Starting A $1.4M Home Service in 5 Weeks

0:00guys how much money do you make we make about eight hundred thousand dollars a year okay so like seventy thousand sixty five thousand a month correct okay what do you do we own home service companies so we have currently right now we have two home service companies we are in the process of buying a third one as of actually today we ended up getting an offer accepted on a pest control company Pest Control yeah what is a Home Service Company like it's a Home Service Company think about the folks that are in your home right think about house cleaning pool cleaning we did that think about

0:35grout cleaning think about Landscaping all that good stuff so the stuff that nobody wants to do like dirty jobs almost it's dirty jobs it is it's very dirty jobs okay so when you DM me the most interesting part about this was that you took the more modern day young man's approach in the sense that you did social media marketing agencies first and then that kind of transitioned into why am I doing all these marketing for these companies why am I getting them all these customers when I could just also own the company so explain that to me yeah so the thought process behind that so back five years ago I was a loan officer

1:11selling loans running ads as well in that space um and kind of the process is when you start an agency and you have five clients 10 clients 15 clients we've never gotten more than like to the 12 Mark right which is kind of a uh kind of a stopping point for a lot of folks where you're making 900 bucks a month per client you're running ads you're delivering everything that you think should be delivered and they're churning month after month right and at that certain point you start to think I'm making you money right I'm creating follow-ups for you I'm creating drip campaigns for you I'm building your

1:47brand right I'm getting you 50 reviews on Google I'm getting you all these things and at the end of the day you're getting paid 900 bucks a month and the only thing you're not doing is finishing the job and fulfilling it right so for us kind of our thought process was why not kind of fill that Gap to where we're running ads anyways we're building back-end systems anyways the only Gap with that is going to be finishing the product which is ending up at the house and hiring the people that clean the house and do all the things right so for him that's kind of where he comes in

2:19where he is the one really fulfilling all of that and for me I'm just another ad person at the end of the day and that's kind of our different approach so this is like a very like old school business that just people need their houses clean people need these services and it's not as sexy and the online world might overlook this so maybe it's because it seems like a lot of work and intimidating one buying one of these companies that sounds like a weird conversation to have with the person who already owns it so take me back to like let's say you're just doing your smma

2:53and you're like okay I want to buy this first company what was that process 2021 had airbnbs Tempe nightmares right which is why they're all sold um and we had a very hard time getting a pool person so we're like this sucks and I was like hey man you want to try to like flip this pool from green to blue so like I don't have to refund like two thousand dollars to these people like yeah sure let's let's go for it so he did it and we were like hmm that's interesting it's interesting nobody else answers our calls right and we're trying to pay you 800 to turn a pool from blue

3:26to green right in two hours of work right and it's like okay there's something to this right like why why don't we try something like this so that was kind of our first introduction into like why going from more of the ad space of just running ads and taking retainers and stuff like that moving that into actually owning a home service company was a pretty easy and natural decision at least for me because my job doesn't change right so for him it was like hey you want to learn how to clean pools like okay and he was like sure he cleaned the first pools up until 60

4:02accounts which we can go into kind of the revenue and what that looks like at some point that's 60 accounts he stopped cleaning pools after that so it was like what was that five weeks yeah give or take so five weeks how did you learn how to clean a pool I mean is it just pretty straightforward I put a lot of weight in learning from you know YouTube or the pool shops and just trying to meet as many people as possible to figure this out to make it float because we already invested so much money into it so um yeah yeah I mean there's there's certain

4:34certifications you can try to get and things like that but at the end of the day we're just but you can literally you just went on YouTube and just that was pretty try to pattern match this pool looks like this how do you fix it and people have tutorials on cleaning pools for free yeah yeah they're always so you guys invested 25 Grand but was that necessary for like equipment to clean pools like you needed a power washer or like where did the 25 Grand go I mean with the equipment alone if you have your own truck you can start for under a thousand dollars really really yeah yeah

5:04and then you just can charge a client for whatever you need to actually clean their pool I assume we're actually cleaning the pools we're charging 150 bucks a month give or take um we can go into volleyball do you have like a retainer service oh yeah okay we'll get into all that I want to focus first on ads I like going through the order of the business like if I were to start today first you need customers that want to get customers but it is important to know how you learn the skill so yeah obviously foreshadowing I'm assuming you're buying businesses so you don't have to learn the skill they

5:31already have this skill down and now you can just keep now we have a lot more money okay exactly exactly but if you're just starting out thousand dollars you want to clean pools you can learn on YouTube Just Get out there figure it out and then you can scale but oh yeah I think I'll try aware I think a lot of people are in a position where they know the skill but they have no idea to get customers a lot of people know how to get customers they don't know how to get the skill so let's start with customers because that's where most people probably get caught up yeah so you want

5:54to get a customer for a pool company what do you do we've used next door organic and ads we've used Yelp a lot of mean people on Yelp so be careful we've used Thumbtack we've used Angie's List and most successful we use Google AdWords also Facebook but everyone used Facebook but number one is going to be Google AdWords so most of the money was spent in Google ads obviously like retargeting back to Facebook and kind of you know all that good stuff but number one is going to be Google if you don't have any money at all um you're going to want to just go organic and you can join Facebook groups

6:27of stay-at-home moms right you can join next door organic which is an app that basically if someone says Hey do you recommend a pool company near me or do you recommend this near me right that's an app and all the moms talk them back and forth and all that good stuff so that's really cool that's 100 free so next door is like a neighborhood app right like it's like based on your neighborhood to let people like post on what's going on around them in their Community exactly and so you're just going to participate are you straight up like selling on there like what's your strategy on Nextdoor yeah so next door

6:57organic is different than next door paid so they do have paid ads correct is that made for service offerings or is it just anything it's made for pretty much anything okay not really like offer up where you can like sponsor a post and sell like a couch right but mostly next door ads you can kind of funnel them either into the messaging portal on Nextdoor which we've had a lot of success doing and then we have our admin just messaging everybody on Nextdoor right the other thing that you can do is just post organically just saying like hey you know we do pool service we do

7:26house cleaning we do Pest Control whatever it is right you also the number one thing that I will tell you is if you're going to go organic on next door get other people in your area like friends family Etc five ten of them just hound them right because I'm just like hey you didn't do it yet hound them in order to download the app and start asking for recommendations getting a little bit of I guess credibility on the app and then they're going to be able to recommend you and they can just stay kind of around the app and we've had like we've probably gotten we've probably made it

7:58easily 50 to 100 Grand from next door for sure so what are you like posting on next door like so if we're running ads I'll go two channels right so organic is there's one people can share stuff right so when people when you know XYZ mom says Hey do you recommend this person that person will like tag you and then you'll get like a notification and your profile gets optimized the more tags that you get so it'll be like in your profile say 100 mentions right which is really cool so you kind of get put to the top right kind of like SEO on next door is it per neighborhood no it's just

8:30kind of geographical location so it's a very unique thing people don't really talk about next door which they they probably should just because it's cheap right it's not like something that you can go blow up and get to Seven figures with but it's pretty cool so you can post on Nextdoor offering your service straight up you can get people in your neighborhood good friends family to go on there and say hey I got pool cleaning I really recommend this person right you shouldn't do it yourself from like the same IP address and stuff um which is like of course but people probably don't think about that no way

9:00so if you have other people do it it's super organic but yeah so you're literally so if you really had to just start out you would make an account on next door make a post and then you're saying make a second account to kind of boost that one again other people make second accounts okay different IP addresses okay that's really important yep try to give you like credibility and then hopefully you get a few clients there the new referral Network could Blossom correct on next door what are you posting like what are you physically saying it literally like nothing like you're literally basically just saying what will you do now if you have other

9:31people post you're just having them recommend you for a certain service how would you word it because a lot of people would be like we sell pool cleaning services correct buy our services so okay great question so for us it's always a special right hey we're doing this XYZ just for Nextdoor shoot us a text with code next door 10 and will give you your first month for free only on Nextdoor okay right we've done that just typical ad copy stuff but I guess that's like more advanced that's your offer your promo correct a discount I like how you say it's next door specific to make them feel special so

10:04they take action yeah that's the scarcity um but sorry you said that it's 150 per month is your offer correct so you're trying to get a subscription to clean these people's pool once a month twice a month what's that once a month once a month 150 a month correct okay and then a next door you're gonna act like it's not act you're gonna promote a special make a post have other people make accounts to help you to get a few boosts so you look like a real person which is pretty normal Airbnb you do the same thing to get your first few reviews and then from there you're at least look

10:32credible and now you can build off that momentum how totally so with that momentum you're gonna have you'll actually have stuff coming in right everything that comes in I would recommend funneling back and paying for more ads especially as you get more credibility right conversions will go up everything will go up 100 percent what I recommend on Nextdoor is to send them to messaging don't send them to a landing page doesn't convert at all so you need to send them to the messaging app within next door and get back to them within 30 seconds there's no sort of Integrations like with zapier or anything there's nothing that you can like automate that

11:05process but you can manually do it so I hope that kind of answers that that makes sense also just to correct something it's It's weekly service so every week but it's on a monthly subscription correct one okay so one pool cleaning per week for 150 a month okay cool it's pretty good okay so next door is one you said Google AdWords is your biggest and so I'm going to preface this saying you don't if you're watching this and you just want to figure out how to make money you don't have to fulfill you can do exactly what he's talking about and then sell those leads to other

11:36companies they just do both and you can make way more money doing both obviously why they're making 70k a month so what is your Google ad strategy ex give me a visual explanation so like I assume you're trying to rank for pool cleaning yeah someone Google's pool cleaning you're the first ad that pops up that's your goal correct totally yep okay so the strategy behind the landing page I use for pretty much any company I'm running ads for which at least now is ours um I'm using pretty much the same exact templates for ads on the landing page so number one we're always doing a special right I

12:10changed the special every month depending on obviously what month it is right we don't mention anything about price because then they know what they have and now it's like okay I already see this I'm gonna go bounce and I'm gonna go to a different page so no nothing about price nothing at all quick bullet points Square quick bullet points with everything that we do and obviously like things like all of our repairs are in-house we don't contract anything we have over 300 five-star reviews right we have same day service guaranteed you can text us we have a virtual sign up process nobody has to come to your house

12:41right you get a picture of your pool and a report sent your email after every service right this is persuasion tactics you're eliminating every objection trying to make them trust you essentially with all these different little points and they build up to potentially a close deal correct and always shooting for at least a 30 conversion so someone lands on your website you want one in three of those to convert which is pretty good conversion I can go into cost per lead and cost per acquisition all that kind of stuff if you want me to yeah we shoot for in the pool space at least here We've ran ads in other states which we

13:17can talk about that but here we shoot for anywhere between 22 and 30 dollars per lead we will close at least one in four of those okay so you can reverse engineer the cost per acquisition right which is very good um you're talking 80 to 120 bucks give or take and cat cost which is fantastic when you're charging 150 a month yeah so it's a subscription which also brings into the question Enterprise value for your company so explain that so with a subscription model all pool companies are subscription models right the only downside to a pool company is margin so margin's not going to be crazy

13:52high through the roof you're talking 20 to 35 maybe 40 margin depending right we also did repairs we did High ticket ten thousand dollar pool heaters we've done all that kind of stuff where you're 60 plus percent margin now if you're just getting into it building a route and getting each technician can handle between 60 and 80 pools per week right so you can kind of reverse engineer the math each technician each track should be about ten thousand twelve thousand a month top line revenue right so that's how we got to our Peak wait one truck can do 60 pools a week yeah 12 a day yeah at least what's the

14:30biggest what's the biggest route someone's had um we've had routes of probably 100 to 110. it's a week what one person could do 100 it's really hard yeah some of these guys especially in the winter time they can move a little quicker and as we winter in Arizona which is in the we're still swimming yeah so if you're not in Arizona Nevada any of the Sun Belt states don't start a pool company okay but uh as your company grows and your routes become tighter you guys can do a lot more work so we had some people doing 20 to 25 pools a day okay wow yeah

15:03and I just want to make it clear they have multiple different type of home services this is just the first one they started but the same marketing strategy applies to all of them I assume same exactly down to a T I wish I could say it's different every single Home Service I'm sure Roofing well give me a list of everything it could be Roofing Turf kind of solar solar's hard solar tide ticket house cleaning 100 exactly the same thing floor cleaning upholstery cleaning we know people that make a lot of money in that which is crazy Pest Control pressure washing pressure washing mobile car detailing which we also do so we can talk about

15:38that at a different point but it's all the same thing you're going after homeowners and that target audience is the same throughout everything and the only variables are going to be Service delivery which is obviously going out to the home doing the dance right and being able to have really good employees which God bless him that's that's his role right and so we at some point probably should go into like recruiting and all that kind of stuff how we do that but yeah that's kind of the main thing so it's all the same throughout the process and they're also are they all subscriptions or just the pool no so the

16:10only ones that we've been involved with that subscription is pool and then pest control as well but that's one you just bought yeah well hopefully we got offer accepted literally this morning okay I want to go through all that but I want to stay on track so people can think in order so what was it offer up or next door next door my bad yeah next door was your first strategy then you go to Google ads and again all Google ads correct it's just ranking for a keyword so someone searches on Google pool cleaning your ad pops up and you pay whatever price it is for that to be shown up a certain amount

16:42of times and you're averaging 20 to 25 20 to 30 perfectly click to your website so cost per click is going to be anywhere between eight and twelve dollars okay right and then out of those because Google doesn't charge for conversions it's only clicks right so you're eight to twelve bucks a click depending on the season depending on competition depending on all that stuff which we can get into for sure depending on that and also depending on your conversion is how you're going to get a low cost per lead right now Google AdWords is something that if you're already an agency owner and you're running Google ads for other people you

17:14obviously understand Google which is awesome or you need to hire an agency to run Google ads for a Home Service Company because Google ads is probably the most complicated like I've spent like freaking 500 Plus hours on Youtube Learning it and I've bought courses I've done the dance right um there's a lot of things on the back end and we have a lot of people that are like man I ran Google I had to spend a thousand dollars I got two leads ah I get it it's hard but that's kind of the final step and there's a lot of free or cheaper stuff that you can do but Google

17:43ads will blow you up okay so most people I would as a naive person would think Google ads is what you want to go straight for but you're saying don't do that until you have a good base correct yeah I would start with next door right as the first free cheap one right I would then go to Yelp which we can touch on a little bit the yelp's a pretty cool platform most people don't really know that you can run ads on Yelp which is really cool you can pay them for ranking um they take a lot of money so I don't endorse them that much but setting the

18:13minimum Budget on Yelp at 300 a month can bring in a pretty good amount of leads they do sell those leads to four to five people so you're talking anywhere probably five to twelve dollars per lead on Yelp but they will sell them to four or five people so your conversion on those you're not gonna get as many people from Google you might get one in ten rather than Google we probably get one in three leads that inquired to convert and buy your service okay Yelp is universal as well for all home service companies and all these platforms you're advertising the same special same thing 10 off 20 off is that

18:45what it is yep same thing mostly what we've done was the first month free now the other thing that we started doing when we wanted to have a little bit more money coming in up front is we would kind of try to bring value in some other way where it's like hey we'll give you an algaecide treatment for free right things like that we would even say like hey it's a free inspection 21 point inspection we would have the guys do a full inspection have that automated sent out right so they kind of know a lot of people charge 50 bucks 100 bucks for that so there's a lot of perceived value

19:18there when really it's just an extra 10 minutes of work are you sending someone out there to do the inspection they sign up okay so we don't we don't do quotes in person everything's virtual sign up okay so let's just do first month free but you're doing that on any of these platforms for Google ads are you doing a special offer just ranking by keyboard and it's like your website Google ads is pretty much the same so it's it's supply and demand I'll change it if we're getting flooded with inundated with leads which it's seasonal right I mean out here you're seven months a year where everyone's swimming right and

19:49everybody's like hey I need to get my pool clean because I've been neglecting it for five months right at that point you don't get anything for free right because the phone's ringing off the hook but in Winter right we flip over to a different model which we can kind of talk about we switch to bi-weekly so this goes a little bit deeper into like margins which is kind of cool I think so we we did a 99 dollar monthly special or bi-weekly service meaning that they come once every two weeks instead of once per week and the cool thing about that is the cost per visit ends up more than it does for

20:24monthly coming weekly so if you're 150 a month right you can divide that by four and you're roughly what's that 35 bucks a week give or take right now if you come twice a month and you're only ninety nine dollars that's fifty dollars a visit so by charging 50 a month less you actually make fifteen dollars more per stop which is kind of cool you have more customers correct and you can kind of fill up during the winter and then in the summer you now will need to hire somebody though but you actually get way better margin and we can go into obviously like you can touch on like

20:57chemical costs and kind of the peak of what we're spending on all that stuff in the winter versus Summer because that's crazy that's the offer that you're doing a free month first month 150 yep for four stops per month okay so this is the flow ad platform top of funnel yep or next door or Yelp and that's a offer that is a free month then you go to the website and it's just what is your website landing page looking like is it just like one headline and you're calling or is it an application is what information are you asking from them do they when you take credit card what's that flow so

21:33the the sign up process is is fun we love that so that's like my favorite thing so they're going to landing page right if if it's Facebook it's Facebook form inquiry just lead form inquiry LinkedIn with ghl auto text if they're going to a landing page on Google right they're going to either call right or they're going to fill out the form right which is just simple phone number email first name not even last name right the less amount they have to do the higher conversions will be we don't have them go through a whole thing how many gallons is your pool all these different crazy things we don't need to do any of

22:07that it just hurts conversions bad so with that being said they go to the website site it's short landing page never run ads to a actual full website that's built out because they will click around and they will bounce they will not convert so short landing page five six sections if you know website building you kind of know five six sections right always show social proof we have screenshots of all Google reviews on there five stars five to ten screenshots pretty much very simple right we have pictures of the software that we use so it shows an email of getting your pool report it'll show like you get a live

22:42pool report right it'll show kind of our services everything we do every week skimming brushing vacuuming all that good stuff very simple and then we obviously end everything too with where we're located online so we're talking Yelp next door kind of more social proof all the little logos pretty much just laid out the website so very simple very clean very minimalistic nothing bright nothing loud very clean no videos no videos okay no just like a headline Banner social proof application basically yep okay and then once they fill out that application I'm assuming there's an automation that triggers someone to call them correct so we use ghl on the back end we have sub accounts

23:22for any company we've either ran ads for or that we own ourselves sub account which is the pool cleaning company for this one this example form gets filled out goes into ghl through zapier lead connector whatever goes through there sends a trigger text saying hey looks like you just inquired on pool service we just ran your uh your um your email looks like you're not in our system yet shoot me a quick text back with your zip code and we'll see if you qualify for our neighborhood special right which is kind of another cool thing that goes there get the email get the text message back notifies our admin

23:56in-house she goes through says cool they'll send back zip code from there she'll look it up send out another text template saying hey great news you do qualify you know do you have any questions do you have any repairs that are also needed shoot me a quick text back we can go from there they shoot a quick text back from there at that point she's calling them and getting them on the phone and trying to get them to e-sign our agreement on the phone and take credit card so we don't invoice for anything everything is auto pay on the credit card okay when you say e-sign

24:26does she have to be at the customer have to be at their email to like so receive that we we actually have a pretty cool thing where or at least the pool company we use a company called sign now and what they do is you can actually sign pretty much via text oh so this is all you're closing in the text message yeah cool okay ghl means go high level this is the software they use so you run an ad they go to your landing page they fill out a form or call or call yeah but if it's a form name email phone number then once they fill out that form they

24:55automatically get a text message correct then they have to answer back their zip code correct and then from there someone on your team gets notified via email or automation then they have to send another text asking if they have other repairs needed and then from there she calls them closes the deal sends a text signature and takes a credit card over the phone correct yeah credit cards all over the phone and they're on the monthly subscription right there instantly and recharge before we even get to the house okay so and they're all notified of that it's a pro rated charge even if it's a free month well depends

25:29so a lot of the times what we'll do is we'll either do free month as the second month right because that it's it's a lot harder to just eat that first month because people will cancel so we usually if there is a free month we will do usually the second month so that helps a lot which is people don't love it right the Karen's out there aren't very happy about it but it helps our bottom line a lot so business yeah it's how it is okay how long did it take you to learn that system that you just told me it's a really good question um

25:59trial and error I would say easily 20 30 hours of just tube right um like I said though being in the space before being in sales running ads things like that this is pretty normal um pushing it over and kind of handling all of it is the only difference really but if you're already in the ad space you know all this stuff right but if you don't know anything about any of it 20 30 hours on YouTube you'll be good to go what should they Google how to set up a lead automation on go high level I would say yes number one I recommend using unbounce for landing page builder

26:34I use them for all of it love it fantastic system um but yeah with go high level there's so much stuff out there so much content it's it's really easy to learn it's very simple um and we we love it we use it for everything the biggest problem for me when I'm trying to learn something new is I never know how to ask the right questions or what words to use so just real quickly if I wanted to learn exactly that system and I want to do it on go high level what should I YouTube search I would I would search on YouTube I would search up how to build go high

27:04level lead gen system I would search up go high level automations I would go to their actual website as well they have a really cool backend Community I would search up that exact same thing on their backend Community as well because there's a lot of smart people really smart people and go high level okay if you're wanting to make more and you're really trying to work for yourself watch over that system again because that is the system that every single local business should be using and none of them have it most of these people have a great service a great business they're older 50 60 years old and they

27:37have no idea how to Market in the new age you can easily learn this in 20 or 30 hours and start making 10K a month so there is no secret sauce that is what you need to do just learn persuasion learn the little details but you'll learn that by being in the trenches so you don't even need to watch the rest of this podcast if you don't want to even at the deception or even at the self-deception of this episode go learn that skill but if you want to learn how the Masters are doing it to make hundreds of thousands of dollars continue watching so that's the system

28:05totally and it's not rocket science you can use canva for photo ads you can yeah exactly you can use canva to make the photos you can just use chat sheet BT now to come up with good offers and write the copy you just need to learn that that system exists and implement it and start offering it to businesses and have you ever done like cold calling or like knocking on doors for these businesses no okay so it's just Business Online yeah that's so cool it's the modern way to do it okay great how by the way how much can you sell one of these businesses for this is this where

28:35it gets real fun so the pool business is not traditional so in the way we sold it is not traditional at all very weird so in the pool business there's what's called pool route Brokers believe it or not this is a whole industry dude yeah you can make money so many ways it's crazy so these pool route Brokers are also 250 years old right they've been in the business for 30 years brokering pool routes taking a multiple on the sale which will go into what that is so these pull out businesses go off of a monthly multiple top line revenue right that multiple is anywhere between eight and

29:1512x of monthly monthly Top Line Jesus now we need to get in the pool business yes it's interesting so you build a pool company to 100K a month you should be anywhere between 800 Grand to 1.2 million selling it right now they take a pretty hefty commission they take a 2X multiple so if you sell it at 12x you get 1.2 million bucks you're netting one million bucks how they sell the business is they run Google ads right or they have SEO because there's only like five pool route brokers in the country right and they've been in business for 100 years they run ads or they just naturally rank

29:53organically on Google for poor routes for sale near me pool route business for sale near me business Arizona right they run ads or they rank for that they go on the website they have a bunch of pool routes for sale right you could even pop it up on the screen it's crazy it's like houses they have all these routes for sale saying kind of minutia about the route like what percentage of them are this what percent of them are there so there's literally a website for you to sell your pool routes correct like sell your leads essentially it's your business but correct you have to do the

30:22Fulfillment when you sell I guess a fulfillment team expected so yeah we'll go we'll we'll explain how this works it's interesting so you get to these websites right and you're going to see line items like an Excel spreadsheet saying hey we're out for sale in Scottsdale a hundred thousand dollars monthly Revenue nine thousand okay cool that's that's interesting right top line revenue not net so it's very deceiving so I highly recommend people really audit if they're buying pool companies because it is it can be not great so they go through this they talk to the route broker the route broker says hey cool sounds good you're more interested

30:55in that route I will send you a PDF of that route with basically no information right and you can see if you want to do it here's the information of the person selling the route go text them where that's how that's how they do it that's how they broker a deal brick and mortar in a way it's unbelievable right and uh so you just literally like we have this many houses this is the path you need to go the route is just like how many houses you're doing correct and then you can just I mean it makes sense like yeah yeah so now where it gets really weird is we saw that and

31:29we're like I don't know this is this is kind of weird I don't know I don't really want to use these guys I've talked to them they're great people they're nice people but I was like I think I could do this a little bit better so when we sold our business what I did is we ended with about 600 accounts and about 12 technicians and then a repair person and then two admin people so what we realized and by the way we we built that our first account was January 17th of 2022 and we just sold it within the last like month so we're talking like 16 months

32:04start to finish so what I thought is I was like you know this is interesting I don't really want to pay these guys a commission right I'm like I'm a salesperson I can go sell it right so I start running ads I pop up a landing page saying who else for sale by owner right no commissions no nothing and here's what we have to offer and I broke it up into a bunch of different routes and we would have that go to a call booking funnel that call booking would then go back to ghl and from there they'd book a call myself or Reese would talk to them they'd come in our office

32:35sit down give them the whole rundown on everything and open escrow that fast yeah took us three months to sell all the clothes okay we sold it to a six different people what do you mean like you sold piece by piece correct we bundled them up and sold them individually each so you basically just have like 50 pools in this one neighborhood or area 50 in this area 15 or the certain you can just sell them piece by piece yeah so you're just running ads building this up having one person do 50 or 60 and then equally selling it one by one you could yeah it's like modular in a way you could so

33:09huh that's an interesting business model where you could essentially build them and as you're building them always have them for sale sell them build more sell them how much did you sell it for we sold it for a total of around 900 Grand oh my God yeah but that's to six different people so 16 months to build all of them three months to close all of them so 19 months total yeah 19 months around there 19 months start to finish to bake about around a million dollars yeah well we made money doing it yeah while you cash flowed yeah damn I've never heard anyone talk about

33:42this it's like it's really weird real world way to do business okay yeah it's it's interesting and I think the most like lucrative part of it more than anything is bundling them up because to be honest with you we definitely could have gotten probably more money so we can go into that too where like as soon as you get to more you start getting an ebitda multiple rather than a Top Line monthly Revenue yeah now that would be like a thousand fifteen hundred accounts you're getting big money pretty big money because VCS jump in at that point because it's fully automated right you have high leverage at that point but at

34:19our scale we're like I really want to just take the money and buy so that's kind of what we did we broke it up into pieces which is kind of unique in that sense but it would have been hard to sell it all to one person with a million dollars because who's and it's very stressful too and so it's like with us doing it step by step in bundles in kind of almost a Biz op franchise type of sale if that makes sense right so it's kind of a starter package like we've sold them to awesome people like we've had a great experience with all the people that we've sold them to like

34:50and I say six seven people because there's a couple people that were like 20 accounts so it's kind of like there's some people that you know I think the most that we got from somebody was around 150 Grand from one person um and obviously they get more accounts with that right but I think it's cool doing it in those bundles because you have a lot more control over the transaction like we use an escrow company there's a you know 15-page contract that we've got drawn up and all that stuff so wow okay so what does it take to make this company sellable because you're you're really good at

35:19getting leads and a lot of people just do like lead generation agencies and they charge a monthly retainer for that but you decided to buy the company to then hopefully exit it so what is the difference between just a lead generation agency like what holes you have to fill to make this a sellable asset good question you have to you have to get Reese now okay I think the the holes that you have to fill are fulfillment on the back end which is obviously going to be employees showing up every day review management right we've gotten a lot of not nice reviews nothing that we've really done that

35:52wrong like we've obviously messed up in instances but we've tried to be really good we've had a lot of great guys out there and you have some rich women in Scottsdale too much time on their hands basically yeah they've hit on our employees too um but yeah it's really just the Fulfillment and I I highly recommend Partnerships like if you have two people and you have one person on the phones running ads taking all the customers in you have one person out in the field learning the trade that person can really get out of there mission in the field right like he did to where he's like I'm never gonna clean

36:23a pool again so that's really the only Gap that's really the only thing that people are missing really is taking it that one step further where I think if we were to just have ran ads for pool companies on a small retainer basis I mean we probably would have done pretty similar work for maybe 20 grand a month and so like one-fourth one-fifth the reward yeah so if you're willing to take that do the harder work or the work that most people don't want to do or find someone who is like Reese you can make five times more than just doing the leads the farther you take it the more

36:52leverage you have right so it's like if you're really good at running ads for home service companies it's a it's a genuine thought to consider going that extra mile to then maybe you take on ad spend and you sell per lead right rather than retainer and then maybe after that you take it on a little bit further and now you start the company right and you find a partner or you invest some money and you buy a franchise right if you don't want to really take a huge risk so that's kind of our thought process on it okay so let's go to operations and then I want to go into

37:22your kind of current business model of acquiring like your system for acquiring scaling different types of Home services at the end so operating a pool service company you learned it yourself yes and you had your own truck I assume right just have all your equipment I did so it's like power washer some you said some chemicals to clean the pool and you had to learn this game but you said you learned it in what five weeks yes yeah so you learned the game five weeks and you're doing it yourself where did you get what was the first person that you hired where did you find them what were you looking for so what'd

37:56you set them up with how much did you pay them honestly in the beginning I was looking for anybody yes yes I was just needed help so especially with this guy doing the marketing it was like all right these things are coming in way too quick we need to scale on our team so luckily we had a uh a friend of ours who had a um a friend of a friend was looking for a job he ended up coming on and he rode with me for a couple weeks I kind of trained him up on what I've learned um he was also very Hands-On which seems

38:27to be common in this type of type of workspace is a lot of these guys are very handy um they might not be great at kind of communicating with customers or anything like that but they're figured out type of guys they won't leave the job until they get it done so he was one of those very handyman um type of type of guys and so with him luckily striking gold there especially with him not having previous pool experience which is something I can get into as well he was able to help me take on those initial like 60 to 150 pulls and then also help me train our

39:06new technicians and free up space for me so I could worry about getting new trucks setting up more systems for like gas cards and oh that's not very nice yeah yeah so you found a guy with work ethic basically that you could trust work ethic with you could trust and he was down how much you have to pay him it was all effort based um what do we start paying him I believe uh we did it in a weird way we started him on a salary which I don't recommend um 36 000 a year it's like okay it's like 3K a month and then by the end of

39:39it he was making like 42 000 give or take but we completely switched our models like per stop per pool we actually do correct how much per pool any anywhere between eight dollars and 14 depending on hierarchy so like if they just get hired eight dollars per pool and they're doing 8 to 12 pools per day maybe more at least yeah so 12 pools per day we'll just say it's the average yeah okay okay so you make like 100 bucks a day not bad and it's nice to setting it up that way was very important for us because a lot of people especially with experience in

40:13the pool industry are looking for that extra dollar or two per pool so being able to start at a base um and move up every couple months just dangling that dollar being like I want to give it to you we just need you to stick on keep learning things like that so uh yeah it was great we had some guys making a lot of money um you know making thirteen fourteen dollars a pool and knocking out 20 pools a day it's a great job they're just listening to a podcast the whole time so yes because you can learn and double double dip I could see it's great for a college

40:42kid or something during the summer but basically if you hire one employee do they get their own truck is it one employee per truck so it's a single person job and they just go house to house and they just look at their phone it is how do they know is there like an app that you can like lay out their map or do they have to type in each address they get like a list of addresses yep so there's an app and we set up the whole system and we build their routes for them so the app that we used is called skimmer it's specifically for pools it's great

41:10you can it it's a route optimization app um you can add nodes so optimization apps or pool cleaners and it's the one that gives you the picture right so they have to take a live picture it's like Snapchat you can't upload it so that live picture and then all the chemical readings they go right to the customer automatically when they leave the property what a niche app wow okay awesome yeah so that just does all of your organization essentially and you can make sure your guy is staying on top of it and doing his job and not just holds everybody accountable and it also leaves us with that receipt so if the

41:47customer does have an issue or if they're like hey I I don't think you know I don't think they came today we're like nope exactly which they always say 252. yeah yes you guys are dealing with people oh man we've gotten people that have sent us video recordings of the guy cleaning the pool saying he was only here for seven and a half minutes you told me he would

42:08be here for 10. so crazy stuff where people you just would never ever think that people would act like this but they they do man it's crazy stuff treat your service people nice that's why I like working on the internet because I worked at a restaurant for like four years you get it when I was in high school in college and yeah people are just making up stuff especially when you're in someone's backyard in their personal space yeah they want to know who's there so you want to keep those technicians whoever you put on a route you want to keep them on those same routes so those people get

42:40to know them they're comfortable they're dogs it's a relationship yeah oh yeah okay that makes sense Okay so hire one person you have to buy a truck for every person yes how much does a truck cost like 20 plus 20 to 30 000. we wanted to get nice Vehicles it's another incense part of your brand yeah and so we would let we would track have trackers in the vehicles we give them gas cards they have a nice vehicle so it's another incentive to stick around you're comfortable exactly yeah is it one of those like white bands that stereotypical or like a semi truck pickup trucks pickup trucks okay what

43:15brand Ford Rangers oh yeah random yeah and you wrap it or just I guess vinyl on the side we just have vinyl on the side okay yeah so you get a truck for 20 30k how much down a lot of them we were able to do zero definitely zero so you put zero down on the truck and then you're paying how much a month for the truck four to six hundred okay so you have four to six hundred to buy a vehicle then you have let's just say three thousand dollars a month for your employees that high maybe two I would say between like twenty eight hundred and thirty five hundred

43:44okay so let's just say three thousand dollars a month for an employee 600 for a truck so thirty six hundred dollars per truck how much can one truck make you a month yeah so there's a lot more expenses that go into that sadly I wish it was like that okay so we have the truck which is anywhere between 400 and 700 bucks a month depending obviously on interest rates all that good stuff talking 500 600 a month gas another 250 a month per truck Commercial Insurance another 200 plus per truck depending on the driving record of who you hired um you're gonna have Labor at call it

44:18ten dollars a stop right and if they're doing 60 70 stops a week right you're talking 600 700 bucks a week times four pretty much right at that like twenty five hundred to three thousand bucks a month give or take so right there you're around four thousand bucks a month now with that being said you have the biggest expense of all which is chemicals and you're talking probably another three thousand dollars a month in chemicals per truck so that ten thousand ends up netting you three grand the 10 you make ten thousand dollars per month per truck but seven thousand dollars on the expense side obvious

44:51various costs correct you're making around three thousand dollars per month per truck yes sir and that includes ad costs no so ad costs damn no so the cool thing about the pool business and like pest control and subscription stuff right like even like trash can cleaning business that's another interesting one but the pool business the lifetime value of the customer is really what you have to think about right you're going to eat that ad cost for the first month yeah maybe even two months right but at the end of the day the way our mental shift was when we realized that people sell pool routes which was like four months in brand

45:27Equity we were exactly and we're like so you can acquire a customer for a hundred dollars in ad spend and they're now worth a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars when you sell it um a month on top of that per truck exactly so that company that you sold for 900k and a total of 19 months will say how much how many trucks did you have how many truck drivers trucks I believe 12 and then plus one repair guy in a van and he's repairing the van or repairing pools repairing the pools okay okay yeah okay so you have 12 trucks and the cool thing is you just build this up over

46:04time totally yeah we did it really quickly but like we know a lot of people in the business like not that many like five those guys have been in for 5 10 15 years and they have 300 pools and five tracks they just didn't scale it like psycho it's a lifestyle business at some point you don't have to go for the moon it's an awesome business like even as an owner operator like if if guys are out here and they're like I would love to have my own business and you can go as an owner operator get to 120 Grand a year in revenue and you don't have to

46:32heat that 3K labor cost right so now you're 3K a month that you save now you're 6K now you're making 75 80 grand a year running your own business probably working four hours a day yeah yeah wow wait so how I was gonna ask what is the hours for one truck typically we're looking at most guys start around 6 a.m and they're going to be done by 12 or 1 p.m they can do 60 pools in a week for six hours per day they're not all cleaned very well I will tell you so that's where the reviews the truth's coming out yeah but or good guys

47:03are definitely doing it they are yeah the the the minority are great okay but there's some awesome guys Okay cool so you could you're literally you have 12 drivers making 10K a month 120k a month minus what is that 72 000 so like 50 60 km 40 60k a month profit yeah right around there now Less ad spend correct now some of the other stuff that's interesting about it is the ancillary products so upsells basically correct so for us this is a big thing too if anybody has a pool company wants to start one is making sure that you're charging for the other little things because that brings in a lot of money

47:40every year which was only one and a half years we did it once we did a 90 algaecide treatment on everybody and we emailed them today hey you know your pool is going to really need this Etc just reply yes if you're if you're interested we got like I wrote that email took me like four hours to write the email because I was like I'm gonna make this the best email you've ever seen in your life we've got like a 72 acceptance rate on it and times like 500 people yeah that's 40 Grand in a day smart so and then we would go and we'd put them on the route if they said yes

48:07and we would treat their pool would it automatically if they just said yes you had to manually do it yeah I wish not right our admin she was busy that day she was like yeah and but yeah it was great I mean it cost us 20 bucks and they were on the route anyways so there's no extra labor right so it's like hey drop this product in there cost us money but you know we'll make 4X on it it'll keep the customer a lot happier during the summer it's called a pool RX like they're like 20 what 25 30 bucks if you buy a lot of

48:34them at a time you can buy a ton of them so spoke yeah so that was a really cool thing whatever like physical things you'd sell yeah well that that was it that was that was the pool RX which was which was a physical product that they would put into the into the pool equipment and all that good stuff which I don't know that much about pools you ever thought about toys or like floaties we kind of did actually um we just I don't know it was something that was kind of interesting but we we did kind of think about even like the e-commerce stuff that you could sell

49:01back to them but we're like gosh I don't know maybe not our thing but you might need to focus on scaling like 30 40 trucks before you and the other thing too that we did so with pools they each have different filtering systems so you have like de cartridge filters sand filters right that's another huge Revenue point that can add anywhere between like 800 bucks and 1500 bucks per truck so we had an automated system if you have a de or cartridge filter you need it cleaned every four to six months we charged 150 for that and we'd pay our technicians around fifty dollars as a

49:33bonus for that so we're netting 100 bucks on that right we had it all automated to where they would get reminders reply yes right kind of the whole thing via text it would go into the sequence we would get them all dialed in get them all uploaded get it scheduled on the system on skimmer and they would do the filter clean charge them and eventually towards the end before we sold it we actually had a guy in a Nissan Versa which was actually our only non-truck because it was better gas mileage um only doing filter cleans and so he was doing about 15K a month worth of

50:04filter cleans give or take ham okay this is a good business it is it's not easy but like it's a cool business it's different you know it's uh definitely different next door landing page and then the lead automation sequence with go high level are like the main three things if you're just starting out that's what one person needs to learn yep and then one person needs a truck and the willingness to learn on YouTube then the equipment and you can also find that on YouTube and so it's like a thousand dollar investment the free on the marketing front go high levels how much 97 bucks a month so 100

50:39100 bucks a month for this all the software you need to unbounce I guess to make the landing page yeah you can do more probably cheaper stuff but I recommend on Bounce other 100 bucks a month give or take and then two skimmer which is interesting you'll like how they charge so they charge per stop there you go so it scales with your business yep they charge a buck a stop okay we're early and we I think we're at what 50 cents a stock per customer on a route per month correct okay so if you wanted to start this business today you just need to get on next door in your

51:07neighborhood start working that with a offer that gets people's a gets people's attention then website with unbounce then the go high level automation to nurture and close the lead then you need a truck the equipment and skimmer to fulfill totally that's the whole business pretty much yeah and then you'll get into the details as you learn that but that's a great starting point yeah perfect exactly okay and then you guys so you started the company 19 Monty sold it how much revenue slash profit did you do in that 19 months total yeah good question I just actually talked to my accountant for last year um so first year we ended up doing about

51:46550k in top line revenue which was ending yeah I mean it was ending up in about 10 months or so give or take because obviously we go from like 10K to 20K to like 28k to 35 pounds all that stuff yeah and then by the end of it for the next year we ended up hitting that like 100k a month Mark in January of 2023 which before we saw so I think total we probably ended up around like one point 4 mil in top line revenue probably like around 400k in in net plus the sale it's like 30 margin yeah and and that that's hard to hit it's really hard to hit and

52:20really the main way that you hit it is those like ancillary products and keep yourself lean and I really would recommend too to people like definitely with the trucks like we bought nice stuff and we like we bought our employees really nice uniforms and like we went all out on the brand because we initially were like let's take this thing to like 100 trucks and we wanted the Cool brand we wanted everyone to like be paid well we wanted all that stuff and I completely agree on all that the only thing I would have changed would be I would be buying trucks for five to eight grand

52:47um instead of taking loans out on trucks that are 20 30 grand only because you're buying out right you kind of have to at that price point but you save so much money on Commercial Insurance like at our Peak we're spending close to like four thousand a month on car insurance and then gas we were spending like six thousand a month how'd you qualify how did you get a car for no money down we just both have good credit man we bought a lot of cars so we have good car history and stuff like that it's the history with that lender okay yeah and the only other thing to think about too

53:15is like we would have done this but you actually usually can't get autos under an LLC so all of ours were under personal you can't get them on an LLC until you've been in business two years uh mostly so with most lenders like non-like not subprime people like just normal like B of A and you know depository institutions they're going to want two years to give you a commercial Auto so we really wanted to be able to like if we kept the business we would have tried to refi all of them into the actual LLC um just for just for many reasons obviously to get off our credit I mean

53:44we have freaking 400 000 300 000 in cars from trucks you know it looks weird when people check our credit back yeah oh my God yeah that's funny we would buy another truck and they'd be like are you guys throwing they'll be like no I swear it's a pool company they know what that is and they don't like it I assume yeah no because the lenders is like it's gonna get damaged so fast totally okay so well last question I guess on this company then I want to move on to like the new business model that you guys are on which is the same thing but scaling

54:11it kind of like a holding company but what problems did you have as you scaled like what were unforeseen problems you had when you just had one employee compared to six employees compared to 12 trucks why did is that a reason why you didn't want to go to that hundred even though it was your initial goal just explain those problems on the logistical operations or what were the biggest issues with scaling say I mean as we scaled the operation side for me got a little better um it got stronger because we had technicians that were obviously we were in business longer and some people stuck around with us

54:45um and I was able to move them into more managerial roles to keep track of other things um but I mean I think so it actually wasn't too hard to scale like sure somebody might have been sick in your whole business is actually easier it's easier at scale yeah so the more you scale the easier it gets to manage um so especially a lot of people will try to take to build pool routes in very specific areas but we took the whole valley we were just like we're doing it anyway we might as well do it now but sometimes that might mean you're driving 20 30 minutes to get one pool and then

55:20driving back to another area yeah that's money so as we scaled those routes got tighter our guys were a lot happier also if someone calls out those routes are still tight so people can pick up a pool here and there and we have 10 guys that can go you know make each other slack up oh so they could bounce off like that they didn't have to it wasn't just like this person's glued to this route in an Ideal World they would be but in an Ideal World people wouldn't crash our trucks and to get DUIs in our trucks and all that stuff but it's not an Ideal World

55:52there was some truth to that one huh yeah damn okay yeah those are the headaches you don't want yeah that he you know he gets the calls that's liability in the morning and you know it's like oh they're driving your truck so they have your trucks they take them home are they allowed to we yes because we have an office that's like for admin but we don't have like a flex space where you have a whole warehouse and like so in an ideal world you would have like 12 spots and they have to come they you will that caused a lot of problems but it's a it's a a must for starting

56:23early days yeah tell them about the guy that that we thought stole the truck the the oh I shouldn't say anything so yeah the thing is I'll I'll just talk about kind of the trucks in general so especially in the pool industry here in in Phoenix as well in the summer when it's 115 degrees our guys want to start as early as possible yeah our customers are okay with that so they are they are they actually are 95. there's always there's always a uh not be okay with that so and they know to be quiet they know to click okay close Gates very quick um you know

56:58quietly things like that but um so the thing is is just trying to balance all these guys obviously things come up these people you know get sick they're not they're no call no showing things like that so if I'm sitting there with all the keys just waiting for them at each truck it gets very difficult in the morning so we would just let them start as early as possible we had like a 7 A.M cut off line but the thing is is you just can't control it that much um sometimes we just needed to let them take the trucks home and it was easier to track

57:30it so we could kind of manage it that way what would you have to do if they started driving the truck after hours for their own use um a lot of times what we mostly did is we would just wait on it because I'm I try to put a lot of trust in these guys and then you know we go through the gas reports at the end of each month hey your gas was a lot higher than even though you're tracking it even though you know the first engineer right like their route how many miles their route is which is how much they're spending on gas yes but that's like the angle you

58:01take with them even though you can you have a Tracker in the car because I I understand especially for a lot of these guys I understand that they're going to need to use the truck every once in a while maybe go to the grocery store or something like that yeah and it's like if you're if you're working hard for us I totally understand yeah I just ask that you ask me just send me a text I'm always going to say yes okay um if we noticed any someone was going out of town or something obviously I'm going to reach out immediately but I had notifications every time the truck

58:28started or where they were if they left a certain one because that's the software or yeah we used um we use GPS track it so you can like buy like a physical yeah and you have to hide all it yeah oh you install it yeah you install it and it looks out and and inward towards the technician as well so we would even get notifications you have a camera yeah so it faces the technician and the the road and we would get notifications of technician's the driver like a cool technician yeah and we'd get notifications if um if they yawned if they were smoking oh my God but we like

59:00told them like it's not that weird it was a little excessive we didn't know how to turn that those features off it's like I don't care if you're yawning I understand but uh yeah that's why I feel like truckers like long distance yeah that's cool they can that's also scary it's like surveillance state is coming but I know anyone can do that that is crazy but they're also driving our trucks under our personal name it totally both sides but it's what that technology in general is freaking man it's wild yeah okay so that was your business and you guys 19 months pretty much a million dollar

59:32business on top of making 400k profit in less than two years so great work great income right there good lifestyle but now you've taken those lessons and now you're acquiring or so what is the process let's just use your Pest Control one why Pest Control actually one how do you acquire a company like that and then two why pass control so Pest Control is just like pools it's a subscription model which is fantastic which has really good Enterprise Value on the back end um higher margin and a lot easier for guys to do and a lot less visible to the customer if that makes sense so the pool business is

1:00:13really hard because it's so visible to the customer they go out there and they look and they're like what are these six leaves doing right and you're like oh no I'm sorry I will get the leaves out next time right with Pest Control it's invisible right these guys come in they spray and they leave and they can do 20 30 plus stops a day very easily the billing for Pest Control is the same thing auto pay monthly sometimes bi-monthly so every two months um we do we do not have the pest control company we made the offer on it and they accepted it which is beautiful thing I

1:00:48can go through kind of what that looks like the pest control company like you were saying is I think with pest it's a way higher leverage play so they go for huge multiples on the back end and when I say huge anywhere between like 7x and like 14x ebitda ebitda yeah 12 month trailing Revenue correct whoa yeah huge and um I have a friend at uh damn that's the comparison I have a friend at a private Equity Firm who's a VP of Investments and he handles all Home Service stuff so he handles pools he handles gutter cleaning HVAC and I believe also pest control and so we've

1:01:24chatted about that stuff and that was kind of what motivated me a little bit because he was like these are the best has the best LTV so put this in perspective the average Pool Company their LTV is eight months not great for Pest Control it's like 16 to 17 months so you're talking double which is fantastic and you're talking higher multiples on the back end which is fantastic each technician can also handle 300 pest accounts rather than pools 60 70. and the reason for that is because simply the visits number one take less time when they go there and number two they also are not weekly so you're able to have a

1:02:06technician handle 300 accounts that he goes to once a month which is a pretty beautiful thing so they're charging 49 bucks a month give or take so you're 50 bucks a stop on pest control which is really cool we're pools we're like 35 dollars a stop and we're paying for chemicals which is like six or seven dollars a stop so with Pest Control there's no overhead the chemicals are probably 25 cents a stop so that's a beautiful thing and then to go back to how we acquire the company um funny story so I have friends and home service companies that are in Facebook groups and all that kind of stuff I get

1:02:40a screenshot from one of my buddies that actually we sold a route too so we're still friends with him um and he screenshots this guy who's selling a pest control company on one of the pool Facebook groups hey we're doing pest control company we're trying to sell it blah blah blah trying to get in different things I'm like okay cool he screenshots it I messaged the guy like hey let's chat like I was in the pool business we literally just sold and this was like a few weeks ago and we're like literally just sold it I was like we're looking to get into pest ironically and it's hard

1:03:11to go on like Biz buy sell and all that kind of stuff because it's like very outdated and it's just not great it's very hard to acquire these things so we hop on the phone for two hours he gives me all the numbers of everything how many customers like literally everything and I was like this looks great like let's do it I'll make an offer that's kind of how it started wow how much is pest per month did I miss that 50 bucks a month 50 bucks a month and what are you doing so you're going in the house sometimes around the backyard all the time and

1:03:40you're spraying all the problem areas with basically pesticides so it's just like to stop ants from coming into your house any type of bugs anything like that and so this is just one type of chemical and you're just hitting all the windows pretty much and some cracks in the house exactly from pretty much from what I've discovered in the short two weeks is there's definitely like three levels of chemicals there's stuff that's like not that great but it's cheaper stuff that's like okay but this guy that we're buying the company from they're using like really good stuff so he's like it's a little more expensive but he

1:04:11thinks it's worth it to put in perspective with how many customers they have they're only getting like one call a day from a current customer and with pools you're getting like five to seven complaints or like questions or I would say mostly complaints yeah yeah so a lot less admin on that back end they just know that if someone cleans a pool then one leaf blows in after the guy leaves it's your fault oh yeah they're lit up yeah we've had we had somebody actually say that they uh they were like during the storm they were like you just need your technician to stand under the like

1:04:40pergola and wait for at least like an hour and clean as it comes because we have a party coming

1:04:54always on the employee side yeah because the employees are harder to come by and those guys work hard that's like trust how did you find employees that's a good one to go into how did you find your employees indeed ads indeed yeah I've used indeed has to be ads a lot of yeah we pay sponsored 25 an application that's not bad 25 bucks and you get like a like 100 200 people I bet no oh yeah how do you bet what are you looking for um I'm oddly enough I'm looking for zero experience yeah um and all you know just all personality pretty much so the thing in this space where a

1:05:31lot of people a lot of customers get a little weirded out is either it's just some guy that's very upset with his life and he's just dry and just go does his job he might be fantastic at the job at his profession but he can't communicate you're in people's backyards exactly you have to have a relationship you need to be presentable exactly so we're looking for presentable people just you know good guys most of pretty much all of our guys were between 20 and 25 um just very well spoken and just excited to work and and meet the customers um also there's a lot of bad habits that

1:06:04you can form in the in the pool industry a lot of these guys for a long time they don't want to especially from guys like us that we've been in the business for less than two years they're not going to take any anything from us about how we operate they're going to tell us well in the past this worked better or something so um we just wanted to to mold and and build our team the way that we knew would be most efficient and also make them happy and keep them keep them rolling so no experience was great and just take your time to train train these

1:06:33guys what does the okay what's the training process look like um the training process pretty much just all all visual just ride with our manager or in the beginning it was just ride with me for about two to three weeks and then that manager manager will be available for questions at all times and it's nice nowadays you just hop on FaceTime yeah show them a pump I'm getting this error or something like that yeah things like that on call then were they getting paid while you were training them same price started the eight bucks a day or something or hour yeah yeah okay eight bucks a pool eight

1:07:06bucks and then your indeed ad uh what did it say well it's funny because I started launching the indeed dads when Reese was first cleaning the pools like right when we hit like 50 accounts he was like dude like I need to hire somebody so I like write the ad pretty simple ad like I've pretty much written all of them just very like clean simple value proposition Ys right so we're really highlighting like we're a young company yeah we're a young company culture you're paid per pool which means you get paid the more work you do right we're talking you're getting a beautiful company vehicle that's like nice it's not like a POS

1:07:42right where it's like a nice vehicle you'll feel safe everything's good to go um and yeah I mean it's always pretty simple and we're like we want no experience and like what he's saying is dead on is like we wanted to just hire really good people and just train them and that's the intangibles that like you don't know because we went through at first we're like we need people with experience right and we're like wow these people with experience have been doing this for 10 years or like stuck in their ways oh yeah it's brutal you're looking for younger people always Young yeah like what age like anywhere 19 to

1:08:1224 not in college just trying to figure out life yeah I mean they can be it's great the nice thing about honestly the biggest selling point about the job is the lifestyle yeah being able to work you know four to six hours a day you don't really have a boss like on your ass yeah yeah once they have that route that's their business and they know exactly what they need to do exactly show up do it and you're good yeah and they take complaints very serious and personal so you know they get to know these customers and um yeah yeah that's that's essentially it it's just a good

1:08:41lifestyle we never we would offer if we had overflow into the weekends if someone wanted to work a Saturday to cover a route it was great they could make a 50 bonus something like that we would always incentivize but we gave our guys weekends off holidays things like that it's just you know and other service Industries you kind of get worked down to the bone they do so we just wanted to be a little we kept them on pools too to where they couldn't do too many to burn themselves out they get in the pool ever to clean they've Fallen yeah

1:09:17are there people that you like with that pool business that you've taken to your new business no they all got sold yeah but that's not a bad way to put it but yeah they got sold like cattle um no but what's been cool is we you know we we placed them if somebody was buying one of the routes from us we offered a technician with them as well which was cool but we only had two people that wanted our technicians um not because they're not great but because they wanted to so those other 10 got laid off essentially yeah tough yeah it's it's very upsetting um very upsetting not not great some of

1:09:54them were like not great employees a lot of them were great employees we really prioritized like we're super up front that we were letting all of them get sold off as far as the routes not the people and our best guys like our best like two or three guys these were the ones that were really pushing like hey take him and then give them a raise so that was really cool like our last guy who was like the best employee ever um he ended up getting sold off with our last route we gave him a bonus on exit just because we're like hey we appreciate the business and then he got

1:10:25another like 20 rate he was up like 14 15 a pool um with the other guy so he'll be making freaking 60 70 grand a year which is awesome for him absolutely great kid okay so Pest Control the one you're buying or in verbally buying verbally approved to buy what are you gonna do differently with this business compared to the pool business well I would say number one um probably go a little bit cheaper on the trucks um not too cheap there's like a nice happy medium but probably like for us at least we feel comfortable being like the 18 000 range gives us a nice little margin on the commercial

1:11:01insurance anything under like 18K you get way better deal on Commercial Insurance so at scale that helps a lot but zero are you doing taking a loan for the car at 18K we usually just will just because it's like why not of course it's zero down yeah exactly so that's number one I would say number two that we're gonna do differently is probably probably the hiring process I think that like with the hiring process we we started people off a little too quickly like I think with reason we talked about this today actually is that like we kind of want to do more of an apprenticeship

1:11:35type of deal where we have them ride along and do a little longer of a training period mainly because Pest Control you have to be licensed as well so they have to sit down and take a test so we kind of want to do more of an apprenticeship which I think will keep employees there a lot longer getting them involved you know for two three months before they're really making more money start them off low and then get them up really high which is cool and we can afford to pay a lot more in pest control because it's a higher margin so Pest Control is fifty dollars for one

1:12:02month for one trip correct one visit yeah that's the term exactly but also another cool thing is people do like 39 a month that you come once every two months so you're talking eighty dollars one trip ten minutes so that's where it scales really cool so you can have guys handling 300 Plus accounts 300 houses correct per month and now if you do that for two months you're pretty much talking like you can get somebody to easily 15 18 000 a month top line

1:12:30revenue per truck whereas pools was 10. how much damn how much are the chemicals per like per month do you think for Pest Control yeah so for this guy he quoted me the seller of the company he quoted us that he's paying about 250 bucks a month on 300 accounts so you're talking like a dollar a trip that's a great business another hitting with pest control that we're excited about too is so with pools it's all just residential pools so we're confined to people that have pools in the backyard you could do commercial also with uh yeah some you know some apartment complexes things like that but

1:13:04with Pest Control it's infinite so you know how competitive is it out here Theory but you have just better customer acquisition you think I think that's what you're betting on yep that's what I'm betting on um the cat cost is a lot higher like it's probably going to be three or four hundred dollars per account oh wow yeah but the ltv's longer way longer and so you're talking like if we get that thing to two thousand three thousand plus accounts you're talking big multiples so it's like have the cash to be able to just I'd be okay breaking even and getting to a thousand two thousand

1:13:38accounts in a year and it's freaking worth five million dollars who cares how much are you buying this company for only only 100 Grand how do they not have a lot of people the fella that we're buying it from flipped houses and I think that didn't go well so I think he was he from what he told me that he was flipping houses for one of the hedge funds and they cut everything off as they did because they're not buying as much so it's like a tertiary service that he could offer for his houses basically yeah a little bit and I think he just he built this

1:14:07business so I'll just say it pretty much exactly what it is so it's 245 pest accounts for only 100 Grand so you're talking like 400 bucks an account and we're actually getting him to seller finance a small portion of it as well which is kind of cool so that actually works out really well um great guy super cool guy when you say seller finance meaning he's going to get a loan to just no he's going to carry it so he's going to carry a small percentage of it and we're going to pay him back over two years from the offer that he took with us oh so you can just

1:14:34pay him a monthly exactly so you don't have to pay 100K you can just pay yeah okay a month or something correct but that's only a portion so we're paying majority of it up front and then we're having him carry a little on the back end is that so you don't have to take a loan out basically I guess I mean it's just more leverage but it's also cool because what it does is it keeps him involved because he wants to keep getting paid ah okay so he sells a little bit Equity you're getting majority exactly it'll buy him out eventually exactly and we're doing it

1:14:58over like 24 months cool so and he'll learn you'll learn I'll learn from everything and you know obviously and most importantly Reese will be able to learn everything about pest control that's not my job that's his job and he does it really well so I hope he'll be able to learn all of it from this guy which is really cool and that's kind of the incentive of like why I want it a little bit on the back end for him to carry a little just so he's a little bit indebted to us to make sure that Rhys knows everything about this and we are inheriting a technician as well have you

1:15:26tried Facebook Instagram like ads with video for this at all no we've only I've only ever done Facebook with just straight static image for for at least pools okay cool but no videos I want to invest boys yes let's talk but this is so cool so you're just buying the customers basically for break even what you would typically would so you just get like a little package of this an operating business and he's got to do what you do best Justin it does about 150k a year in top line revenue damn is the margin the same pretty much 30 it is 30 cool so every social media marketing

1:15:58agency kids that's just running these ads this should be their goal it's like run the ads get good at that game learn the lead automation process the following the closing build the funnel like I learned that in like three months myself that was the first business I really ran it's pretty straightforward it's a path you can just follow just do these steps and it should work totally and then once you have that system down hustle for a year or two save up some money then try to acquire the exact same industry you're in yeah and I think that's the I think that's the best business well especially a lot of these

1:16:27marketing guys like they make really good cash flow like it's not crazy for like if you've ran an agency for a year or two and you're you know doing 10 15K a month and you know you've got 50 hundred grand in the bank go out and whatever Niche you're in right you might be in house cleaning you might be in solar you might be in all these different niches go out and try to figure out on the back end like how do they really fulfill it ask them all questions too because I mean they'll tell you I mean you're their marketing guy so I think that's a beautiful thing

1:16:52and you know you can take out loans we haven't taken a loan out or anything in that regard for purchasing and we're doing it cash with this guy and then having him hold a little but there are a lot of places like orange-fi fund and grow um to buy extreme these are companies websites to buy these companies no those are companies that will give you business loans oh unsecured yeah what are those called orange-fi light stream fund and grow dog so if you're trying to buy a business they'll give you a loan correct did you guys use them or just go out of cash you didn't

1:17:22use them we're cash on this purchase but the reason I know about them is because people use them to buy our pool business which is kind of cool really cool yep and this is something that I think most people it's kind of flipped recently like everyone's focused on online businesses super high leverage fully remote nothing physical where I think everyone's leaving your world which is making that way more of an opportunity way more profitable that's what you slept on that's like the way you think we we just didn't want to kind of go down that rabbit hole I think I think it's really hard to get to 100K a month

1:17:56fully online I really do I think I don't think it's easy at all and those guys are smart and I think this could potentially be easier if you can either be myself and Rhys you need a race you need a reason and that's the thing you can the only other thing that I would say is if I didn't have Reese and we did start ahead because we did make a lot of money in mortgage which that does help that we could obviously that's how you

1:18:18learn these skills that's totally in 28. but at the end of the day it's like I think if these folks can go out there and if they can find a partner or even if they have enough money to bootstrap and buy it themselves you can go on indeed and hire someone that has been in the pool business for a few years and give them five ten percent equity kicker and make them your general manager right you can do that in any space and that's what I personally would do if Reese was not here and I think Reese would probably do a similar thing he'd probably hire an ad agency and do

1:18:48exactly what he does and hire me out for two grand a month some more disposable 100 isn't that ironic yeah just no they just don't know how to find people like you even though there's thousands online but what's crazy is like for him it's like he was a loan officer making six figures a year so it's like it's not like he's been like this like home service manager like he's a loan officer sales guy and so it's like a new skill for him and he's done a great job at it is there anything else that you think that you is important for people to know if they like if they're dead serious

1:19:13someone's listening like okay this is like this just makes sense this seems easy I can understand it I need to find people and I just need to clean their pool is there any other advice that you would give on the customer acquisition side you know I think we went through a lot of it I think the only thing we didn't really touch on is probably Facebook but I think Facebook is that like first step into Google uh to be honest I'm sure you'd probably agree too where like Facebook is you're talking a weekend and you could learn enough to acquire customers it is made to be as easy as possible for someone to

1:19:45learn because that's how they make money fantastic they want you to be able to use it super quickly super easily yeah and you can go with any budget and I think a lot of people that have never tried it overthink it you could literally watch one video for an hour and you know exactly how to run Facebook ads and the copy doesn't need to be complicated just make an irresistible offer AKA one month free AKA 25 off only three spots left we do the only spots left yeah yeah we still have to there's there's some that we do that's pretty cool it's like a guy in the backyard

1:20:13like opening the gate and we say like we're already in your backyard nice and people love that one and then it's like text us for neighborhood special right so it's like there's cool stuff like that that like it's like it's pretty simple though yeah it's like the universal skills of business like the persuasion tactics scarcity Authority trust building and do you have like any are you even doing email marketing at all other than like blasting the list yeah there's nothing that we've done that's like any cold email stuff yeah we've kind of considered like I was telling him the other day I'm like man it would have been kind of funny if we

1:20:43because we could pull a list of every person that has a pool yeah we could start obviously using Ai and all those tools to start blasting everybody with the pool we did not do that I think that's kind of interesting would not recommend Direct Mail we did do Direct Mail like flyers yeah Direct Mail eddm Every Door Direct Mail canvassed it the cost of pre-acquisition was like 500 bucks on that so I was like Ah that's all good but yeah Facebook's fantastic especially just targeting certain regions and building it there and making sure obviously on the headlines that you know if you have different ad sets and

1:21:13you're targeting different areas to make sure you're calling out exactly who you're talking about like Scottsdale Mesa Tempe right you want to just make sure you're calling out that person saying you know we're in your backyard right things like that and we're already on your route let us add you so pretty cool so how long do you think if someone was starting today how long do you think it would take them to make ten thousand dollars a month if they can start with like 5 000 bucks I'm you're I'm thinking probably three or four months and they're making 10K per month regularly yeah why do they need five thousand dollars

1:21:44where's that going ads just add thousand bucks to equipment and then they could just start on next door they could and that's the it will take a little longer if you're doing it organic and you just need a car to carry the equipment exactly we've seen people driving around cleaning pools with Priuses hanging out the back which is so funny yeah it's crazy is there any other software you use um you can think of yeah so the software the tech stack that we have we use slack which everybody does we use zapier with go high level unbounce QuickBooks obviously we put everybody in auto pay through stripe super simple

1:22:18um skimmer which I don't know if I said that um yeah nothing nothing else really um signed now as the e-signing right or quotient which is really cool as well another little SAS that's like really low-key but really cool um yeah that's pretty much it nothing too crazy at all but I guess for the pool company in general like it would if it was just an owner operator I would say just skimmer and quick looks pretty much yeah track your money and track your routes that's it and they link up together too yeah it makes it super easy yeah API plugs right in it's awesome beautiful any advice you have for anyone

1:22:52just trying to start this business that's going in blind I would say if you're going in blind to the pool business what I would say is the number one thing that you're going to need is going to be a good person to start cleaning the pools and being able to have somebody that is either reliable if you're hiring or if it's a partner making sure that they know exactly what they're doing because churn is the number one thing that will kill your pool business that's the number one thing and second to that is going to be obviously having ad spend whatever's enough depends on obviously how what

1:23:27you're looking to scale but having at least five thousand bucks in the bank is going to make it fantastic and on the cleaning side itself if you don't know what you're doing obviously everything takes time even with training so communication is the biggest thing when you're doing your pool reports whether you're using skimmer or a different app or you're just texting your customers in the beginning always just communicate if there are problems let them know if you're figuring it out let them know things take time customers are a lot more understanding as long as you let them as long as you communicate it so that's the biggest thing

1:24:01okay fire I really think we cover all the bases I guess last thing I'd ask is like name all the niches that you think would be worth going in I think I already kind of had you do it but just one more time for recap and then if you know how much someone should Baseline be paying for that customer good question so I would say the niches obviously the pool of business under 150 bucks to acquire the customer Pest Control you're gonna need a little bit of bankroll for that three 400 plus dollars to acquire the customer Mobile card detailing good business 50 75 bucks to acquire customer one-time service

1:24:37though right house cleaning same thing 50 hundred bucks mostly one-time service sometimes reoccurring most of the other stuff Landscaping we've talked to a few landscapers very very specific wouldn't really recommend it because it's definitely kind of skilled and it's not as like automatable I guess if that's even a word but it's not as automatable in the way that like everything's the same so you know house cleaning pool cleaning Pest Control mobile car detailing very simple licensing you don't need any sort of general contractor's license that's why I don't say things like framing Roofing even painting right all that kind of stuff you need licenses you need

1:25:15obviously bonds you need all that good stuff so we go for the kind of the unlicensed stuff that's a lot easier not as skilled labor makes it way more simple at least to start we'll we'll get there with the licensed stuff and I didn't ask who's doing the sales calls when they opt in yeah good question that's our that's our admin so we have two admin we have one for the weekdays one for the weekends just one okay basically one and they just do the sales calls but it's really not even that hard of a sale because it's pretty straightforward she's fantastic they're both fantastic more like processing

1:25:45calls yeah and we we hired her actually our third month into the business was she your first hire other than the fulfillers correct yep she's been great she's been like the best employee I've ever had by far what would be her title she's our office manager office manager yeah and she'll be essentially on all the ventures moving forward she's going to learn each one and then we'll have an admin reporting to her under each branch so with Pest Control she'll learn it we're gonna have her do it for the first month acquire customers get it dialed in Sops dialed in everything completely perfect and then we're going to hire an

1:26:15admin and then she'll train them manage them and we'll keep doing that and the sfps are essentially like if you get an email that there's a lead text this message yeah then call them here here is your script yeah get this is where you put the credit card info in this is how you notify people just simple like how the business Works scripting's big like for for with pools like she gets credit card like first call like closer it's awesome it's like oh I want to think about it I'll shop it around like hey you know what are you looking for that we're not offering yet just out of

1:26:43curiosity right yes we're phone guys like we've sold a thousand mortgages I made a script that took me like 10 freaking hours for pools right which people don't do that but I was like I mean it's worth it it's so worth it even more important sometimes in ads are the follow-ups and the sales calls right like are people the only complaints that we would get to is like these people texted me 400 times and it's like yeah I mean it's automated but yeah we did yeah totally it's worth it okay well boys I appreciate you coming sharing the game us too you guys have never done any sort of online social

1:27:20media content yeah you hit me up with a cold DM and I think this is like a really rational bang for people that they could reasonably do like totally not rocket science I think it's the evolution of smma you want to grow up and own the business you'll make a lot more money it's got to do the Dirty Work find yourself a Rhys Off to the Races he's hard to find though do you guys have social media want to promote or anything or no man keep it low-key it's all good all right just happy to be here yeah man as fast as it came as quickly

1:27:47as they'll go everybody watch it over multiple times this is everything it takes to build a million dollar business just got to be willing to do the work have a wonderful day we'll see you next time