Hey everybody, it is Mark with MiFi. We are so excited to be here at the Moving Titan Retreat. I was even luckier right now to grab Tommy Mello from A1 Garage Doors, who was walking by, said, 'Come on, you got to sit down.' And he was so excited to come down and hang out with me. That's great. I had to pull him from the strings, but it worked. So thank you so much, Tommy, for coming on the podcast. You know, I'm going to hit you with one of the questions that I've been throwing to everybody. Looking back, what are the five main tips or like business areas that you could tell someone that wants to get in the industry, just any trade? Like, you know, it doesn't have to be into like garage doors or HVAC or even the moving industry, but like from the start, you know, what are five fundamental things that you look back now going like, man, this is something that I really wish I focused on?
Yeah, well, number one is I think a lot of people go into an industry with no money. They're good at a job and they think, 'I know how to do this, so I'm just going to go start a business.' They end up being a technician owner that are going to do all the work. That's a big mistake. You should go into this with money saved. In fact, I worked three jobs when I started A1. I was still painting garages, I was bartending, and I was flipping cars on top of that, and I had my landscaping company. So like I was getting all these other incomes to be able to grow A1, and I was putting it into the prize.
Number two, I remember this tap vividly. I met this awesome CPA. He only worked with ten business owners, like amazing, very, very wealthy, affluent clients. And he goes, 'Dude, for some reason I really like you. I'm not even going to charge you to work with you, but you got to read everything I give you.' And he handed me The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, and I read that in two days. And then he handed me The Richest Man in Babylon, and then the Red Bible by Chet Holmes, the what is it called, The Ultimate Sales Machine. And then he got me reading, so I was getting educated.
Here's something else. A lot of people want to pass the baton, they want to help small companies out. You go find the biggest, best companies in your industry, go visit them on the other side of the United States, make the trip, ask a lot of questions, be a student for life. Like success leaves clues. These guys have so much wisdom. They've already made it. They already have a hundred million in the bank. They're not worried about you wanting to learn from them. In fact, they're inspired. You got to bring a notebook, you got to take notes, you got to smile a lot, go in humble, don't tell them how you're going to be the next them and you're going to grow better and better and all your dreams. Take a lot of notes, meet their team, the oxygen is different now.
The next thing is my partnerships. You know, they redid my brand over there, Keep Chiropractic. It's a culmination of great partnerships. You know, right now this year I expect almost a million dollars for consultants for myself. Next year on Thea, so far it should be double. That's just me getting coached. I mean, I got one guy paid three hundred grand, I got another guy just put one hundred and fifty, I got a trainer, I've got, you know, 365, I feel those kind of... I've got the supplements, I've got the doctor, I've got literally like two speaking coaches. Like I'm just, I paid the money to get the best. It's like, it's like I could jump five years ahead by getting coached. Michael Jordan had four other coaches on top of Phil Jackson. So get the right coaches, find the right partners.
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What would you say, I'm not going to jump in there, what would you say is one of the first coaches? You know, you probably jump the track, different ones, like what's going to work? You talk about speaking coaches, talk mental fitness, everything else. What's one fundamental? Because people are like, man, well, I'm not, I don't have that kind of, I can't drop that. So what's someone that you would be like, no, if you're going to get a coach, start with this.
Well, read the book The Seven Power Contractor. My best coach I've ever had, Al Levy, last week, he wrote a book, Seven Power Contractor, and he explains the org chart, the depth chart, the triangle of communication, which is your CSR, your dispatchers, techs in every industry, off service, that's what it is. And then he understands how to really build a man, which is when he found me in 2017, I was the best firefighter. I knew how to literally handle anything in the business, payroll discrepancies, online reviews, I could hire, I could train, I could go sell, but there was no systems. And Al Levy, he goes, 'Dude, you're the best firefighter. We're going to be fire preventers. We're going to create systems, standard operating procedures, and checklists, and all these problems are going to go away.' And it was a lot of work. I had to put my head down and do the work.
So people, they buy books but they don't read. They get coaches but they never implement. Like anybody I've ever met, they're like, 'You're the best student I've ever had. You do the work. You don't just listen, but you absorb, and then you go out there and you exercise.' So many people are looking for this, they're looking for this magic in a pill. They're like, if I just said the right person on high school, they're so disorganized, they have no plan, they don't have goals, they didn't reverse the journey of what needs to happen, they don't know their numbers. And now Tommy bought all this stuff, and all of a sudden, led him at 17 million, wasn't making much money on the same. The bottom line, revenues for vanity, profits for sanity. But what I learned was profit matters. If don't you see, you're reinvesting in the company, get profit. Reputation matters, and systems matter. So now every guy's trained the same way, every truck's the same, all of our shirts are the same, every single thing we do for life, the brand is the same in every market.
Everybody's got all these reasons why, well, you don't understand my industry, you don't understand my market. You need to raise to the bottom of the city streets. Someone's winning. Here's what I learned: everything falls on the leader. The more excuses I make, the more issues I say, if I always say there's, well, you don't understand, like everybody wants to like, the more I work on me, the better the company gets. There's this, there's this wall, the wall of love, and the company will only grow as fast as I grow.
And are you, in the position that you are now, does that still hold true today? Like for you, are you still heavily involved, a lot of the, the, the, the, the markets that have to be taken care of, the assets of the business, people coming to like, Tommy, this is what happened?
I'm involved in the culture, like the communication, how we do things around that. But I would say my job is to maintain the vision, the growth. I'm heavily invested myself in marketing and culture, and I know the numbers like the back of my hand. Like there's always something that's kind of on the deck, whether that's our booking rate or conversion rate or average ticket or cost per lead might be going up. I use the people I've known for a long time in our size to get on top of major issues, but I delegate. One of the things that Al Levy taught me again is how to be a master delegate. And I delegate to Al. I won't outwork anybody. I do work very hard, but I out-delegate. That's how I win. When people, they control freak and they don't do it, it's not done right. That's a mistake. No one's going to work as hard as you for your business. If you just get 80%, if I had a thousand people, 80% of what I could give, I mean, I'm massively surpassing everybody.
I feel like in March you had said two things that really caught my attention. With, you know, every day you focus on four hours of hard work. For you could succeed so much more than just per at the office. And oh yeah, it was gone for eight hours, but you basically off, you didn't achieve anything. There's nothing that got done.
Me and B were at this comedy show, and the guy goes, you know, those people that say they work, you know, dude, another 70-hour old Earth back. He's like, he came to my house one night, my buddy, and he's like, what you get done this week? And he's like, you know, man, putting out fires, meetings. And he goes, no, no, no, you worked 70 hours. What did you advance? What projects did you complete? And people are always like, man, you know, just do the grind. Wow, you work so hard and you waste so much time. And there's 168 hours in a week. 168 hours. You spent 50 working. You spent 50 sleeping. You still got 70 hours to burn somewhere. You know, you can spend 10 working out. You can take your wife on two days a week. You can write your favorite, watch your favorite show, go to church, go to all your kids' events, and you still got 20 hours. I think the biggest problem I see is time management out the window. People are firefighting, trying to fix whole problems. They're not working on processes. They're working into the business versus out of the business. They can't get out of their own way.
