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Welcome to Founder 2 Founder, the ultimate podcast for entrepreneurs who refuse to settle for ordinary. Hosted by Sardor Umrdinov, founder and CEO of Home Alliance - a $100+ million tech-enabled home services platform operating nationwide.
From bootstrapping his first business to building a horizontally and vertically integrated empire, Sardor brings you raw, unfiltered conversations with successful entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and game-changers who've turned their visions into multi-million dollar realities.
Each episode dives deep into the real stories behind business success - the failures, pivots, breakthroughs, and strategies that actually work. Whether you're scaling your first startup, planning an exit, or looking to acquire your next business, you'll get actionable insights from founders who've been there and done that.
What You'll Learn:
- How to scale from startup to 8-figure valuations
- M&A strategies and exit planning
- Home services industry insights and opportunities
- Investment and business acquisition tactics
- Leadership, team building, and operational excellence
- Fundraising, private equity, and wealth building strategies
Connect with Sardor:
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sardorum/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sardorum
Subscribe now and join thousands of entrepreneurs building their path to financial freedom!
"Partnerships are everything. Success is not a solo journey." - Sardor Umrdinov
Hello everyone. Uh, today we're going to be having uh Jay Abraham, who doesn't need introduction, but who have generated to his clients over $75 billion in profits. J. Abraham, a marketing legend, mentor to mentors, and the highest paid marketing consultant in the world. He's the go-to guy. Now, I got to say, there's if you think of most the marketing consultants that you probably don't know the name of, they've all been influenced by Jay. I probably wouldn't be here without my [music] mentor Jay Abraham. Through, you know, his teachings and what he's done for me, [music] he's taught me how to position myself in very unique positions. what is my unique [music] offering as well as the ability to communicate. Jay Abraham has significantly increased the bottom line of over 10,000 clients and over 400 industries [music] worldwide. Jay has had a tremendous influence on my business. Not just my business, but really the deep ways in which [music] I think about my students, my readers, my clients, my customers. His books have profoundly influenced my ability to grow Bulletproof. And his personal mentorship [music] and his one-on-one sessions with me have absolutely changed the game for me and for Bulletproof and for our mission to change the world. Forbes magazine called him the real thing. Enlist [music] Jay is one of the top five executive coaches in the country. He's also a best-selling author and [music] has been featured in USA Today, the New York Times, Inc. and Success among many others. [music] Life is a series of mentors and Jay Abraham is absolutely the best in that area. Jay, uh, thanks for accepting and being my No, it's my pleasure. It's really, um, a joy to have the vehicle and your access to all these trades people and all these uh, all these service companies that I can help challenge them to really see how much more their business is capable of of doing both for their audience and also for themselves. So, it's a great forum for me. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Keep watching it and it's going to be really interesting how Jay is going to be breaking down every single industry including the home services and AI. Jay, imagine you are 35 years old, right? And you have no reputation, no network, you have $100,000, right? And a limited amount of access to AI. Okay. What kind of business you would do and why? Great question. probably it would be a service business and the reason it would be a service business is two things. Number one, most service businesses are highly repetitive. They either are subscriptionbased or they are for some activity that recurs including your your background. Equipment breaks uh pipes wear out. So, I like things that are you do something once as far as building the relationship and you get paid for it every time it needs attention as long as you loyally serve them. But what I would probably do is create a service business that very strategically had many different tiers of revenue that is not normal for the industry. We were talking off camerara and I didn't get into this, but there is a correlation that if you have one kind of a trade service that if you are trusted, you can refer, recommend, introduce, partner with all kinds of other trade services. So, you have been to my home before. It's a big home, but it's an older home. This year, as an example, we had to replace two air conditioning units. It's about 7 12,000 square ft. So big ones cost me about $60,000. Wow. We had because our house was built on the location of another house and the pipes are very old. We've had to replace half the pipes in the front and some of the pipes in the back. Same thing with gas. We had to have different people come. Next time you need air conditioning, you need to tell me. I will. I would do it for free. I would do that. I wish I wish I had because it cost me through the nose. But the point is, if my HVAC person would have introduced me to a plumber, if my plumber would have introduced me to an electrician, in total, it wasn't $100 transactions. I'm talking maybe $100,000. And I know the margins if you price it right. Everyone could have made many times more. And the problem is with the plumbing, it's probably better because it's more reoccurring. Yeah. With HVAC, maybe if it's if it's an older year, it's a 15 years. Yeah. But if you have control of everything, the stat and appliances and appliances isn't that profitable, but it's more recurring. Correct. If you had control of all of that and you were able to be what I call sort of the toll position. So when you basically became my most trusted advisor, you would say, Jay, look, you came to me for whatever HVAC, but you probably don't realize I have access to the very finest, most trustworthy, fairly priced, reliable, expert services in every field. And I'd like you to turn to me anytime, every time you have any kind of a problem. I promise you two things. I will find the best person. I will get them to you response. Their response will be almost immediate. They will give you a very fair quote. They will overd deliver and you will be very pleased and I will never let you down and I'll stand behind it. If you did that, instead of doing the one static transaction, you might do 10 other ones every year and it might not be the volume uh growth, but it would be the profit would just multiply and multiply and multiply and you would be in the total position. If somebody ever let you down, you replace them. I would do those things in that. I also would do something else since most people see their business doesn't matter the kind of business as singular and yet almost every business that has access to a decision maker including a family including an executive including any kind of special uh interest that person is also buying other things before during after instead related to that transaction but also they buy a lot of other things you're you're you run a company. I could say, well, you're interested in all kinds of things relative to, you know, to trades, but you're also interested in things that are going to help you control your expenses. You're And so, if I basically used my access much better, I'd make a lot more money. So, one of the businesses I would get into is basically working with every business out there and finding multiple ways to add profit to them that you got half of forever. Because most of the ways to do it don't cost a penny. They already have the relationship. They already have the trust. They already have the access whether it's, you know, through email salespeople. But most of the people thinks of just spending more marketing and actually doing a hit and run business, right? Yes. Was $100,000 in home services, right? What exactly you would do if you had no connections, no relationships. So here's what I would do. I would look for a company that had a great reputation, but they were terrible marketers, terrible on um on diligent follow through, not follow through on doing the work, but in in keeping uh customer really relationships. And I I always look for companies that major underperform what's there. I mean, I've looked at companies that they might have 15,000 past clients. They don't even email them. They don't call them. they don't offer to come out knowing I mean so let me give you an example back 40 years ago I created one of the first loss leader tuneup programs for your industry was in Dallas and I said I think you should offer depending if it's if it's uh summer or winter you know air conditioning or heating tuneup for a modest amount $29 and they said well we'd lose money and I said but what is the statistical probability if you look at an older unit that something's wrong. Is it 5%, is it 95%, they said probably 50/50. And then I said, "What's the average the average U repair?" $800. What's the margin? I don't know, $600. I said, "So, you're saying that if you lost $30 on a hundred people, and I did the math, you're going to make $20,000 net by doing that?" And they go, "I [clears throat] never thought about it." Well, most people don't see all the ways to continually monetize ethically relationship. I would look for a company that had a ton of they did great work. They really were uh conscientious, ethical, very very high quality, but they were terrible marketers, terrible strategists, terrible follow-through. They did nothing other than wait for the phone to ring because that would tell me that whatever they made in profit was probably about uh one tenth of what I could do with the same asset. Does that make sense? Y and then I would probably there's two ways to use your 100 grand. One is to buy it, you know, and say, "Okay, I'll I'll buy because most businesses, they're not worth that much if they don't have systems in them. They're definitely not worth that much if the owner is pretty much the control freak. So, I'd find one that was older where the person really was tired. I would if depending on what I paid for it, I might not want to give them money. I might want to do an earnout where I say, "Look, you're making X right now the way you're doing it. I can probably pay you twice of that rather than giving you just a lump sum by getting more yield out of your people. And if you want to do that, I can make you basically a very very well compensated retiree if that's you want to you want to do. And a lot of people don't understand that. I've had clients buy businesses and pay two or three times more than the market, but pay for it on a formula where we paid out 50% of the profit we were able to get from their buyer base, their database. So that every time we gave you a dollar, we made a dollar. And we didn't care what we paid cuz it paid for itself. But it's a way of thinking. I hope I'm not being too confusing. No, no, no, no. Let's talk about your strength which is customers and hidden value, right? Yes. How can entrepreneurs discover hidden asset inside their businesses? Well, I mean, first thing is open your eyes because you've got it everywhere. You've got it in leads that don't convert. You've got it in ads you've never questioned. You've got it in referrals. You never initiate. You've got it in current buyers. You never try to offer anything additional. You've got it in people that stop buying. You've got it in salespeople that have variable performance. You've got it in websites that don't optimize either the booking or the sale. You've got it in a brand you only use for one thing. You want me to continue? I've identified at least 61 leverage points in any and none of them cost anymore. It's just you use them better. And when you use them, see, I come How do you prioritize like when you find all of them? Well, the way I do it usually is not on what's going to be the highest yield, what's going to be the easiest. So, you have lowhanging fruit. Yeah. Then you have optimization, then you have maximization, then you have innovation. So lowhanging fruit is something so blatant that one small shift is going to put tons more to the bottom line. Optimization people get all confused. They think optimization and maximization is the same. It's not. Optimizing is making something the best it can be. Maximizing is the biggest it can be. Innovating is either basically replacing it or adding to it something that explodes beyond that. And it's a sequence to do that. Do you know uh for the same example we recently I've been in the business for home savings for 15 years. Yes. And recently we accidentally we discover one really interesting point and we were trying to do that for the membership purposes. We basically tried to stick uh on the booking process. We start emailing and texting so they can pay for the service call fee, right? And on that service call fee we tried to upsell membership, right? But instead we got some 20% maybe membership conversion right on that booking conver booking uh thing but different things happen most people like we have probably maybe one or few% like when people cancel because of that but everybody pays their service call fee through that link on Apple Pay or Google Pay whatever things right but what happened is our cancellation dropped from 15% to 5%. Our closing ratio went up from 46% to 70%. Our average dollar per lead went up from $250 to $350 and our return on ad spend doubled. And that's profound. But what you're saying is exactly and you know this what my whole life's work. You have within the framework of a revenue system and everyone has one even if it's dysfunctional all these different dynamics that if you improve each one a small bit the combination is geometric and it all comes to the bottom line. Yeah. Doesn't cost anymore. It's just yielding. It's just delivering a lot more bottom line profit. So I have a belief that's I'll share this with you because it's pretty profound in its simplicity. For many years, everybody talked about a 10x moonshot, business moonshot. And just so we're clear, what they were talking about was top line, getting 10 times more revenue. And what it normally meant was you had to use technology to do it. You had to figure out the right initiative. You had to find the right experts. They cost a lot. They may or may not have ever worked in your industry, so they might come into it theoretically. uh you you're going to have an initiative but you have to keep the main business going too. It takes longer and costs more. It's like building your own house and you got to pay for it somehow. You either pay for it out of cash flow borrowing or dilution. You have to sell stock and when it's finally done it's normally not going to perform as well and it's very expensive. I always say, why would you do that when you can get a 10x bottom line breakthrough for no investment, no risk, no extra resources just by figuring out all those combined levers that exist in your business that you you improve each one 5% 10% and you do it over a dozen or two dozen, it becomes a,000% that falls right to the bottom line. And most people think they think that there has to be a correlation. If I want to double my profit, I have to double revenue. Nothing could be further than the truth. You just have to get more yield out of the asset, out of the effort, out of the investment. And you just discovered that most people don't see that. They're very linear thinkers. We teach uh a concept that's very cool. It's called knowledge asymmetry. And what it means in its bottom line is you understand [ __ ] other people don't. and you know how to apply it. And the most important thing you can understand is that you have geometry available in a business and you don't have to double your revenue to double or triple or quadruple your bottom line. Before our EIT was less than 5% on that business unit and now we didn't spend more marketing. We didn't cut the technician pay. We didn't give a worse customer experience. Customer experience got better. Mhm. Our EIT is like 20 25%. Just because we made the customer experience even better by giving them to like how they can pay for the service call. I used to think before I met you by the way. Yes sir. When we met in that restaurant you told me you don't have a problem with leads and marketing. We have a problem on the back end with your retention. I would before I put any I would figure out the back end. And then we came up with a membership as a passport right a retention tool which is like $20 months $50 months and $100 months and we give ton of value to the customers right and one of the ways of we are converting the members was on the call center before we send the service we says would you like to join our club which is going to avoid the service call that's was our it is kind of our way of getting members and we got 15,000 members now and recently I started talking to my friend who has a flower shop online flower and they have 90,000 orders a month and they're doing like 3,000 orders per day and their biggest problem advertising is going up like 24% on Google every year, right? And they spending $25 on ad costs and they have a local flower shop paying them uh $30 or something. They only have a really low margin like $10. And then he said if I had five or $10 more on the back end I could 10x my revenue. I said look let's actually give them to my passport membership three months for free I'll pay you $5 $10 and even we are converting like five or 10% nation but it's still the numbers it's the real numbers like well so what most people don't realize is that whatever you do as I said earlier that audience has the capacity to do a lot more so I'll give you a really interesting we're working on something pretty interesting uh I help people in over a thousand industries over my career career and all of the time to 30 or 40 industries I'm working on. But I just did some work with a collision center that's like a body shop. Body shops and most of them are very linear. They follow what everybody else does and most of them get almost all their business from insurancebased accidents. It's a big ticket but after all the expense it's not very profitable. Mhm. And if you screw up at all it's definitely not profitable. But people don't look at all the other possibilities in that relationship. So, your car is in the shop for an insurance paid repair, but almost every car out there has blemishes. And if you added that, if you said, "Hey, you've got 25 blemishes I want to fix." And if you came separately, it'd be two grand, but since it's here anyhow, it's 750, which only cost you about 150 to do. That might double your profit. Believe it or not, something like 25% of every car that is involved in a decent major accident gets sold within about 6 months because people don't think it's it's it's desirable anymore. If you just offered to buy them from them immediately when you're delivering it or a few months after, even if you didn't have the money, you can get any car dealer to back it. You could make double the profit you make on the collision. I can go on and on and on and on, but the point is there's no business that I've ever looked at that doesn't have within it many times more revenue capabilities within the same audience. So, let's take your flower shop. If instead of being reactive, which they all are, you said, "Oh, by the way, we have a new service at anniversaries, at birthdays, we automatically bill your credit card and send a beautiful bouquet uh with a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful card that you can choose right now. We do it automatically. You'll never forget it. You'll never to pick it up. You think a finite number? If you had hundreds of thousands of people, do you think maybe 20, 30,000 would do that? And that might double or triple the amount of people that would automatically monetize for you. Or if you said at holiday time if you have a party we have an automatic service will be a beautiful arrange we'll bring out. And by the way they have at the same order they have two customers. One is who is receiving and one is who is ordering. Yeah. So it's so you could do it twice. If you had services for the floral shop services and it doesn't have to be that. You can say okay well why are you getting flowers? Okay. It's uh it's a celebratory event. Well, when you're doing it, if you bought the present yet, here we have some wonderful presents on this site and that because we buy them in volume, it's very fairly priced or they're very unique. I mean, on and on and on. There's probably an infinite number of ways you can double redouble redouble again the yield or the profit that your business can ethically generate from every buyer, every distribution channel. Let's say if you had a HVAC or plumbing electrical company appliance, how you would do that? Give me like few examples. Sure. Well, the first thing I would do when anybody called me from my ads, I would say, who referred you? And they would say, "Oh, I came from your ad." And I would say, "Oh, wow. We are a referral-based service by and large. We do run ads, but hopefully when we serve you and you're satisfied, you will tell their people." So, I'd start programming them ethically for doing it. Okay? I would remind them of that when I'm doing the job. I would tell them about other scenarios and I'd say, you know, we basically pride ourselves on the work we do. We're very committed to our client. We aren't really great marketers and we try to remind our clients that anytime they have anybody in their life they care about that ever expresses that they need a good whatever that you should feel free to recommend them. And because you recommended them, we will always give them a a priority attention. So you do that. Next, the next thing is you basically could issue certificates for two people to do something. We could say, you know, we always give our prime valued clients a tuneup for only $20, but we also have found that if we allow you to tell one or two other people that good things come to us, so we're going to give you two extra. And I can go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And then you could take referral to more systematic. We've generated probably $5 billion of business from people by getting other companies to partner with us. So let me give you an interesting insight in home services. Okay, I'm not talking about repair. Let's talk about uh about remodeling because this will be really powerful and then we could bring it to repair. The typical first remodeling that normally happens in a house or a condo is a kitchen. Yeah. And the reason is that's the focal hub of of a home. You spend a lot of time there. Uh you you you're in it probably more singularly than anything else. So its age or its dullness is more evident than some of the other rooms. Like I have two family rooms, one kitchen, a D a formal dining and a regular I got a big house. You've been there. And I I I think I'm in the uh the formal sitting room only at holiday time. I'm in the formal dining room two times a year. So it doesn't really I don't I don't even know if it looks old, but I'm in the kitchen five times a day, six times a day, and I'm really noticing it. So the kitchen is always first. So now you have a transformed kitchen in your house or condo. And guess what? Now you're noticing that the rest of the house doesn't look so well. So what are you going to do next? Probably the bathrooms. Okay? you're going to call somebody else, right? Cuz kitchen people don't do bathrooms. Okay? So, now you get the bathrooms to look great. Guess what? You look at the rest of the house inside, you go, "Crap, my you know, my carpets suck. My closets are a mess." And you're that, then as you're driving out into the driveway, you go, "My driveway is all cracked. My roof looks pretty bad. Uh my my garage door is ugly." And the point is there is an if you interviewed which I've done the average person that started with a kitchen in the course of a few years they'll do all these other things. And yet kitchen people don't have any relationship with bathroom people. Bathroom people don't have any relationship with kitchen people. Bathroom people don't have any relationship with carpet people or closet people or garage door people. And yet if if you understand that that's so predictable and if you had that relationship and you make X from your regular service but you ethically made a reduced X from five other services, those five other services may be twice as much as you make from the regular one. Yeah. Does that make sense? It's phenomenal. And and it applies to yours too, to the trade, to the service business. Now, I mean, I can give you a lot of ways that I've helped service companies grow. I'll tell you one of the things that I've done, and it's so logical, but people don't think about it, is if you're going to do a major repair, I'm not talking about fixing an appliance for $300 or, you know, a few parts on, but if it's if it's 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, the default way most people do today is they'll email you the bid. And if you get a bid emailed, what are you going to do first? Are you going to look at all the itemized things or you going to look at the price? Price. Look at the price. And if you're getting a couple of bids and the price is higher, then you're going to probably automatically reject them unless there's a very high uh credibility to that company. Yeah. Every every uh home services company I've ever helped, I I mandate that they physically deliver the proposal and explain it line by line because two different companies aren't the same. Take roofing. You know, if they don't really replace the felt, if they don't do two or three other things, then their dollar is not the same as my dollar if I'm going to do all that. Would you recommend to do that same thing over Zoom? like uh well if that's yeah if that's the only option yes but I would never recommend any high ticket proposal just be sent also if it's going to be uh prepared for review I always want a cover letter that really that really sells the proposal if a cover letter says I prepared the proposal I've itemized it because there's so many iterated factors, functions and elements that if you don't understand it, you will not be able to evaluate it against others. We are very committed to doing not just a good job, but the only way to do it is the is the best job. We use materials that are designed to not, you know, not uh break, not, you know, whatever it is. And I would basically go through everything in a cover letter and I would actually read it before I present it. But I would never ever send an expensive proposal by email without having some control of how it is perceived. Yeah. Because I've done that and it will increase conversion by 10 15%. And on a 10,000 20,000 $50,000 job, that's a lot of money. So if you don't believe you can do the closing on high ticket through video, Zoom calls. No, I didn't say you couldn't, but I said I said if you have Yes. Let me give you something even easier. So, if you have a service company and you have a lot of trucks and your trucks are tricked out, they're really cool covered. They are really wrapped, impressive, usually Saturday and Sunday. Where do those trucks sit? In your yard. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Are they doing anything beneficial in your yard? No. You've already paid for them, right? Yeah. You paid for the wraps. Yeah, the wraps are pretty cool. What I get my clients to do is take those trucks and do one of three things. Either park them always in in quantity in high visibility areas, shopping centers, um you know, where people are going to go all the time on the weekends or drive them around a few blocks from each other all over the highway round and round so it looks like they're everywhere. And I have or for give you an example, one of my clients got a milliondoll HOA uh roofing deal because they had their truck at a certain place that the head of the HOA saw it and asked them about it. But most people don't even think to use that sunk cost asset more intelligently. Let me get a personal one then. Yeah. Doesn't that make sense? If if I have let's say hundreds or thousands of trucks everywhere now. Yes. But all white. Yes. Because we have no logos. Right. Because those trucks belongs to the subcontractor partners you work. Right. Right. Would you recommend me to paying their lease and actually paying them monthly a few hundred dollar to actually wrapping them with I would say to them this. If you want to keep your relationship with me, I'm going to pay to wrap it, but I'm going to give you credit towards that on every deal we get. People don't understand if you pay to wrap at a at a retail, it's like four grand. Correct. The hard cost is not 4 grand. It's like $400. By the way, anything I say, if you followed me, and I know you have, you never do anything in volume until you first verify it. So, the first thing I would do is I would take an area or an application or something that you can test. Maybe you wrap 10, but I will bet money that if you wrap them, they're going to be two things are going to happen. They're going to be tied to you more. Your brand is going to get the benefits so that if they try to go around you, they're not going to do it as well. And basically you can give them a you can you can basically say and if you ever start going direct you're going to have to pay me retail for the wrap. And so what if you had a thousand wrapped and it has whatever your company name is. What would that do to your brand value as an asset you could sell? Be a hell of a lot better than saying oh I've got a thousand white trucks out there that I have no no proprietary um access to. So again, I wouldn't do it overnight because that might cost you at cost if you had a thousand times, you know, uh $400 a piece. It's $4 million. But I would test 10 or 50. And I and if it got good, I wouldn't just wrap them. I'd own a wrap stop so that I made it a profit center. So I would do all everyone else's white trucks, but I'd also sell it so that I made money as I was doing it. And every time I sold a wrap for if the market's four grand and the cost is 400, if I would sell it for 200, so I had budget wrap and I'd get every time I brought in 2,000 and that 2,000 was 1,600 divided by four, I could wrap four more white trucks. Then you have the basically billboard. Yeah. You have a billboard forever. Yeah. And I'd control it rather than But I wouldn't do it, you know, until I proved it. Yeah. and then I'd make it self- finance. But think about what I said. If that billboard was everywhere, it's g that $400 is going to probably make you a hell of a lot more than $400 on on Meta or $400 on Google, don't you think? And every time a truck is seen, it reinforces your brand, not theirs. Yeah. So, I would do that. I mean, I wouldn't do it every truck, but I would I would I would first of all, you know, figure out how to get into the rap business because I don't think it's that hard to do and I know the cost is so much lower than than what people charge. And then I would basically create the killerist rap that commanded attention that that uh manifests credibility and and quality. And I'd have that brand everywhere and I'd make it a stipulation if they wanted to work with you. And if they didn't want it to be wrapped, I'd say fine, I just can't give you any more leads. Even if it's profitable, you'd have to hold your ground because you want that to build a brand. So, you know what the brand Healthy Choice is? So, Healthy Choice is this billiondoll brand that uh a a commodity company out of Minneapolis created and it's just a license. They just put that brand on anything comes to they get a license because healthy choice has this perception of being very healthy for you but they don't own anything. They just license. If you had Home Alliance and the Home Alliance trucks were everywhere and they were creating your brand. You could then put that brand on anything else and charge for it because all those thousand trucks built your brand for you. and they might build you a4 $50 million asset that's just the just what you got out of the intangible. Pretty exciting, isn't it? Imagine you become the chairman of Home Alliance tomorrow, okay? And you have 12 months limited capital and cannot increase the marketing budget. What would you do? I was trained on probability and outcome. So I'm going to assume you have hundreds of thousands in 500,000. Okay. So, at any point in time, this very moment, out of those 500,000, I promise you, there are people in your database that have been thinking about replacing their air conditioner. There have been people that are thinking about doing all kinds of things and they don't take action if they don't have to, but if you proactively remind them or offer it to them, they will. I would go after a number of different scenarios and probably end up generating out of those 500,000 three or four or $5 million worth of almost overnight profit by partnering with people and I would use that basically then to either expand acquire another company or pay to wrap all those white trucks. What do you think should be our mode? I think the first thing is to establish yourself not just online but visually as a brand. Yeah. Because we have too much online because right now if you say your name I mean I wouldn't know that but if I see your trucks everywhere it becomes embedded in my brain. Don't you think? Yeah. So I mean I think what we talked about is probably a priority but in order to get there I would probably access I would figure a ton more things to do with those 500,000 names. And I wouldn't wait for them to call you and I definitely wouldn't wait for the white truck people because you know damn well that if they can do it, they're going to basically divert people to themselves. They're not going to come back. They're going to say, "Oh, you know what? You can come right to me and I'll give you an extra deal." And you know that happens. I I used to always use a national service to get massage people to come to my home. 90% would say, "Oh, you know, if you want to deal direct, I'm less." and they give you your card. There's no integrity and it's just unfortunately it's human nature. But you have the database. What else can you do with that database outside of the way you see your basic business? Because probability is out of 500,000 people, I don't know if it's 25,000 or it's 100,000 will are are primed to do different things if you just help them take the last step. And if you have an interest in that transaction, and it doesn't have to even be, you know, in those three or four or five categories, you can say, I I don't know if you've been if you've been contemplating repairing your roof or replacing it, but we're getting ready, you know, all the forecast is some of the wildest uh the wildest wildest weather is forthcoming, and we have now have uh under our brand access to some of the best uh roofing um quality roofing companies in the country. Very competitively priced. And if you'd I mean I would just keep doing that all the time. You don't think that would work? I do. It's probably just kaching kaching kaching in your pocket. I mean I'm just giving you a few things. But you gave me control of that. I would basically say how many ways can I ethically utilize logic and probability in that database. Then I'd say okay how many ways should I use the brand? And I don't think the brand is as usable, frankly, by the way you've done it because it's it's not memorable. But it is very memorable if there's a thousand of your trucks out there. Yeah. And one of the things you you demand a lot more out of is your relationships with your buyers, people that didn't buy. Just because somebody called and didn't buy doesn't mean they don't have recurring need for something. You could take everybody that ever either did something once and never came back or didn't come forward when you when they heard the cost and you could follow up and say, you know, we really felt bad when you contacted us and you didn't, but we want to do something to really win you back, so we're going to give you a $25 certificate. Exactly. Look, one time, did you do it? Yeah. And it worked. It was other way around. It was other way around when I was a customer. Okay. I spend with someone I think it was $50,000 for coaching, mentoring or something like that. Then I don't know like for some reason like when I paid too much no it was like okay good then I asked my assistant to call and cancel it and I we asked like can you give the portion back because we not utilize it then they were nice enough they did like 50% I believe that's very nice. Yes. And then I was before I was mad then they start sending some SMS like after a while and my negative experience completely turn around. I was almost purchasing again. That's whole example like what you just mentioned like you can turn around the whole experience of from negativity to positivity by actually sending an SMS or reminding about yourself. So most of us and and I am also we erase the homeowners or like customers whenever they don't purchase thinking they won't purchase again. No, you can always turn around that experience actually to the positive experience and support of they might something else. I have a an agency, an ad agency I counsel and they work with orthodontists and they're very expensive. And we went through a bunch of the clients that stopped being their clients, exclients, and we looked at the timeline and we acknowledged that they weren't as good then as they are now. I got them to send letters saying the truth that we weren't as good and we probably understand why you left and we want your last transaction with us to be very satisfying. So, we want to buy you three out three months of our time. No strings. If we deliver the way we promise, we'd hope you continue. If we don't, at least we invested back in you. It's like 6,000 a month, $18,000. And if you have any qualms, we have a number of people you can talk to who like you quit and came back. And they will affirm we're not the same. And they got about 50% of them back. But yeah, the only way you can't save something is if you don't try. And and trying is not grit. Most people's idea of achievement is grit. That's just effort. That's the slowest, worst, least yielding. You have to learn to be strategic. And strategy, the best way I use to explain strategy is if you understand billiards. Billyards is not pool. Billyards is the one that there's no holes. Every shot sets up the next shot and the next and it's a metaphor for how to think differently. And this experience is coming of course from my own like you just said in the box. Uh recently I had to replace my air conditioning like you did. Right. Right. And I did it after 10 years. I've been living in this house for 10 years. House is built in 2002. 20 years like 24 years time I'm replacing it. But I started shopping even though I own air conditioning company like five 10 years ago and I never really made a decision until I found out it was a re rebate from LAWP right which they giving I think $1,250 per ton right and I'm almost getting $12,500 rebates and when my air conditioning was installed almost for one to1 ratio like zero and then I'm looking at it it took me like 5 10 years to make that decision of replaceing ing it. Even though I knew the air conditioning was old, I was keep repairing it. I don't want to spend money. And then I said, "Hold on a second. Why I'm keep spending on Facebook or Google and thing $500 to get into the house to the new homeowner when I already have my historical not closed job for five 10 years, right? is there actually I can convert them much easier because they haven't when we think after one week the salesperson walked out we think somebody no a lot of them they just don't do anything but just keep it they yeah the key to all this is realizing that within that database you have enormous stored value that most people never ever try to monetize and actually if you believe in some of the things that I teach, which is how to be preeminent. If you know that a finite number of people really want to do it, they're just not that committed yet because it's deferable. They don't have to do it, but if they did it, their life would be better. Then you have the responsibility to try to help them. And another thing we understood was on that data and not many people think about it is on if you go back to air conditioning whenever you find one air conditioning is being replaced after 20 years of cycle it goes on the cycles right it means entire neighborhood cluster needs to be replaced that's I'd never thought about that wow and that is so important it is yeah because with one you can actually nurture entire and also people are now talking in the inside like next or whatever the communities or if you give a discount to one you're basically getting everyone because and that's so fabulous I love that it's a cycle right and there's a related something and that is most people don't understand correlations and implications I told you about about the I was probably the first person that got people to do the discount tuneups that I'm talking about 50 years ago but I understood quantification has nothing to do with losing a little bit of money. It has to do with we call it third, fourth, fifth order. What's going to happen next? How many out of a hundred people are going to statistically have a problem? What is that problem going to entail in a service and repair field? What's the profit? How much is that profit over the little bit of loss? What kind of return are you getting? And most people don't think that way. So, you remember you have the story about the Lexus like sending as you buy utilizing that name to the neighbors, right? mailing them or something. Yeah, just imagine the same the situation. You replace your air conditioning a few months ago and I guarantee you in that cluster because all of the houses built in a similar year and it's either on the first cycle or in the second cycle. I don't know how old is your house. If it's 2000 is the first cycle. Yeah, I never thought about this. Whatever it's it's the same cycle and and they go to I love that. And what you could do so you have full integrity, you could say to the homeowner, "Yeah, if you're if you're willing, I'd like to be able to talk to PE people in the neighborhood and tell them I did it with you. If anybody engages us to do a replacement, I would like to thank you for letting me refer to you and I'll do whatever. I'll give you free repairs for the next three years or I'll give you uh I'll clean your ducks or whatever it is." and and almost no, as long as you do it right, they won't mind cuz they'd have nothing out. But you're exactly right. What if you could pick up three more jobs from the first one? I mean, but here's the point I'd like to make. Things like that are profoundly exciting, but they're they're everywhere. It's not just that I could, if I had enough time, we could look at any business. You could look at this the uh you know, the trades would be the same. um home service would be the same, but there's probably 30 different revenue opportunities within any of those businesses that just are sitting there dormant right in front of your eyes that you don't see that don't cost a penny to access. And and we prefer as a contractors going and paying Google or Yale $500 to getting to the next door. And our chance of closing is normally like 20 30%. It means to get a closing we are spending from 1,500 to 2,500 right give that to the existing customer to refer you right so let me give you another thing if you understand 8020 thinking that basically 20% of your of your business is 80% of your profit if you have salespeople I'll take you on a tangent because a lot of people have salespeople well there's a fallacy in in selling owners think every salesperson should be omnipotent. They should be they should be great at everything. They should be great at opening accounts, great at keeping accounts, great at selling luxury people, great at selling all kinds of things. And they're not. Usually salespeople are great at something and they're not great at everything. But no, no company that has multiple salespeople o ever tries to see what are they strong at, what are they weak at. Because when you understand their strength or their weakness, now you can align them to the scenario. So if I understood that this gentleman to my left was three times better at closing people in multi-million dollar homes than this person, but you tended to be democratic and you would just rotate leads. I would never do that. I would say this is an affluent person. They have to go here because I have a three time better probability I'm going to close them than him. If he's better in a lower neighborhood, he's going to get that. If somebody is better at a certain scenario, whether it's uh it could be anything. I mean, I don't but the point is when you understand that you can double and triple and quadruple the productivity of your sales force. We are probably going to have a better way of explaining what I'm doing. We have implemented AI now centralized brain which connected to all my employees all call center all technician everything is listened and we are collecting the customer information and we know the personalities. We try to attach on AI level on the distribution. We know which customer talks the best which agent and which technician is the best for which customer. Yeah. With AI. I love that. But also what you can do without it being manipulated if you understand neuroscience is mirror and matching. Yeah. You can actually and it's not it's actually going to comfort and connect. It's not diabolical. But if you know, if you have the language that was used when they talked to you and you told the technician, please do this in order to start the relationship, use this language to confirm to them why you are out there. If they say, you know, it's just driving me baddy because I can't get my air conditioning cool, then if you start and say, I heard it's driving you baddy because then I'll go, wow, they understand me. So I mean this is very powerful but it comes down to the same thing I'm talking about. There are all these variable ways that will multiply result performance outcome and thus income by orders of magnitude. Now I'm going to get into something else. Originally we were going to talk about how to increase the enterprise value of a business. I'm gonna basically take you on a little bit of a tangent and address that. Okay. Yeah. There are a number of ways to do it, but I'll give you the simplest three or four. Your business has to have a higher than industry growth rate. That's qualitative quality growth. Your business has to have a higher than industry profit level. Your industry has to have a lower than industry concentration risk, meaning the source of your business. Mhm. And your industry has to have a defendable competitive advantage. So let's go three. Is that four things? Okay. How do you get a higher than industry profit level? Well, you do a few things. You have more products and services you offer. You basically have more sources. And this is interesting. I hope I don't confuse people. I am fanatical about setting up partnerships, joint ventures, being recommended provider, getting endorsed, do co-branding. Why? Because if you look at the research, sorry, 2,000 of the top corporations in America right now get 20% of their revenue, but 40% of their profit from partnerships. How can that be? Because they're giving a share away. because they're covering all their fixed overhead with their normal business. And somebody that already has a relationship with an audience, their audience, their buyer base is trusted, is is uh has delivered. So when they assign their trust to your company, people will buy more, buy more often, buy more combinations, and buy longer and refer more people. How do you get a higher growth rate? You basically don't depend on one source. One source is waiting for people to call you because somebody told them about you or waiting for people from 10 years ago to come back. You create what I call as a power parthonon. Normally my clients have at least nine areas that source revenue. And it again in most of the companies you're talking to that are trade. I'm going to bet that 50% of their business comes from referral, word of mouth, or repeat. But I'm also going to bet that if you and I went and we analyzed it, the majority of them are reactive word of mouth or repeat. They're not proactive. As I said, let's talk about acquisitions. Why to build something that could be acquired? Because a lot of home service business owners, they don't think about acquisition like selling a company. They see they give it to their child where they the next generation but they normally yeah closing it down eventually. So I co-authored a book about 3 years ago and it was called business wealth without risk and the subtitle was how to how to earn the income of a lifetime every 3 to 5 years and the concept behind it wasn't start it was acquire. It was find a viable business that is successful but is so grossly underperforming all that's possible. Get control of it advantageous on terms that at least partially pay for itself. Immediately multiply the yield you get. Use that yield to buy more every three years. sell it and use the proceeds to do it again and again and again or flip it. You basically buy like almost like a flipping house. So let's say you had a million dollar business that I knew I could turn into a $3 million business but a five or 10 time profit. So I'd buy it on an advant maybe maybe I'd give you a portion down. I' you'd finance the rest and I'd pay for it. But then immediately I would go back to everybody and find all kinds of ways to mine all this profit that you had walked over because you didn't know it existed. Then I would take that and I would probably buy other things and other things can be in terms of not your business but if in national businesses you can buy well you could do too. Let's say somebody has a related business and they're not doing very much anymore, but they've got an inactive client base. The thousands of people, they never work, but there's goodwill. You could buy that for almost nothing. And have the owner say, "We now have uh we have collaborated with your company." I mean, there's all kinds of ways to do it, but the concept is you buy an underperforming asset. You get it financed in a way that most of the cost is paid for out of the profits. You multiply the profits. You then dramatically increase the profitability. You use the profitability to acquire other either similar or complimentary businesses or depends on the kind of business. You might buy somebody's salesforce. You might buy a company that has complimentary products. I mean all kinds of things. And then you get it to a point because at a as I said before four things if you have a higher than industry growth rate higher than industry profit. Oh I didn't realize I forgot to finish that. Higher than in a lower than industry concentration risk. It's not depending on one source and a defendable competitive advantage. It'll sell for multiples. We did a whole program on how to multiply the multiple your business sells for. Just because there's an industry average. Let's say that a home services sells for I don't know seven times even big ones but small ones is three times a bit. That's the norm. Yeah. But if you have those four factors you might get I mean I can show you companies that sold for 20 times what the norm was because they had such outstanding factors. So if you think about it the reason you want to build it to sell is that you keep doing so you rinse and repeat. You just do it at a higher level and higher level and higher level and you just leverage up using the original investment and making it generate all the capital you need. I got to tell you how you get a competitive advantage. It's so simple that it's almost embarrassing if you understand the various things we've talked about and there's many many more and your lifetime value for a client or customer is three times mine. you have a lot more what's called allowable cost to invest in bringing them in the front door to pay sales commission to do advertising than anybody else. And as long as your competitors don't know the game you're playing, that is a defendable advantage. If you own products or services they would buy before they would buy your service, that's another because you have access to them before they're going to need your service. Let's say pool cleaning they sell on six uh x of the monthly I think they're revenue you which is $100. It's $600 right on each client. But on HVAC you have a much bigger LCV. Right. But yeah but if I was a pool service I would recommend a plumbing service. Yeah. Uh I would sell uh we have around our pool. We did $25,000 worth of artificial turf around our pool that I know the company behind it. I I I traded for it, but if we bought it, it cost 25 grand. It cost them about four grand. There was $21,000 of profit in the deal if I had paid for it. There's all these reasons that you're in a position. And the best thing about a pool man is you're there 52 times a year. I mean, so yeah, but most people don't think this way. It's it the difference between being tactical and super strategic is night and day as far as what you end up with from any business. But yeah, owning a business, you're getting ordinary income. If you sell it strategically and you use the proceeds that you have increased to take the next level higher and the next level higher, you're creating enormous wealth. Ordinary income is not wealth. An asset that no one will buy is just if it's very if it's very profitable, it's a very lucrative job. But an asset that everybody would stand in line to buy is wealth. And every time you take it a gradient higher, it multiplies your wealth. And and that should be just like people understand compound investing. And if you invest today at the beginning, if these younger people started with a couple hundred uh today a month, they would have x million dollars in 20 years. Well, if your strategy is I'm going to build it and sell it or I'm going to use it, you either build it and sell it or you build up the profit and you use it as an acquisition business and so you do your own rollup. Biggest mistake experienced entrepreneurs make. They don't question any of their assumptions. They they basically follow herd mentality and they don't think there's any other way to do anything or they're stuck thinking they should only do it one way when in fact if you add multiple sources multiple approaches it multiplies results not linear but geometric. What can compound faster than revenue? Well, obviously the bottom line, you can create the bottom line multiples almost overnight just by getting more yield out of everything you do and everyone you do with every transaction. Yeah. Easy. Most valuable asset in the AI era. Your ability to really outthink people because AI is only as good as how you direct it. And right now people are not telling you to direct it better. They're just saying here's how you use it. So again, if you're one of the few people in the beginning that has an agent or has, you know, has predictive uh you know, that's great, but in in a year or so, everyone's going to have it. So that's not an advantage. It makes it brings every it brings what everyone is saying is so great right down to a commodity, doesn't it? Yeah. And it marginalizes nothing about it. So but this AI can't I mean a as I said somebody said AI has infinite uh perspectives which means it doesn't really have any perspective and you're the one you if you are flying the plane and you understand the process and you understand the asset you have control of and you can you know it's it's sort of in the oil business everyone believes believed that there was no more potential till they created fracking. All of a sudden they got so much oil out of a different approach. But how people use the AI, how they direct it, how they multiply its performance, how they get it to basically produce insights and and outcomes that nobody else thinks about is going to make all the difference when everybody has access to the same thing built by a partner. There's a book is called who not what or who not how. So, I mean, why do anything that somebody else can do better that will free you to apply your own superpower? But people go, "Oh, I want to cover it all." Well, we did a a program on a a strategic partner and we call power partnering. And we identified 263 different ways you can partner with somebody not just for moneymaking, for technology, for buying, for skills, for selling, for for uh uh for uh distribution, for supply chain. Well, if you'd want to do it yourself and it's not your superpower, first thing is you're either going to do it terrible or the learning curve is going to be timeconuming and expensive. And in a fastmoving world where speed and and agility is important, why would you want to tackle anything you're not great at? And why would you want to spend money if you could defer the cost and convert it to some kind of a correlation? share of profit, share of saving, share of productivity. Yeah. I mean, it makes no sense to me other than people who are very uh they're very self- consumed. It's not optimal. Partner. Yeah. Partner. The greatest acquisition in the business history. Oh jeez. Probably Bill Gates buying u Micros DOSs for $50,000. He didn't create it. He just bought it and and sold it. Which business trend would you avoid? This is interesting. I have a a take on something that is interesting. People get all excited about best practices in an industry and I would certainly learn them, but I wouldn't think of them as being the most important thing because it's very similar to what we're talking about AI. In the beginning, a best practice is an advantage, but sooner or later, everyone does the same thing. So, it's not an advantage at all. Maybe an advantage to consumer. Probably the most power I don't know if I'm going to restate it right. The most powerful thing you can do in a business is travel outside and learn about how what all the other businesses outside your industry are doing, how they're doing it, why they're doing it. And then you have a a killer advantage because your competitors are going to all be following the herd. And if you do the same thing everybody else does, even if you do it more productive, more efficient, more effective, you get a tiny little incremental gain. Whereas if you're doing it totally differently, you can have exponential explosive topline but even greater bottom line. So I would always say the biggest thing you can do is not not stay uh stay stuck in your own industry. Next trillion dollar industry. Wow. It might be actually derivatives of longevity and health because what's happening when my parents were getting to be my age they were feeble old they were very inactive today I mean I don't mind telling you I'm going to be I'm 70 almost eight and I still have clients everywhere people still pay me you know three $400,000 retainers I'm getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to Japan to keynote not to speech and I want to stay young and viable and I want to look handsome for the women and I want to be you know I want to basically have uh my brain work and I think that's going to be even more and more critical and right now it's available but I got to pay you know to me I can afford it I can get stem cells I do I can get Botox I do I can get personal trainer I can get all those things but I think that there is a very interesting statement If you sell to the classes, you live with the masses. If you sell to the masses, you live with the classes. I think there's going to be a huge shift in loads of people wanting to preserve and enhance their vitality, their energy, their their everything. And I think that's going to be probably a huge industry. It's not the answer you thought, but I think it's going to be huge because I want to, you know, you're not my age, but if you were my age, would you want to basically not be able to do anything, be able to just sit and observe or you want to be part and play the game of life? Definitely. I think everybody's going to want it whether they have a lot of money or not. Don't you really? If you look historically like 50 years ago and now how long people are living actually have extended correct like Yeah. If you think about it, the body was really designed to be about 40 and die. Now it's been doubled. Yeah. But that doubling starts becoming currently not as as enjoyable at about 80. But people don't want at 60 when they retire to not be. That's why you know the pickle ball is probably as popular as it is because when people retire they need to have You play pickle ball? No. But my wife does. Do you? I play bodell. Yeah. Okay. My my my wife does for hours a day, but I think it's popularity to older people because it gives them a sense of vibrancy, of vitality, of of being great at something. And I think it's going to be bigger and bigger. And I think that industry, however it will manifest for the masses, will be huge. That's why Elon Musk is investing in Neurolink, right? Yeah. No, but I think I mean that's my honest truth. Strategy or execution? Knowing isn't doing. doing isn't optimizing. Optimizing isn't maximizing. Maximizing isn't uh innovating. So, I think strategy is so much more powerful than tactics. But execution, implementation is the biggest flaw. Let me tell you a tragedy that really drives me crazy. You know who Tony Robbins is? I don't know if you've ever gone to him, have you? Okay. So, Tony Robbins was affected positively by me uh 30ome years ago. I taught him the three ways to grow a business. It transformed him. He used it to go from a million dollars to I think today he's got access to he's got something like $21 billion worth of of re revenue businesses. And he and he acknowledges the impact I've had. Very very nice about it. He teaches a $10,000 5day training program called Business Mastery. at that program. One full day, 20% of the whole curriculum is going deep into my three ways to grow a business. You increase the number of buyers, you increase the size of the transaction and thus the profit. You increase the frequency or the utility. Utility means you add other things that monetize. He shows them how he uses it in his business. He shows them that there's no risk, but it can multiply the bottom line many times over. He shows them it's the safest, fastest, most powerful way to multiply your profitability. Everyone gets excited. A year later, they are invited to Mastery 2, which is advanced. He asked me to do cameos at it two years ago. So, there's 1500 people comes there. They pay $15,000 instead of 10. They've had a year to apply the three ways. Tony acknowledged and identified it was singularly the most important thing they should apply first, right? And he asked me to go there and teach them six more advanced things, the power parthonon, the nine drivers of exponential growth, things like that. And I I I did something before I started. I asked everybody if they were blown away when he taught them the three ways 12 months ago. Yeah. Yeah. Uh you saw how how powerful and proper. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Before I start, tell me how many of you honest to God did anything with it? And you want to guess how many? Five. 15%. 15%. And so I said to them, and I'm giving I'm coming to your your answer. Yeah. So I said, "Okay, so what you're saying is you just paid 15 grand for the advance for me to teach you six more methods you're not going to do anything with." Okay. There was a book that was written 30 years ago. The title was action. The t subtitle was nothing happens until someone or something moves. So I would say as as fanatic as I am about strategy, if you don't execute, if you don't implement, if all you do is contemplate, it's tragic. I use a metaphor. Most people deal with profound knowledge. knowledge that has a capability of transforming their business or their life as if they were spectators just watching up in the stands, drinking beer, eating hot dogs, and dripping mustard on themselves as opposed to being on the field basically being a first stringer playing in the game. And if you're not going to play in the game that all the knowledge, you might as well not even watch this because it just becomes intellectual entertainment. And speaking of that, you are too young, but in the 90s, I did a quarter billion dollars of seminars around the world. We were the biggest seminar company in entrepreneurship. That's before the internet. I was m I was charging5 to $30,000 a person when everybody was charging 500. We were selling out. I had 100,000 documented success stories. That's a lot. But I had actually taught the methodology not just in seminars but interviews and keynotes to bill to billions of people. And one day I was on stage and I thought I don't want to do this anymore because I have no interest in being intellectual entertainment. And at the end of my seminars everyone would be wanting to stand up because I'm very good and my methods are so powerful. They wanted to give me a standing ovation and I'd say don't stand up. Don't clap. The best acknowledgment you'll ever give me is to go home and do something meaningful what with what I just shared. That's all I ask. And I'd say the same thing to your audience. Strategy plus execution. Yeah. If you do both, it's killer. Jay, thank you very much. Really insightful conversation and I'm really uh appreciate to accepting me to to being my host. Yeah. Then I'm impressed with you. I mean, I hadn't caught up with you for many years, but we had a private conversation offline and you've you've evolved and grown very impressively and it sounds like uh what you're doing uh both in business uh sense and also in contribution to all the the trade people that you create in you basically create business for a bunch of independent entrepreneurs who probably on their own wouldn't because we just talked about they don't do much of anything but you basically are the source and the force of of their security, their financial success. So, you should feel very proud of them. Thank you, Jay. Thank you. If our followers uh uh wants to connect with you, how they can reach you. Yeah. If if you're large enough, I mean, we have we we gift a lot of things away and there's plenty of stuff I think on YouTube and sadly a lot of people have knocked me off and and I use my stuff. But if you're large enough that you want to explore collaboration, and I'm not inexpensive, but I tend to make people a lot of return on their investment, get a hold of me at j aabraham.com. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. Thank you very much.