The Home Service Expert Podcast
Q&A With Tommy - Stop Trading Time for Money: How to Build a Self-Sustaining Business
Fri, 21 Feb 2025
Tommy Mello is the author of Home Service Millionaire and Elevate, and the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $200 million-plus home service business with over 700 employees in 22 states. Through HomeServiceMillionaire.com and the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy shares his experience and insights to help fellow entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In this special episode of the Home Service Expert podcast, Tommy answers your biggest questions about lead generation, delegation, financial intelligence…
Chapter 1: Why is thinking big essential for business growth?
You got to start thinking bigger. I was talking, we were talking about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg. Here's why they win. They think bigger than us. And I'm not thinking small anymore. And that takes bold changes. It takes people that are willing to take very controversial decision-making, extreme risks. And most of you guys don't even, you would never move. You're in your comfort zone.
You know, you don't want to change too much. You know, look, I'm going to change everything. Be comfortable with change, get an accountability partner, get comfortable with discipline, set yourself up for success, find somebody to hold you accountable.
Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299.
And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.
All right, we are live. Welcome to January's Q&A. 2025, it's going to be a good one today. I got a lot of energy worked out this morning, feeling good. Started up my diet again, going hard in the paint. I weighed 246.2 this morning, looking to get to below 8% body fat here, going hard in the paint. And I started thinking a lot about this, like,
You know, some of you guys, I've been getting a lot of messages, lots of social media messages of how do you work so much and still motivate yourself to do these things, work out and go on vacations with your family and do these things. And I know this word gets overused and the word is accountability. It's kind of you versus you. David Goggins talks about this is it's you versus you.
But accountability is when you get an accountability partner. You can be accountable to yourself, but why not find somebody, you know, if you got a really good person in your life, they don't allow you to kind of miss. You know, when they say, hey, dude, let's just miss the gym today. Hopefully the other person's like, no, we said we were going to do this. Let's leave early.
No, no, we're not going to leave early. Hey, dude, you might be having a bad day. Take some pre-workout. Let's get through this. We go to the gym. We're going to work hard. We're going to work. We're going to work hard. You know, it's such a big deal. Another big thing is I had my buddy Barry over from Power of Selling Pros and his son came with him.
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Chapter 2: How can accountability transform your personal and professional life?
But I would have called like someone specific in the company that's responsible for upsells. How would you structure performance pay for mobile detailing? Average ticket, 280. Jobs per month, 42. Well, what do I care about? What are the things that really matter to me? In this case, mobile detailing is all about routing, right?
I don't want to drive an hour to this job to clean the car, an hour to this car, an hour to this car. So it's kind of like pull service. You want to be able to get as many clients as possible. So what I would do with mobile detailing is
I'd have my guys put out signs and I'd have them knock on a couple of neighbors' house, especially in affluent neighborhoods, and pay them a lot of freaking money to close. Say, listen, we get this client on, we sell them a 10-pack of mobile cleanings. I'm going to give you half the money.
I'd make sure that every single person doing the cleaning becomes, they're posting on their social media, they're putting out yard signs, they're talking to their friends about it. You know, their girlfriend is posting about it. They're out there hustling for you, getting more clients because it's all about keeping close. It's all about dispatching.
So you want to be in the vicinity of the next jobs. Next thing I do is just, I'd have a checklist to mark off and have the customer walk through it. And if they didn't want to walk through it, I'd send the whole checklist with pictures to them. I actually have an app that we've created. It's a checklist app if you want to know more about it.
But I said every little detail, make sure the client's happy and we exceeded their expectations. I'd also pay them a little bit for reviews. A video testimonial or a review on Google, a review on Nextdoor is a big one. Nextdoor is in the community. The BBB is a big one. The Yelp is a big one. So you might say, well, they can only get one review. How do I keep paying them?
Every time, hey, you let me review on Google. Can you do one on Yelp for me? And every three times they clean it, ask for a different review or a video testimonial. Get their wife in it. See if there's another car you could do. Hey, listen, we have the two nice cars and we've got our son's car. Listen, can we do your son's car? Figure out if there's still profit. You're at the same job.
Figure out how to get to that other car. Like I said, the neighbor's like, I would look at a few things that your people can control and pay them on that as long as you could track it well. It's important that you got very good attribution that you can track it. And it's going to help you grow the business. It's going to make you more money. Therefore, they get to make more money.
But I don't have the perfect, like I would have to sit down and whiteboard it for a minute, but those are just some ideas. What are the best frameworks to get to a million starting out? I do landscaping. You know, it's all reverse engineering. Like how much do you make a billable hour? How much time do you put in? How many clients would you need? What's your gross profit?
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