How Nick’s Built A $300M Year Business… Hauling Junk

Speaker 0: Sometimes people call to complain about driving. I'd be in the driver's seat saying, like, you know, we'll fire those guys when they get back to the office. Jokingly looked at us and said, you guys could be college hunks who haul junk. Mhmm. There's no Pepsi to the Coke of junk removal and moving.

There's no Burger King to the picked up McDonald's. And that month, I think we did, like, $40 with one truck. We literally started with a notepad, and we would just kind of document as a checklist format what we were doing every single day. Mhmm. We can't become a billion dollar brand using $300,000,000 systems.

I I call ourselves a twenty year overnight success. That was, like, how we had to think of it. It's like, okay. I love the smell of the facility in the in the morning because that's the smell of money. That's what we were thinking to ourselves back then.

Have the urgency of effort, that founder mode urgency, but have the patience for the results because they don't always come as fast as we think they're gonna come, and you can drive yourself crazy when they don't.

Speaker 1: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's episode of disruptors where millionaires are made. Today, we have Nick Freeman with College Hunts Hauling Junk and Moving. And Nick flew from Tampa to Talk about how he built a $300,000,000 business 300,000,000 a year business by hauling junk. Guys, I'm gonna mention to create millionaires. Information on the show alone is enough to help you become a millionaire in the next five to seven years.

If you'll take consistent action, you will become one. And before we jump into it, if you're here to learn how real entrepreneurs are building real empires, make sure you hit that subscribe button because every week, we're sharing lessons like that can help you create your first or your next million. And And right now, I've got a 100,000, 250,000, or more just hang out in your CRM, resurrect all your old and dead leads by having our objection proof AI calling agent calls through your database, text cash to the phone number 33777 to unlock the money that's just sitting there inside your CRM. You ready?

Speaker: I'm ready. Thanks for having me.

Speaker: Oh, I'm excited to hear your story. This is kinda crazy we're gonna be talking about. So let's just jump right into it. Tell me what was your life like before, you got into hauling junk?

Speaker: Yeah. So I grew up in Washington, DC. I had a pretty traditional upbringing. My parents were, I would say, you know, kind of along the lines of work hard in school, get good grades, get into college, get a degree, get a job. So the concept of entrepreneurship didn't even exist in my household.

It was seen as very kind of almost taboo, like a risky proposition.

Speaker: For sure.

Speaker: And, so, you know, as looking back as I think of the, you know, title of disruptors, I was very disruptive Mhmm. Sitting in class. I was the only kid in third grade, who they required to carry a behavior folder around to get the teachers to sign to say In third grade. In third grade, no less, to say whether I was disruptive or not. And so, you know, in hindsight, looking back, that was some of that restless energy that now applied in a very, you know, productive entrepreneurial endeavor can make a major impact and make a lot of money out of it.

But I think a lot of times, kids and youth get sort of, in some cases, dismissed or or labeled, because they're not able to sit still or or or listen to, you know, the teachers or or follow the, you know, straight line. And I I was able to maintain enough, you know, discipline to, you know, not get kicked out of school. And I ultimately got into college, but it wasn't until the summer before our senior year that we kinda stumbled on this idea.

Speaker: Yeah. Senior college.

Speaker: Senior college. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. So everything was normal. Everything is fine. You're going through the path. Maybe disruptive, but going through this path.

And then senior college, you said the summer?

Speaker: Senior college? So we're home for summer vacation, and I was trying to do everything to build up my resume to go go get a job after I graduated. And we were sitting around, and my best friend and I, were sitting at his house. And his mom, she had a small furniture store, and she had this beat up cargo van. And she said, you know, why don't you guys just use this van?

You can move people's furniture. She used to have to haul people's junk away when she would deliver furniture. So she's like, you haul people's junk away, and then she jokingly looked at us and said, you guys could be college hunks who haul junk. Mhmm. And we just kinda laughed about it at first because it's sort of a funny, you know, rhyming name.

And then we were like, well, that's kinda catchy, not what people typically associate with movers or haulers.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: So we just put it on computer print out flyers. We realized very quickly people had a need for the service. They thought the name was catchy. We were doing all the work ourselves. It was, you know, a lot of hard heavy physical labor, but it was a lot of fun because we were actually making money.

Yeah. And I would say most college kids would, you know, quit after college and go do something in the quote unquote real world.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And we actually did get regular jobs, using our resumes from, you know, class and everything else, and we hated it. About three months into it, after we graduated college, I emailed my best friend, Omar, and said, hey, what's our timeline for starting college hunts on a year round basis? And I think he was feeling the same restlessness. He said, you know, my timeline's right now exclamation point. Let's do this.

Yeah.

Speaker: And there

Speaker: was a lot of skeptics. You know, people were kinda looking at, you know, raised eyebrows. Hey. It was one thing you were doing that in college, but

Speaker: That's cute.

Speaker: You know, you're gonna make this a year round venture. You're not in college anymore. Yeah. And then you're gonna call it college hunks. Are you throwing away your degree to start a trash business?

And so we used a lot of that doubt as sort of motivation for us. But,

Speaker: When was this?

Speaker: This was in the early two thousands. So this was, you know, kind of, you know, resources like this one, this podcast didn't exist back then. We could go, you know, get books. Actually, somebody I don't know where I got it, but a copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad, which I see is is sitting on your shelf here, somehow found its way across my desk. And I didn't somehow found its way across my desk.

And I didn't read a lot when I was in college or high school. I just kinda did enough to get by and get the grades. But once we sort of found an entrepreneurial endeavor to sink our teeth into, I became, you know, a pretty passionate reader, and I know you are as well. And so I would just, you know, dive into these books and be dog earring pages and circling stuff and then be talking to Omar and be like, hey, we gotta do this. And I think I remember there was some anecdote that, Robert Kiyosaki talked about in his book where it was he was talking about, like, something from, like, the antiquities or the stone ages or or, you know, the Roman Empire and the difference between somebody that was, like, carrying buckets of water versus somebody that created, like, this river of water that could flow from point a to point b Yeah.

So you don't have to do the physical carrying. And at this time when I read it, like, we were carrying the physical furniture and putting it in the truck. So that was, like, the light bulb moment for me. It's like, woah. If we're ever gonna have another truck, let alone another location and, you know, create an aspirational successful business, we've gotta start stop being the ones lugging the buckets ourselves.

And so that kind of flipped a switch for us.

Speaker: Let me ask, like, the the transition. So summer, you're doing it before you graduate. Are you making, like, real money or is this, like, fun money?

Speaker: Yes. It was, you know, it was real money for college students. No doubt. It was probably $5.06, $7,000 for the summer, which back then was a lot of money. And for a broke college kid, that was a a lot of money.

Speaker: It was enough.

Speaker: It was enough for sure. But we saw that there was opportunity there. And so, I actually forgot to mention, we wrote a business plan our senior year of college, and we entered it into an entrepreneurship competition. And we actually won $10,000 out of that as first prize. And a lot of people are like, oh, okay.

So you took that and, you know, parlayed that into startup. But, you know, I say Way more from that

Speaker: than that.

Speaker: That's right. Work. Exactly. But I would say, like, when we were in college, you weren't thinking about next week or next month or next year. You're thinking about next weekend in most cases.

And my business partner, he went to University of Miami in South Florida. And so I think that 10 didn't make it to to graduation, unfortunately. I think he spent some time on South Beach and

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: You know, bought some new suits and stuff and and kinda blew it. And so, so yeah. So we we saw that there was an opportunity to make money by providing a service that people needed. Yeah. And I saw the vision.

And Omar ultimately, we both saw the vision of creating a brand and a logo and a website

Speaker: and But was it a like, when you guys, like, you know, screw, like, with this w two thing? Like, was this, like, side hustle or is, like, hey, like, this could be, like, a major business?

Speaker: When we quit our jobs after college is when we said this is going to be a major business. It wasn't like this could be. It was, like, this is going to be. And by that time, we had seen that some other people were doing it, when I say, you know, moving or junk removal at a larger scale, that had gotten some publicity. And I was like, you know, there's no there's no Pepsi to the Coke of junk removal and moving.

There's no Burger King to the picked up McDonald's. And Yeah. And I said, why not us? You know, that was kind of the question we kept looking around and asking. And, you know, I I call ourselves a twenty year overnight success because that's how long it's taken to get to where we are.

So I think, you know, most entrepreneurs, things do tend to take longer and are harder than you than they you think they're gonna be when you get into it. Because as an entrepreneur, we're sort of wired for optimism, and and I think that's why a lot of people quit and give up too early is because they're not willing to sort of endure the pain threshold of making it to the next level to the next level. And, for whatever reason, we just you know, we we started with a lofty vision. Like, hey. We're gonna be a national brand.

Imagine if we could see our trucks in all these different cities, and we could picture that. And so that was sort of, like, the guiding light for us to continue to, you know, chart down the path.

Speaker: So you got one cargo van, and you're making okay money. When did it finally become real? Yeah. Like, okay. This is, like, we like, on paper Yeah.

Like, this is something. When is, like, okay. Like, this is this is real?

Speaker: Yeah. So, probably about three months into when we started what I'll say the business on a full scale, we only still had one truck, but we finally had a logo. We got the vehicle wrapped. We were still living at our parents' house, so our overhead was zero. Our parents didn't like us parking that commercial vehicle in front of their in front of their driveway too much, so they were very happy when we got our first office.

But, we actually there was a Washington Post reporter who had seen one of our little bandit signs, you know, those yard signs. We we still use those, or that gorilla grassroots marketing that we used twenty years ago. We still use that today. Mhmm. And she thought, what is this?

You know, college hunks hauling junk. So she called the 800 number on it. Now we still had the 800 number routed to our cell phone because, you know, we always wanted to make ourselves look like a bigger business. Actually, tell the story, we had the 800 number on the back of the truck. Sometimes people would call to complain about driving.

I'd be in the driver's seat saying, like, you know, we'll fire those guys when they get back to the office.

Speaker: What's the place's flight?

Speaker: That's right. Oh, man. That's crazy. Yeah. Exactly.

I mean, we would park that one truck in different locations, and people would come up to us and be like, what do you have? Five, ten trucks? You know, I see them all over the place. And we're like, no. We just have the one.

We're moving it around strategically so you see it. But, anyway, this Washington Post reporter, she called us and and we told her the story. Hey. We did this as a summer gig. We wrote a business plan.

We got regular jobs. Now we're doing this year round. And she was kind of a human interest reporter. She would write about kind of these interesting stories, and this was, again, pre social media. So people were still, like, reading the physical newspaper, and we started getting calls of people who had read the article, and we'd come to their house, and they'd have the article ripped out, like, on their fridge, and they were telling their kids about it.

Like, for whatever reason, I think it was a very relatable story. You know, we didn't we weren't inventing or trying to invent sort of this new, you know, technological breakthrough. It was like trucks and labor, and we got a catchy name and a bright orange and green color scheme, and, we're gonna be very intentional about the customer service. And so that month, I think we did, like, $40 with one truck, and it was the two of us, you know, doing all the work ourselves. So it was almost like, you know, our gross profit margin was almost a 100%.

So now we were making some real money, and, that's when we would decide we were gonna get an office and think about getting a second truck and think about hiring some employees. And, of course, that was all a big new learning curve for us because we had been so accustomed to doing all the work ourselves. I think that's a a challenge a lot of entrepreneurs Yeah. Run into is, you know, when they get started, they're so good at

Speaker: Well, so, like, Michael Gerber talks about this Yes. In the E Myth. Like, you you love bacon pies, but it's the business of bacon pies that you're in.

Speaker: That's right.

Speaker: That's right. So you're really good at hauling. That's right. But the business of hauling is a different story.

Speaker: It was a completely different story. So actually, the the E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber was sort of the next book that lit us up when we read that, because he talked about franchising in it. And franchising, I didn't really know what that word meant. It was kind of a buzzword. I knew about McDonald's and these fast food franchises, but the the framework that he talks about is, you know, create systems and processes as if you were gonna teach somebody else how to run your business as a franchise even if you're not going to.

And that was, like, the next light bulb moment for us. You know? Again, we didn't have Chat GPT to give us a checklist of how to run the business or, you know, podcasts or, you know, masterminds to kind of learn from. So we literally started with a notepad, and we would just kind of document as a checklist format what we were doing every single day. You know, how we answer the phone, how we loaded the truck, how we wore the uniform, how we greeted the clients.

And that sort of, I would say, system evolution, I always emphasize that's something we do, not something we did. Like, as a brand to this day, we're still constantly evaluating, like, if our systems and processes are ready and capable of taking us to the next level because we have an aspiration of becoming a billion dollar brand, and we can't become a billion dollar brand using $300,000,000 systems. And so we need to start, you know, identifying that identity today. Here's what nobody's telling you.

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Hey. On the way, Omar was your, is your partner was your partner? Yeah.

Speaker: Still my business partner. Partner.

Speaker: Who who was doing what? Because, like, I could see, like, you're the you're the one, like, go go go.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So is Omar the one that's, like, holding up to create the systems?

Speaker: You know you know what? It was a lot of just sort of ad hoc by committee or by des designation or delegation to each other. Sometimes it's like, hey. You do this part. I'll do this part.

Somehow it works. Like, it kinda flies in the face of traditional business partnerships because we end up

Speaker: guys more similar than you are different?

Speaker: I would say we are more similar. Now I'm a little bit more kind of nuts and bolts, you know, obsessive compulsive. He's a little bit more laid back. Actually, like, you know, things are gonna kinda fall into place. But if you're thinking of, like, you know, let's take the the EOS traction rocket fuel framework, we're probably both skewing visionary.

Mhmm. But I'm probably more can play the role of integrator and he's kinda more pure visionary. And so I I was sort of like visionary integrator, and he was pure visionary, but we divided things up as like, hey, Omar, you do marketing and tech. I'll do, you know, ops and sales, and we'll, you know, I'll keep an eye on the finances. And Yeah.

I would say our vision and values are in alignment, so that's always been what's critical. We've gotten in fist fights. I remember one time, it was his turn to take out the truck and, and or empty the truck before the day, and and I think, you know, we were back in our twenties. We we used to stay out, you know, burn the candle at both ends, and he was still sleeping on the couch. And I was, you know, just I just started punching him.

I was like, dude, we have jobs today. You gotta go empty the truck. He started punching me back, and so there was a flash point in my mind. I can actually still feel it pretty visually today where I thought, oh, this business partnership is not gonna work. Yeah.

But, you know, one of the things we we never held resentments longer than, you know, twenty four hours. It was like we would get over that and then immediately get right back to business and kind

Speaker: of put that Partnerships are tough. Very. But this is the first one I've heard as, like, natural fist fight.

Speaker: A fist fight. Yeah. And usually those fist fights, you know, that would be the end of the partnership. Like, hey, see you. We'll see you in court or something like that.

But Yeah. Maybe it was because, like, our friendship, you know, had started in high school, and, you know, we just neither one of us I mean, like, we have egos, but we're, like, humble enough to, like, sort of check them, you know, when it comes to each other. Like, we we never really too concerned about who was on the podcast or who was on this TV show or

Speaker: Who's getting credit.

Speaker: Who was getting that credit. Right? And we did a lot of stuff together. You know, we did some stuff separately, but we just always came back to the business, and and our vision and values were in alignment. That's the best I could say on that one.

Speaker: Alright. So you guys, 40,000 a month, then you get an office. Right? And then you start hiring. You get another truck.

Like, what?

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So, our first hires were a disaster. I mean, we we didn't have any experience, like, no management experience, no leadership experience of of actually hiring somebody. So we were just, like, literally doing it by the seat of our pants.

And, like, we use the fog a mirror technique. If they could, like, fog a mirror and lift the other end of the couch, like, we would hire them. And, it was definitely not the the image that we were trying to portray with the College Hunks brand, but that's, like, sort of all we knew. It was off of Craigslist or off of, you know, you know, somebody that walked into our office because they saw our truck and said they, you know, they wanted to work. But the worst was when we would hire people to drive the truck because we had no training systems.

So we would, you know, hire somebody. They would tell us they knew how to drive. They tell us they knew how to lift. We'd give them the work orders for the day. They come back, like, ten hours later with, like, I don't know, a $100 in revenue and, like, $400 in labor expenses between the two of them or whatever.

The two guys that went out on the truck, I'm like, okay. This is not gonna work. So, again, we had to reevaluate the systems. Like, okay. Who are we looking for?

What's the ideal hunk that's gonna be moving furniture and hauling junk that we're sending into people's homes? Mhmm. And then secondly, how we're gonna find them and screen for them. And then thirdly, how we're gonna train them. And so, you know, we had to start, you know, documenting all of those systems.

And, of course, our you know, even though our revenue was going up, our profits started going down because now we had overhead. We had an office. We had people we were paying. We started spending more money on marketing. Thankfully, because we were sort of bootstrapping it, we sort of knew incrementally that, you know, there was enough that we could pull out.

We didn't, you know, expand our lifestyle too early. There was enough we could pull out to kinda support our our our quality of life in our early twenties. We didn't need much, while still kind of investing in the business while, you know, being able to afford the new truck payment or the new insurance payment or the new, you know, office overhead.

Speaker: So you guys were responsible with money? Like, you never, like, had, like, a dark moment financially?

Speaker: Well, no knock on wood. No. There was plenty of dark moments where, like, wait. Payroll was coming up, and I don't know if we have enough in the bank. They were gonna be able to make it.

Like, we need to, you know, piece these, you know, strings together to be able to keep the business and the lights on. Omar went out and bought a Range Rover probably prematurely before we needed to, and I think it was after a day where he was out on the truck. So he comes in, he goes into the Range Rover dealership. I don't think they looked I thought they thought he was there for maintenance. He had, like, you know, a a sweaty polo and, you know, dirt all over his pants and work boots, and he, like, looks at the Range Rover.

He's like, I want that one. Mhmm. And, the guy probably wasn't taking him seriously, but, you know, sure as shit he drove off the lot with the Range Rover. And I remember when he pulled into the office, I was like, Omar, I don't think our employees are gonna appreciate, you know, you pulling up to the, you know, the the office here in this range where they're going out to move the furniture. Like, it's it's a little premature.

He actually also when we moved our headquarters to Tampa in in o eight to open up our call center to support the franchisees, which actually helped our cost of living significantly. It was a lot less expensive than the DC area and a lot higher quality labor than we were getting up in DC. Omar sends me a text because he went before I did, and he's like, hey. I think now that we're gonna be living in Florida, we should get a boat. And this is, like, around 2000, 2008, 2009, right before, you know, the housing market crash and everybody just got foreclosed on.

And so I texted him back kind of pragmatic. I was sitting with my dad, and he's he's much more sort of conservative about, you know, financials. He's like, you know, well, do your research. You might be able to buy one at auction or buy a used one. Little did I know Omar was at the boat show in Tampa, like, signing up a, you know, purchase lease for the boat in our business name.

And, you know, we had no idea we were, like, city slickers. When we got on that boat, we beached it three or four times on the sandbar because we didn't know how to stay in between the, you know, the the buoys and everything. So a lot of those kind of, I would say, you know, financial mistakes, none of them were catastrophic. Like, we didn't, you know So

Speaker: the Range Rover was on it was under the business name. Exactly. Not owner Omar's name.

Speaker: Correct. Range Rover's a business expense. And what we did as business partners is we would identify, like, okay. You're getting the benefit of this Range Rover. So whatever payment that that's pulling out of the business, I'm getting trued up as a, you know, partner as if I had that same Range Rover payment even though I don't.

So that's how we kind of level things out if the business, you know, provided an ancillary benefit, you know, discretionary business expense to one that benefited one over the other.

Speaker: Okay. So the second van, no crazy stories getting a second van? I mean

Speaker: No. I mean, like a second truck or a second commercial vehicle? No. I mean, it was always, you know, a bit of a challenge to get funded, but this was before financing got really tight. So, like, we were able to show some profit, and we were able to show, that we, you know, had work orders and jobs and and some operating

Speaker: So the greatest challenge then isn't, like, getting more trucks. It was managing people driving the truck.

Speaker: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The people would it it still to this day is the biggest challenge because, like, at every level, we're trying to operate as if we're the business in the future that we're going to be. And so I think a lot of the mistakes that we made in the early days, a lot of mistakes business owners make is they operate either as they always have in the past or they operate sort of in the present, which allows just sort of incremental progress.

And so when we started thinking about, okay, we wanna be a $100,000,000 business, you know, who are the people that we need today that's gonna help our business start functioning?

Speaker: Before we get there, what's a nightmare story of a hunk calling junk? They're like, I can't believe this call we just got.

Speaker: Yeah. Man, we had,

Speaker: Early on in the

Speaker: Yeah. Early on in the business, we had, I got a call from it was like a pizza shop or something like that. And I guess one of our employees got into a semi altercation with the, like, the person behind the counter at the pizza shop. And, again, thankfully, this is before everybody had their camera phones and social media because it probably the incident could have, you know, ended up as a viral moment. That would have been the end of our brand

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Right there and then. Thankfully, we made all these, you know, bonehead mistakes before those, things existed. So the stakes are higher now for the business owners that are trying to build a brand out in the in the community. And so and and for some reason, the employee was surprised when I was like, we gotta fire you. Like, you threatened to, you know, basically drag the guy over the counter and take him outside into the parking lot and, you know, beat him up, and you were throw you know, he was throwing things in the in the pizza shop.

Like, what what led to that? I think he would probably was stressed out. He was having a long day, and maybe the guy wasn't, you know

Speaker: So he wasn't hauling for the pizza shop. He went to a pizza shop. He went

Speaker: to a pizza shop for his lunch break and got into a fight with one of the employees in the pizza shop. And, and then got mad at me when I told him I we had to fire him. And we I mean, the early days, we had some employees threaten us because, like, we were young too. So, like, we were in our twenties, and we're hiring some of these guys that with, you know, checkered past, blue collar, you know, backgrounds. And, and, you know, here's Nick and Omar, you know, thinking that they're gonna be, you know, these hot shots running this, you know, junk removal moving business.

And so when we would have to fire people, like, they'd be like, well, I know where you live. I'm gonna come, you know, you know, light your house on fire. And I'm like, bro, like, we are this is what are we getting ourselves into? So, again, we need to do a better job in the outset, background checks, reference checks. Mhmm.

But a lot of times, you know, we're moving in so many different pieces and spinning, you know, all the plates of the business. It was hard to, you know, take the time to be diligent. And now it's easy for people to say, you know, hire people smarter than you are. Hire slow, fire quickly. But when you're in sort of growth mode and you're trying to just sort of plug the holes on the ship, yeah, and and keep keep things moving forward, a lot of, you know, a lot of the decisions we made were probably just sort of haphazard out of convenience as opposed to out of intention.

Speaker: So why did you move down? You said you moved to Tampa for a call center.

Speaker: Yeah. So when we started franchising, our thesis behind So did you franchise first or do you go to Tampa first? We we started franchising first up based out of DC.

Speaker: Okay. So let's talk about franchising. Yeah. So what was going on? What was your what was the business production like?

Volume, revenue, whatever, when you say, hey, we we should franchise.

Speaker: So I'll say we probably franchised prematurely. I think we had a naive, almost glamorized view of what franchising was gonna be.

Speaker: Oh, everything we do is, like, we have a glamorized view.

Speaker: A 100%. You know, to and when I say to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To entrepreneur, everything looks like a great idea. Right? You know, it's gonna work great.

And so, we had heard about this concept of franchising. I heard about this concept of royalties. And in the back of my mind, I thought royalties equated to passive income. Meaning, okay, we're gonna collect the royalties and somebody else is gonna do the work. Sounds perfect.

Let's let's get into franchising. What what they don't tell you and what I always try to advise people when they approach me and say, hey, I'm thinking about franchising my small business. A, is it do you even need to? Like, are you are you able to grow multiple locations without having to go through the headache of getting your franchise documents and your attorney documents and your, you know, operating manuals? And the way you can know whether or not it's even franchisable is you need a second location.

When we started franchising, we just still had the one location.

Speaker: You didn't have a second location yet.

Speaker: We didn't have a second location. So we kinda took for granted that, you know, all these franchisees will just be able to kinda do the same thing we did, but a lot of things that we did were just sort of like grit and hustle, and it wasn't like truly by a playbook yet. So so to answer your question about revenue wise, I think we did probably in our second full year business, a little over a million dollars. Mhmm. And that was always a big hurdle for me because I had heard about the entrepreneurs organization, and they had this, you know, million dollar threshold.

It's a kind of a peer group for, other entrepreneurs. And I was like, oh, man. If we can just get there and get in that room and be surrounded by other, you know, growth minded entrepreneurs, we'll be able to learn from each other and hope to feel like we're out on this island, which it's true. Having peer groups is is is phenomenal. Masterminds, I'm a big believer in.

And so then, you know, there's these franchise consultants that we stumbled across, and they're happy to take your money to teach you how to be a franchisor. Sure. And and so they kind of which is funny because I think they copied and pasted our name, like, in like, I found they where they had forgotten to copy and replace our our company name in their, like, training manuals with, like, a different company they had already done a franchise, like, program for. And so, so we hired them, and, we decided we were gonna be a become a franchise. And and we had to get Saudi as a manager to run our our DC operation to keep that corporate location going, because that was really our cash cow.

That was funding us being able to go put money into franchise growth. Yeah. And what we realized is or one of our, I guess, thesis in the business was we're gonna have a call center that answers the phone for all the franchisees. So we're gonna be kind of their point of sale so that the franchise owner just needs to worry about hiring and training a quality crew. And then what we say, go out and be the mayor of your market.

Go network with the real estate agents, the property managers, anybody that could use a mover or a holler, they need to know you as the go to person. And the DC area, high cost of living, high cost of labor, you know, no call centers, all the entrepreneurial kind of businesses there were all very sort of, like, government focused or, you know, legal focused. As you know, I imagine in that in that, you know, market

Speaker: Government contracts are lucrative.

Speaker: And so I did a a Google search. Literally, I said, what are some call center cities? And it was like Phoenix, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, somewhere in Texas, and it was like Tampa, Florida. And I was like, You know, just started thinking about it in the back of my mind. I was like, I always kinda wanted to live in Florida.

I was like, people retire there. Like, it must be nice. And then I looked on real estate on Craigslist, and I was like, oh, I could live in that for, you know, a fraction of what I'm paying, you know, for this little apartment in DC. And then pods, the portable storage franchise, you know, those big pods storage containers? They had just had this big private equity event.

They sold for, like, 400,000,000, and their headquarters was down there, and their call center was down there. And so, actually, I think I called one of their, just the random number and talked to a call center agent. I was like, how do you like living down there? I was like, are the call center agents really good down there? And she's like, yeah.

It's great. Sunshine. And I think it was, like, you know, the middle of winter in DC. So Omar and I just kinda relocated sight unseen down to Tampa in roughly, again, 02/2009. Now on top of the fact that we were premature franchising, if you were gonna pick a time in history to franchise a home service business that was dependent on discretionary income of homeowners, 02/2009 was probably not the ideal time to be doing that.

Right? People were worried about how they're gonna make mortgage payments, not about paying to get rid of junk or paying to move from point a to point b. So there was a lot of, you know, sort of distress as you as you might say in in those days. I think it forced us to just either kind of give up or or breakthrough. That was, like, our only two options.

So you

Speaker: were saying, like, you might have been premature to franchise. Why would you say you're premature?

Speaker: Because we hadn't proven a second location yet. Mhmm. And so our systems and our model wasn't, you know, fine tuned. Our call center wasn't really functioning in the DC area, which is why we needed to relocate to Tampa. We had already started franchising when we were based in DC.

So we were sort of, like, building the plane in flight. And, and and, really, I think we didn't have any support structure or infrastructure to not just sell franchises, but to, like, support and train them to be successful.

Speaker: So talk to me about the first franchise sale.

Speaker: So you so, funny funny enough. So the first franchise sale was actually a friend of Omar's from college. They've gone to, you know, school together. That guy's family had owned some different franchises in the restaurant space. So he was familiar with the concept, and he kind of, like, like, raised his hand and say, hey, I'll be the first franchisee.

And, you know, one of the things that they always tell franchisors is don't sell too much territory, because it's hard to take it back. And, you know, people franchisees always wanna kinda hoard territory if they're gonna, you know, be able to service. And then a lot of times, they don't need that much. So, anyway, we didn't have a lot of options of who wanted to buy a franchise. So this guy was like, I want all of Central Florida.

And we're like, you mean, like, Orlando? He's like, no. From Tampa to Daytona and everything in between. At first, he wanted the whole state. We're like, no.

So somehow, we gave him the whole state. Or not the whole state, the whole Central Florida, corridor. And then he said, oh, by the way, I don't have any cash to pay you for the franchise fee. He goes, I got this land that I got stuck with because he was doing land flips in Florida during the housing market, like, run up. And he goes, I'm stuck with it, and I'll I'll give it to you.

It's worth, like, $50. I think this is the we still own this property to this day. I think it's the only real estate that has not gone up in value. It's gone down in value over the past twenty years, in Putnam County, Florida. So if anybody's listening that wants to, you know, develop some random noncontiguous plots in Putnam County, you know, give me a holler.

But anyway, so he was our first franchisee. I guess the fact that there was a, you know, familiarity there and we kinda give him a sweetheart deal, he was able to sort of, like, overlook the fact that we didn't really have much to train him. Like, our training was, like, hey. Come ride along on the trucks so it wasn't, like, hey, here's how you hire your guys, here's how you train you guys, you know, here's how you, you know, convert. It was it was very much just kinda, like, hey, come come shadow and now you're in business.

And, again, initially, we were trying to service him from the DC area. Thankfully, when we moved to Tampa, we had a little bit more proximity. That's actually another mistake franchisors make is they sell kind of non contiguous territories and then they're, you know, running all over the map. And there's no, a, there's no brand awareness that develops from that, you know, concentration of locations, and, b, you know, the ability to get out and support and and help doesn't work either. And and and then they also don't really tell you that in franchising, you're not really make as a franchisor, you're not really making money until you have 50 or a 100 franchisees because that small royalty you're collecting is a small amount, and you need a significant number of franchisees for it to make a meaningful amount that covers your overhead of supporting them and the infrastructure to reinvest and develop and improve, you know, the system.

So it's always kind of a cart horse situation.

Speaker: Still in business, number one franchise?

Speaker: No. We so we ended up take we ended up splitting up the territory. He kinda handed I think he got bored. He handed the keys to one of his cousins. That gave us an opportunity to kind of condense the territory.

So his cousin was running Orlando. We took back Tampa. We resold, like, Jacksonville, Daytona. And then I think his cousin was just sort of, like, you know, running a one or two truck operation. And thankfully, we were able to find somebody who literally overnight took it from a $60,000 a month business to, like, a $600,000 a month business.

Like, the the the demand was there. We just didn't have an operator there with enough trucks and enough, you know, wherewithal to there were systems, quite frankly, to be able to support a a bigger business. So by the time we had somebody that was, you know, interested, the business was a little more sophisticated. We had better systems, better call center, better technology to be able to support it. So it was it was kind of a

Speaker: So the first one was a bit of a fiasco?

Speaker: Bit of a fiasco.

Speaker: How about the second one?

Speaker: Second one oh, brilliant. Probably the first dozen half a dozen was were fiascos. I'll tell you what was a real fiasco was the first franchise conference that we hosted, when we had, like, eight franchisees. We're like, oh, we're supposed to host an annual conference. So we just went to some random hotel, you know, just got a small little conference room or or, you know, you know, meeting room.

The franchisees had to fly themselves down. We, you know, had a few vendors that we, you know, asked them to pony up some money. But, like, we're setting up the displays. Like, I had this little, like, chicken scratch. I I'd say You're

Speaker: setting up the display.

Speaker: Yeah. I'm setting up the displays. Omar's setting up the other display. By this time, we had hired our very first employee on the franchisor side, and he was a game changer for us. I mean, that you think about, like, I saw that you have the the the, Ben Hardy book, Ask Who Not How or 10 x Better Than, two x, you know, Ask Who Not How.

Like, the Super Who's make all the difference when you're trying to scale a business. And so we got very fortunate with our first key employee on the franchisor side, and and so he took a lot of that heavy lifting of that conference. But, people were staying out late drinking, and then, you know, we're trying to get them up in the morning to, like, come to the speaker. Nobody was in the room. We had a guest speaker to come speak, and nobody showed up.

And so, yeah, I think our second franchise, we actually sold up in, you know, San Francisco. So it's, like, the complete opposite side of the country, you know, not to mention a highly regulated state, high labor law, you know, completely different operations. And so, like, we felt bad. We ended up sending one of our employees who was, like, a pretty good truck captain out to San Francisco to help manage that location for those franchisees, and he didn't know what the heck he was doing to run a business in a random city he had never been to before. So there was definitely some early fiascals.

Speaker: So what would you say? So first eight were fiascals. So what were the major lessons and things you put in place Yeah. Where after that one, it was less chaotic.

Speaker: Yeah. I think the the couple of things is similar to our hiring practices in those early days. We needed to become more discerning and define who is a ideal franchisee. It, again, is very easy, and in some some cases, you don't have a choice but to sell a franchise to anybody who's willing to write a check and fog a mirror in those early days because we're we were depending on those franchise fees to keep the lights on Mhmm. And to cover the overhead of this new franchise or entity.

Speaker: Okay. So the franchise or is it completely different business?

Speaker: Than the local operation up in DC. The local operation in DC was still profitable. Now it did start to falter a little bit when we moved away. We ended up having to replace the manager there.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Put a guy in place that stuck around. He actually owns his own franchise at a neighboring, market now. So I think just figuring out the the right people on the right spots on the field made all the difference. And, you know, god bless our early franchisees. I mean, they were pioneers.

They were willing to sort of raise their hand and and, you know, walk into the flames and and not know what they were gonna, you know, walk into. And, you know, some of them are still around and have actually built pretty decent sized businesses. Some have been resold and are off doing other great things in in their careers. But I think so back to your question about the the lesson, I think being very definitive of who is the ideal person, you know, is and I'd say that the fit family, financial, and fun. You know, do they have a transferable skill set, which is the fit?

Do do they have a spouse or family member that's gonna support them even when things get tough? What are their financial expectations based on how much it costs to invest in one of these franchises and how much they expect to make? Do those align? And fun factors, like, are we gonna enjoy actually working with this person? Are we gonna enjoy going out, spending time with them in the field or having them at our franchise conference?

Are they gonna align with kind of the energy and the culture that we wanna try to build that, you know, suits us, as as individuals and as leaders? So once we started getting a little more clarity around that, I think we started being able to attract better people, also be a little bit more disciplined and discerning about letting the, you know, the right people into the organization. But again, also, until we had probably over 50, we were a lot more, I would say, not held captive, but, like, like, depend the franchisees held the leverage. Mhmm. Because, like, if one franchisee was threatening to quit or threatening to, you know, rally the other five franchisees, that's 20% of our system that's, you know, you know, rattling the the the sword a little bit.

Whereas at 50, if we got one or two that are kinda stepping out of line or not aligning with the brand values or the service expectations, you know, like, that's that's on them. Like, everybody else believes in what we're building is rowing in the same direction as we are. And so getting past that early critical mass point is is was probably the hardest thing I've ever done as a business owner aside from, you know, hauling junk in a 100 degree weather in the summertime and, you know, crawling in a crawl space.

Speaker: So it was harder to get to 50 than it was to make your first million as a solo?

Speaker: Definitely. Definitely. Like, as as a local junk removal business, getting to a million, I don't wanna say it was easy because it was, like, hot days, long days. Like, I wouldn't do it again. Like, I can never get the smell of the disposal facility out of my, you know, out of my nose.

Speaker: What's the smell?

Speaker: Oh, man. It's like a I mean, it's just rotten garbage. Like, I don't know how else to describe it. It's like rotten garbage on a hot day, but it's, like, piled up, you know, three stories high all around you. So you drive in and there's trash juice, you know, all over the place, and you gotta get out to open the truck and you're stepping in trash juice.

So, like, you know, you're taking that stuff home with you. I I have a ton of respect for the sanitation workers in in our communities because it's it's not easy. And that, you know, eventually, I think you get some nose blindness to to it.

Speaker: Like, I've been through, like, some pretty horrific hoarder homes.

Speaker: Oh, I bet you have. Yeah. We have too. I mean, that's that's something we bump into in

Speaker: our business. Is is it like that?

Speaker: That's that's actually a good way to put it. It's think of it as a hoarder home, but, like, in a basketball gym instead of, like, a home.

Speaker: Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah.

Because I I I don't miss. Like Yeah. I I know it's I know it's the smell of money. Right. But, man

Speaker: Yeah. That's that was that that that was, like, how we had to think of it. It's like, okay. I love the smell of the, you know, the trash, you know, facility in the in the morning because that's the smell of money. That's what we were thinking to ourselves back then.

Speaker: At least that's what we had to tell ourselves.

Speaker: Exactly.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. So it was much harder to get to 50. So, once you got to 50, then it became

Speaker: It was almost like the flywheel and the momentum started happening. Now granted, we started getting some market win tailwinds as well. Right? Like, you know, after 2012, you know, the housing market came back. Mhmm.

The economy was doing well. We started having franchisees doing over 1,000,000, doing over 2,000,000, doing over you know, we started hitting these milestones. Like, when we first started franchising, it was, like, a big deal if a franchisee did 30,000 in a single month. We're celebrating that. Now we got franchisees doing that in a single day.

Some of them are disappointed if that's all they do in a single day. And so, like The standards are a lot higher. The standards continue to raise. And, you know, when the standards continue to raise, it started attracting better franchisees. We had more money to hire better people.

So, like, it it seemed like the flywheel started moving faster and things not got easier, but just got a little bit more fluid. We kind of moved into this out of this grind phase into this flow state or flow phase. And, you know, I think it's kind of entrepreneurial roller coaster. I know you've had Cameron Herold on here a few times. He talks about that.

Like, you could be going through that roller coaster on a daily basis or multiple times a day or over the course of a long period of time. It's sort of like up and down, up and down, which you wanna continuously, you know, like the stock market hopefully be trending up into the right over, you know, longer periods of time.

Speaker: So, you mentioned Cameron. Yeah. So, Elias was telling me that before the show, like, you you try to get kosher from Cameron.

Speaker: Yeah. So, like, look. He he obviously, we know, he he kind kind of his claim to fame was helping one of our biggest competitors, which was kind of the McDonald's of junk removal become a $100,000,000 business, and then he went off on his own as as a coach. And for a while, I think he had, like, a like a almost like an emotional attachment to where he came from even though he wasn't working there anymore because I would ping him. I'm like, hey.

That's that's my super who. I gotta learn from him. He's gonna help us. And he was, like, gave us a stiff arm. Heisman stiff arm for the longest time as a guy.

He's like, I feel like coaching you would be like, you know, coaching my, you know, like, my brother's, like, best friend and to beat my brother or something like that. And I was like, okay. Fine. And then eventually, like, maybe five years later, kind of the 20, I guess, he said, hey. I've opened up my coaching.

I'm kind of industry agnostic, competitive agnostic. It's, you know, it's it's not a big deal anymore. And by that time, the company had come from it, you know, was multiple hundreds of millions in in business, and we were still trying to get to that, you know, $5,060,000,000 threshold. And so, we had him speak at our our franchise conference. We've read his books.

We've had, you know, some of our top leaders go through his, COO Alliance program. Yeah. But, you know, everything that he talks about is such a master class about, you know, getting the wrong people off your team. I I remember he had every everybody in our, franchise audience, you know, stand up if there's somebody that gave their resignation today that you'd allow them to, you know, leave tomorrow. And everybody stood up, and he's like, okay.

You need to go home tomorrow and give that person his, you know, dismissal his walking papers for lack of a better word. Basically, like, we hold on to people sometimes, like, we shouldn't be holding on to in our business. Right. Because and that's what's actually holding us back. And that's sort of that that past dragging us down as opposed to thinking about, you know, future based.

And I know he's big on vision as well. So, yeah, we've taken a lot of pages from from his playbook, from, you know, a lot of the books on your bookshelf's playbook as I was sitting, you know, getting ready to come on. I was like, oh, okay. Patrick Lencioni, you know, Atomic Habits. So a lot of those books, you know, Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness.

Like, so many of those have been influential. I'm not sure

Speaker: of books. Yeah. So, so at 50, franchisees, like, you're talking about, like, revenue. Like, what what kind of revenue we're looking at right now?

Speaker: Yeah. At 50? Yeah. We were probably probably at roughly 25,000,000 in system wide revenue. And, you know, for that franchisee was probably averaging at the time about 500,000 a year.

And they could still be profitable at that number. You know, nowadays, our franchisees are averaging about 1,500,000 a year, and we're trying to get that doubled or tripled to 3 to 4 or to 5,000,000, because, you know, obviously, everything costs more, and we wanna create more, we'll say empire builder franchise owners to continue to elevate, you know, all ships rising with the tide, so to speak for our brand. But back then, we we were probably roughly around 25,000,000. And I think that was around the time we hired probably the most pivotal role in our company. We hired a financial controller, and his name is Roman.

I call him Roman numerals because he's a numbers guy, but he's also had really high EQ, which is a great kind of double Yeah. Combination. He's now our integrator using the, EOS terminology. So he's running the whole company as as the brand president. And his story was actually really interesting how we landed on him.

As his senior of college, we we did a case study at the local university because we couldn't afford to pay real consultants. So we had the marketing classes do, like, a case study about about us to see how That's a hustler mentality. Exactly. You know, very resourceful, whatever it takes, right, to figure things out. And, his team came in, third place, but he he just stood out in the in the presentation.

He he's comes from really humble beginnings. He he's not, you know, ashamed to tell the story, you know, no running water, dirt floor in in rural Jamaica, and, was able to get a a scholarship at University of Tampa and really wanted to work for us. And we didn't have a job from at the time. He didn't have the experience. And so, he actually went back, got his MBA, got a CPA, and, got some real world experience and continue to follow-up with us on LinkedIn.

And I would use to just ignore the LinkedIn message, and then our controller that we had at the time, she quit. And all of a sudden, I remembered, you know, Roman had sent us that LinkedIn message that he was doing finance. So and I pinged him, and we we grabbed dinner. And he was on his way to put a acceptance letter for a public accounting firm, like, for a big, pretty prestigious, partner track. Yeah.

And, we intercepted him. He joined the organization. And when he came in, I think he thought our bit our brand and business was bigger than it was. Because for a long time, you know, the old fake it till you make it, like, our brand seemed bigger than our business really was. And when he got under the under the hood and, you know, it felt like we were driving a car that had mud on the windshield, no gas gauge, no, you know, speedometer.

We had no metrics, no scorecard, nothing, no KPIs, nothing to make decisions on. So it was almost like he just cleared the mud. Also, we could see clearly. You know, we we had data based, financial based decisions instead of these sort of, like, just kind of gut based, intuition based decisions that could only get us, you know, so far. And at that point, it was like the business was gonna struggle if we kept trying to do things, you know, haphazardly the way we had always done them.

Yeah. So having that financial transparency and not just from being counter number presentations to any point point, but making recommendations. But then as I said, he had high EQ, so he could also kind of help us suss out, like, who was gonna be the right people to help us continue to move the company forward and who were kind of, you know, just being, you know, negative disruptors in in in the sense of, like, you know, holding the company back.

Speaker: Right. So at which point did you go into Shark Tank?

Speaker: Yeah. So this was right around, right around 2009. We were on the very first episode of the very first season of Shark Tank.

Speaker: So before the franchise?

Speaker: We had just started franchising. We had about five or six franchisees. And we saw an ad in entrepreneur magazine that said looking for business owners to pitch a an idea for a TV show. That's all it said. And we're like, oh, well, this could be a great way to get our name out there.

You know, we're selling franchises now. And we're, well, we don't really need to raise capital for College Hunks, but what will be a a a business idea we could send in that they might select us? And we had always joked about having having a sister company to be called College Foxes Packing Boxes. So which was exactly the Sharks reaction when we said that,

Speaker: Oh, so that was

Speaker: the pitch? So we so we got selected to go on and pitch College Fox's Packing Boxes, but then we tried to explain, hey. We've got this brother company, College Hong Sauk and Junk. We've already sold six franchises, but we want the investment in this new venture. And, of course, the sharks were not dummies.

They were like, okay. Forget the new venture. We wanna invest in your existing venture. And we got sideways with mister wonderful Kevin O'Leary. And but you gotta remember, this was episode one, so we didn't know who these sharks were.

We just thought Kevin O'Leary was a jerk. We didn't know that that was his TV persona that he's Understandable. You know, you know, creating. And,

Speaker: Well, he's not like that?

Speaker: Right. Exactly. Yeah. And they didn't have well, at least he's a celebrity now. So that's his persona.

Speaker: The Shark Tank guy.

Speaker: Yeah. Exactly. And then, you know, mister, Mark Cuban wasn't on the show yet. So there was, like, these guys were just random dudes to us.

Speaker: It was, like, Kevin Kevin Harrington.

Speaker: Kevin Harrington, Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John. We knew a little bit about Daymond John's story, but we didn't he wasn't a television guy yet.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And so Robert Herjavec actually made us an offer. He offered us, 10%, for $250, which is like a 2,500,000 valuation, which probably at the time is give or take what we might have been worth. I think Fair. Yeah. I think we ought we asked for a million dollars for 10%.

And, you know, of course, we got laughed almost off the off the set, and Kevin O'Leary called us greedy pigs. And when he declared himself out, I didn't mean it to come out this way, but I was like, okay, that means you get to stop talking. Right? Because I wanted the other Sharks to be able to ask questions, but it would have been a meme or a mic drop, you know, viral moment because people and you could hear the producers in the background being like, oh, he just said that to him. And so we turned down the offer from Robert.

People always ask us, oh, do you wish you'd take the, you know, deal? Actually, on the way out of the studio, I remember, like, whispering onwards. Should we be taking the money? And they they actually caught that audio and put a little subtitle in the in the episode. But, you know, our business is worth a 100 x that today.

So or maybe more so. It's like his investment would have been a 100 times is, you know That would be

Speaker: great for him.

Speaker: It would have been amazing for him. And who knows? Maybe we would, you know, gotten there faster or maybe not. Maybe we would have, you know I've heard a lot of guys and girls who have gotten deals with sharks, and then they just expect the shark to be this, like, knight in shining armor that's gonna, like, be an, you know, an easy button to help them save their business as opposed to doing the heavy lifting and the hard work. And, you know, these guys are making multiple investments.

They're not gonna be able to, you know, put their fingerprints on all these businesses. No.

Speaker: They can't.

Speaker: They can't. And, you know, I've I've heard also anecdotally and talked to some of the sharks since that, you know, a lot of those investments haven't done so well. Mhmm. You know? And and so, on paper, maybe they're performing alright, but cash on cash It's

Speaker: kinda like a VC deal. It's like, I'm gonna plan a lot of season, see which ones Yeah.

Speaker: Maybe one out of 20 is gonna pop. And if that's 20 x, then that makes up for the other 19 that that were dogs. So, that was, you know, that was our first experience with really massive mainstream media. Even though the show wasn't as popular because it didn't exist, it was episode one, we still got a bump from it. You know, we're still talking about it twenty years later.

It's, you know Did you could you

Speaker: did you see a bump? Because, like, I know later on, like, if you're on Shark Tank,

Speaker: you're on Shark Tank, Almost like the

Speaker: Oprah effect. But the first one

Speaker: The first one, we we we saw definitely a meaningful in increase in franchise leads, website visits, and even moving and hauling, inquiries. So for sure, we we we saw it. But a lot of it, it was like a just a quick bump and then it sort of tailed off. It didn't sort of make us, like, any sort of viral sensation at those times.

Speaker: Yeah. So looking back now, like, what are the biggest lessons you learned whether it's, like, leading people, culture, whatever? Like, what are some of the biggest lessons you learn along

Speaker: the way? Yeah. So I'll tell you this. After reading, Delivering Happiness and some other books about culture, I missed an important piece of those books. When what I missed was, you need the performance based toughness to accompany the warm and vibrant culture cultural environment.

You need need a performance results driven culture as well as kind of a fun, vibrant, everybody loves each other

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: In environment. And what happened was we had this fire environment that was sort of kumbaya. And then the minute we started trying to hold people accountable, they it was almost like they got offended. They were like, hey. That's not nice.

That's not in line with our values. And I remember Omar was like, hey. You know what the problem is? We have too much Sesame Street, not enough Wall Street. We need we need a we need a balance of the two.

And so I always tell people, it's like, you you need the core values, the warm and fuzzies, because you gotta have a vibrant locker room where people get along and they wanna, you know, work together. But you gotta be cold on the numbers. You could be warm on the people, but you gotta be cold on the numbers. And that's what we were missing. That was one of the biggest lessons that we had to kinda, like, overcome and and elevate our, I would say, organizational maturity and accountability because, like, we were like, oh, we're gonna try to be this, you know, Silicon Valley style business even though we're doing junk and moving, but we wanna kinda be this, you know, modern, you know, fun place you walk in.

It's orange and green. It's a fun house. And and that was cool, but we weren't, like, holding people accountable to what they were actually supposed to be doing out on the field and performing, you know, with their respective roles.

Speaker: So You and Omar are both visionaries. So are you both, like, the fun people?

Speaker: Yeah. I would say so.

Speaker: So who was the one that had to or did you both have to also become the the firm?

Speaker: The heavy? So thankfully cause I think when we when we tried to become the firm, Omar and I was there somewhat conflict avoidant. So when we tried, that people were either were offended by it, or we didn't do a good job. We sort of sugar coated it too much. We realized if you put it in the box of things you're good at and enjoy doing, like, I'm probably not that good at con confrontation, and I also don't enjoy doing it.

So, like, I need people on my team that are good at that and enjoy doing it. I don't know if Roman enjoys doing it, but he's probably the most phenomenal person I've seen to be able to have a direct conversation with somebody, tell them something that they don't think they wanna hear, but then them almost thanking him afterwards for telling them. And it's, you know, the Brene Brown, clear as kind, you know, be be direct and and and, you know, honesty is actually the the highest form of kindness. That took a steep learning curve for us. It's like I was always, like, worried about offending people.

So Omar and I probably allowed some of the, inconsistent performance because we were, like, shying away from having those those friction, you know, difficult conversations.

Speaker: So what I'm hearing is it's not you or Omar doing that. It's Roman.

Speaker: That's right. That's right. And, you know, that's one of the powerful things about entrepreneurship is you gotta learn areas that you're strong in and be able to delegate, elevate of areas that, you know, you have people that can do better in. And, like, I've you know, having after having read RocketFuel about this kind of integrator visionary dynamic, you know, we're diving pretty heavy back into our business because we really wanna scale it to a a billion. And, you know, we talked about Tommy Mello.

You know, he he he kind of lit a fire under me to kinda get back in in in the game, if you will, off the sidelines. But, we felt like we were in this sort of entrepreneurial nirvana for quite a bit of time where, you know, the noise wasn't bubbling up to us as much. And that's sort of like, we got to do the fun stuff, the creative things, whether it's, you know, branding, TV, you know, getting up on stage, you know, being a cheerleader for our franchisees, for our team members. And then the team had to, you know, handle the, you know, the muck and the mud of whether it's employee issues or franchise issues and and everything client issues and everything in between. That's the stuff that's sort of energy vampire, for me as a founder.

I wanna keep my founder energy, you know, kind of high. So

Speaker: You wanna drive.

Speaker: That's right.

Speaker: But we want we wanna go fast. Yeah. But someone does need to do the other the other work.

Speaker: That's right. Exactly.

Speaker: Yeah. So then, like, you're talking about, like, you know, your 200 franchises now. Right? So you said at 50 is when the flywheel took effect. Anything else, major lessons or, like, crazy craziness from two to 200?

Speaker: So we did Undercover Boss, speaking of TV shows. So we kinda had this interesting arc from Shark Tank to Undercover Boss. That was actually a good lesson to persistence. Because when that show first came out, I was like, man, I really want us to get on that show. I was like, it's such a heartwarming representation and storyline at the end where you give these folks, you know, gifts for for their, you know, hard work.

And and, you know, I could see our business and brand being a a strong representative. So I've somehow tracked down the producer, sent them an email, and, they weren't I think we weren't big enough at the time. They needed a business over a certain size. And so I would kinda follow-up with them periodically. Hey, we've grown to this size.

Any interest? They're like, no. Thanks, but no thanks. I probably fired followed up with them, like, 10 times over, like, almost ten years.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And they had pivoted a celebrity undercover boss, and the show got canceled, then it came back on. And finally, I think we got selected and then cut, and then we got selected again. So we did the last season. It was on its kind of tail end anyway, but we did the last season that it that it aired. That was a really cool experience because that reinforced to me something that we probably started forgetting, which is the importance of going out to the front lines.

You know, I think the the Japanese call it go to gemba, which is sort of management by walking around, going, you know, walking the factory floor if it's if it's, you know, thinking of it from a manufacturing standpoint. So in our case, it's, you know, listening to the phone calls, shadowing the call center reps, shadowing the hunks out in the field. When they're in people's homes, how are they, you know, interacting? Are they saying the scripts that were, you know, preaching up up top in the, you know, quote, unquote ivory tower office? And so that sort of experience of undercover boss reinforced the importance of just getting people out in the field.

Even if you're not doing it for a TV show, like, spend time out in the field. You don't have to be undercover. You can do it as the founder, although people, you know, tense up. I think honestly, there should be a business that goes into businesses and helps the boss go undercover Mhmm. Without I mean, they can still do videotape it, but it's not for broadcasting.

It's just Yeah. To learn and to get insights and to get, you know, understanding of what's really happening in the field. And so, you know, that, I think, brought to light operational opportunities, cultural opportunities, growth opportunities for the brand. So I think that that opened our eyes, and then that kind of coincided, like, right at the time of COVID. And then COVID hit, it was like a six week moment where we thought we were gonna lose everything.

Thankfully, there was a big bounce back. We ended up doing a pro selling about 25% of our business to a private equity company right after COVID because in my mind, I was like, I need some liquidity out of this business in case something like that ever happens again. I wanna at least know that I've got something to, like, sleep at night over. And, so we so we got a really phenomenal private equity partner, that owns a minority stake in the company. And then, honestly, these past couple years, we've hit a bit of a of a, you know, plateau running in place.

Right? The mortgage rates have gone back up. So you see that in the housing market and the general housing consumer. I think I saw a statistic that 75% of people that have a mortgage are, like, 3% or lower. So, like, they're stuck.

They're not gonna trade that for a five or 6% mortgage. So that obviously, the demand curve impacts our business. So that's forced us to say, okay. How are we gonna turn the growth curve back up? You know, know, we're adding long distance moving.

We're adding we have a national accounts team now that we got some of our national coverage, that are kind of trying to generate business that can benefit all all pieces of the puzzle. We're doing military moves. We're looking into storage. So kind of expanding the pie a little bit without getting too far beyond our core competency.

Speaker: Is this when you added moving?

Speaker: We added moving back in the, o nine, o ten downturn. And now now and that was always local moving and junk removal. Now the past two, three years, we're adding long distance moving military and and potentially storage.

Speaker: Got it. So what does that mean potentially storage?

Speaker: The storage piece is is interesting because it requires obviously bigger facilities. So, like, I see the value in it, recurring revenue. You know, it could be multiple moves. Right? You move them into storage, then you move them out of storage.

So we're, you know, touching with items multiple times. It's bigger jobs.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: It's a value added solution. I think I think at least one out of five clients need storage when they're moving. Mhmm. So we need to do it. We just need to figure out kind of thoughtfully how we can make that part of our franchise model.

You know, are we buying the warehouses and the franchisees are, you know, leasing them from us like the McDonald's model, which would be amazing. We created, like, a whole REIT, you know, division to to assist with that. You know, making sure that it's not distracting from our core business of converting leads and and executing the job out in the field. So it's gonna be it's going to be a part of it. It's just how quickly and how

Speaker: how interesting because for me, I'm looking at, like, what we train a lot of we work with a lot and and train a lot of, like, house buying organizations. And one of the things we talk about is a benefit you offer to the homeowners. Like, hey. Like, look. We can't pay you that much, but what if we were able to have someone come along, remove all this stuff, put it in a storage for you?

Not remove, but, like, move some of your

Speaker: stuff,

Speaker: put it in a storage for you. We'll pay for three months. Mhmm. Right? And then, like, from there that way, you don't have to worry about this.

You can move on. So, like, that is something I think kinda coincides with the need of the of the house buying Yeah.

Speaker: That's a great point.

Speaker: Industry. So then if you're talking about, you know, you you got your 200, like, who is who who are people that should seriously consider franchising with college hunks?

Speaker: Yes. So we probably have only, like, 10 to 15 major markets available. And those would be, you know, things like Phoenix, we sell availability. Salt Lake City, sell availability. Some other major markets.

Those would be for, like, the Empire Builder that's maybe been in middle management or maybe even owned some businesses. But they understand this this concept of of, you know, service based business, and they like the idea of hiring and mentoring and training and being a kind of a coach and a leader of the the young men and women that they're gonna employ to go be moving people's, you know, belongings. So that could be somebody that's, you know, wants a 6 figure plus income, maybe greater than that, potentially a 7 figure if they can build a big enough business, and and, you know, they don't wanna figure it out on their own. They like the idea of being in business for themselves, not by themselves. We also have probably about a 100 what we'll call sort of like, not micro markets, but like, smaller markets, tier two, tier three markets where, you know, somebody might still be on the truck couple times out of the week or they might have a two or three or four truck operation.

They could build a, you know, million, $2,000,000 revenue franchise, but still be pulling in a $102,103 $100 in profit, but they're kind of in the business a little bit more than over the business from a leadership and management set level. So there's kinda two avatars there. There's one that's more of the empire builder, you know, maybe more of a white collar background, they've got capital to invest, they've got some time and energy that they wanna put into building something. They do believe in our values and purpose of, you know, building leaders and and, you know, mentoring leaders. And then I think in the the the micro model, it's gonna be more folks that maybe been in the moving industry or hauling industry that have hit a glass ceiling.

And maybe folks that, you know, perhaps even from your audience that, you know, are are real estate investors, but they need some other sort of operating business to, you know, create some cash flow for them to kind of, you know, have a steady income while they're it also actually could be a great lead generator for, you know, people who have the opportunities.

Speaker: Some of the investors that have started

Speaker: Side service comp side,

Speaker: hauling businesses because it's great lead gen.

Speaker: Yeah. Because you're walking in a home, you know, it's you're gonna know right away what the situation is.

Speaker: Exactly. So I I just had a quarterly strategy meeting. Right? Like, around this table, you know, a consultant came in, Sharper Solutions. And in that meeting, I was fired, right, from the company.

Basically, like, look. You're in the way here. Mhmm. You're stopping the company here.

Speaker: Like, you're slowing us down.

Speaker: Right? Like, so we would appreciate if you just kinda sit over here and, like, go play over here.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Do you see this happen? Does this happen to you?

Speaker: Yes. This has happened to me. So we've done some some exercises where we, you know, go around and share have shared kind of leadership strengths and also things that are kind of limiting our our abilities lead from a leadership standpoint. One of the consistent themes I've heard, which, my wife even can echo this is I'm actually not a very good listener. And that's one of the biggest weaknesses a a great leader can have.

One of the comments made was, you know when Nick's done talking to you because his eyes glaze over. I mean, like, I'm immediately thinking about, like, what I gotta do next or the text I gotta respond to or the email I wanna send. So I've been intentional about trying to address that. I also had the other feedback I received is I had knee jerk reactions. Meaning, if somebody says something, might go go instantly into solve mode, I fire off the email, or I fire off the why is it this way, or my reaction to it.

So I learned to either a, pause, or b, at least after I send that knee jerk email, followed up with, hey, that was a knee jerk reaction, but, you know, x y z, still do that. You know? So, but in in terms of, like, me sticking my finger in the soup, like, one of the analogies somebody used was, like, hey, Nick. You know, you're you're you're being a Seagull, business owner. I said, what do you mean?

It means you fly in, you shit all over the place, and then you fly out. And I was, like, oh, that's that's a good point. He's, like, it's very disruptive. And, like, when you send a text to the team, they don't know if you want them to drop what they're doing right now to go do that idea or if you're just saying, hey. This would be an interesting idea to think about three years from now.

Like, they don't know the difference. And so we just started creating a big list of, you know, every time we have ideas, I just write in my phone, and we do, like, the same page meeting with our integrator. And it's almost like a therapy session where we just wanna get off our chest all these ideas we've had, and, and then, you know, we have a conversation that, hey. Where does this fit into the grand scheme of the priority chain? But I've got actually a lot more clarity recently about what is actually driving the economic engine of our business.

It's leads, it's lead conversion, it's how we execute when we get the job, and how we follow-up when the job is done. That's it. Mhmm. And everything else in the business is is potentially noise. Like, that's the signal.

Yes. We wanna potentially do other services or, you know, diversify or, you know, find a different, you know, segment. But if we can't nail that value chain cold and especially nowadays with AI, we can you know, we shouldn't miss a call. We shouldn't miss a lead. Like, every single lead should be touched and followed up with.

And and if we book a job, how do we keep it on the schedule so they don't cancel because they got a small, you know, cheaper quote somewhere else? Like, that's where we gotta be pouring our energy into. That's where I gotta be pouring my focus into. And then the other ancillary stuff is sort of like the planets revolving around that sun. And so once I came to that realization, that realization was, like, six months ago.

So, So, like, I'm fresh to it, but, like, I understand that I've been in my, you know, our own way holding us back because of, you know, me wanting to run-in different directions or me having these different ideas or wanting to do everything on my list

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And then we're doing nothing.

Speaker: So execution. It's there are no secrets. Right? There are no, like,

Speaker: Elon Elon Musk will tell you, like, he everybody knows how a Tesla's made. He goes they just do it better and execute it much more effectively than anybody else who's ever tried.

Speaker: I mean, the fact that they don't have patents

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Is nuts. Right?

Speaker: It's crazy.

Speaker: Like, yeah. If you if you can do this better than me Yeah. Go do it better than me.

Speaker: Yeah. And I I I didn't mean to cut you off, but, like, I I also I got on stage in front of our franchisees once because, like, people would always be like, what's your differentiator? It's like, oh, you know, the name's catchy and everybody says service is better. But, like, execution is a differentiation. Because, like, if you can do in our business, like, if you can do our business more consistently than the alternatives in our business, we're going to win over time.

And I think that the whole is true and and to your point, like, execution is easily said, but it's it's, you know, very hard to actually do. Yeah. And I think it is a differentiation. Like I've said, like, you know, our moat is our brand at this point, which we can continue investing into top of funnel advertising, TV, radio, or big enough to be able to start doing that, not just the bottom funnel bottom of funnel Google. Our culture, you know, purpose, values, people, and then the way we execute.

Like, those have to be our how we differentiate and become a billion dollar plus business.

Speaker: So how do you execute better?

Speaker: Maniacal focus, on the little things. I do think details matter. You know, as an example, when our truck is not in use in certain markets, they're supposed to be parked in highly visible locations with the back of the truck facing the road, so it looks like a billboard, not the front of the truck. If I see any of those other ways, like, you're getting a text from me, the founder, to let you know that that didn't look that way.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Repetition. You know, I think as founders, one of our roles is chief repetition officer. Like, we need to reinforce and repeat ourselves multiple, multiple times. That's repeating the vision, repeating the values, repeating the purpose, repeating things that we're hearing, you know, and and learning because, you know, they say somebody's have to hear something seven times to hear it the first time. Mhmm.

I know as a father, that's true with my kids. And a lot of times as parents or as as leaders or managers, we get frustrated. It's like, hey. I told you to show up in uniform with your shirt tucked in. You know, I've told you three times.

I don't have to tell you again. Well, you actually gotta tell them four more times before you actually might do it and show them the why behind it. So, so I think being maniacal about details, maniacal about focus, and, you know, really repeating ourselves about the foundation, the why we exist, the where we're going, the who we want in our organization, and, and then the what and the how is kind of the day to day strategy and tactics that that need to be executed on. But you gotta measure what you manage too. You gotta, you know, keep a scoreboard.

Like, how are we doing against how we say we're gonna do? Like, are we converting leads at the highest level we possibly can? Or can we move it forward, you know, and and incrementally or or step change, improve how we're converting?

Speaker: So a lot of things you're talking about here, really, the little things sounds pretty boring. Like, it doesn't sound like, like, alright. I'm gonna build a $300,000,000 new company. Here's how I'm gonna do it. And then you list these things.

There's nothing here that sounds, like, incredibly exciting, but we also know, like, you know, boring businesses are the most profitable.

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker: So talk to me about, like

Speaker: Yeah. So look. I I mean, people were like, oh, you know, follow your passion. Follow your passion. Like, I I'll tell you, I'm not passionate about moving and junk removal.

Like, it's not my passion.

Speaker: You don't wake up excited about moving.

Speaker: Right. You know, if you ask me I don't think you guys any kid, what do you wanna do when you grow up? They might say fire fighter or policeman. They're not gonna say junk hauler and mover. Right?

Speaker: YouTube creator.

Speaker: That's right. YouTube creator now, apparently, is the the highest rated or influencer, you know, where my kids are doomed. But, the the point is, what I'm passionate about, what I enjoy, and what I find purpose in, which I think is more powerful than passion, is the the branding, the creative process, seeing an idea turn into a reality, you know, seeing the continuous improvement, something I call, potential maximization, like getting better as a leader, helping those around me get better, and then ultimately my brand and my business as a platform continue to elevate its potential, what it's capable of. I think that progress I think Tony Robbins says, you know, the progress is fulfillment, and and that's, something I've I've experienced. So, you know, the the glamorized stuff, I think, is for social media.

Speaker: You know,

Speaker: it's like you're gonna put the highlight reel out there of, you know, the stuff you're doing that's fun, or, of course, you're gonna reap the rewards and be able to take the time to celebrate whether it's your time off from work or, you know, you wanna buy that luxury, vehicle or or even the boat or the vacation. You know, if you've worked hard, you've got the capital to do it. You know, by all means, do it. That's part of the overall experience. But, you know, there's hard days.

And to your point, the little things are boring, but they matter. And, if we can express that not just as the founders, but to the people that wanna be a part of the organization, like, in my case, if they believe in getting better as leaders, if they believe in trying to build something that's meaningful, if they believe in trying to help successful franchise owners and deliver good service, then they're gonna get fulfillment out of that, and they're gonna make more money. They're gonna, you know, have a better experience, you know, being part of the organization, and then the business grows as a result. So that's actually, that's one of the things we created a flywheel, based on the Jim Collins model where it's, you know, hiring great people, training them properly, executing effectively in the field. That's gonna lead to, you know, loyal fan client base, and that's gonna give us the capital to be able to reinvest in building a bigger rocket ship.

Speaker: Yeah. I saw this earlier. Doing some background research on you. There's there's there's founder mode and then there's leadership mode. What does that even mean?

Speaker: So founder mode is, to me, the kinda get shit done mindset at all costs, you know, don't get caught up in constraints or limitations, just do it. It's like like the Nike, just do it. And I do think and I've kind of been banging my table with the team these past couple years. I'm like, guys, we're in sort of wartime where, you know, the the wind isn't at our backs in our industry. We gotta be a little bit more in founder mode right now and be able to just, you know, willing to stick our neck out and take a little bit of a risk here.

Like, you know, I'll give an example, like, I was asking why are we not texting, you know, sending text messages to our clients and, like, there was, like, all this, like, oh, well, you know, this and the do not text and the do not call and this and that. And I'm like I'm like, I get a text from my dry cleaner to remind me that I'm due for another dry cleaning. Like, I've never subscribed to their, like, texting platform. Like like, the little guys are gonna eat our lunch if they're, you know, doing these things and we're not because we're worried about this. And I'm like, you know, don't don't, like, risk setting completely burning the boat or, you know, capsizing the Titanic here, but, like, we shouldn't be rearranging the deck chairs on the on the boat either.

Like like, you know, let's figure out how to text the damn clients so that they know we're coming, and they they get a text in the middle of the job to say how it's going. I've been sitting there for, like, two years, and so that that's what drives me, like, kind of bet shit as a founder is, like like, I want everybody to see, like, if we were only a 20 person team, we'd be texting people tomorrow.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And so, like or we'd be manually texting them if need be. So, like, sometimes the business gets big and too big where it's, like, all of a sudden a bit of bureaucratic and it slows things down. Yeah. Franchising adds another level of slow, I would say, like, sort of like slowness because, you know, it's almost like a condo community. Right?

Like, you have all these different individual owner unit owners. Mhmm. And if you're gonna, you know, change how something's done in the condo, you need to check with the condo association, and you need to make sure the owners are all not upset about what's, you know, getting changed. And same thing is with our franchise system. Like, we're making a, you know, change in a system or change in a, you know, pricing model.

You know, we got a 150, 200 different independent owners that might raise their hand and have some concerns about that that we've got to kinda diplomatically talk to them. So it's like, it's not a dictatorship. It's not a pure democracy. It's probably more like a democratic republic almost the way that they're operated Yeah. Where you still have to have the final say in in how things get done as the brand kind of steward.

So that's founder mode. Leadership mode, to me is a little bit more inspiring as far as, like, setting the vision. I just read this book, Science of Scaling, also by Ben Hardy where he says, you know, you wanna set an impossible goal with an impossible deadline because that's going to change your mind straight. It's gonna limit your thinking. It's it's kind of an extension of 10 x easier than two x.

It's gonna, you know, whereas 200 paths will get you to incremental growth. Only two or three paths will turn us to a billion dollar company in three years. Mhmm. So, like, it force focuses, but it also so that raises the frame, but it also raises the floor. And the floor is both your internal choices that you make every day as a leader, you know, what you're saying yes to, and more importantly, what you're saying no to.

But all and that could be, like, just daily decisions whether it's sleeping in or binge watching TV or, you know, doom scrolling. Those are leadership decisions that you gotta raise the floor if you're gonna try to, like, get to an impossible goal. But then also, we're raising the floor of the people we have in the organization and what we tolerate. So maybe if we're gonna be a billion dollar business, we can't tolerate a $500,000 franchise owner. We've gotta raise the floor of servicing $3,000,000 franchise owners, not $500,000 franchise owners or team members.

You know, the nonsense that, you know, a team member doesn't like the idea of coming back into the office. Like, if okay. Let's make sure you're okay and feel good about it. Like, that might work in a $203,100,000,000 dollar business. We're trying to be a billion dollar business.

We gotta get our asses back in the office because we're running in place for the past three years. So, like, that's, to me, a little bit of the leadership muscle is is being able to set the vision and raise the floor of what we expect from a standards standpoint. And it's gotta be a standard of where you're going, not where you've been or who you are today.

Speaker: I'm gonna ask two questions, and there's probably gonna be long answers here. Right? So if we if we we could just identify the three things. Right? Because the $300,000,000 business, an incredible accomplishment.

You can say, like, what are the three things, right, that, like, were instrumental that, like, if you didn't do it, there's no way you'd be here today. Mhmm. What what would you say are those three things?

Speaker: Yeah. One of our core values is always branding. Like, we are shameless promoters. And I've always said, like, if you're not gonna promote what you're doing, who is? And then Yeah.

Speaker: I see the shirt here.

Speaker: Yeah. I'm wearing the damn shirt. You got this, you gave

Speaker: me this cap here.

Speaker: Yeah. You know, and I think, honestly, one of the things I wish I had done sooner, I think we'd actually be further ahead is if I had leaned into even the personal branding on social media ten, fifteen years ago. Like, I had a insecurity about, you know, putting something up there and people in my inner circle or people I knew, you know, cringing and be like Who do

Speaker: you think you are?

Speaker: Yeah. Who's Nick thinking is talking about that? Like like, no. I don't care. And so, like, I that's actually what I talk about raising the floor.

But in terms of, like, branding, you know, jumping at opportunities like Shark Tank. You know, in the early days, when we had the one truck, the DC baseball team was, like, opening its, new stadium. And we somehow drove our truck down there and convinced the police officer to move the barricade because we said we were there to pick up garbage. This wouldn't fly in today's era of, you know, you know, security and and so forth. We probably would've gotten thrown in jail.

But we parked our truck strategically right at the entrance of the metro subway station where literally everybody coming to this new stadium opening saw our big orange and green college chunks truck. So, like, that sort of, you know, relentless promotion, I think has elevated. Because as a consumer brand, we need people to know who we are. We need people to if they happen to see us on Google, click because they saw somewhere else. We need them to recognize the trucks.

So that'd be number one. Number two, it's gonna be cliche to say, but I think the focus on the values and the culture and the purpose, that's created loyalty and passion and the people we bring in, the franchise owners. Because that way, when things are difficult, you know, they're not jumping ship as easily or quickly. They're not, you know, stepping on each other or stabbing each other on the back. So I do think that foundational, component was critical.

And, thirdly is, you know, kinda just brute force persistence. You know, I was one of those guys. I wasn't, like, the most talented athlete, but I realized, like, if I was diving on the ball for loose floor, I would get some playing time because the coach, you know, was I was hustling. I was I was, you know, making a play in another way. And so, like, I don't think of myself as, like, the most smartest, you know, savvy, tactical, you know, strategist when it comes to entrepreneurship.

But you can have an advantage and a competitive advantage if you're willing to just keep grinding and keep going. And so that's what I've leaned into personally. Like, the the story I always say is, like, when when I would play video games, like, I would kinda be the one to, you know, call hail Mary on on the football Madden games or, you know, all out blitz. And so, you know, probably wasn't the most tactful. Now, thankfully, we've got tech yeah.

All in. We've got tacticians that'll help us, you know, execute. But I do think there's something to being all in, to make a vision a reality. If especially if it's a lofty one. And and I've been guilty of chasing shiny, you know, shiny object syndrome or burnout where I've kind of taken my eye off the ball or doing, you know, side quests here and there.

And I think that's important piece of the overall puzzle. Have you

Speaker: a true visionary for not getting distracted?

Speaker: Exactly. You're right. You're absolutely right about that. So but I think those three things. I think, the the commitment to to promoting the brand, I think the the culture and values, and purpose, and it's it's called bundled into one.

And then I think sort of that, you know, brute force persistence.

Speaker: So there's this rule of three and ten. Right? Like, to go from one to three, three to 10, and so on. It's really hard. Like, we're gonna break things.

We're gonna restructure things. To go from 300,000,000 to a billion, that's very much right there, like, the essence of the rule of three and ten. What is your plan to go from 300 mil Yeah. To a billion?

Speaker: We first, I said it earlier, we gotta raise the floor. Yeah. And what what I mean by that is we gotta raise the floor of of minimum performance expectations of our franchise owners. We gotta raise the floor of what's, you know, acceptable in our call center conversion, in our web conversion. We gotta raise the floor in our talent level, and that doesn't mean replacing people.

That means people either raise their floors of what they're, you know, capable of doing or potentially we have to bring in some other Super Who's, you know, that have seen a business and been part of a business growing. We're kind of in this messy middle, which is kind of funny to say, you know, from a, you know, perspective standpoint of but to get to a billion to your point, there's gonna be some things that that might might get broken. You know, franchisees might not like some of the decisions we have to make. Team members might not like some of the decisions we have to make. You know, for example, I said we came back into the office this year and that, you know, didn't suit a lot of folks, you know, that for those that were in town, but and where it's only three days a week, by the way.

It should be five in my opinion, but it's only three days a week. But, it's, so I I do think that that raising the floor is gonna be the most important impactful piece. AI, you know, and but not just doing it from a sprawl, having a very, like, meaningful, strategy of how we layer in all these different solutions that now exist, you know, and and I think a lot of it comes back to that value chain focus, you know, lead to conversion to performance to follow-up. Like, if we just keep, you know, pointing, you know, arrows back to that, then I think that's gonna compound. And then, I mean, it'd be nice to get a little luck in the market, you know, have the the mortgage rates come down and people start moving again, that will be very beneficial.

But I think a lot of the things that we're doing in the meantime, like, we're doing the same revenue with less leads that we had three years ago. So now since leads come up, that's immediately gonna boost our revenue.

Speaker: So if I'm no. If I work for College Hunks and I'm watching this show and I'm, like, feeling uneasy Yeah. About you saying, like, well, we're just gonna have to raise the floor. Is it like, what what do you say to that?

Speaker: I say, I don't want you to feel uneasy. I want you to raise your floor. No. But I I think that look, I I think the, the part of raising the floor is raising the maturity and the accountability of the team. And that's my job as leader, not just founder mode, but, you know, leader to say, hey.

As we're trying to climb this great big mountain, we've gotta act as if we're already on top of that mountain today because the companies that make it to that mountain function a different way, you know, perform a different way, hold each other accountable a different way. They don't take things personally. You know, I hate to say it, but, like, we can't get in our feelings if we're gonna be a billion dollar business. So, like, that's would be honestly my my, my pushback or my comment. And I would say, look, by the way, raising this floor, it might scare you or can excite you.

Like, I want you to maximize what you're capable of. Like, I'm committed to that. Mhmm. And I'm I'm committed to you becoming the best version and professional of yourself that you can become. But if that truly isn't something that feels right for you, like, don't stick around just because, like, you feel like you have to stick around.

Like, let's find you some place you're gonna be happy. Maybe you feel more comfortable at a 100, 200, or even $300,000,000 business. Make you know, make make a move. You could be very happy there, but, like, we're trying to go climb this next hill. So I think that's the the framing that I've gotta position it in.

But but, hopefully, anybody listening to this, don't feel nervous. Your job's not in jeopardy. We're not, you know, shaking the trees here, but we are in founder mode and we are becoming a billion dollar business.

Speaker: So I we have our own AI service. Right? And we're we're basically we review every single sales conversation. We find areas for improvement. Yep.

Right? And I've talked to business owners, like, hey. Like, here's what we do. Here's what it does, and here's how it helps you. And the thing I hear a lot is, like, there's no way my team would be okay with that.

Mhmm. And every time I hear that, I was like, why would you tolerate your team Yeah. Not being okay with that. Yeah. Like, it was just it blows my mind.

Speaker: So, so not so much on that because we do have that in our something like that and I think in our call center. But when we started installing ActiveTrack when we were full remote, which just kinda shows us, like, people's engagement levels when they're plugged in and and working. People are like, oh, that's you don't trust us. That's big brothers. Like, no.

That's not that's not it. Like, we just wanna be aware of what everybody's doing from a work Yeah. Standpoint. Like, we're not all here in the office. Like, you know, there's nothing to stop you from if you're in the office from, you know, clicking into Tetris and clicking back into the email, like, you know, I can't prevent you from doing that.

But, like, at the end of the day, the results are gonna, you know Alright. Shake out and prove themselves. But to your point, I think, you know, leveraging the technology a lot of times people, I think, as human nature, you know, to, resist change or feel uncomfortable with change. And, one of the quotes I love is, you know, change isn't always better, but you can't get better without change. Mhmm.

And so you've gotta understand that that's going to be part of the program here.

Speaker: Well, the thing I I was I had a different consultation. I was talking to someone about, like, here's what we do now. Like, we literally we we record every conversation, right, in our in our company. We because we're a remote company. Everything's in Zoom.

We use Fathom, record all the calls. And, basically, what we do is we review, like, if it's a group meeting, like, not like a one on one. Like, not me and Nick, but, like, there's, like, an actual, like, company like, a morning huddle. Right. We review every single one of these.

Like, we look for how to be effective, and they're like, why would your team be okay with us? Like, well, our company culture is a growth mindset. Yeah. Right? Like, I wanna be better.

I want as much feedback as possible. I'm not saying I will agree with all the feedback.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: But I want as much data as possible because I wanna be the absolute best version of myself Yeah. As possible. And if you don't have that, go work somewhere else Yeah.

Speaker: Because we want to be the best. Yeah. Exactly. And I mean, you you you you gave a great example of the team giving you feedback and you being receptive to that feedback because that's a great example of leadership is, like, being, you know, a great leader wants feedback and wants to be held accountable.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And a great leader gives feedback and holds people accountable.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And so, like, if you're gonna create a growth organization, you have to have both of those components Mhmm. In unison. And and and it starts with myself included. Like, I I need to be willing to listen if somebody tells me, no, it's a bad idea. I can't just be, like, you know, okay, well, you know, you're an idiot, like, get out of the way or you don't belong here.

Like, I I have to be, you know, listening. Now I still in taking the information in and trying to look at it in a sort of holistic manner, still may believe my idea was correct, and in which case, I'm gonna say that, but we gotta be willing to listen.

Speaker: Yeah. I may disagree with you. Yeah. But I wanna hear it. Yeah.

Yeah. And then this is a selfish question on my end. Are you talking about, like, selling a piece of the PE comp, firm? Because, like, my quarterly commitment, not only did I get fired. Right?

But they're, like, hey, like, you need like, here go do these other things. And then some of these other things is go talk to five investment bankers. Go talk to five PE firms. Go talk to five venture capital firms. I'm like, selfish question here.

It's like, when you decided to go and have a PE invest, what were the things that, I guess, what do you wish you knew after Yeah. You've done it?

Speaker: Man, that was that was a a master class and and, learning experience into it itself. It definitely took my eye off the business. Thankfully, we had good people to keep running it. But I think we ended up with the right partner. But I'll share that we actually had an LOI in place with a different private equity firm to sell 40% of the business, not 25, which we ultimately sold.

And, thankfully, and it was hard to do, we did not move forward after the LOI was in place. It started to feel like some of the horror stories that you hear about with kind of the the central casting PE firms that are just gonna get up all up in your stuff and that, you know, aren't really aligned with you culturally and are gonna, you know, put you on a shot clock of when you gotta sell the business again. If things aren't going right, they're not gonna be with you. They're gonna start, you know, being against you in some cases. So thankfully, we didn't end up with those guys.

We ended up with the group worth now. The group worth now, it's run as a PE shop, but it's actually more like a, a family office because it's these three dudes, self made billionaires, they made a ton of money, algorithmic trading. They were one of the largest private shareholders in TikTok. So these guys are worth a lot of money. And they created a PE arm because they believe in investing in businesses, to help fuel the economic engine, if you will.

And so their their end because they're minority partners, their timeline is our timeline. When we're ready to sell, if we're ready to sell at some point or recap the business, you know, they're gonna help be helpful and, you know, help steward us through that process, but they're not going to be like, hey, you gotta sell next year or, you know, three years from now. So that piece, I think we landed in the right place. I think, investment banker wise, I probably would have done more reference checks. You know, like, if you're hiring a key employee, in that process, you need a scorecard of what you're looking for.

You need to ask questions about examples where they've done relevant work that for that specific scorecard to match it up.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: You wanna do, you know, reference checks both direct ones that they provide you as well as indirect ones that they didn't provide you. And we do a case study now with key employees, you know, leadership level and above. And nowadays, you could put all that stuff into chat GBT and help it score it for you. And we do personality profiles and and and cognitive tests as well. But I think I would have done the same thing with the investment banks, probably the PE firms.

I would have just I would have been more diligent, trying to evaluate, like, like, a, what is it that we want? And I don't think we really knew what we want until we got into the process, you know, because considering we almost sold 40% and ended up only selling 25. But getting clear on on sort of the who or or, you know, the outcome you're looking for. And then in the interview process, you know, make it a learning experience and, and and do the reference checks. Like, don't shortcut.

Don't skip any of those steps. Yeah. Anytime I've skipped steps is like I get burned. Like, when we did the case study, we we almost hired a really high level, technology officer, and we thought he was great. Even the PE group was signing off on him.

And then we had him do a case study, and it was like you could hear crickets. It was so awkwardly painful. And, like, had we not done that, we would hire them and then What is

Speaker: what was the case that you asked him to do?

Speaker: I don't remember exactly, to be honest with you, but it was it was not just a hypothetical. It was somewhat relevant to what we were doing.

Speaker: But at a high level, like

Speaker: High level, like, hey, here's what we're, you know, here's where we are in our tech stack. You know, here's what we're trying to build. You know, create a road map and, you know, tell us what tools and vendors you would bring in and then give us examples of things you've done in the past that are relevant to that. So, like, it's not just him, you know, getting a a chat GBT response of what he should would do Yeah. But he's act actually gotta give specifics of what he did that's relevant, to to what he's sharing.

Speaker: You know, just as a side thing, I I was on x this morning, which is a massive time suck, but there's good stuff about AI. Yeah. And there was, there's this college. Right? College professor who suspected that everyone she'd done in the midterms is just take home.

Right? They use AI. So he he there was a plot of, like, here was all their scores on the take home midterm, and then here were all their scores on the real in person final. And the disparity

Speaker: Oh my gosh.

Speaker: The the one kid, like, there was, like, 30 on them. The one I respected was the guy that I failed to take home and the in person.

Speaker: Right? Right? At least he was consistent. He's honest. He didn't cheat.

Yeah.

Speaker: He had integrity at least.

Speaker: Yeah. That's right.

Speaker: All those other people that crushed it on the midterm but failed in the finals, like

Speaker: That's wild.

Speaker: But that's that's that chat GPT world that

Speaker: we have to we

Speaker: have to, defend ourselves against and Yeah. As a business owner.

Speaker: Well, actually, one of you one of your team members before we came on, he was, like, helping, I think, come up with the the title for for our, segment. And he was like, we wanna be able to kind of die discern this and delineate this without just throwing it in chat GBC and asking it to give us something. So, like, he was kind of like doing a creative process with me, which I think that's that's gonna be a lost art that a lot of people are gonna lose is that, you know, creative the creativity, decision making, discernment, critical thinking. And so I think being able to, like, think of the AI as a tool, but not just a, you know, blanket Yeah. Decision for you, like, and be able to weave in your own thoughts and, you know, because there's stuff that it throws out that I think is, like, that's sloppy.

And nowadays, you look on LinkedIn and everybody's post is an AI post. It's like, you know, what did I do when I first started? Question mark. This is what I and it's like, okay. You didn't write that.

You just copy and pasted that from either LinkedIn AI. Not that there's I mean, I guess that's the world we're living in. So, like, you know we're

Speaker: living in.

Speaker: So maybe that's just the way it's gonna always be and the robots are gonna be kind of creating all the content for most people.

Speaker: Well, not only is gonna create the content. It's gonna process the content and feed us what we want.

Speaker: That's true. It already is, but it's gonna keep doing it even more effectively.

Speaker: I noticed there are a lot of periods in hunks. What what does it stand for?

Speaker: Yeah. So this was not h u n k s was not originally an acronym, but probably two or three years into the business, we got tired of answering the question, hey. Are they all really hunks? How do you hire? Do you make them take their shirts off?

Like and, honestly, they still ask us those questions twenty years later, and so he's like, that's an annoying question. Like, how do we answer that? And then we're like, we need to make it an acronym, and then we'll tell people what it stands for. So we redefine HONKs. It stands for honest, uniformed, nice, knowledgeable service.

And that has become our brand promise. So we tell our HONKs, so we hire them, hey, we're not hiring you to be a hunk, we're hiring you to be provide honest, uniform, nice, knowledgeable service. And if you can't deliver on those, then you're not a hunk.

Speaker: So no more bros?

Speaker: Yeah. No no more dudes, you know, just, like we have some, you know, some pretty strong dudes that come in and and and do this work, but, it's it's it's a reframing of the, traditional hunk, hunk word.

Speaker: Gotcha. And then you've done some impressive things and you're not slowing down. You're going faster is what it appears. What what is what is it that's driving you?

Speaker: Yeah, man. So when I was younger, I would say it was ego driven primarily when I was younger. And I would and when I was younger, I was like, hey, I just wanna make a bunch of money, cash out, and then just chill. And, as I got older and started getting surrounded by people that, you know, had reached higher levels of success that that I was reaching, I realized that, you know, they were continuing to grow not from a point of scarcity like they had to have more. Although, there is sometimes that component that that, you know, creeps in.

But it's from a point point of abundance, like, how much impact can I make? How much bigger can we get to maximize potential? So as I said earlier, the thing that I get excited about is potential maximization, you know, for myself as a human, as a leader, as a father, husband, as a business owner, and then my business, like, how big can it be and how many lives can it change with people that are moving with franchise owners that, you know, create their own independent, success, team members that come in and learn and grow and go on to do something else. So that's the stuff that kinda drives me and excites me. And, I saw an interview with Nick Saban.

This is what actually drove it home. So because somebody asked him a very similar question. Might have been me who asked him, and when it was weird in the audience. And, you know, he's won seven national championships, but it's like, he's thinking about the next season as soon as the championship is over. Right.

And his answer was pretty straightforward. He said, complacency leads to bad decisions. Bad decisions lead to bad outcomes. And I thought about that myself, and I was like, man, if I had a bunch of money and a lot of time, I'd be probably doing some stupid stuff. And I'm a little bit more sure now that I'm in my forties than I was in my twenties, and that's why I, like, I think, you know, God didn't bless me with, you know, the success until I was perhaps ready for it.

But, I I just I don't see myself getting complacent. And then, you know, I probably took my foot off the gas a little bit, and I saw, you know, Tommy Mello, speak at an event, and he had just sold his business for, you know, 3 or 400,000,000. He's he's, you know, gonna sell it for over 1,000,000,000 next trade. Just half of it

Speaker: for that. Right? It's crazy.

Speaker: Yeah. And and and he, you know, he looks like he wakes up and eats glass every day. And I'm like, man, you know, he's in the home service business, garage doors. We're moving and hauling. We have a similar average job size.

Like, why, you know, why am I not operating, you know, at that level? You know? I've got more more juice to give. And so I I guess that's why, has is is, you know, for all of those reasons.

Speaker: Yeah. If I were to have Omar sit here right now, right, right to your left directly, and I ask him, like, what is your super like, why like, what is it that, you know, makes Nick different? Yeah. What would he say?

Speaker: He'll probably tell you persistence. He'll probably tell you persistence. It's kinda that brute force persistence. It's like not the most tactful, approach with whether it's sales or follow-up or otherwise, but I'll, like, I'll follow-up. Like, I will follow-up.

I matter of fact, on the flight plane right out here yesterday, I had a list. We have another business we haven't even talked about, but it's called Butler Plus. It's a service for apartment communities. It does, valet trash, pest control, pressure washing, porta service, apartment turns, things like that. And, there were some folks that were really high level executives that I talked to two or three years ago and, you know, for just the valet trash piece of the business and but we hadn't yet introduced those other services.

I was like, man, you know, I haven't reached out to them in a while. So I literally spent, like, the three hour flight going back in my email finding these folks I had had conversations with and started sending them updates about, hey, we're now doing pest control and pressure washing and porters and turns. Could we have another conversation? And I got, like, three or four responses, and we're setting up calls with these large portfolios. And so, I don't know.

I think I think that's probably the the answer he would give you is, like, I'm I'm pretty,

Speaker: You're a bulldog.

Speaker: Pretty much a bulldog. Yeah. It's funny. That's that was the word I use with my daughter. I I said, you you have your mom's pixie dust, and if you get your dad's bulldog, you're gonna be pretty powerful.

Speaker: What do you struggle with? And because you're accomplished a lot of things. Yeah. Like, what what do you Be

Speaker: boil it down to FOMO, fear of missing out. And what I mean by that is, like, you know, I know you have to focus, but I wanna do it all and I wanna, you know, find balance. And I know that there's also no such thing as balance. But, like, you know, if I'm if I'm building the business, I wanna build a business as big as I can build it. If, you know, you know, we're going to Vegas for a boys weekend, I wanna blow it out and have a good time.

And, you know, it's like those sometimes don't align very well, or you get home and you're the, you know, deadbeat dad on the couch. That definitely doesn't align well with the family piece of the puzzle. So Right. That's probably the biggest struggle is is, like, I don't wanna miss out on all that life has to enjoy, and I think that's a blessing and a curse. Like, it's it's blessed me with the ability to, you know, find a pretty, you know, colorful, vibrant life of that.

I've done a lot of things and and dip my toes into a lot of different adventures. But, it also can be, you know, exhausting and and also sacrifice.

Speaker: That's the hardest part of saying no. Mhmm. Right. Because, like, when I was, like, if I say no to this, like but, like, it's right there.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's always a a reason to justify it. And my my sister gave me the journal.

There's a journal, The Joy of Missing Out JOMO, and it's like a daily journal of, like, you know, thought provoking ways of, like, you can just, you know, say no to these things. Actually, that's why I left COVID so much because there was no FOMO. It was, like, everybody was just home chilling

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And, like, you had no choice. There was, like, nobody at the, you know, this ballgame or that, you know, vacation. Like, everyone's just kind of in the same bucket. And so, like, oh, I didn't get us spun up during that period and, you know, end up having two two COVID kids out here. But, that's something else.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, I'm gonna have to check out The Joy of Missing Out because I I definitely struggle with that

Speaker: as well. I'll send you a copy of it. It's yeah. It'll send you the link if nothing Yeah.

Speaker: What what book have you gifted more than any other?

Speaker: More than any other? Probably Traction, or What the Heck is EOS? Just because I'm, you know, I'm a believer in it now. We have sort of I don't know if the words graduated from I I know you have the book, what's the the five

Speaker: Five Obsessions.

Speaker: Obsessions. I haven't read it yet, but I I know it's come highly recommended to me. I think that the framework and the foundations of EOS are are universal, and they're so simple. I think every small business owner where you're doing 500,000 or 1,000,000 or or whatever should think about those frameworks of, you know, people, assist or process data, you know, priorities, and and think of it, you know, meeting rhythm. So I think I've given that book out the most.

Secondly, probably I mean, probably Good to Great. But I started recently giving out Science of Scaling by Ben Hardy just because it's so top of mind for me, and I'm making my team read it and send it to my YPO form and so forth.

Speaker: Yeah. I was just, I was talking with those investment bankers and he's, he's like, you need to read blitzscaling. I was like, alright. Let me check that out. So I just just started that one.

Yeah. Alright. So

Speaker: Blitzscaling was the name of it.

Speaker: Blitzscaling.

Speaker: Blitzscaling. Okay. That probably compliments the one I just read. I'll check it out.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. So, what are what is a message? You know, like, everyone like, we went through we talked about a lot of things. Yeah.

Is there any particular message? Anything you wanna leave anyone with, all the listeners with, take away?

Speaker: Yeah. I mean, the advice I would give my younger self and I try to give a lot of people is, you know, have the urgency of effort, that founder mode urgency, but have the patience for the results because they don't always come as fast as we think they're gonna come, and you can drive yourself crazy when they don't. And more even worse, you could try to take shortcuts, they're gonna end up taking 10 steps in the wrong direction. And what I mean by that is, like, you know, it's it's Jim Collins call it fire bullets and then cannons. Meaning, like, if you think something's could work faster or better, don't unload the war chest of capital that you have limited on or time or energy into that one idea that's gonna you think is gonna shortcut the success.

You know, fire some bullets at it. If it hits, then you can kinda load up and and and fire a little more aggressively. So I think urgency of effort, patience of results, I think, are gonna be hand in hand.

Speaker: Yeah. It's, speaking of the the the bullets in that can, it's like, I I've I got this great idea. Right? I talked to my coach about it. She's like, hey.

That's great. We're not allowed to use any company resources on it. You can go start it. Yeah. You can go see if it's a good idea.

Yeah. And if you get something back from it, then you can talk to your team about it. But you're not allowed to use company resources.

Speaker: Right. You can't use anybody that you already have assigned as a who to go be the who for this other idea. So you're gonna be the who unless you go find somebody outside of the company and you own personal resources or otherwise.

Speaker: Personal pocket. Exactly. Yeah. Perfect. Someone who wanna connect with you, collaborate with you, whatever, franchise with you, whatever, how what's the best way to connect with you?

Speaker: Probably best way. I mean, I'm all I'm on all the social platforms, but I actually have a website, nickfreedman.com. And I think that has links to my social media as a contact you form. I respond to all of the contacts. It has links to our book, to our, you know, company website, to speaking, you know, some of the TV stuff we've done.

So that's probably the most direct way, nickfreeman.com.

Speaker: Yeah. It was an absolute pleasure.

Speaker: Yeah, man.

Speaker: Thank you so much.

Speaker: Thank you, Tom Fluth. This is great.

Speaker: Thank you guys for watching. See you guys next time.

Speaker: Steve train. Jump on the Steve train. Disrupt us.