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Million Dollar Electrician - Sale to Scale For Home Service Pros
Rewiring Our Mission: (Electricpreneur Secrets)
Helping Electricians Achieve the $1M Service Van so they can experience ultimate control over their futures.
Join Clay Neumeyer & Joseph Lucanie for a new electrifying episode & High-amperage action item each week to spark up your service van sales to $50K, $70K, $100K, $150K months, and beyond!
Million Dollar Electrician - Sale to Scale For Home Service Pros
Ep 22 - Forged for Success: Brandon Vaughn’s Blueprint for Scaling Electrical Companies
Unlock the secrets to business success with insights from Brandon Vaughn, a second-generation home service entrepreneur who mastered scalability and sustainability. Brandon shares his compelling journey from working in his father's window cleaning business to creating a thriving venture of his own. Discover the vital concept of the "bus factor" and learn how building systems and processes can transform a single-point-of-failure business into a robust machine that runs independently, preparing it for potential sale.
Explore the art of delegation and the power of a competent team as we venture into strategies for scaling a business effectively. Brandon and our host delve into trust issues, accountability, and the pitfalls of the DIY approach. Learn how industry giants like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson harnessed the strength of others to lead their companies, and how you can apply similar principles to avoid the dreaded bottleneck that can stifle growth. The conversation taps into the valuable insights of Dan Martell and others on leveraging team strengths to maximize efficiency and business potential.
Shifting mindsets from scarcity to abundance is essential for entrepreneurs, and this episode offers guidance on overcoming financial fears. Through personal anecdotes, Brandon illustrates the importance of investing back into your business and the substantial returns that can result. The discussion also covers building assets, presenting options to clients, and structuring a business for eventual sale, drawing inspiration from Michael Michalowicz's frameworks. Elevate your business standards through strategic systems and processes to ensure consistency, reliability, and long-term success. Join us for an episode packed with transformative lessons and real-life success stories!
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Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Million Dollar Electrician podcast, where we help home service pros like you supercharge your business and spark up those sales.
Speaker 2:I'm Joseph Lucani and, together with my co-host, Clay Neumeier, we're here to share the secrets that have helped electricians sell over a million dollars from a single service van.
Speaker 1:Now it's time for sales, it's time for scale, it's time to become a million dollar electrician. All right, guys, welcome back to the show. We just had some fun backstage with some audio technical difficulties, so we're entering with a bit of laughter here, but this is no laughing matter. We've got Brandon Vaughn on the show as a great guest here. Welcome, brandon. If you notice, brandon's actually walking, he's putting the miles in and I think personally, joe, this is a testament to brandon's character. Uh, brandon, I'm going to be able to lightly introduce you, but you got a ton of stuff going on, man, so you're going to have to go into kind of bragging right city here and fill us in and everything that you've been up to. I'll start you off, though.
Speaker 1:Brandon and I were introduced here not too long ago. We hit it off right off the bat, because we both came from, I feel, like some real school of hard knocks. We both had some adversity, joe as well. Right, we've done the interviews, we all know about that. But we're going to learn a bit more about Brandon's today, because Brandon's done some exceptional things in the home services industry and I was thinking, you know, maybe Brandon's like the sixth guest we've had on. That's not an electrician, but since you just bought an electrical company, you're working on that. I don't think that even qualifies brother. So congrats on the big purchase, purchase there, the acquisition, and please, man, tell us a bit about you, why you here, what's going on?
Speaker 3:well, thanks for having me. First of all, and yeah, it was the second that we got on a call together. I was like dude, it's clay, it's like my brother from another mother. He just immediately connected and hit it off uh, which is? Is is rare, it's, it's, it's rare to rare to be able just make that kind of instant connection.
Speaker 3:Let's see, I've been in home services my entire life, second generation home service business owner. My dad was a owner operator, window cleaner, started his window cleaning business in 1978. And for 33 years, 34 years, he was a owner operator. So between zero and one employee for all of that time period. Wow, guess who was one of the first ones? Well, maybe not one of the first ones I have. I have four, uh, four brother, brothers and sisters. All of us worked in the family business.
Speaker 3:I started working with my dad full-time at age 13, homeschooled through high school while I was working with him full-time. And he started mechooled through high school while I was working with him full-time and he started me out, like you know, paying me five cents a screen to wash screens, and then eventually, you know, we just kind of started working together on a regular basis, four days a week, five days a week, and yeah, that's kind of how I got started in the home service space. That's actually how I knew what a business was. Was like my dad's model of one guy. That's the business. Of course, over the years I've learned that, no, that's a job, not really a true business, because there's something else that I learned called the bus factor, which is how many people in a company have to get hit by a bus before that business ceases to exist.
Speaker 3:And my dad's score was one, only he had to get hit by a bus before the business ceased to exist. And you know and I can kind of dive into that a little bit later, but you know, in effect, metaphorically that happened and so that was a pretty pivotal trajectory move for myself as kind of a business owner and entrepreneur. The day I turned 18, I got my first business license and mostly almost entirely been self-employed, 100% commission-based pay ever since.
Speaker 2:Wow, that is intense and I honestly I just want to start using the bus example going forward because it just makes it really simple to understand. It's like okay. Well, if you have a team member, how many people need to get hit? That's a very clear and direct answer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a cool. It's a cool score and metric. That I learned from somebody else, a mentor of mine, and one thing that was you know that that bus factor can be yourself. It can be someone else on your team. It could be your spouse that does the books, it could be your key employee that you're like man. If I lost this key employee, I'm screwed. Anytime a business has a very low bus score, it's a dangerous position to be in and the more redundancies, the more systems and processes and documentation and training videos and very clearly defined job roles and descriptions, the more easy it is for anyone in the company to be replaceable. Everybody in the company should be replaceable, including the owner, if you're going to have a true business. Um, man, it took me years and years and years to truly learn that and even still I'm. I feel like I'm I'm learning little spots of myself where I have to build those redundancies out, because I kind of fall back into that trap again.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say that's not spoken like someone with a bus factor of one. So it must have grown. You must have done some things. Yeah, give us the fast forward now and then we'll break it to, to humble beginnings and some adversity and stuff that led to this. Um, but where are you at today, Brandon, with, uh, with reference to the bus factor of one?
Speaker 3:Well, I've. I've had a lot of businesses over the years, learned a ton, had some successful exits at some successful acquisitions, had a successful coaching company for a while that I sold, and then today I own 12 companies total and have CEOs and GMs that run. The vast majority of those and one of those companies is a software company called Hirebus that I am CEO that's where I spend my full-time work in is that it's an AI-powered recruiting software program specifically for home services, so we hire the top 3% of talent without business owners having to ever write a job ad. We do everything, and so that's where my primary focus has been.
Speaker 3:But one of the other companies I have is called Hammer and Forge and it's a acquisition group where we're buying electrical companies and expanding that out. We just closed on our first one January 1st small business that we're turning into kind of a platform company. We're going to be documenting kind of the growth of taking a business that's small, rebranding it, putting in systems. I hope we're going to be able to work together on that. I have a lot of cool ideas on how I could use your guys' help and expertise to be able to do that.
Speaker 3:We'd be grateful to serve. What's that I said we'd be grateful to serve? Yeah, I know you guys would be, cause that's actually how we got introduced to each other was a mutual friend of ours who came to me when his business was super struggling and you guys turned him around Like it was mind blowing to see the transformation of what you guys did, which is why I was so happy for us to be able to connect is you're obviously rockstar entrepreneurs as well as coaches, let's see. And then my one of my other businesses is called wise coatings. It's a garage floor coatings company that I started in january of 2021 and that's actually a youtube video and channel called map to a million.
Speaker 3:So there's 16 episodes on starting that company from scratch. Built it from zero, got 100k month in revenue, month four, hit seven figures our first year and now, you know, fast forward four years later, we have 37 locations, we're doing about 2 million a month and, uh, some cool things. I can kind of talk about that and kind of building that, but I have a CEO that runs that company and GMs that runs a lot of our individual locations, so that's another business of mine Very cool Starting to collect businesses. I think that's my new hobby. Slash personal interest is, instead of investing in the stock market, just investing in businesses and viewing them as an asset, which is it's been amazing.
Speaker 1:It's been really fun been thinking about a couple of things there, one being hire bus. That sounds interesting. Recruiting is hard and we're struggling with that, which is something we talk to electricians about and hear from electricians about every single day. But I imagine there's another really powerful point there that has people's interest peaked and I think we saw this coming too. This is probably two different podcast episodes. We'll go with the flow today, but ultimately, the fact that you're investing in electrical companies is really interesting and the fact that you have experience in exiting as a strategy and Hammer Forge being focused on building that realm up. I imagine there's a lot of questions out there on that and what it takes to build a company for exit and how to plan for that and the steps to achieve that in general, and I think that you'd have a ton of wisdom to share on that today, brandon.
Speaker 3:Oh man, I'd love to geek out. I'm an open book, so happy to talk about everything on that side, including, you know, valuations, how to get things set up, how to increase your bus factor. Yeah, wide open book.
Speaker 1:Awesome man, Joe, did I interrupt you?
Speaker 2:I mean, honestly, the thing that really came to mind that really kind of made my jaw drop on all this is you've said a lot of really great stuff, but the key thing that stood out to me was that you're replacing yourself with almost more competent individuals and you're saying you know what I'm going to? Surround myself with high-level individuals that I trust with my assets, that I can walk away from and know that someone is reasonably and professionally handling it. That takes an immense amount of trust, but it also shows personally to me, it shows you have a very good judge of character, and I think that's not something that can easily be taught, because for you to have a business that you would trust to someone else and then see them grow it and scale it, you have to really be good at judging people.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, it did not start that way from day one. I would not say it's an innate talent that I have to, just In fact, if anything, I believe that it was actually one of my weaknesses as an entrepreneur. So when you look at my behavioral profile, I have a behavior called low criticality, and criticality is the scale that measures your desire to be critical of people and things. And people that are very high criticality. They poke holes in things, they challenge things, they question things. They don't take everything at face value. People with low criticality, like myself, think everyone's amazing, wears rose-colored glasses, thinks everything's going to work out great. My wife has extremely high criticality, by the way. So we have this really great work-share relationship where she is always challenging me and asking me like well, what about this, what about that? And the reality is that a lot of my early hires on as an entrepreneur were I think this person's awesome, I think they're going to be great, how could it possibly go wrong? And constantly being surprised at wow, did not see that one coming. You know, either I got stabbed in the back or that person's a really low performer, or keeping them for too long, or giving them too much and giving them too much forgiveness and just being like the nice boss.
Speaker 3:I got a lot of guidance and mentorship over the years that taught me several big key things. Number one inspect what you expect. So if you have an expectation for one of your employees or one of your team members GMs, whoever it is you have to be able to inspect them. You have to hold them accountable. Gms, whoever it is, you have to be able to inspect them. You have to hold them accountable. You put locks on doors to keep the honest people honest. Locks don't keep out criminals Criminals will break in but making sure that you have frameworks and guards and safeguards in place. So this is dashboards and accountability and third-party verification having a third-party bookkeeper and financial person that is auditing your books to make sure that nothing weird is happening and the data is getting ported in your dashboards by a third party so that people on your team don't have that temptation to be able to fudge the numbers or maybe lie or try to get around something if you're a little bit more of an absentee owner. So these are all things that I've learned honestly through kind of a lot of trial and error and mistakes that I've made over the years.
Speaker 3:But I will say that I have. You know, one of the other big quotes that always stands out to me is Steve Jobs, who says I don't want to hire people so that I tell them what to do. I want to hire smart people so that I tell them what to do. I want to hire smart people so that they tell me what to do. And, like with Wise Coatings, for instance, when we knew we wanted to grow that to a whole bunch of locations, I hired a CEO that took a company from eight locations to 220 locations in eight countries and brought her in to be able to run the business, and she's a way better operator than me. She understands manufacturing and distribution and all these other components that would go into. You know how we would get this all set up, and I've learned that that's a playbook of really, really successful entrepreneurs that bring in people like Richard. Richard Branson when he wanted to decide to do Virgin uh cruise lines, he hired the number two from Carnival cruise lines and made him the CEO.
Speaker 3:You know, it's just like that it's. It's a playbook, and it's not something that I invented, but have kind of learned over time to kind of follow the patterns of success of people way more successful than me yeah, really good, Really good.
Speaker 1:That reminds me actually something that's recently trending Dan Martell buy back your time.
Speaker 1:He talks a lot about that, too, and I love Dan's positioning on this particular play, because he said look, the first time I hired someone better than me to be the CEO of my company, that person asked me to stop attending my own meetings, and he was so butthurt about that. It's like this huge epiphany moment, though, isn't it? I'm not the best. I'm not meant to be the best. In fact, what would happen, just strategically thinking, if we continually sat at a table of people we considered to be less than equal to us?
Speaker 3:well, eventually lowers us. Yeah, the problem happens is that you're the smartest person in the room and anytime that you're bringing people on that, you have to teach and train and coach up to a level of your own competency. You are this person that now everybody else relies on to for answers and it becomes extremely overwhelming to be the bottleneck inside of your organization on all fronts. You know, if you think about the marketing, the phones, the project management, the financial, the sales, the production, you know systems and SOPs, and I think the problem is is that people fall into the DIY death trap where they feel like you know systems and SOPs, and I think the problem is is that people fall into the DIY death trap where they feel like you know I can. I can figure that out on my own. You know.
Speaker 3:It might even be the reason why some of the people listening to this right now, why you went into business for yourself, was that you're like this is you know, I know how to do this stuff. I'm going to go out and do this on my own, but being talented and being good at a lot of things can actually be a detriment, because there's business owners out there that are way stupider than you and they've built very successful businesses because they just realized I don't know how to do this. I'm just going to go find the smartest person I can possibly find that's already solved this problem. Pay them a bunch of money, you know, to save me time with having to learn it, and those are the ones that usually build businesses way, way, way faster. And I think there's a lot of challenges that come with kind of that ego and hubris that, well, I got to be the person that knows how to do everything and I got to be the person that's you know, uh, uh, does it better than everybody else, and it's just, it's just not true.
Speaker 1:I've got the agenda for this particular avatar in my mind and I know this. I know you guys know this. Hey, I'm going to get in business for myself so that I have more schedule control. I actually have more time and I'll have more money, because it's my boss that's making the real bucks.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But no one ever makes that next step, as the specialist that you mentioned, and ends up with those two things. It's quite the opposite you end up with more money problems and less time than you ever had before, and maybe less sleep. In fact, for a lot of them, I know that's the case. So a lot of people listening to this. As soon as you said, well, you're the bottleneck of your own business, I know I felt like raising my hand, and I know countless others did too. We're all fighting that, and half the calls we get on to help electricians every day they're saying that exact thing. When it comes down to this question, what's in the way of you achieving this on your own?
Speaker 2:Well, it's me.
Speaker 1:I'm the biggest bottleneck. I'm out of time, I can't afford to do the next thing, which just relates back to a pricing and a service issue, a value proposition issue and all these things just mothball. But it's really back to this one thing that you mentioned I'm a specialist doing too much in my business and I need some help it's one thing.
Speaker 3:One thing that you mentioned that resounded really well with me is the time side, and and I can't afford x there there's only two things that are expenses in our business things that cost money and things that cost time, and I think the the the challenging part about a lot of us is, as just humans in general is that we don't know when our time runs out. It's not something that's necessarily measurable, in a certain way and it feels kind of infinite because it's not something that we're reminded with all the time. But time is infinitely more valuable than money. You can save money. You can lose your money. You can gain it back again. You can choose to spend it, you can choose to hoard it.
Speaker 3:But, like, time is something that you spend every day, every second, whether you want to or not, and every day that you decide to, you know, in an evening or a weekend, spend time working on the business, spend time with your family, with your kids.
Speaker 3:That's not time. You get back period, and I think the biggest epiphany for me over the years that I wish I could go back and tell younger Brandon was spend money to save time, and that's one of the reasons why I love Dan's book Buy Back your Time is that he hammers on that so eloquently where anything you can do to buy back more time for yourself, even if it's at an 80% proficiency level compared to you know, the person that you're hiring compared to what maybe you could even do, is a hundred percent absolutely worth it, because the things that you could be working on your business they're they're valued at $10,000 an hour, a hundred thousand dollars an hour, if you're really intentional about it. And I think that's the, you know, the number one biggest challenge that we all have is identifying what are those lower level tasks that we can truly have someone else do so we can focus on those higher leverage tasks, and that's a hard, hard thing to figure out.
Speaker 2:You know, I also want to like touch on something here, because you're also aligning with a particular value that I feel is very, very crucial to a successful business owner, and that is what you choose to spend your time on. Once you now have it back, and for me personally, whenever I get free time, I'm trying to spend it taking care of my kids and being with my wife and cultivating that relationship, and you're completely correct that if you can gain time back, you could choose to invest it in yourself or in those you care most about, because life is linear. We don't know when we're going to drop off of it, but the things that we use in our time that better the lives of others continues the ripple of our legacy onward. I think it's really, really cool that you're investing in that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, man, I love that. Thank you, I appreciate that it's been, it has it has been something that is, uh, made a big impact on just my overall health wellbeing and, interestingly enough, my my personal wealth as well. Uh, and I think that's one of the biggest impacts that a lot of people really underestimate is when you do start systematically creating a stop doing list instead of a to-do list. What are all the things that I should stop doing on a day-to-day basis that I could outsource to somebody else? That would open up more capacity for me to do other things that are more important that currently no one else in the business is doing. That really, really accelerates your net worth accumulation. It's kind of wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to touch on something there because I want to drill down a bit deeper and I think there's a very specific reason where people really get this mixed up and it comes down to some serious financial misunderstandings. I think it's a misrepresentation of your wealth that leads to the erosion of that very thing. Let me explain what I mean by that. I wasn't born with a silver spoon. We had to work for everything. I remember weeks went by where it was peanut butter and crackers. That's just what we had and that's what I ate. Unfortunately, at that time I was also into smoking a little pot north of the border, canadian here, guilty as charged. So it was a brutal cycle.
Speaker 1:But that poverty mindset stayed with me a long, long time and I remember specifically as I got into this trade that's well beyond my first company I actually started to accumulate more money than I'd ever had before and the banks started calling me every day, which I hate even calling them banks. They're financial intermediaries. There's a very important reason for that. I'm not going to deep dive on it right now, but let's just say you don't need them. They're not the boss. You can control your money, and you should, and so they're calling you every day. Why? Because they want you to invest your money in what bonds, right, like low interest endeavors, so that they could have more money locked in. That was a really good feeling, but something developed with it, and it was the same as before, when I didn't have money. It was scarcity about using that money to my advantage, to develop myself, to develop my enterprise and to develop my lifestyle, even for my family. And I found that my habits were consistent throughout and it didn't matter through the times I've had $0 in the bank or the times we've had $300,000 in the bank.
Speaker 1:That same thing haunted me, which was well, slow season's coming, I better not use this. Oh, there's something around the corner that's going to plague us. So we better not Now. I don't want to suggest we'd be irresponsible with our capital, not that, no, I'm a Michael Michalowicz fan. Right Profit first. We got a nest egg, but should we really be hanging on in a scarcity mindset or are there certain times where you realize you've got to double down and you're going to have to invest to see a return on investment? 100%? Man Love that Been a huge, huge game changer. And, by the way, I ought to be vulnerable. That plagued me just two months ago again. It's not something that's like a switch. It's not oh, I turned that off, I'm good on that for life now. No, it's something you keep on exploring and realizing wow, I'm holding myself back again for some reason, even if only for a week or a day or a month. I never really find that acceptable. Have you ever experienced something like that, brennan?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, man, absolutely I resound with what you said. That's came to mind when you were describing this is, you know, your store of value and enterprise value and putting cash in the bank and kind of the differences between liquid value and non-liquid value. A lot of people don't understand just how massive of a return on your investment you get when you invest in your own business and when you're putting your cash back in and your time back into your own business. There's actually a really cool internal rate of return calculator that you can use to show what your cap rate is on your own business, based on how much starting capital you had, how much net profit has been generated from that, what your multiple of your EBITDA looks like and what your current valuation in your business is. Now there's a lot of people listening to this that are millionaires. Whether they may know it or they may not know it, their business is literally worth millions and when you start looking at a business in that way, of what kind of value you can create.
Speaker 3:For me, that was one of my biggest epiphanies when I started my exterior cleaning company and grew that from zero employees to 70 employees over the course of five and a half years and suddenly realized, holy crap, my business is worth millions of dollars.
Speaker 3:And I did that over the course of six years like literally that's the equivalent of making an extra million bucks a year, plus because I grew that business and reinvested back into this and, yeah, I only took a tiny little salary out of my business while I was growing it, so I kind of felt poor. But when I sold, all of a sudden, you know it's like there's the cash, there's a withdrawal out of the bank of our business and there's just a lot of things that you can shift in your mind when you realize exactly how valuable your business can be If you are investing your right, you know, time, energy, money, resources, uh, into expanding that and growing your bottom line. Um, and I think that's that's a big, it's a big miss for a lot of people. They just don't really equate that. All they just feel is not paying myself very much on a month to month basis or an annual basis.
Speaker 1:That reminded me of I think Grant Cardone talks about this as a principle the income and the lifestyle rate and how your income will steadily climb, and it should right If you're continually improving and get more experience and more knowledge and you're better, you get more leverage, you continually improve. But your lifestyle is always going to kind of follow that. People don't really become independently wealthy from just income your general expected income, right. But what you mentioned, I believe, was about those income spurts where all of a sudden you realize the additional equity payouts become liquid at some point because of the sale of a business or because you worked on your property for X number of years, as Grant Cardone would also talk about real estate. Does that kind of ring a bell for you too?
Speaker 3:A hundred percent. Yeah, it was a big unlock for me to realize like, holy crap, I could build a business, I could sell it, and then I could build another one two times faster, four times faster, ten times faster and then build that up to sell it. So every company I have now is thought very intentionally with a mindset of build it to sell, whether or not I decide I want to keep it and hold it and continue profit distributions and keep that going. The act of building a business to sell or building a business to keep that is truly an asset that can run on its own without your day-to-day involvement is the exact same. It's all the exact same steps. So you kind of have that freedom and flexibility to be able to kind of choose your own adventure once you get closer to that. But the paths to get there are both the same.
Speaker 2:So it's like a mindset shift and it's almost like what gets measured gets managed. You're looking at it, you can see the scoreboard and because you can see the evaluations of it, you can plan future moves. It's really, really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've been on record saying a few times that we believe we're creating a billion dollar economic ripple in our industry specific to service electricians. Absolutely, and the reason that is is perfectly in line with what you're saying. And we try to explain this to people because even our programs it's no secret, we have programs People come, they learn, we share the wins. In fact, win of the week is coming next, joe, and you're ready.
Speaker 2:I'm so ready they learn.
Speaker 1:We share the wins. In fact, win of the week is coming next, joe, and you're ready. We got a great one or two or three this week, but we help people work on themselves ultimately and release the bottleneck, and that doesn't just affect this year, this quarter, this period, whatever your measurement is. So we try to price our programs really on a one-tenth, 10x rule, which is from some consulting mentors I had way back in the day. But ultimately what that means is well, hey, if we're going to have you invest $1,000 into yourself, then we expect, during the period of that investment, a $10,000 return that you can measure, and that's what keeps it really easy and simple.
Speaker 1:But we rarely talk about what happens after the term. And the reality is, if you learn some skills and you gain some leverage and those improve and you prove to yourself how great you are and what you're really worth. As for brandon's logic here today, then what about next year? Do you stop doing those things that worked or do you continue to leverage those? Do you continue to build off that, train more and expand? And so in a 10-year period it's like holy cow. Here's my direct results, my direct return on investment. But then I trained Joe, who is my journeyman, who just came up from installer to service to now sales tech, and then he trained his apprentice and that apprentice went on to have their own company and they taught their brother, son, daughter, whoever. And so this thing just grows and grows and it's got a heartbeat and that's what we're in it for, that specific heartbeat I.
Speaker 3:I know for 100 fact that your 10x analogy is completely flawed because it's way, way, way bigger than that.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 3:I was going to say you're so conservative with it.
Speaker 3:I mean the 10 X value. Oh my gosh, I can literally. I can literally measure hundreds of X improvements over. Well, because, just like you said, when you learn something you never unlearn it. You know, when you invest in your own education, you invest in in something. It becomes a skill set that you use in every single one of your business ventures, moving forward, every single one of them. And for me it I've tried to break it. Hey, how much can I spend on coaching? How much can I spend on personal development? I wonder? I wonder if, like where the, where the law of diminishing returns comes. I wonder if we know the 10 X rule or the whatever X rule. And you know, and in this last year I was, I was paying a guy 10 grand a month for coaching and it like I'm familiar, joe, yeah.
Speaker 3:I was going to say, I was like my wife looked at me like I was a psychopath or spent. She's like what are you even thinking right now spending that much? But a lot of these things that I'm talking about with owning multiple businesses and buying companies and doing these acquisitions guys, I didn't know any of this stuff not that many years ago. I mean I'm talking, like you know, less than five years ago. A lot of this is just kind of compounded just off of some of these things and it's come from the direct result of these coaching investments that I've made in myself and you know the value of it is so much greater than 10X and it just continues to compound, like you said, over time. So, yeah, if people need to just think about a 10X return and be like, yep, that sounds good to me, it's an undersell and an overdeliver that they will be pleasantly surprised about, for sure.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, Beautiful. You heard that, folks. I just got called down on our own podcast let's talk about. Let's talk about some. This period wins man when you're ready, when, in the week, here we go.
Speaker 2:Okay, I actually I have three that I feel like are all equal here. If that's okay, Can I get into it a little bit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, unleash.
Speaker 2:The first is one of our clients, alex. Alex was an amazing individual, but he went on a particular call that I'm incredibly proud of the result he did. So he went to a situation where the customer had called and said hey, I have a range cord, I bought the material. I want you to come and change the range cord for me. What's your diagnostic? What's the cost to do that? He's like well, I'm going to have to evaluate it. Let me come out and take a look.
Speaker 2:Turns out the stove is getting 120 volts because of a miswiring situation. But he checks the panel, he runs the play, he checks the panel, he looks at the electrical system, he designs a range of options for the customer. Now, this customer is completely aware it started as a 150 diagnostic call. He ended up selling a $24,000 platinum renovation project oh my gosh when he went through the home and he addressed that there were concerns and he presented and the thing was where the real win is is like yeah, that's like several thousand X at that point it's like but the thing was is that the customer chose it willingly.
Speaker 2:This wasn't a situation where he could have technically done a far less solution to get that stove working, but he chose something better because Alex offered it and he said I wanted the best because you did that. So that's a huge win to say you can go on a small call where you think there's nothing happening oh man, they bought the material themselves. But then when you actually learn to sell not sell but serve when you're serving the person on a both physical and an emotional level, the returns and dividends are huge. So that's one win. The second I say something on that right there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, hey, that's freaking amazing. And B the other thing I thought about when you mentioned that is, you're not your target customer and so often what ends up happening is is we put ourselves in the mind of our, of our homeowner, and we're like I wouldn't ever spend 24 grand to redo all my house because you're thinking like an electrician that knows how to do it. But you know, it's like it's. It's not possible for these people to be able to do this on their own and the value that you give is so insanely high and people have disposable income and they want the best and they want this. Maybe you don't, maybe you would rather DIY it. I know I would. I'll figure that out. That's how much and I'll do it myself. That's like my death trap. I love the fact that he got out of his own way and just sent the package and lo and behold, man, that happens all the time, doesn't it? We end up getting surprised. Our customer's like really, You're going to pay that much for that. Really, it's cool. Not your entire customer, that's cool.
Speaker 2:And similar. The other two wins actually are exactly lined up with that concept that you said. So I feel like you almost knew what I'm saying and getting ready to set me up for it.
Speaker 2:So the second one was where Jesse, another client of us, got out of his own way. What happened was he went out to a call and he had said it was actually for a basement renovation. Same kind of situation Customer wants to do some of the work themselves and he goes in and he offers a range of choices, from I will do everything and you do nothing, down to you work with me and I'll give you a hard hat and we'll just do it. And the customer said even though you're more, you're the only one who offered me more and gave $10,000 to do this job. And I asked him I was like what would your previous job have been? He's like well, before we worked together, it would have been no more than 3,500.
Speaker 2:And the whole reason I got the job was, he told me, that I offered better than everyone else. So even if I was that much less because I didn't offer the additional services, this particular customer might not have gone with me. He was telling me he wants to do it himself. I would have given him ways of doing it himself and then he wouldn't have wanted to do it. But when I said said I'll do everything for you. He's like I don't have to do it, dude done.
Speaker 1:You don't have to lift a finger except to write a check. I love that.
Speaker 2:I love that and the last thing is our team at Matthews, and I'm sure this comes at no surprise, but one of the things that I really, really, really love doing is building options. It is almost like a professional calling. I love it more than anything else. So we actually have options classes where we teach exactly how to do that, and in one of those classes we had trained Cameron on a particular presentation that he was getting ready to go into. He said the presentation is coming up, I need you to help me prep for it.
Speaker 2:No problem, we helped design a whole range of options. The next day he comes in the class. Now he steps out for a minute and then he comes back in and he goes hey, joe, by the way, you know, the options helped me build. We just sold the $9,500 platinum on it and the best thing about it was that in that situation he wasn't fully comfortable with the sale, but because he had the opportunity to prep for it and he said I want to get ahead of this, he took the initiative to prep himself and because he prepped, they bought the best thing he could have offered, rather than perhaps missing it and then having an email it over situation.
Speaker 1:You know what? That is a great win from them. I'm surprised you chose that one, though I'm all ears. Let me explain. Explain something amazing happened yesterday and, brandon, I think you're going to find this one particularly interesting. Austin and cameron had a double platinum win and I just saw in the chat they actually, on the week of christmas, made a 5k platinum sale, which means top option, which included their club membership.
Speaker 1:Yep, january slows down a bit. We're all about smoothing out slow season, so they go and do their full home annual inspection. Cameron moves a 16k platinum again. Here's why that's really remarkable, not just because of the inspection and the additional platinum, not just because, yes, that did smoothen out some slow season for them, but also, if you remember, we had Guillermo Castillo on the show and they deep dove on their data and he said gentlemen, our average ticket this year for 2024 was $2,000 and change. And we went yes, and he goes. Yeah, I'm so proud of that.
Speaker 1:But that's not the deep reveal here. He said our average ticket for the second transaction with our customers is just over 3x that at $6,000 and change. And we went whoa, this is amazing, great find For Austin and Cameron. That exact thing just happened with their initial 5k. Platinum led to the club membership. They went back and the second transaction was you guessed it 16k, which is just over 3x the initial transaction, and so we start to see playing for the base hits sometimes is all we need to do you go, you serve, they choose, and when they choose you again, what will happen then? Just knock it out of the park. Awesome Way to go, guys. That's cool.
Speaker 2:Man, I feel good at even saying that.
Speaker 1:Okay, brandon, I know that we only had so much time. We spent a bit of time in technical difficulty to get started today, but we have another bit of time booked after, so are you cool to continue for another five or 10 minutes here on this podcast?
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, I want some help. I think this would be a great way to finish. Can you help us understand, or audience understand? You said you know you got to build this way, whether it's healthy for you or healthy for someone else for sale. What is that? What is that way we need to build for? Give us some insights to. What does that company look like that's ready for sale, that maybe even your endeavor is willing and interested in hearing about.
Speaker 3:Well, put yourself in the mind of a buyer. If a buyer wants to buy a business, not a job, and they're willing to pay for that, knowing that if they put their money in itX depending on the size of the company and the size of that EBITDA and how big that is EBITDA is a fancy term for net profit with a couple of things added back in. We'll just leave it simple like that. Yeah, so in order to be able to build a business that is attractive to a buyer, you really have to be able to say I can step away today and I can be gone forever and the business can be successful and the owner of the new business doesn't have to come in and work a full-time job in order to keep the business working well. So how do we do that? We put in team members. We grow to a certain size that we can afford to have those production managers, operations managers, office managers, csrs, rehash specialists, marketing people, sales people and we have all our different departments kind of covered inside of our business and there's clear job descriptions and roles, there's checklists, there's systems, there's processes, there's training videos, there's a good pipeline of technicians that can come in. Everyone inside the company is replaceable, there's a strong brand, there's a repeatable process for buying customers, you know exactly what your customer acquisition costs are, what channels work really well and the whole business can literally run without you.
Speaker 3:And maybe there's a general manager in place or someone at the helm that knows all the operations and supervises things. And that's an attractive business for and supervises things. And that's an attractive business for a buyer because they can add it to their portfolio and they can see the return on their investment come back to them over the course of the next few years. So that path of putting all those components in place, creating the systems, creating the training documentation, it's the same either way.
Speaker 3:If you want to be a semi-absentee business owner, fully absentee business owner, or have a business that has high enterprise value that can be sold, it's all the same kind of stuff. So it's just a matter of kind of picking. Okay, what part of the business should I be working on first, to systemize and put those things in place so that the business in that department can run without my personal direct involvement and I can have someone that owns that department and make sure that it works well and I can have a dashboard and KPIs so that they can do that properly, and then just move to the next department and just kind of work your way through each of your departments until you delegate yourself and promote yourself out of a job. Way through each of your departments until you delegate yourself and promote yourself out of a job and you promote yourself all the way up to just business owner, as opposed to even CEO.
Speaker 1:Okay. So it sounds like what I'm hearing when you say that is sure bet, sure bet For someone to feel like your business is attractive. They want to know that the numbers are in place that I particularly said you can buy customers. Everyone knows what to do with those customers, and so to me that feels like a sure bet. If Susie's sick Johnny knows how to cover Right, Owner doesn't have to get involved, right yeah.
Speaker 1:And a technician drops off or hey, even if you need another technician, there's a process for recruiting and getting that person in play Didn't mean to cut you off, Go ahead.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, you're, you're exactly right. They that that process of you know. Okay, I bought this business. What are the risks that I'm thinking about? Well, the risks are they don't like me, they don't like the new owner and they quit. And then when that person quits, the business is now unsuccessful because that person was the glue, holding everything together and being able to take inventory and know that every person inside of a company is replaceable. That is really important to be able to have that kind of established. So it does take a lot of intentional work and effort. But these are all the things that you guys teach and coach on and all the resources and part of the reason why I'm coming to you to say, hey, teach me, teach me the expert ways and in an electrical company and how things are systemized and built, so that that way you know we can implement those things, because it is just the most important thing that you can do in a business. I think the quicker you work on it, the better.
Speaker 1:From your experience, because I know you've done you said you've done some serious coaching as well, and we're not going to go into any of the details about that, but let's say it's serious coaching. I mean you did this at a high level as well. So, in your humble opinion, when you're looking at a company, whether to invest in them or just to help them, what are some of those first things? Because you really you mentioned a list of items there to fix. But kind of in again, maybe to give Michael Michalowicz another shout out. He had this book Fix this Next. That I loved. Have you ever read that one? The Business Hierarchy of Needs. You got it, man. I love hierarchies of needs, same with Maslow's. But what's your hierarchy? How do you begin to say start here, let's work on that first.
Speaker 3:I like to simplify things as much as possible and the first simplification question I usually ask when someone's like my business is stuck, I'm in trouble, I say, okay, great, your business is a teeter-totter. On one side you have sales and marketing and all the efforts required to get a new customer to come in your door. The other side, you have your production and that is enough technicians, equipment, inventory to be able to satisfy and complete the work. Where are you at right now? Do know are? Do you? Do you have texts that you're concerned about? Is there enough work on the schedule for tomorrow? You have a sales and marketing issue. Do you have a problem where you're booked out for two months, three months, and you cannot get enough people on your team to be able to complete your work? You're turning through, you're burning through, okay, okay, let's just. Let's just like start there and find a focus area to kind of drill down on. And usually that's one of the first places where we start to kind of dive in and say, okay, let's hone in on this area.
Speaker 3:And then usually the first place in a business that I like to systemize and I did this for wise codings is the production side, the service side, the operation side of the business, where technicians have very, very clear checklists on exactly what they're supposed to do. You have your service standards documented. You know exactly what type of Romex you use for different things. You know what your suppliers are. You know what your favorite supplies that you use. You know what the process is, the time is to complete these certain things. You have training videos. You have documentation.
Speaker 3:So when a tech on this, the, the, this you know your deliverables side of your business goes out there, they know exactly what to do. And and it's not just a training program where it's like hey, you're our new apprentice, You're going to go out with John and John's going to like show you the ropes. You know like they actually know what that looks like. And there's a feedback system and you have train the trainer programs and you have a little wiki that talks about how you do everything inside of your company that they can refer to. And and that part. When you get that really dialed in well, it becomes very easy to scale a business once you have what it is that you sell honed in and systemized and operated. So usually I end up kind of starting there in a business to get that part dialed in so that I can start scaling it up and not have everything fall apart as I'm trying to grow it dialed in so that I can start scaling it up and not have everything fall apart as I'm trying to grow it.
Speaker 1:I'm going to full circle around here because I think one of the areas we started ties back into this and it was that concept of the nice boss. I think the things you just said by having those redundancies again, sometimes you don't need it, you won't have to look, you'll just know it and you'll reflect on it, but it's able to keep a level and fair playing field for everyone, assuming an even keel of emotional aptitude and just ready to serve today. So where emotions get in, we usually follow this framework of first looking at the process, the training, and then asking the person well, are you okay If the process there, the training's there and you agree on all that? Are you okay? If the process there, the training's there and you agree on all that, are you okay? And then my favorite question is what kind of workplace would this have to be for you to want to come and do that process following the training that we provided? Yeah, I love that, because when you talk about the nice boss complex actually it's funny you brought that up.
Speaker 1:We didn't intend for this, but I was just reviewing Sun Tzu last night. A little bit Art of War, yeah, joe's got who doesn't right, no offense, oh, I like that version. Lovely nighttime reading, yeah, yeah, the Art of War, right, if you haven't realized, business is war. There's strategy to it, there are competitors, there are people out there who will erode trust, erode decisions, erode strategies. So there's a bit of war influence here.
Speaker 1:But one of the five things that will erode leadership as you head out into battle he called attention to I think it was number five and it was about that nice leader concept. It's great to be good to people and I consider myself a very kind leader myself, but nice is not what we chase. Nice isn't quite that, and I can't remember the term you used in the beginning, brandon, but it was your rating. Criticality was, yeah, criticality. So if you find that you're someone who's low criticality as well, then all of these processes get to step in and help you do the right thing, which is to be able to treat that person fairly, based on and dare I say, the meritocracy of it all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I'll tell you one thing that really helped me to understand and kind of break down the nice boss complex is when they interview people and they talk about what employees value the most about their companies and what makes them love their jobs. One of the top answers is I had specific, clear instructions and expectations of what I was supposed to do and I knew what success looked like. It was tangible, it was clear, it was written down. We knew what the standard is. People crave consistency. You know McDonald's is horrible for you, but it's still one of the number one restaurants in the world because it doesn't matter where you go. The French fries taste exactly the same. The burger is still exactly the same. Everyone knows exactly what they're getting when they go to a McDonald's restaurant every single time. Like, the systems in that business are just insane.
Speaker 3:Humans crave consistency. Customers crave consistency. If a customer hires you and they get the on my way text and then they get the person that shows up and they say the exact same thing. We go to Chick-fil-A and they say my pleasure. They don't say my pleasure. It's weird and you're like what the heck? Why didn't you say my pleasure?
Speaker 3:Like, humans crave consistency and you creating written systems, a standard that is well communicated to everyone and immediate, instantaneous feedback If someone's not following a standard and calling it out. If you have a dress code and someone shows up in jeans with holes in them and their shirt not tucked in, you immediately call them out and you tell them to go home and change. It's not because you're not being nice, it's because you're holding the standard and people respect standards and they respect consistency and the people that actually are in your company that do follow the standards and follow that level of consistency. When you start making exceptions for other people on the team or you're not calling out other people that need to be called out for poor performance or some kind of issue, they get pissed off and they want to quit because they're like what am I doing here? If someone can perform at this poor level and boss just overlooks it and gives them grace and does all, why am I trying so hard? So upholding that really high center of standard actually is the nicest thing you can do. That can make for the happiest employees, most fulfilled employees inside of a business and create the best culture for high performance.
Speaker 3:And when I kind of understood that a lot more and I realized that if you just run towards problems, the second you see them you run towards issues, the second you spot them a hundred times easier to address them. It's not a big, long, awkward conversation because something's been going on for weeks that now you finally have the courage to call up and it's like this big ugly blow up, it's like quick little micro corrections and it just it feels a lot, a lot better. You know, and I think there's a lot of parallels to raising good children, as there are to managing employees on a team and that consistent feedback and application of discipline to let them know what's expected of them. I think there's a lot of parallels there on how to do that 100% 100%.
Speaker 1:As we wind this down, I'm reminded of our own values, which follow the service acronym, and the first one is standards, and that's really a heavy influence from Patrick. That, david, your next five business moves. If you haven't read that book, guys, you're looking for some additional literature. Highly suggest it. But ultimately the person who raises those standards and is able to uphold them shall lead really right. Because under pressure we don't fall back to our highest appraisal of ourselves. We fall back to our lowest standards. We will accept changes, the game, brandon.
Speaker 3:Anything else you want to leave with our listeners today uh, if you feel overwhelmed and you kind of feel stuck, uh, I would say that you know. If there's, if there's one single thing that you can just kind of take away from my biggest epiphany moments is, uh, start taking an inventory of the things you do on a day-to-day basis and start putting together a stop doing list. Try to figure out ways to get things off of your plate and get other people on your team. They can start taking care of that for you. Promote yourself out of a job. Love it, I love that Great advice, man.
Speaker 1:If anyone wanted to connect with you, follow you on social. What's the best way to do that, brendan?
Speaker 3:Yeah, feel free to add me on Instagram, search me on Instagram. Facebook, connect with me over there. I'm on Facebook purely for business, so feel free to shoot me a message on messenger over there. You can also email me, brandon, at hire buscom. If you want to check out our AI software platform, go to hire buscom. If you want to hire CSR, service techs, production managers, operations managers anyone you need inside your company we do done for you hiring process. It's all powered by AI less than a third of the cost of a recruiting agency. We love to help you find some good talent, absolutely man.
Speaker 2:We're going to check it out too. People are going to want that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're going to check that out too and have you back for another HireBus. If you want to go deep on just hiring, recruiting and all the things that HireBus is doing, we want to unveil that with you for sure. I would love that. Thanks for having me guys. Thank you, brother, it's really been our pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. See you guys next week. And that's a wrap for today's episode of the Million Dollar Electrician.
Speaker 2:Podcast. We hope you're buzzing with new ideas that charge up to take your business to the next level, so don't forget to.
