 hours. So you got into the processing facility with like in a couple hours to make your money.

Tom Howard: 51:21

So you see this guy and he pulls a tightrope across the canyon and he takes his wheelbarrow and he goes across the tightrope. The canyon's a thousand feet deep and he goes across this tightrope way up in the air and he goes every day. You watch him do it. He takes his wheelbarrow across, he digs up the gemstones on one side, then he runs across that tightrope and dumps them off on the other side of the processing facility and makes his money. See him do it every single day.

Tom Howard: 51:48

And he said Tom, do you believe that guy can do it? Do you believe he can go across that tightrope with a wheelbarrow? And I was like, yeah, I do. He said do you have faith that he can do it? And I said I don't know. Yeah, I guess. He said, good, get in the wheelbarrow. And I was like, wow, and that's the difference between faith and belief. And that happens in business all the time.

Tom Howard: 52:14

People will say they believe that something can happen. They know about Phil Falaski who sold 19.6 million in sales last year at my company and I show them the numbers and everything else. It's real, it's not. He didn't do it over the phone, he actually in person. If you do the math, he has to make like three sales a day at a 26,000 hour average ticket, six days a week. The dude did it Cause sometimes he works seven days a week. Sometimes he's got four or five jobs in a day. The guy is an animal, he is. I can't copy what he does. I would ask well, do you believe that can happen? And they'll say yeah, but then, do they have faith? Do they have faith to go train the salespeople to do the things that he's telling them to do? Everything else, usually not.

Tom Howard: 52:55

And the reality is, if you can get your people in your company to have faith in a process, faith in a procedure, faith in something that if they do what you tell them to do, this is religion aside. Religion at this point is out of it. Religion is faith in God and other things and discussions about faith in God. We're talking about faith in you. You need to get your people to have faith in you that if they might believe what you're telling them is true, but they might not have faith to do it, they might not be willing to get in the wheelbarrow and make it happen. So you need to go and say, oh my gosh, how do I get them to have faith in this? Because I can teach them a sales procedure, but do they have faith that it's actually going to work? If they don't have faith, they're not going to do it. They're going to sit there and listen to you yak your jaws for an hour teaching them that thing and giving them their handouts explaining it and whatever else, and that thing's going to end up at the back of the truck with a boot print on it in an hour and they're going to follow it.

Tom Howard: 53:52

All of us business owners have done it. I tried to trade in my sales guys forever and ever, but if you can get them faith, so then that's when I went to the religious side of it. I was like cause the religion, at least my religion talks a lot about how faith grows. And so what they say is guy named Alma gives this story. He said faith is like a seed, and the seed that you plant is hope.

Tom Howard: 54:15

And if you plant the seed in the ground, which is just a hope, you just gotta give them hope that it's true, right, like at first they don't even have a belief yet. They just gotta hope that they can make a lot of money in their sales. They gotta hope that they can close at that rate. They gotta hope that these things can happen. And then you gotta have them nourish it. They have to decide okay, to nourish it, plant it, water it, everything else. If the seed is good, it'll grow right. If you nourish it. If it's a bad seed, you have hope in something like I don't know, money's going to fall out of the sky. Probably a bad seed, it's not going to grow.

Tom Howard: 54:50

But if you nourish that hope that you can make those sales, you say look, I'm going to work with you today. I'm going to, I'm going to send you out on one call. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to track it. I'm going to work with you, I'm going to watch what you're doing. I'm going to make sure you keep nourishing that seed.

Tom Howard: 55:03

And if that happens, it's going to grow a little bit and they say, oh my gosh, I got my it, but now I'm starting to have faith. And then they nourish it some more and then they get more paychecks and whatever. And things started happening. Now it's growing like a plant and what he says is he says at some point it becomes and grows like a tree and at that point you have perfect knowledge. You don't even have to have belief or faith or whatever. You know for sure that this will happen. He's like at that point you have perfect knowledge of everything. He's like no, you have perfect knowledge of that one thing. So go plant the seeds other places and nourish them and see if you can grow your faith. They do it for religious purposes, but I'm sitting here thinking about it.

Tom Howard: 55:43

When it comes to business, I'm like huh and I try not to cross business and religion, but I can't use the word faith in business because they freak out and say, oh, he's trying to preach religion to me. No, no, no, I'm just trying to get you to believe in yourself. I'm trying to get you to have faith in yourself. I'm trying to get you to have faith that you can succeed and make generational wealth for your family. I I want you to have freedom. Everything else, if I get you to believe in that, it's not about God or Jesus or anything else, it's just about you. If you want to apply that to religion, and whatever religion you're in, I don't care. Fine, go for it. But while you're at work today, I need you to believe in our process. I need you to have faith in our process. I need you to have faith that we're going to succeed. That's what I need you to have, and so we're going to work on that.

Corey Berrier: 56:38

Yeah, so to work on that. Yeah, so it's complete sense, makes complete sense. That was fantastic and I can't remember who said it. But if you believe you can, if you believe you can't and it holds true with a lot of things right now holds true. And your boy, bill, is that what he said? You said bill. I know that name, I just don't know. Is it bill? Bill Pulaski, is that what you said?

Tom Howard: 56:55

Oh, Phil, Pulaski Phil yeah, he believes.

Corey Berrier: 56:59

There's no question about it. The results are there.

Tom Howard: 57:01

He has perfect knowledge because he's done it. He's like, yeah, I can do it. There's never a question about whether or not he can go sell a job. He knows he can. But he planted the seed of hope, he nourished it, he followed the programs, he tried them, and that's the thing is like, when you're trying to build faith, you've got to put yourself out there and try it and see if it works. And then that seed grows and you have to sort of have faith in it and then eventually you have a perfect knowledge in it and you're like I know for sure I'm going to go out and close this deal. This is how it works. You don't.

Corey Berrier: 57:31

Well it also. You've got to be willing to fail, because nobody's perfect. It doesn't work 100% of the time. Now, for him it works pretty damn close to 100% of the time. But for a lot of things in life you just got to try different things and different mixtures of things. But at least follow the process that's laid out, that we've proven. That works right. Works right it's, but everything gets tweaked a little bit to to your own personal, your own personal preferences. But at least start out with the framework that works. Anyhow, I know we're getting close on time. Tom dude, I really appreciate this. All right, just a great conversation. My friend, where, where can people find you and where can they find your book?

Tom Howard: 58:17

my friend, where can people find you and where can they find your book? The book is on Amazon called Fetching Millions, and that also, howardealscom, is the website where you can get information on me and that kind of stuff, and on Instagram you can do a real Tom Howard on Instagram is probably the best place where you'll see like videos of me talking about it. We try to post a video every couple of days and my stories and that kind of stuff.

Corey Berrier: 58:37

Cool, appreciate you, my friend.

Tom Howard: 58:40

All right, thank you so much. You got it, brother. Bye See ya.