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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:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sardorum/
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
90% of the Google ads clicks are bots i mean I wasn't part of the oil family or anything like that you know is it really worth 190,000 i don't think so yeah right and then you get to come back to your business and see how bad it did yeah you're like "Oh my goodness." You know but if you really want to start a business just start it on the evenings and the weekends if that's not for you then entrepreneurship is not really for you it's a good test people here don't pick up the phone yeah my phone is always mute you're never going to be able to reach me like on the phone hey that's a normal thing here it's hard to scale zoo it's a much easier to scale a farm [Music] hello everyone this is Sardor Mardinov i'm a founder of Home Alliance and group of companies it's tech enabled company with over $100 million valuation horizontal and vertically integrated company nationwide today I have my guest incredibly and interesting person Mo Muhammad thanks for having here thank you appreciate it hey everyone my name is Mo have a big sales background you know started in uh sales when I was 18 years old uh to eventually having my first company when I was uh in my early 20s and I would say I'm a product of failing forward learning paying to learn you know the Harvard program Tony Robbins today i you know I've always wanted to have a business in the United States and you know I'm here uh you know ready to use all my experience and networking uh to definitely not only get ahead but to add value let's talk about uh building a business what are the ways or like the methods of building a successful business in 2025 like what kind of direction you would take yeah it's a great question great question i mean I'm just going to use my experience in the home service space and bootstrapping the business and home services kind of comes from my sales experience so I look at it as today social media is huge there's mass adoption the baby boomers have like adopted social media so the marketing has changed where I started in door to door and today you can do social media marketing so I look at you know HVAC doing HVAC i would get my social media Facebook set up very simple have a small ad budget you know AB test something simple to actually get leads and go out there and do it myself i think a lot of people you know try to plan to perfection and when you're starting up a business you just got to take action what do you think what is more important to know how to install to do how to do work or to do mark proper marketing or to do proper sales it's a great question so I mean in the industry itself like let's look yeah for HVAC distribution is ready is already set up for you so you don't have to do distribution yourself you know uh installers I have no technical background you can subcontract that all out right and essentially what you have to learn is how to sell so you just have to have a simple value proposition that the end user can understand and add value to you know what I mean so all your time and money should be on sales and marketing because you can get the distribution for the actual product they're doing it all for you you can sub out the job you know and I'll use something as simple as a furnace you know you literally run an ad online and the cool thing about today compared to when I started in the business like I said mass adoptions happen on social media and people are now buying or getting interested uh not in commercials anymore they're doing it on social media today just to kind of give everybody a practical example you can go on Facebook ad library look up the space you're in type in furnace and see what ads are being run on furnace and copy it so what you are saying is you don't really need a billboard to start a business at all and and believe it or not it's a lot cheaper than what most people think it is right how much of a money you need to start a business so I'll use my real life example i started off in the HVAC space using a thermostat to get in front of homeowners that first month just under $3,000 and my business took off from there and bootstrapped it just getting in front of homes using a thermostat digitally to get in front of homeowners so you are talking about the experience uh here now or you're talking about the experience in Canada when you started first time in Canada so basically you're doing the same methodology here as well absolutely absolutely and it's very simple to just focus on sales and marketing spend a little bit of you know money but even if you don't need to be creative the social media Facebook ad library you can see what everybody's doing practically the older the ad is that it's been running it means it's probably working for that business so you can copy it if you want to start and scale home service business and you don't know how follow and subscribe i'm going to be sharing all of the insights here so basically you plan it from the end from the installation but you test it in the beginning in the marketing itself that's absolutely right and you know finding uh the fulfillment side of the piece is simply calling people you get the fulfillment first so you someone has to be ready to install yes you negotiate the deal how much it's going to cost to install it right then basically uh now you know what you're going to be selling yes you know how much it's going to cost yes you are basically doing minimum viable product MVP absolutely absolutely and you're running an ad on that one product you're running an ad you're converting it you are doing a test sell yourself yes and once this contract sign you are basically giving it to subcontractor to install it and then you rinse and repeat rinse and repeat and if you're making a margin a good margin healthy margin and the ad is bringing in at a low cost or minimal cost where you are still making a margin and you're able to get enough data flow or lead flow you can start what is your ro expectations in the beginning from my experience I'm targeting anywhere from $5 to $25 a lead every dollar you spend how much revenue you're expecting any dollar I spend I want to get $10 return at the very beginning it's much simpler to do it because it's just you you're trying to actually leverage out you know what I mean just you so you're a AB testing and you're setting the expectations along the way and your energy is really high and your excitement's there you know what I mean it's really similar I do but my ROS expectations lower because I'm not the one who's doing the sales i kind of delegate that one as well uh in the membership I kind of looking for one or 2x rows on the sales cycle uh on any ticket I'm selling i'm looking like two three four robots because if that works now I know how can I fine-tune it further on the marketing or the conversions or on the sales and actually you can optimize it and actually come up to the five to 10 rows afterwards which channel were you looking for your side of the business when you started were you taking advantage of you know me I focused on Facebook a lot right when I started uh Facebook didn't exist in 2009 and That's right uh I was doing PPC Edwards yeah so basically uh depending on what uh product we are selling what about today today again depending on the product if it's emergency services it's not Facebook got it it's going to be still Google Adwords google Adwords normally cost 33% of the revenue like oneird three you're going to be getting because it's really competitive right but if I'm looking for high ticket items like solar HVAC uh or any other things it the Facebook works perfectly you cannot really go that target local it's harder it has to be big enough uh the population territory or audience to actually get it and uh uh yeah lead cost uh we are getting about uh depending on the product offer it can be 25 it can be $100 sometimes and it can be 20 bucks $20 uh if the offer is really good uh then we can drop it to like 10 and one of the offers I'm running is I'm seeing like $15 $2 wow i remember those days those are good days those good days yeah so you're looking for $5 right on the lead cost yeah yeah yeah i mean I I've I've always been extremely happy with $5 your margin for error is bigger right and you get what you normally get that you get basically $5 per lead and what is your uh conversion expectations from that lead how many lead will convert to appointment i'm usually targeting 30% 30% of the leads coming in I'm trying to book for an appointment wow yeah that's a huge number and then you should have actually really good call center or like SDRs uh from the lead so right after the appointment you're trying to close at about 20 to 25% so first and foremost uh from appointment 50% of them usually show up so there's a fall-off they reschedu cancel and then I'm trying to close at 20% of who we actually sit down with the end result is about you know two 2 and a half% conversion of all leads that come in that's that's the target when that was in the good days of like you know when you're kind of doing something and uh I would also say on like the the advertising as a whole try to be very creative you know Facebook which I know you want to be very unique but also relatable you know if you're doing what everybody else is doing you're not going to be getting five bucks a lead yeah i like the way how you do it uh you basically set up the ads yourself try to close them yourself you go through actually every single step of the journey you try to go and document the scorecards and KPIs your expectations so then you can actually scale that's literally what it is and then when you set the expectations one by one and I think the first 10 people out there seeing people every day is the hard part is the challenging part you know you got to go through a lot of people to get to 10 and recruiting and once you get there you have an engine that's really really scalable and working so basically you're kind of proving the model in the beginning once you kind of identify that block by marketing block sales block then installation and then after that you calculate your unit count and profitability making sure you fit it like the net profit and gross profit and all that then you repeat basically right like after it's rinse and repeat you got to have your package your your margins in order and all that uh you know and the cool thing like I said Facebook the numbers don't lie right you're getting the numbers you know what you're paying your guys and you know where you end up at you got to review that month to month yeah i think it's a Facebook is like same thing as having uh banners billboards but digitally like you have you can see more data like how many people saw it yeah it's all about impressions right impressions correct yeah yeah yeah it's crazy cuz I I knocked doors in the past and seeing it it's like kind of knocking doors online how many times people do you think should see the banner like in order to actually do a decision to convert like the fill up the lead form you know that's something that I would that would be a complete guess but I know from commercials from back in the days they would say they would see it seven to eight times before buying right yeah you know it's now 35 times it's 35 times because people time span is shorter now because they just flip flip flip flip people have to like see your ad like 35 times to actually buy wow wow so what are you on your on your side for the uh for the advertising is it totally different on the Google i guess it's more when it's service like you're saying you're obviously having to spend a lot more money the pain is in the moment right yeah yeah because we are we are as you know we are on more emergency services right like it can be appliance hack plumbing electric whatever the emergency services and an emergency services it's all about it's a search ads it's not social ads it's a Google Adwords it can be Yelp ads uh or it can be SMS or email um it's it's search engine optimization so like we spend a lot of money on SEO and nowadays actually like it's becoming AI people are start looking into GPT and other AI platform and everything correct like if you look at the top uh appliance repair companies is whatever the CT that result is going to be one like our company is going to be one of those results is it because you're using AI platforms and stuff like that um is it cheaper or like is it No no people's habits changing their habits like let's say like when you're looking things now how often you're using now Google versus JGPT yeah yeah yeah it's definitely down the middle now like Google I think this the first time they got their red alert or something uh because they never really had the competition now the Chibbit AI is actually creating competition for them yeah absolutely so like now it's time is becoming it's not just about the search engine optimization it's about AI optimization like CH GPTO or other AI platform optimization because they're crowling the information from there from Google and other browsers and actually combining them together and giving it more friendly way do you think the current future and everything it's going to shift into the ads now you're running on um these different platforms like chat GPT you're running your ads strictly on there or like X because they're all competing against each other for ad rev right do you think it's going to be like that or and also another question would be is is there any you know one company where we can kind of integrate all of it or you can kind of run an ad where and then it shoots it everywhere you know how Facebook you go you run an ad there it's on Instagram too yeah you know I think I think eventually the the Chad Jippet is going to come up with a ad platform right yeah yeah they're going to have like probably on the results like they have the organic results now they're going to probably have like almost like a Google Adwords like on the side or on the top they're going to have the ad just API with everybody yeah correct yes then you can go actually how you set up the Google ads or or it was Yahoo ads first it will be the same thing paper click think that will make it cheaper per result or more expensive i think cheaper right probably it's going to be cheaper yeah probably it's going to be cheaper because I don't think they're going to be able to have bots because in Google you know 90% of the Google ads clicks are bots I saw the Oxford University research I have a proof uh and then they delete it uh like 90% of the clicks whatever happens at Google AdWords is it's bots or like not humans wow basically it means Google is generating 90% of the revenue artificially they should not be having that basically you can a lot of revenue for article correct correct yeah you basically can divide it by 10 that should be the Google revenue wow and they actually pushing the competition to kill fight with each other and actually click or whatever the Facebook Yes I agree with you it's a 50% of the I think uh clicks or lead forms are fraudulent wow i don't think it's u someone is purposely is filling up the lead form i think just uh Facebook itself does that um they just basic algorithm fits you nonexisting leads uh it's this practice uh it's a big practice in the paper call uh paper lead uh businesses they basically mix the sand with salt which makes sense so you're getting a false reality of where you are correct yeah because people are ready to pay we continue paying for it right so they just generate more revenue yeah and a lot of people are that's why the importance of the KPIs so that you can actually know where you're at when you're doing and you know starting a business in Facebook and everything like that you got to be able to or leveraging Facebook or any social media platform you got to really know what your end result is converting at because you know how much you're going to have to spend regardless of how much sand is in there right yeah so basically like first you identify the the MVP you create the MVP then what you do next like so then you start building the production block sales blocks uh how you scale organization so I think there's you know there the next key piece and you can kind of wear all these hats at the beginning yourself and that's what I did is is really the next piece is your start to recruit because if you have something that's working uh uh and you think about it from a hey can I bring somebody in and they can make a healthy living doing this okay I can um you got to recruit salespeople but you also got to recruit more installers you also you know have to have some distribution deals in place where you know the distributors are everywhere so in HVAC you know or the distributors are all over the place you go and you just get a a deal for a certain product line that you're going to offer for a customer so that you can easily get it right so so you believe in selling the same package over and over right yes I do i do i think you know I really try to understand the pain point for the consumer and then build a value proposition that's not only productwise but service and product together so I build a unique value proposition for the customer and just keep it simple right so that because when when you keep the same product mix and you in the program you know you're targeting a certain niche of clients it's much easier to teach one two three 10 15 salespeople than everybody doing something different so so when you're building an organization uh how long do you think uh do you plan like a year three year five year how you normally plan four years yeah so you know first and foremost they go Yeah 1 three and five yeah you got to be just kind of clear on your organization's goals whether it's built to sell or built to last okay what you which one do you prefer built to sell a lot of business owners out there like they they hold a business and they think the next generation will take over but normally it doesn't right like Yeah yeah with all this technology advancing yeah baby boomers hold most of these plumbing HVAC service based businesses and their kids are somewhere else so Tik Tok and I think a lot of baby boomers right now are selling their businesses at a very high rate right yeah because because we no matter what we're going to be exiting right like first we exit the field then we ex exit the field from the field we go to the management then from management we exit to the leadership yes then from the leadership we exit to become the board uhhuh then eventually we become the investor exactly you got to let go to grow correct yeah yeah yeah you might get stuck you might be stuck on the field or you might be stuck in the management where you have like octopus running the whole organization or you might be stuck in the leadership but eventually you're going to have to let it go either way like we going to no matter we are humans right like the time is going to come no matter what progression correct i like the way you think like about like eventually we're going to it's better to build it to sell right like that way it's easier to attract talent yes it's easy to attract investors this way like when you build it backwards with the exit in mind it's much easier to build everything it's like you can build much faster absolutely and I I think it's also perfect everybody has different preferences of like what they prefer to do but like that's why you find certain people in the same place 10 years later right because they're holding on to their business which is totally fine right uh and and you know they're getting the value out of their business to serve their life it's really where your vision is and what you want to do with your business that that uh really matters but personally yeah like built to sell definitely what that's referring build a cell but it's easier to motivate the people as well because people don't want to become like be with you forever they probably they have their own priorities they want to spend time with the family or love ones and and go somewhere well how can you can hold them for so long exactly you should actually have an exit in mind uh so they can actually have a liquidity event and exit because I did that mistake of actually building a legacy play uh but I end up losing all my core team uh because they couldn't wait that long yes exactly a lot of people have different uh internal goals for themselves yeah you're right yeah and and people's priorities might change the situation might change someone gets sick so you have to actually give the people opportunity to liquidate exit and and be able to start something new or I really like the movie called uh Ocean 11 ocean 10 Ocean 11 yes you put the team together for the target once the target is achieved all split up the next one when you want to call again you can call those people loyal people again they will come and join you for the next target right like same thing in business like build to exit you can much uh uh faster and better attract talent because you have exit in mind guys once we get to three years or five years we're going to be selling it so much everyone gets this yeah and people think just exiting means you know fully selling the business you can exit multiple times along the way right and that's that's a win yeah if the Elon Musk didn't exit he would not be able to build build what he did paypal right it's 100% right i think a lot of people you know they they they fall in love with like just kind of keeping their business and they lose their people and they wonder why and it's I think the like you said the human nature and I think it's in all of us is people want progression and the minute they stop progressing they'll probably start looking elsewhere yeah and exit doesn't mean you give up exit is not exit doesn't mean you betrayed your people exit it exit means you actually want to take care of them absolutely because you're giving them an opportunity to also exit like if you you can sell the organization if you want just share the wealth with them if you're building a business and you have some unknown questions comment below i'm going to be answering them on the next video yeah can you share uh three secrets of scaling a business i would say absolutely knowing your KPIs just the simple KPIs because in order to scale your business you got to know where you're at so you can't get better what you don't measure you know what I mean so just knowing those simple KPIs the funnel for me of uh no matter the time period will allow you to scale the other one I would say simple of practical things to do uh that I would do is you know increasing ticket items just look at your business whatever wherever you're at uh you could do more by just increasing the ticket items you don't have to add more people how can you increase the ticket add more value so you always want to be thinking about okay well I have my customer how can I add more value to my customer a lot of people think that you know I don't do price wars I focus on value unique package propositions and the more things you can layer into those packages then you you can justify increasing your ticket price which if you're a company doing $10 million a year you can add a million dollars a year just by increasing it by 10% that's one and then the other thing is uh scaling your business you know you got to be able to I would say position yourself correctly so using the home services space you know we have a model where we go into homes and sell right when you're in a very competitive environment we'll use here LA and uh if you're one area but if you start positioning yourself in other pockets and you recruit in those pockets you'll be positioned to scale your business uh a year from now what do you mean in pockets for instance I'll give you an example so if I'm here in LA and I start recruiting not just in LA but in San Francisco and different areas and getting sales people ready got it you're basically talking about like regional expansion regional expansion uh and and in both ways for fulfillment which is technicians onboarding technicians and the second being uh you know getting salespeople out there you know I did that early on and people didn't understand why we were doing it now we're not ready with like in terms of being able but we just kept recruiting so recruiting is being a big part of scaling your recruiting team needs to be thinking about first of all actionably recruiting and then also thinking about positioning where you're recruiting your people because when a year comes by and you have a bigger base and you're ready to scale it's so you have much more market share to cover right you don't need to start fresh you're already in little pockets with very little expense yeah there's very little expense you're just for me it's just add the ad budget in there that's right that's the beauty of social media you know what I mean i would say it's those three things for me that's been a big thing kpis from the data side you know recruiting yeah you know what I mean and then you know just simply increasing your ticket items uh will help you scale what do you think about market size if the market size is too small you cannot do anything about it absolutely so if you're in a situation where your market size is too small too small correct yeah like it doesn't matter like how hard you work if your market size is too small then you won't be able to grow it right that's number one and number two is what about if the market is shrinking is not growing first one I would always look the market size if the market has a size or not right like and if it's big enough uh and I normally look for the markets which is more than 20 billion in US and the number two things I look uh if the market is growing and number three is do I have advantage over competition yes what value propositions we have how we are better than theirs yeah so it can be marketing strategy price or whatever right it can be anything what how what makes that better than not and number four is do we have a big whales who we going to be selling to yeah yeah yeah if no one is buying it probably it's not a proper market and then last one I think you should enjoy what you're doing and but if the all of the things piled up you're in a good time you're winning you're in good time you're winning and that's the high level approach of looking at it i agree with you why do you think the businesses fail failed number one reason I think people plan too much and don't take action okay so too much planning they're trying to have the perfect product so they fall in love with their product and not their customer so I would say they just don't understand their ideal customer profile the ICP you know creating a great product and being in love with your product is one thing but creating a great business is a whole different thing you have to understand your customer base like you said the market the potential and the customer is not buying you have to be oh got to change my product to fit the market correct it's if you don't have the product market fit your business will fail and I think a lot of people just don't know how to let go of that right and how do you find out if the if the customer is liking your product that's a great question i mean if people are buying AB test that's why I do the online marketing and do it myself at the beginning and go in and you have to pivot along the way to understand it's really pain right so if you have people with a certain problem or pain you're there to solve that solution right we are entrepreneurs i think we're just problem solvers that's it that's what it is you're problem solvers and then I think the other thing my experience and just talking to people that have had hail businesses even myself at the beginning um I would say you know not understanding what a $10 an hour task is and $1,000 an hour task is not delegating not delegating yeah so they will do they don't understand the difference of what their time should be invested in correct you know what I You got to understand what you should be delegating that's worth 10 bucks an hour 12 bucks an hour compared to something that's worth $1,000 an hour i think those are two main things that come to mind what about you what do you think i think that businesses fail as you say just said like they fall in love with product i 100% agree with that they just try they don't analyze the market they try to go against the wave against the market if the market is falling like don't like better just choose another wave it's not growing it's too small and you don't have advantage from my experience the last thing I would say as well just to kind of add to that is they don't know their numbers they think they're making money when they're not i know I was there yeah you know what I mean and you just think you're making all this money but in reality you're actually not profitable so some people can if you don't have your financials down uh specifically even financial modeling if you have the opportunity you can you know outsource that for very uh little you actually knowing your numbers is extremely important i think in the different stage of the uh business entrepreneurship they face different problems like when in the beginning you are still in the field now at that moment it's all about figuring out your product and your value proposition right like that one is number one and number two stage is now you're going to have to exit the field you cannot be on the field because if you are keep going back to the field you're killing your organization you're killing the business like your job is not to sell or to deliver to install or to fix your job is actually to manage the business to actually have work on the strategies on tactics yeah it's like now you now you know you have to know your numbers you have to know your marketing metrics your funnel is working or not you have to know your P&L yes you have to know your like you have to pay people on time you have to do the budgeting and planning and all that so yeah and I think when we say hey the first thing you should do is sales and marketing even I just said that it's like ignore if people just don't actually focus till it's down the road on their financials you can do that from down day one in parallel right it's like yes that that that's the bloodline of the company but to see the vitals of the company and your finances because at the end whenever we start the business we start the business as a uh entrepreneurs visionaries as an investor yes we invest in ourselves we hire ourselves to actually execute the strategy which came up to our mind like to actually do that three-ear plan five year plan then actually you hire yourself you hire the team you motivate them you make them to trust and believe and go after you so actually you can execute the strategy and plan or three years or five years exactly and things change afterwards right as you grow transforms your vision you get more excited you want to do more you know what I mean and later on what I understood is it's not about like doing the being a bass on something not be being a me best on marketing being a bass on sales being a best on installing because you can hire those people someone is going to have to be in your organization who does that better than you because your job is actually kind of as a leader to manage and actually work on the strategy and guide mold that all together mold that and have the vision and make sure you're moving a long ways serving the values and the vision of the company right if you would like to stay on the top of the home service business please subscribe and follow actually that's why we actually came up with a new program uh we have in our organization we help other entrepreneurs to deploy uh to integrate financial planning great yeah we we actually help them to actually understand the P&L like what is revenue what is the cost of goods sold what is the gross profit what should be the spend on marketing or sale like we basically put them on the chart of accounts and actually teach them how that works because most of the people I think uh you can get to 1 million uh with just calculating your cash flow uh but you won't be able to grow from that million to five or 10 or further or if you grow you're going to make a problem mistake because you're not understanding your senior numbers because you're going to have to it's not about now knowing just the unit economy itself the microeconomy it's about understanding the microeconomy itself the whole thing and if your numbers are working if your ROS is correct if you're spending in proper places 100% another thing I would say as well for that question is the team members you have in your team can cost you a lot of money if you have the wrong team players for the culture so you believe in vision mission core values and non-negotiables absolutely it's not just worth out there right no no absolutely and you got to kind of live it yourself and and and and you got to make sure everybody you know a lot of people talk about loyalty but it's really being loyal to your values right as an organization instead of loyal to me loyal to me even me I got to be loyal to the values of the business you know what I mean and that's that's that's extremely important no you have to stick to your vision you have to stick to your mission and the core values i think it's like a DNA of organization and non-negotiables like it's like you you should not allow anyone to break them right like yes I think that's that's extremely important for sure we are completely fully virtual organization everyone works from home and uh before co we used to work from office and how's the business been since what's what's the is it bigger better yeah it's it's bigger and better uh better alignment in organization yes because before we had three offices office in LA office in Ukraine and Kharkov and office in Philippines and we had like probably 50 people on each right but they all kind of in one organizational structure but they still pull to their own tribes and that was kind of breaking the organization itself yeah yeah yeah so so when we actually before I was pushing them to come and I was coming even during the co myself as a leader to show them an example like we're on home services very essential let's actually go through but eventually I understood like you know what let's actually I stopped fighting uh with the time I let everybody go home and work from remote and actually it became better were you there was obviously a concern at the beginning right correct it was a concern be in the beginning it was a huge concern in the beginning but nowadays We are working everyone works from uh remote from home they probably traveling like someone in Aspen another one in Hawaii other one is basically Bali maybe Bali because when that office uh was closed down in Ukraine because of the war they basically splatter uh they basically move out from the country all over the place wow and they can basically work uh it was unfortunate but it can they can work remotely everywhere now and we are hiring and when you're have a global virtual organization you have a bigger talent pool way more because then you have flexibility you have flexibility and you're not depending in the local one region I'm somebody who was raised in organization of being in the office getting a part of that culture you know the physical of everybody being there and whatn not the energy and everything so it's like it's really interesting to see and I've always been a believer like no no you need an office you know and uh but you know how is the culture of being in a digital space like you know when you like you were saying when people when you do have an office and you get a little bit big I dealt with like some bureaucracy and you know problems start happening internally I think like digitally you probably wouldn't have the same issues right no digital you don't have the issue like the the the thing is if your if your processes are not documented you're going to have a hard time of onboarding people that's right so but we have a really good detailed onboarding process When someone comes in we already have a gun chart with like 50 different things they have to go through when and all of the documents are there the trainings are there they immediately get onboarded right like we can onboard offboard someone like onboard someone within a months less than a month and offboard someone like within a week having a digital team big team like the way you've done you know uh you technology the software you're using is extremely important would you say yeah definitely yeah the technology is really important and if you can put those processes together and uh it means you can automate it the call center can be automated all of the process can be automated it can be efficient like actually we have in company a rule now um they can purchase unlimited amount of subscriptions on AI and automation as long as it's job related we push everyone like you don't have to ask just go buy sign up and use the res company resources and utilize it but once a month we're going to be doing audit from the controller accounting blog making sure they utilizing it using it and they can actually report how it's helping their job and we don't want to hire anyone who doesn't use uh who doesn't know how to use AI yeah yeah it's the future you're not going to lose the job because of AI you're going to lose a job because someone who knows how to use AI that's it yes yes 100% also the ones who are leveraging using it it's going to create EU to be able to scale with no cost increase right where you are using AI at the moment oh that's a great question so I mean AI we started working with AI to uh start to do a lot of our process customer service roles on the back end so in the home service space a lot of calls come in for service of course you do an install something happens and every single time somebody picks up the phone you're paying for that right and a lot of these problems are very uh consistent like they're the same type of issues so my equipment's not working it's you know uh so we started putting in we built our own app we used AI to uh uh we put in all the different uh you know things that customer service reps were doing we documented it all and built a cadence for it and you know customer instead of having them uh call in we redirect them to an AI messaging Yeah and they would just book the appointment for them hence eliminating time for for service you know and saving yeah yeah that's interesting how about yourself we are basically implemented AI coach nice uh every single ticket and call is basically listened analyzed by AI and AI scoring the agents and actually pointing it out to the the mistakes they're doing improving it and uh we are doing the same thing for uh on the distributions on the ticket distribution uh and uh job distribution also goes through AI by the scores uh the basically the best technician gets the best job to the best customer as long as it scores yes i believe you took uh the Harvard OPM program right like can you tell me more about that does it is it really worth how much it was it cost and is it really worth spending that kind of money what did you learn from it that's a phenomenal program by the way the owner's president's management program uh I was recommended uh to it by my partner who actually took the year before me course and uh um I think when you get to a certain uh you know level of in business and you're making a certain amount of money and can afford to I think you should always afford to invest in yourselves in different stages whether it be Harvard I've done the Tony Robbins and a different bunch of different uh uh self-growth things but you know Harvard specifically it's uh there's it's a it's a very very unique experience right so you go there for 3 weeks uh you actually have to check out completely out of your business so the first thing for me beyond Harvard itself being there and like learning and everything that I got out of the experience there uh it's a litmus test to getting away from your business because you're not you don't have time to be in your business they give you 50 cases you know what I mean so you have to like read all these case studies and uh you have all these people you're living with them you're do you're reviewing the cases with them it's a lot of lot of time that you have to check out of your business and they prepare you for that so to limit that you know hey can I get away from my business for 3 weeks and a lot of people are like hard to do that right it makes you uncomfortable for that because a lot of business owners you know they want to check in and see how everything's going and that letting grow letting go to grow happens and then you get to come back to your business and see how bad it did you like oh my goodness you know uh but it tells you what you need to work on too right so what happened to the business when you came back the first time I went you know we we definitely had uh little bit of some scares but they did they held it together so it was I was proud you know they definitely held it together and I think it's just you know giving them the time to do that you know you might you might do that for two three days and like oh and something bad happens but sometimes you need it's a it's a little bit of a shift they might rely on you for certain things you know leadership grows i think they take responsibility right yeah i think guys everybody kind of relaxes and then puts their you know socks up and takes takes takes lead afterwards and somebody usually does that shines in the moment you know on the social side incredible you're dealing with business owners from all over the world so about have almost 200 people a part of your cohort that you're with and these are owners from all different walks of life and usually there's about 20 unicorns so meaning special highlevel unicorns that we probably will see on Forbes and you know do things and you get to learn from all these people so you know the perspective that you get the the networking that you get to make and the fun that you get to have with these people that you know it's it's incredible then you get what diploma so you become a Harvard alumni once you finish it that's right uh and uh don't actually get a diploma and like I said they have a bunch of courses uh OPM is their famous one yeah i think it's like final one right yeah it's like the famous one a lot of people when you're doing a lot of great things you know go and I I recommend that you should go any any programs you've done in your in your experience that uh you'd recommend yeah yeah i did uh different programs one of them is from my mentor Larry Janetski Contractor Nation uh it was two-year program i used to go like two days every uh two months nice uh you get to meet with other contractors in the same room i learned a lot i learned a lot it was a really good program and I think they now they became a more of a digital nice I was part of a lot of masterminds another one was Harvard management school as well uh that's where you'll really learn about difference between uh the founder and the business owner and the CEO they actually do two different hats wow it's not the same yes it was how to properly exit the organization properly delegating your fun the functions to the CEO so that was kind of my question what I was looking for for a long time because before I did EOS interpreter organization system I did a scalable scaling up um then I was part of Epic um and I did uh platform review uh Brandon Dawson i think that cost like $190,000 wow is it really worth $190,000 i don't think so right yeah it's too much of a branding they have i think I don't think so based on where these how much impact that they've had did they justify selling it's you know charging that much because we we were already advanced enough we already had all of the the P&Ls and the marketing strategies regional strategy and everything else they couldn't add more value so then probably it adds a lot of value for others but not to us and plus we are not a brick and mortal company we are more tech enabled company and it's different animal right so but uh my education wise was just going four years in backbistan it was university world economy diplomacy international economy that was my degree before I came here and started doing all kind of work what was your educational thing uh so I went to university for businessman I didn't end up finishing like 18 you grow up in Canada yeah Canada water I was born in Saudi Arabia came but I came to the US when I was four years old and then from there stayed here for about I don't know people move out from Saudi Arabia I mean I wasn't a part of the oil family or anything like that you know just a humble beginnings went to school and I would say when you moved to US I mean Canada uh when I was four years old four years old yeah I moved to Canada I was four years old water and was able to uh uh get into like like I said from four to 18 have four brothers just humble beginnings government housing and everything and after my first year of university was after the 2008 8 crash my parents had lost their jobs and then I was able to get into sales when did you get to the sales uh 2009 and how old you were 18 18 tell me how you how did you start your that thing so I was literally 18 looking for a summer job to help out at the household mom and dad lost their jobs in the many in the car manufacturing space cuz 2008 everybody's you know laid off all the everybody right so got this job in sales it was an energy retailing company uh and you know started in door too and it shaped my knowledge of sales so you started from door door to door door to door 100% commission you know first check was $18 but I stuck it out because the people in the you know with me some people were making $2,000 in a week and I was 18 it took me about 3 months to get my learning curve and you know stick it out and once I once I knew what I was doing uh I quickly became one of the top sales people in North America within that organization and uh got promoted became a manager had 30 sales guys yeah working working for me and my team and you know I got some awards there got to travel to Rome England uh you know was on a bunch of leadership summits really young in my life like 18 19 they would take us to leadership summits teach us about uh you know uh like just just to be future leaders and things that I didn't know put us out of our comfort zone and the biggest thing for me that like you know I used to work six seven days a week literally for years straight so and I got used to doing that so I started to have a totally different work ethic than most people uh which helped out in business later on because a lot of people they don't realize you know the hours are very important and I think a lot of entrepreneurs out there they want to start but if you really want to start a business just start it on the evenings and the weekends if that's not for you then entrepreneurship is not really for you then it's a good test you can have a full-time job and at the same time and have a side hustle on the on the weekends and the evenings yeah and then you're pushing yourself to get used to working those hours that's very true yeah and you're kind of at the same time you're keeping the company hours and your own and And you you are actually starting your own business on your own time yeah absolutely 100% yeah from there I ended up going into the HVAC space as a sales agency it was a whole different type of program um but the last company had taught me how to sell yeah and and there was changes along the way we had to sell different programs products and we we you know they taught us all that and then when I came to sales agency uh there wasn't as much structure in this HVAC company that I worked for there so we had to kind of figure it out ourselves on the whole side from recruiting selling our own office but I made a lot more money at a very young age and was able to kind of learn and understand how to build my own business you know what I mean uh which kind of groomed me for opening up my first organization on the HVAC side which was in Quebec so it's I think it's the way you look at the you know a lot of people are looking at how do I get more customers you know I think you got to know who your customer is first yeah you know what I mean where you were at you know you're a platform your customer is going to be different than me as a HVAC guy that's that's running out of my truck you know my customer or their customer they they may think for them is getting more customers maybe you're their customer they need somebody that they can get consistent work from correct you know what I mean yeah who pays consumer pays right as long as you deliver good service with high NPS score like customer obsession with no recalls uh how you deliver it it doesn't matter my one of my biggest mistakes was I was competing too much too long like like nowadays I I understood the partnership is everything like how to actually how can we utilize your resources and how can you utilize my resources like how can we utilize each other's resources that's the key yes I agree with you and it's a A lot of times you know when you look at the business as partnerships you know you you might want to do it yourself because you're doing so well and you think you know you know what you're doing there's a time where partnerships extremely matter and are the difference from going from you know eight figures to nine figures right uh definitely agree with you seven figures to eight figures whatever it might be but yeah you got to you got to definitely partnerships are extremely important shared resources and how you view the business is for sure what is really the end goal i don't think it's definitely one sizefits-all but yeah for sure like platforms are out there now because of technology and they're they have the tech setup and you know the you know the boots on ground are out there as well and I think they should be relying on the platforms or working to partner up with the platforms like you're saying yeah because platforms already have a best practice they already have the SOPs and digitalization everything do you believe in uh growing organically uh or you believe in growing through M&A through mergers acquisitions through buying companies i don't have experience through growing through M&A yeah we were in the process of you know doing a raise uh about a year and a half ago but um I do have experience of you know when I started in the home service space I was a huge believer in growing organically even my salespeople they were not allowed to be from the same industry those were one of my non-negotiables got it so I had to bring in people with a fresh mind that don't don't understand they they could be the top salesperson and they would come to us and be like "Hey yeah I'm the top salesperson at this company and they think that they're going to get the job and that's why they wouldn't get the job you got a clean slate and you do things a certain way." It's much easier to teach somebody that doesn't have preconceived you know notions or anything like that in the market right yeah what about the M&A so so you would not do the M&A you would just grow organically basically yeah at the beginning I think there's a time to do M&A you know it kind of comes back to what you were saying i think if you have a platform that can get M&A's you know you're you're and you have the resources in place to get a lot of these smaller companies that are uh able to fulfill i think that's a that's a great way as well yeah I think M&A can solve any business problems it can solve your talent problem it can solve your revenue problems it can solve your like eBay to net profit problems optimization problems it can pro solve SOP problems depending on who you hire so I think M&A is if the airplane has a two engines uh the one engine is organic and the second engine is M&A so like I think the company once you get to certain size of course once you become a platform company I think now you should actually do the tuck in acquisitions i will yeah 100% because people start to think about we started think about like you know M&As but you know using that same money to acquire a company or putting it into your business to expand what's your what do you think about that because the the other area is like if I go acquire a company that's $23 million uh what could I do with $23 million in expansion expanding into different markets yeah but when you're buying a company for 23 million you're not really coming up with two three million you're only coming up as two 300,000 that's right because the rest you can leverage bank and financing and everything else right and uh it's I think that acquiring a company is not just about buying a IITA and not just buying about revenue it's you have to do the strategic uh acquisition it has to properly fit cultural fit uh the revenue fit the model everything else it's like you have to be really cautious when is the right time to do that when is the right time like what company you're buying are you buying a proper what's going to happen to the owner when they exit if it's going to fall apart or not like what about you and I for your business what when when when do you know it's like okay it's the time for me to start to acquire companies is like how do you how did you know that for yourself uh in order to acquire a company the founder or the business owner should free up his time so you should delegate operation to director president or CEO so you're not running day-to-day operations now you're actually wearing M&A hat and actually focusing on M&A because it's another full-time job so like you have to do deal sourcing you have to negotiations and after that it's it's another part is actually integrating right like you have to properly integrate to the organization as well yes it's also it's a really important part so uh if you even if you do like one or two acquisitions uh like you have to become a platform first in order to start actually switching to the to the acquisition mode and you have to have all of the systems in place uh because you should already know on strategically how you going to improve that business got it yeah if the business is better than us I will be cautious of buying it because I'm afraid that I'm going to make it worse mhm so and when you are acquiring a company you right away you can increase their pay 10 20% all the people so you can align with normally you don't want to change the culture you don't want to change anything for 6 months or year like you want to keep everything in the same order and probably you can even give them like equity or something uh depending if they want to do that and then when you're buying a company not just buying it for the revenue or ITA uh it has to be really strategic buy uh like currently we are looking for buying companies in appliance repair in air conditioning uh in electrical uh the plumbing uh air duct cleaning hensmen uh home cleaning even pest control they have to be kind of in the SoCal or California appliance repair we can buy it in anywhere in nation um electrical and HR also probably but they have to be kind of a similar model uh like us uh more of a uh service based more instead of like sales organizations like yours yeah yeah absolutely yeah because we we uh we kind of my my management team can manage it better uh your experience is in the fulfillment side correct correct yes and uh at the same time we are actually buying uh vertical integrated company we are looking to buy uh a marketing agency who's is doing like 5 million to 10 million topline uh maybe like a half a million a million or maybe 2 million iita uh who can who actually serving home service companies who has the expertise of search engine optimization PPC like Facebook ads and all entire sales team and operation uh the website design this way you can when you merge that agency to your own agency like you basically get like everything becomes much better yeah yeah absolutely and you know when they're on a platform like yours the more you acquire the more work they have yes yes you know what I mean correct it's great private equity being the biggest one it's been it's been hot right now right the HVAC millionaires and everything that are happening in the plumbing correct there it's been a hot space i remember I went to a service titan event about a few years ago and I got to meet some of the uh uh players in in in the M&A space and you know some people that successfully exited for a lot of money and uh you know the private equity companies were there teaching all the business owners what they have to have ready to be able to get sold to a private equity company yeah we are currently helping out to a lot of private equity companies to even if they don't fit to our criteria if they already doing five to 10 million plus all the way to $100 million um we can actually help them to get acquired to 9 to 12 plus X of the EBITS yeah because there's a lot of little things that you can do correct to make sure your multiple is high yeah and a lot of companies you know like uh a lot of companies won't sell if the revenue mix is different the companies would only sell if you're only doing residential or commercial but if you're doing separate they would only accept like 80% residential 20% commercial or other way around uh but if you're doing more than 20% uh mix like 50/50 that company will never sell interesting the only way to sell that company is you have to divide it under two separate companies you have to put it to separate management and then you have to sell this piece to the commercial whatever private equity other piece to the residential private equity rollup companies that's the only way and and we can help to do that thing as well because we just basically come and implement business operation system to both sides just trying to play the both games is a main problem the two different markets two different risks two different ways of generating correct yeah it's a business process are different right like on the residential you do it through marketing and sales on the commercial you do it through the partnership to relationships yes that's right it's completely different business process model for sure yeah yeah earlier you separate earlier you stop doing one so are your advice to business owners that are in that bracket of the 10 million plus and maybe they have you know multiple channels of uh commercial residential to separate them as different entities is that what you were saying correct yes separate as a separate entities and they try to sell those companies separately so you can sell separately residential you can sell commercial and businesses won't sell the ones are doing development yeah I was just going to ask that next new development like here yeah new development companies won't sell well it's because it's not predictable correct that's right yeah yeah it's not predictable you are basically working as a subcontractor to somebody else to GC that's right that's right it's just that's a cash generating business cash generation business that's it based on market condition there's too many things that are variables yes correct would you that wouldn't that just be a cash generating company within residential for instance or do you would say hey separate that too you should separate because you won't be able to sell you can keep it for yourself because whenever you're going to be offering a business you're going to say like I have 50% or 70% residential 30% 50% commercial I mean uh like development they're going to just remove that development as a trash they won't even it's not going to affect your EIA or anything correct it won't affect your revenue it won't affect your interesting it's useless it's hard to scale zoo it's a much easier to scale a farm how you deal with uh personal efficiency uh dealing about your goals and not the burnout you know the first things first for me is I would say my routine you know and routine for me means my health you know I think the biggest thing my foundation of having high efficient days uh is actually sleeping on time I sleep how many hours you sleep so I sleep about 7 8 hours you know but I sleep early and I wake up really early so I'm What time you go to sleep i'm sleeping around 9 to 10 p.m every day nice yeah yeah yeah and I'm up at 5:00 a.m my days are usually starting early and then you know getting the sleep that I need cuz I think like when you have that you can go for a very long time so my foundation is always built around sleeping on time cuz you know waking up early is actually not what I think a lot of people would try to just wake up at a certain time but it's having efficient sleep is the key and that's what changes for everybody everybody's willing to go out to the bar this and that and everything and I think when I'm at optimal I believe it's sleep is my foundation first i completely agree with you about the sleep uh I I I used to uh I didn't know before um I used to think it's not that important i could I could live up with like four or five hours of sleep uh but lately I start understanding and I actually even got this O-ring to to actually measure my sleep and quality of the sleeps like it it makes a big difference when you have enough sleep i completely agree what else you know health as a whole sleep how you eat when you eat all that stuff i think being very self-aware of all that you can have optimal energy throughout the day and not burn out you know what I mean uh you know and and then there's things that help your you know having high energy during the day for me it's coffee drink a lot of coffee and everything the second thing is what I would do for me is I would blitz three months i do like three month blitzes and then take time with family mhm so I would do a lot of 3-month blitzes where I'd work a lot of hours you know and put in a lot of work sometimes six seven every single day for 3 months and then spend that quality time with the family within my first year of business I was out there every single day 7 days a week non-stop you know but what ended up happening is you know by year two year three found myself having a lot more time but do you know that in in the in when your organization and structure changes later it's about not being seven days a week and being active kind of letting it go now being more efficient and actually having people to take those roles on right and then this is where you start to focus on the projects correct and other you know strategical things like and I'm sure I think for you what my question would be is like you're definitely I saw you on Forbes on time management you're probably somebody that you know I can learn from on time management so let me ask you how are you managing your time when you started the business home alliance uh how are you managing your time today you're right like when when when you are on the field of course like I was like 24/7 up right like I would basically start my work at uh 6:00 a.m and I would come back home like 12 like non-stop uh I never really took even break like when I was starting my first business and later on uh uh I start kind of managing time differently basically what I do is uh I I start making a strategic plans now like for 3 years 5 years or a year then I break it down to quarterly targets i have a kind of a whiteboard session what I want to achieve uh and after that I have a monthly uh plans um and I kind of measure my time focus and then I have weekly every week I sit myself i ask you a question how how often are you measuring your time focus like you're doing that daily or weekly i'm measuring it daily interesting at the end of the day uh it I I use the Google I use a Google insights already yes and on the weekly basis I make my plan for the next week i have for each of my focus I have dedicated time as a CEO of home alliance I want to allocate let's say 10 hours a week and as a mergers acquisition and fundraising I want to allocate 10 or 20 hours on the partnership I want to allocate 10 hours on the bisdev I want to allocate like 10 20 hours on uh uh as a founder uh I want to allocate 10 hours as a personal brand whatever we are doing is another like 10 hours a week right something like that like or whatever the hours like I have like assigned already plans for a quarter how much time I want to allocate then on the weekly basis those things has to kind of align with the time on the weekly basis and on the daily basis before I go to sleep I look at my tomorrow calendar and how they kind of plan and my chief of staff helps me to uh optimize like if it's internal meetings uh uh they have to only book at afternoon before noon like in the morning before noon I should be actually going after uh strategic the M&A or fundraising like when I want to kind of go and get but if someone wants to come and get from me they have to wait an afternoon basically yeah you got to go out your calendar and book it yeah defense and offense right like if I if I'm kind of if it's defensive it goes afternoon if it's offense goes to in the morning when you're full fully energized yeah it makes sense and then not to get burned out your your mindset and your plans and and uh uh I think that if if you're too comfortable I think you don't have enough big plants I guess right your surroundings maybe when you're growing organization are you looking for like salespeople who are you looking for now definitely need a salesforce uh definitely need to be able to partner with a platform like yourself you know uh and you need technicians you know what I mean fulfillment you need to be able to fulfillment to be able to scale and grow so basically you're looking for licensed contractors correct who can deliver who can actually take over a lot of jobs right absolutely and then even sales agencies and sales units right now yeah because door lockers maybe both door knockers and closers in general where you know we're going to be able to provide leads uh appointments that are already set that are highly qualified and consistently get them in houses more than what they're getting into now if they're in this space and even people that are you know not even have never done sales before so you can basically teach anyone absolutely to sales right like how much average saleserson makes it's it really ranges but in this in this industry you can make quite a bit of money let's talk solar which is the space I'm in you're talking about anywhere from 50k in the low end and you got some sales closers highend making you know upwards of 3 400,000 a year there are top closers what I hear making in the seven figures you know that I've met personally and uh uh it's definitely doable because of the high ticket item it is in the solar space but like I said I am definitely looking for def sales units and sales closers or even people that want to get into sales so basically we need the salesforce we need the production installing for the HVAC right for home services and the plumbing probably that's right who can actually install those uh efficiencies that's right guys if you any of you uh are in the industry you want to become a salesperson you want to join the team uh or you have you are licensed contractor in HVAC uh you would like to kind of join the production and get unlimited amount of jobs coming in or you're a plumber who can install those efficient system water heaters uh comment below or follow we're going to be sharing a link uh where you can actually like send your application or your contact we're going to be contacting you and we're going to be onboarding you absolutely thanks [Music] Mo i really appreciate your time to coming and sharing your experience absolutely about how to build uh and scale uh home service organization anytime appreciate you having me here definitely definitely a really really insightful inspiring conversation definitely i got to learn a lot from you about you and about your business and how you think and I believe you're going to be able to grow this organization like within next 3 5 years I think we're going to be seeing a next founder next unic in the seller industry that's the plan that's the plan right yeah I look forward to it and it's it's you know it's fun being in America now in United States and you know really happy I met you at that mastermind yeah cuz now we're here right yeah it's it's a mastermind's other place where to really meet and and be great people that's right that's right and thank you they appreciate it appreciate it guys thanks for watching this video if you like the video or have comments please comment below let's have the conversation going about how to building a successful home service business in US or anywhere in the world make sure to subscribe and follow and watch the next