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- [00:05]
Josh
Wake up. Your competition is asleep. It's you against the world. And if you want to win, we need to get a few things straight. Your business is a mental war. Your success is a mental war. And making money is a game. And the game of money starts in your mind. This podcast exists to help you weaponize your brain through advanced marketing mindset and money concepts. To have what others don't, you need to know what others won't. Your future fortune awaits. Welcome to the War Plan Podcast. Foreign welcome back to the War Plan Podcast. How the heck are you? I have a special treat for you right before the new year. Can you believe it? I got Brian Hegarty to join me. We're going to have a conversation that's going to challenge you and going to help you make a lot more money. Brian has been in the industry for over 30 years. He has a pressure cleaning business on the east coast and he's a legend. What's interesting though, is when I met Brian, it wasn't that long ago. I mean, less than 10 years ago, he was just a typical small business owner doing several hundred thousand a year, making a living, frustrated at how hard it was. Today, that's not the case. This guy is going to make you crack up and he's going to call you out. Brian, how we doing? How's New Jersey?
- [01:16]
Brian Hegarty
Great, Josh, thank you for the intro. That makes me feel important.
- [01:20]
Josh
You are, you're. You're a gentleman and a scholar. What I think is interesting is most people just call.
- [01:25]
Brian Hegarty
Most people just call me the old guy.
- [01:27]
Josh
The old guy? No, man. 80 is the new 60s. 60s is the new 40. That's what I've been hearing.
- [01:33]
Brian Hegarty
All right, cool.
- [01:36]
Josh
With technology, some people, I think are going to live to be 120, 110. I mean, things are crazy now. But what I think is interesting is your origin story. So you're been entrepreneurial, been involved in lots of things. I know you owned gas stations back in the day, and then you got into pressure cleaning. And you always did well. You always made a living doing it. But there's some major shifts that happen for you. I don't know what year, maybe 2016 until now, maybe the last eight years. You have a totally different company now. I mean, I know you're a private person, but when you're doing half a million dollar months with 30% net profit, that is hard to believe for some people. When you're spraying water on a house. How did you get your company to that level?
- [02:16]
Brian Hegarty
It was an interesting thing. And actually, you were a really, really big motivator in that. I mean I met you and that's when things took off. And that was when you had the, I believe it was window wealth is what it was. And it was like little blue USB key. I mean I still literally, I have that key and still, I still literally own that key. And in fact, hang on one second. It's here. It is, it's right here.
- [02:43]
Josh
No way.
- [02:44]
Brian Hegarty
I told you I have it. This is it. What says right here Window Wealth.
- [02:48]
Josh
Window Wells. Yes. Yeah, that was my first kind of information product. You know, I had been helping people for free and I finally was like, you know what, I'm gonna write like an ebook and make a couple videos. And yeah, that goes way back. I mean that was, that was all your systems.
- [03:03]
Brian Hegarty
And you know, I got them and I looked at it and I thought, you know, I can do this. Josh did it. He grew his company to, you know, I think it was three quarters of a million. And then you sold it and you moved to Costa Rica and I thought, wow, I didn't even know you could grow a company to three quarters of a million. I mean now we do multi millions. I mean it's like I think back to three quarters of a million. Like it was nothing, you know, like it was yesterday. And I'm not not bragging but I mean it was like there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that happen between 400,000 and multi millions. Like a lot of things that happen and you have to get really, really organized about doing it. And one of the things that was a, like a huge catalyst for me was you. Brandon Vaughn, Automake Gross Sell just Howard Partridge was very instrumental in it. You know, there was like a lot of people that I, I got involved with that. Just new systems, new business. And when I started doing that and applying these systems and creating them for my company, like we have, we have a complete video training program. And I don't mean just like, you know, five videos. I'm talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos for every single thing that you can do in this company. From a first, from a first year technician just learning stuff to a second year technician who's going to be a lead guy who's, who needs to know how to manage people now to assistant operations managers who are now managing like four people each and then to operations manager who's managing 12 people, to the general manager, to the office manager, to the staff that works in the office, to the sales team, like how to Sell marketing, like every single thing you can imagine. We have a system for it now and it's all video. So we just going to move somebody up. Like I have two guys that are getting moved up this year. I sign in the program, they're going to do it. We're closed in the winter, so they're doing it over the winter. They're coming down to Florida because I live down there in the winter. They're coming down to Florida. We're going to do one on one training for a week. I mean we're going to get some fishing in, go to Key west and hang out and go to the beach and stuff. But you know, we're going to get the training in and when they go to do their thing next year, I mean I don't have to talk to them about it. They're, they're going to know how to do it.
- [05:07]
Josh
Yeah. And it's a, it's a heavy lift to create all that stuff though. I mean it, it's a beast of a, of a thing. What I'm curious about is if I. Tell me if you disagree with this, but if I hand everything that someone needs to, to build a multi million dollar business, I put it in a binder, I hand it to them. Let's just pretend that that existed.
- [05:29]
Brian Hegarty
Okay.
- [05:30]
Josh
Still, you know, 8 out of 10 people won't do it.
- [05:33]
Brian Hegarty
No, I think it's more than that. Yeah.
- [05:35]
Josh
Whatever the number nine and a half.
- [05:36]
Brian Hegarty
Or nine and three quarters out of ten or nothing.
- [05:38]
Josh
Yeah. But the point being is information alone isn't enough. So you were presented with information and you took and ran with it. One thing that fascinates me is what's going on in people's heads that really is the driver of success or the thing that's holding them back. I don't know that I'm putting you on the spot, but do you agree with that? It's between the ears. And what is it about you that's, I don't know, different that allows you to take action like that?
- [06:04]
Brian Hegarty
I like, I, I'm one of seven kids and, and you know, like when you grow up in a family like that, you learn how to negotiate very early because, you know there's one television in the house. This is back in the 70s and the 60s. You know, there's one TV in the house and there's one phone in the house and you know, there's one front seat in the car and there's seven kids and everybody wants to ride in the front seat, you know, and of course, we didn't have seatbelts. And my parents both smoked when they drove. You know, like, what the hell? The good old days. But, you know, I. I think I always had this. This. This ability to earn money myself. And that came from my. My dad. And my dad was. He was a real hardworking guy. He was a partner in equipment rental company. So they rented out, like, office trailers and compactors, and, you know, you need a steamroller. They had one. You know, they need a bucket, whatever, jackhammers, you know, like all kinds of stuff. Like an equipment rental place before there was. And he. You know, when I was younger, I said to him, I'll never forget this. I was like, dad, can I borrow five bucks? I want to go to movies with my friends. And he said, listen, take this gas can take the lawnmower, go down to Mr. Ring's house. He lived, like, four houses down. Knock on his door and tell him, you'll cut his grass for 10 bucks. So I went down there, rang the doorbell, had my lawnmower right on his front sidewalk, And I said, Mr. Ring, I want to cut your grass for $10. And he said, okay. And then come back and do it every week. And I was like, wow, that was a quick sale. So every. Every week, I mean, I did that. And then my brother had a newspaper route that he didn't want to do anymore. And I took his newspaper roof from, like, 20, it was right 17 or 18 people to 140. And I had other kids in the neighborhood helping me deliver the papers because we had that many, you know. So I always. And I. I started painting houses before I even had a car. This was funny. I bought a van, and I was only like, 16. I couldn't even drive it. I bought a van. My mother would put her bicycle in the back of the van and then take me to the paint store. And we'd get all the paint and everything that we needed. And I bought an airless sprayer, and we would bring it over to the house that we were going to paint for the summer. And my mom would ride her bike home. So I'd get a job in my neighborhood from, like, one of my newspaper customers to paint their house. And we'd paint their house, and I got the same guys that were delivering newspapers to help me paint. So I always. I always hustled. I always just wanted to do that. But I was always the doer guy. Like, I always had my hands in it. And. And so that was what the biggest thing that was holding me back Was I always had to be the guy that did it, like did the thing. And what I found out when I, when I got to a certain point, which was when I got to like around 500, is that you can't be the guy in the field and then come home and answer the phones and do the sales and, and then, you know, on Saturday and Sunday night go or go do sales and then manage the employees and fix the trucks and do it. You just can't do it all. And it was breaking me. It was really breaking me. I mean, I, I remember sitting on my couch one night and I was just crying. I just, I mean, like, literally had tears coming from my eyes. I was physically and mentally exhausted for my business. My employees were driving me crazy. They would come to work, they'd come to work high, they'd smash up my trucks, they leave them a mess, you know, like it was just a disaster. And I actually contemplated like closing up and doing something else. And that's when I met you. I was like, right around that time and I was like, I got to find a way out of this. And I met you and we talked about automation, we talked about getting out of the truck. That's like the biggest step. Like get out of the truck, like right away. And don't get out of the truck so you can sit on your couch. Get out of the truck so you could be the driver in your business. Like you got to really get out and drive. So the normal course of events would be to get yourself off the truck so you're not pulling the trigger anymore. In our industry, in other industries it might be like cutting the grass or, you know, washing the window or whatever it is that you do, but to get, to get out of there. And then the normal progression from that is you end up being the sales guy. And so now you're out just doing the sales and then you're selling the jobs and then the other guys are doing the jobs. And that's like your roofing companies, that's like your, you know, the landscapers, the power wash guys are doing that. The trick is to get out of the sales position really fast and then get into managing your company. When I got out of the sales position and I stopped doing the sales, I think sales in a power washing industry is one of the most time consuming things you could possibly do. You spend less hours power washing than you would do selling. You have all that travel time to go visit all these people. You got all the phone calls at night to try to close all the Deals, you're working on the weekends, you're doing all this kind of stuff. And you know, if you power wash, you just go out, you'll go to work at 8 and come home at 4, go to the gym. That's it. There's no, there's nothing to do afterwards. I think the highest stress job and, and, and the pay is relative to this. But the highest stress job in my company is the sales team. And they, they do a really fantastic job there. We work on next day service and sometimes same day service, which is in our industry pretty much unheard of. Like, guys don't do that, but you go to like H vac or plumbing. Like my hot water heater broke. Oh yeah. We'll be there in a week to give you an estimate. That's not going to work. You know, like we, we're modeling after them. So like if you call to get a power washing estimate, we'll do your estimate in the morning, we'll wash your house in the afternoon.
- [11:28]
Josh
And I actually want to come back to that and spend a few minutes specifically breaking that down because that's very abnormal. But it's also why you can charge higher prices and stuff. One of the things I used to tell people is when you're systemizing your business, you have to pretend like you have no arms and no legs. Have you ever heard me say that? Over the years, but I have. Yeah. Was it harder for you to get off the truck and do that or was it harder for you to get out of sales?
- [11:53]
Brian Hegarty
It was harder to get out of sales because getting out of the truck was easy. I broke my wrist, skin. I couldn't work.
- [11:59]
Josh
Kind of made that decision for you.
- [12:01]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah, there it is. I got the scar right here.
- [12:03]
Josh
It's the place again. That, what a blessing though, in a way because you just had to figure it out, right?
- [12:08]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah. I whacked a tree at Wolf Creek down in Colorado out on a powder day. And I, I came back in the spring and I had my plate still in my wrist. I couldn't use my hand. And I was like, I gotta hire some guys. So I hired a couple of guys. They came in, I trained them. Like, you know, I went out with them and trained them. I, I was, I could still go places, you know, So I went there, I trained them. They, I trained them up. And then I would do the sales and they would do the work. And then I think I did sales and I was operations manager, the sales guy, the sales manager, marketing guy, and then the office manager probably for like, three years. And then I hired an office manager, and then I got out of doing the. The sales. That was hiring my first sales guy. What a mistake. Oh, my gosh. I didn't know anything about hiring a sales guy. This guy, he used his company credit card to go food shopping for his family and bought, like, steaks and lobster and all this. Yeah, like, this guy was, like, totally ripping me off. And I would see a receipt from Foodtown, and he was allowed to, like, bring cookies to property managers. Like, you know, go get a thing of cookies and drop it off at, like, you know, White Guard or whatever it was and. And drop them off. But I'm seeing all these bills from Foodtown, and I'm like, how come they seem like the dollar amount? Like, where's the receipt for this? What is in this? This 50 bucks. Like, that's a lot of cookies, you know? So I called the supermarket up and I said, hey, this credit card was used on this day to buy this stuff. I need a copy of the receipt. And they sent it to me. And I was like, whoa, we got a problem. I ended up firing the guy. And it. Oh, I had another guy that I hired the guy after him. He was a car salesman. And. And he used to use terms like, let's lock this deal down. Let's lock them up. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't lock up anybody, man. We just do business with us, you know? And I remember him saying to me, when I had. When I let him go, because I had him for, like, about a year, and his close rate was like, 47%. Average ticket was like, around 800 bucks. Right? And I. And I let him go. And he goes, really sorry you ever let me go. You'll never find anybody to do the job that I do. And the two guys that you hired to come in and work with me, they couldn't even shine my shoes. Okay, well, just fast forward. Ellen's got a 75% close rate with a 1200 ticket, and car has got a 71% close rate with a 1200 ticket. So obviously, he could be signing their shoes. It's like, you know, the close rates are really good because we have really good marketing, we have really good sales, and we've got really fast delivery. So they're going out and doing, like, you know, each, like, 10, 15 estimates a day. That's a lot of estimates. And a lot of people meet with. And they're closing deals for tomorrow. Because my technicians, they're like, I like to say like, they're like a pack of hungry dogs. You throw a steak on the ground, they just rip it up and then you got to throw another steak out there. And they, you give them work like two men crew, they go out, they'll be like 4,500 bucks, like one day, 4,500 bucks done. And I tell it to other guys in the industry and they're like, my guys can only do 2,000. And I'm like, well, two things. Your price is probably too low, your equipment is not what you really need, and it's difficult process for them to do it. And you're not paying a performance pay because if you pay performance pay, they're going to look and go, I can make 400 bucks today, or I could work by the hour and I make 200 bucks today. And I can still get out of here at the same time if I just hustle and get the job done right.
- [15:36]
Josh
Well, and your tax get paid really well. I think it's also interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about how because you're a seasonal business, you have two or three months off in the winter, but you use that as a positive, as a perk, as a benefit of the job. You know, they go skiing, they go fishing. It's. You use it in your recruiting as a positive, not a negative. Can you speak to that and tell us a little bit about how much they're making and how you do the performance pay?
- [15:58]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah, well, you know, I got into the power washing business because, well, I just roll it back to like a long time ago, like 1989. Right. I own my gas stations. They're 24, seven mobile gas stations in New Jersey. We don't have self serve, so you have to have attendance pumping gas in New Jersey. New Jersey and Oregon, I think are the only two states with no self service. And you know, it was very stressful doing that. But my father that year got skin cancer and he died. He was only 57 years old. And at the time I was 29. And I looked at that and I thought, whoa, wait a minute. Dad died at 57. Uncle Bill died at 59. Grandpa died at 63. Like you might only have like 30 years left. What are you doing working in this gas station 24, 7? You got to get out of here, man. So I put my gas station up for sale. I sold it and ironically I sold it the exact day my dad died. April 10, 1989. I closed on it. Oh yeah, I closed on it in the afternoon. My father passed away. He Was in hospice. He passed away that night and I didn't know what I was going to do. I took three months off. I got a bunch of money for my gas station. It took three months off. I had to power wash my deck to get it cleaned. I called my brother and asked him how to clean them and he's a contractor. He said, power wash it. There was no Home Depot. In 1990, I went and got a, a machine from ABC Rental. I power washed my deck and I thought, people will pay for this. You can't do it in the winter time. I could have the winners off and I can start living my life. So if I only have 30 years left, I'm going to have like three or four months every year where I could go fishing in the fall, I could go skiing all winter long. And we're not going to start back up until April. It's awesome. I'll be closed from Halloween to April. Like, how could you beat that? And I did that. This is 35 years of doing that. And we trimmed it down a little bit. We're only a couple months now because we added Christmas lights like three years ago. But up until three years ago, we were done. Halloween, that was it, we shut down and we're over. And what I do in the marketing for you were talking about getting technicians. What I do is I market to guys that surf and I market to guys that snowboard. That's the age group I want. They're most guys that surf and most guys that snowbird. Snowboard are. Snowbird, that's me, the old guy. Those guys that snowboard and most guys that surf are in really good shape, physically good shape. They're, they have a really good mindset. They're, they, they like to be out in the, in the environment. I mean, you know, here guys surf. Like today it's freezing cold outside. There's guys surfing in, in dry suits. Like today, you know, like you go out and you're gonna go out in a blizzard and go snowboarding. You know, working in the summertime, getting wet, it's not going to bother you. So I'm getting guys that are outside, guys that want the time off and it's the perk. And that's how we, we advertise. Like if you surf and you snowboard, this is the perfect job for you.
- [18:50]
Josh
So make more money than they would working for a competitive power washing company too. I mean, you too?
- [18:58]
Brian Hegarty
Oh yeah. They make a ton of money. Like my average, my average text around 74,000 for 10 months. They get health benefits, paid vacation. You know, they're getting unemployment in the winter time, and so they'll pick up like another 10. So they're like in the 80s, like high 80s, and they're only working 10 months. And these are young guys, you know, really cool thing.
- [19:19]
Josh
One of the.
- [19:19]
Brian Hegarty
One of the guys that came to work for me about. I guess this is fourth year. He's now going to be an assistant operations manager. But he came to work for me like a kid. Like, he's like 21, you know, and, you know, we taught. He already had experience working out in Seattle, doing it. But, like, when we brought him in, he didn't really have the kind of experience like. Like we have. So we got him into performance pay. We got him into hustling. He started making really good money. He just bought himself, like, a brand. I'm sorry, not brand new. It's like two years old. Brand new to him. Diesel pickup truck, like. Like a nice truck. Went outside to. The smile on his face was just, like, really cool. He was like, hey, I got a new truck out here. And I mean, like, we just went out there and looked at it, and he's like, showing me the interior and everything. And it was like he really was very proud of himself. And five people that worked for us bought their first homes, like, two years ago. They all bought their first homes. So that to me was like, when that happened, I was like, holy crap. Holy cow, man. You really created something that, like, really makes it, like, people can. That work for you, can actually, like, have a good living working for you and be able to buy a home and be able to buy new vehicles. Another guy just bought another truck this year. You know, like, it's just. It's just a great feeling to know that, like, you know, we put that. We did this. I didn't. Brian did do this. We collectively put this thing together. And I will say that I don't really make decisions in the company without consulting, like, major stuff, without consulting with everybody that works here. We have company meetings on Monday and company meetings on Friday. And I'll say, hey, look, this is what I'm thinking about doing. And I'll say what it is. And I'll say, I'd like to hear your opinions on it. Can you all please contact me privately? And then they start talking amongst themselves or whatever. And then the next thing you know, you know, we either do it or we don't do it. And, you know, I get the feedback. Like, you know, the guys really don't want to do that because this, that or the other thing is going to affect them this way. I, I wasn't thinking of that. You know, like, why would you rock the boat? I'm just trying to make it better for people, you know, I'm not trying to make like, get rich more. I already have enough money. I don't need to get like rich. I just want to help them improve their lives. You know, one thing I did want to say about employees, you know, we treat, we treat everybody in our company like gold, man. I mean, and sometimes I think it's taken for granted a little bit because we're so generous with the stuff that we do. Like this year we gave everybody, everybody had to show me now, I don't care who you vote for. Like, I'm going to be like real straight up with that. I don't care who you vote for. But we gave everybody in the company election day off if, number one, they, they send me a copy of their voter registration card and number two, they sent me a picture of them outside the polling place. And I don't care who they voted for. It was just to get people to vote. And five people that worked for me first time voted. They all registered to vote to go vote. So they got the day off with pay.
- [22:15]
Josh
That's awesome. I remember your management style was not like that back in the day. You had a transformation somewhere. Oh yeah, you tell a great story of Ellen Rohr calling you out at a business event and.
- [22:27]
Brian Hegarty
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [22:28]
Josh
You just changed the way that you approach your team. Tell us about that a little bit.
- [22:33]
Brian Hegarty
I love Ellen Rourke. She's like a no nonsense lady. She's extremely smart and, well, let me put it this way, she's way smarter than me. I mean, you know, she's doing Zoom Drain now and she did Ben Franklin Plumbing and Heating before that. I mean, she's got like a ton of experience in business. So I'm at this. I forget what Howard called him. He was like a mastermind or something. But I'm down in Texas at this thing listening to Howard talk and listening to the business coaches. And it was kind of like their entry to get into their coaching program. And I'm sitting at the table with Ellen Rohr and the guy used to work for Zig Ziglar and I can't remember his name right now, but he was like Zig's lead guy. And they're, you know, they say, what's your, what's your biggest issue in business? And I said, employees suck. I said, they just Absolutely suck. They never do what you want them to do. They're always doing the wrong thing. They always screw it up. They're doing this, they're doing that. And Ellen looked at me and she goes, were you listening to yourself? Who would want to work for you? And I was, like, insulted. I mean, I got so pissed, I got up and left. I. I went upstairs. I went into my. The hotel room. I'm upstairs in a room. I'm pacing back and forth, and I'm like, who is that lady? I didn't know who she was. I'm like, who's that lady even say that to me? And so I Google her, and I'm like, oh, man, that was really bad. I'm like, oh, man. So I walked. I walked back downstairs. Like, about an hour later. Everybody had broke for lunch, and Ellen was sitting on a. Like a bench doing some work on her computer. And I walked up to her and I said, hey, Ellen, I owe you an apology. And she goes, just like this. I know you do. Just like that. And so I tell her that story, but she's the one who, like, kicked me in the teeth just with that. That thing. Like, who would want to work for you? And. And I was like, yeah, who would want to work for me? Like, I'm really controlling. And I think as entrepreneurs, like, we get places by controlling. That's how we get there, you know, And. And, you know, like, forcing our way, like, we're gonna just force this to happen. And you could do that to a certain extent. Like in this business, I did it till I was like, maybe 600,000. And then after that, you can't do that. You got to get collaboration with people. You know, you got to sometimes just suck it up when things don't go right and don't. Don't get upset about it or don't even show it, you know, like, I had a brand new Isuzu truck got smacked up because the guy was on the phone. You know, he's like texting on his phone, and he ran into the back of a trailer, did $18,000 worth of damage to my truck, you know, so it's like, you know, you just got to like, just roll with it and realize, like, okay, that happened, but we're still doing multi millions and we're still making a ton of money. And, you know, I'm still alive today, and tomorrow's another day, and here's the plan, and this is where we're going. So let's just get back focused on the plan and get working with the plan.
- [25:26]
Josh
Let's talk about marketing for a few minutes, too, because you were talking about marketing to potential employees. Because everything is marketing. Marketing is everything. Recruiting is certainly marketing, but also regular marketing. You've overhauled that the last few years. I mean, you got it dialed in. You're generating leads, you're closing deals. Speak to that. What changes have you made? What are some tips for people? I mean, imagine you're talking, as I interview you here, to someone doing 700,000. They're stuck, they're frustrated. You're talking to that person about marketing. What do you have to say?
- [26:01]
Brian Hegarty
First thing I would tell you about marketing, if I had all the money back that I wasted on guys who said they knew marketing, I would already retire. There are a lot of frauds. A lot. I'm calling fraud straight up. There are a lot of frauds in this, in our business, and particularly in our industry. Some of these guys, you know, I'm not going to call them out on your show, but I've dealt with these people and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we can do that for you. We got all these leads and, you know, this is the leads we got for the other guy. And then I'm. I'm like, okay, well, I know that guy and I know he's got. He's doing Multimillion, so, all right, cool, let's do it. Like, without even calling that guy, because he already is doing the guy, right? And then when I find out, like, I. After everything went sideways and my. Get this, in the spring, my Google, my business gets yanked by Google, we disappear off Google, we're gone.
- [26:51]
Josh
Oh, man.
- [26:52]
Brian Hegarty
This guy caused it. This guy actually caused it to happen.
- [26:55]
Josh
That's a bad day.
- [26:56]
Brian Hegarty
Oh, yeah. And I'm talking about for a month. We're like in Google jail for a month, right? And so then I called this guy who he said he helped out, and he goes, yeah, that happened for like a month, those returns. And then we went back to, like, normal, what we were normally getting. It was just, you know, it was an astronomical thing. It just kind of happened, and it was like a little blip. But that's not what my normal returns were. And I'm thinking, like, why would you even say it then? You know, you got his numbers. You know what they are. So there's a lot of people who that tell you that they will do your marketing that are just trying to get money out of you. That's pretty much what they're doing. Marketing is like selling air. It really Is it's just like selling air. Like, Okay, I spent 40,000 on Google, but what was my return? Okay, that I can figure out because I got Google, my business, I got Google Analytics, I can look at the returns I'm getting. I know where the ads are, the leads are coming from. I know what my close rates are on those leads. I know that they're, you know, how about Facebook? Like Facebook's like so ambiguous. Like you don't know where you're getting people from. You know, oh, I might have saw you on Facebook but then I went over to Google and I closed over there. You know, it's, it's marketing's a difficult, very, very difficult not to crack. And I would say if you're in, if you're at 700 and you want to go to a million, like, and you know, just saying that sounds so weird like because that's such a common thing now, like conquer and you and Brandon that made like guys that are doing a million, like, like commonplace.
- [28:30]
Josh
Yeah.
- [28:30]
Brian Hegarty
Like really close.
- [28:32]
Josh
I mean there's more 25 year olds hitting a million than ever before. And part of its technology, it's systems, it's the information's out there. When you were scaling your business in the 90s Type of conversation didn't exist. Especially specific to your exact thing with software is built for your thing. It's crazy.
- [28:50]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah. But I would say if you're trying to scale from like seven to a million, you really need to get yourself a Google Ads manager who's got a track record. And I've gone through, I think I've been through like eight or nine of them. It's not many until I found the guy that I have. And the guy that I have is amazing. Just absolutely amazing. I talk with them every two weeks. We have an hour meeting, half hour meeting every two weeks. We go over all the analytics, we look at year to year comparison, we look at spend, we look at different ads, we check everything, we test stuff A and B all the time to get more leads coming in. He is absolutely amazing. We were trying Facebook, we started gearing up at the end of last year for that and we're working with the guy out of Canada who's got a pretty good track record. He was with Alex Ramosi for a while and he's got a pretty good track record. And we're trying to hit it off on the Christmas lights and the power washing as it ramped down. But I think we'll be using them in the spring again to get it ramped Back up. I think we're going to get somewhere with that. Facebook's difficult because it's like, oh, power washing. That's nice. And they click on it. It's not like, you know, you're looking at your deck and you want to get power washing done. You go to Google, you're not like going to Facebook to kind of romp around on it to maybe find an ad. So it's more like, you know, the.
- [30:09]
Josh
Difference is this is my passion subject, so I have to say something. But Facebook is interruption marketing. Google is intent marketing. So the problem with Google. Google's amazing because people that already are looking for your thing find you. That's the best case scenario. The problem is, is if there's 263 people a month in your market looking for you, that's great. But we can't make it 511 people or 600. You can't scale how many people are already looking for that thing. So there's. There's ceilings on it.
- [30:43]
Brian Hegarty
Yep.
- [30:43]
Josh
With interruption marketing like Facebook, it's more expensive. Typically, it's more challenging because you're. You're spamming people, you're bothering. They're sitting on the toilet looking at cat videos, and they see your ad. So that the key with interruption marketing is, is to have a foot in the door offer. There has to. It can't just be, we exist. Give us. Get an estimate. It has to be this week only. For residents of Blank. You know, driveway power washing for 199, normally 299, whatever. There's some sort of initial impulse buy, and then there's an extension process. But it is complicated, especially when you're small and you're wearing all the hats. You're trying to do all this stuff.
- [31:22]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah, Yeah. I, I would tell you that if you really, if you really want to grow, grow with your own customers. That's the thing. Everybody's always chasing the new shiny penny, which is like, I gotta get more leads. I gotta get more leads. Don't forget the people you have. That's really important. Like, we have 14,000 people in clients in our database, and we market to them all the time.
- [31:45]
Josh
Like, I remember years ago, the first time you did a voicemail bomb through send.
- [31:49]
Brian Hegarty
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Voicemail bombs work really good. They used to work. They don't work so good now because people are so like, I just got a text while we're on the phone from, you know, your U.S. postal Service package. Click here. You know, like, there's so much crap coming in Your phone now, you know, like, and, you know, people just don't even use their voicemail anymore. That, you know, there's statistics. I think it says, like, 20% of all emails get open, but almost 100% of all texts get read, you know, and. And as far as voicemails are concerned, most young people, which, that's really not our demographic, but most young people don't even have voicemail. They're just. Voicemail is full and they don't even use it. They just text, right?
- [32:30]
Josh
Texting. Yeah.
- [32:31]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah. That's huge. I. I would say, you know, don't forget your existing customers. Make sure that you're constantly in touch with them. You know, like, and I don't mean bugging them. I just mean constantly in touch with them. Like, you know, you could send them something, like if you know their birthday, happy birthday, you know, like, get out. Like, you know, happy 4th of July or happy holidays to you. It's just a little text or something. Most CRMs will do that automatically. You just hit everybody in your list and it sends it right out. And you might, you know, on Twilio, might cost you, like, I don't know, 30, 50 bucks, whatever, to send it all out. But keep it, keep top of mind. Because you. I'll tell you something right now, you know, people, we get that say, yeah, I had it done a couple of years ago. I'm like, who did it? I don't know. I can't remember. Okay, you will not hear that. From one of my clients. They say, oh, A plus Power washing did it. Yeah, you're not going to hear that because I hear it all the time. And I'm taking people's clients all the time. I'm taking them because they're not following up with them. The easiest person to market to and the easiest person to get to spend money with you is the guy who already spent money with you.
- [33:33]
Josh
Yeah, by a lot.
- [33:35]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah, by a lot.
- [33:36]
Josh
You know, you also have a lot of social proof. You have a lot of really, really good testimony videos and all kinds of things like that. Like video testimonials.
- [33:48]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah, that's a real strong thing, too. You know, like, a lot of times when people come into our, you know, into us, they'll see us on Google or whatever it is, and they'll have already been to the website. They'll watch the testimonial videos that our clients did. And pretty much, this is no kidding. I mean, Ellen tells me this all the time. She goes, yeah, he just wanted to know when we could do it. He didn't even care how much it costs. Like, you know, that's the kind of. Because they're already looking at it. They're looking like, we are the real deal. We're going to get you done today or tomorrow. We're not stringing you out for a week for an estimate. We're not swinging out two weeks to get the work done because we're quote, unquote busy. I, you know, everybody knows Tommy Mello and Tommy and I were doing a sales boost with Patrick Clark down when Pat was doing it down at his place in South Carolina. And we're talking, and we're on a panel. Brandon was there too, I think, and. And we're talking on a panel. And Patrick said, what's the most. What's the one thing that you think really drives your business? And everybody was talking about a whole bunch of stuff. And I said, you should always have more capacity than you have work. So let me break that down for you. That means you should have 10 guys standing around with no work. Because think about that. I just said that. And I know everybody that's listening to this, their hearts are skipped a beat, like, oh, my God, everybody needs work. Right? That's the mindset you want for every single person in your business to have, including you. You want that stress, that lump in your throat thinking, like, we need to get work. It's 8:00 at night. I got guys planning on coming in at 7am tomorrow morning, and I do not have work for them. I need to get work. Now that makes you get on the phone. It makes your salespeople get on the phone. It makes your office people get on the phone and dial back everybody who called up to get an estimate last week. And then you hear from them, it makes the guys that are going out tomorrow with work that can do $4,000 worth of work, and you're only giving them $3,000 worth of work, thinking, like, how am I going to get $1,000 worth of upsells at this job? My guys will not only go to that job and not get an upsell, like, maybe there's nothing there, but they're going to go right across the street, knock on the door and sell a guy across the street and do his job while they're there. That happens, like, a lot. We probably did that. I want to say we did over 75 times this year. Like they knocked on the house next door and sold that job while they were working on the house that they were working.
- [36:09]
Josh
Hmm. Well, that's a good segue into this whole 24 hour service idea. One of the things that we've been teaching people inside a war plan is, you know, to sell speed. Not the drug from the 80s that was popular.
- [36:22]
Brian Hegarty
Come on, man.
- [36:25]
Josh
Because there's lots of reasons. There's no incremental cost to speed. There's just a process change that has to happen. Or what I'll have small companies do sometimes. That's a simple solution is if your normal schedule is 9 to 5, open up some 7am slots, pay a little more to people that volunteer to work those spots. But then throughout the working day when you're scheduling jobs, you can say, hey, if you want to skip the line, we can do a VIP service tomorrow morning. But it's a little more. Because when you're selling it, it's just pure margin, pretty much. The other second benefit of selling speed is that people that are attracted to collapsing time and saving time are affluent people who are less price sensitive on average. Like, they value their time more than anything else. They don't want to wait and drag it out and make it complicated. They want to be quick, fast, do it now, make it go away. Boom. Um, when did you make that decision to start doing that? Because it is a competitive advantage for you. And then how, how do you do it?
- [37:23]
Brian Hegarty
Okay, so one of the things that. Yeah, and I believe it was, it's either Grant Cardone or somebody else that, that, that I was listening to. I, I think it might have been Grant at one time. I don't listen to him too much anymore. But at the time he said, you know, how you make money, solve rich people's problems. You don't want to solve poor people's problems. You want to solve rich people's problems. Right? So we started looking at what, what is the biggest problem that rich people have? Like, first of all, what's my avatar? Right? My avatar is people that are affluent people that have like, you know, the guy works Wall street, whatever he does, you know, or he works as a lawyer or a doctor or whatever. His wife's home, she's got three kids, she's got a nanny, she's trying to get the pickleball and yoga and all this other stuff and get the kids taken care of and all this stuff. So what's their issue? Their issue is the wife is always the one that gets stuck making the phone call to get the house washed and then she gets the estimates. The husband looks them over. I would assume they either make the decision together or the husband Makes a decision and the wife does it. Some houses the wife does it. But one way or the other, somebody's making a decision and then the job's getting done. Right. So what's their biggest issue? Their biggest issue is like, who do you trust around your house? With my, with my kids, who do I trust with my five million dollar house? Right. So we built all our marketing around that. Like we got affluent people to give us testimonials and we, we had them professionally done and we just said I was really simple. It was just like, hey look, we love the way your house looks. Like when we were doing the estimate, we love the way your house looks. It's going to make a great testimonial. You seem to be like, like if I was talking to you, I'd say, Josh, you seem to be a very charismatic guy. You know, if you want to do, you know, a video testimonial for us after the job is done, you know, we'll give you a discount on the job because I really want to use it. And we're going to put it on our website and we'll put it on our social media. People go for it all the time. So we, we would bring our videographer, like we're not doing the video. We hired a professional videographer. He would come out, he'd mic them up, you know, get them all set. He'd go out before the guys did the work, take all kinds of video, get the B roll, go out, do the video with the guys. So the guys are watching the house and they're high fiving each other as they're walking by. You know, I'll pull up in my truck and A plus power washing uniform and walk up and like give the guys a thumbs up and high five them, you know, on the videos. And then he would, at the end he would always get the person like walking out of their house and looking at it and they always had this wow. Like the, we call it the wow factor. But like wow, like looking at their house. And he always captured that. So when people are looking at our website, they're looking at that going like, well that's a nice looking house. It looks like mine and that lady looks like me. I probably go to yoga with her or whatever. And, and these guys were trusted by them. And look at, they have, you know, 2000 five star reviews on Google. Like, yeah, we're going to go with this guy and that's it. So we're solving their problem. They don't have to deal with some guy In a beat up pickup truck coming and smoking a cigarette on their property and then learning little kids and stuff like that. I mean, they don't have to deal with that at all. My guys, another thing, I mean like in season, my guys are not allowed to have facial hair, period. Like no facial hair. Right. And it's just part of the deal. Like I've had guys that are really qualified that want to work here and, and I say, yeah, but just so you know, before we even interview you, you can't have facial hair the whole time you're working here. And you're like, no, I'm not shaving. I'm like, goodbye, have a nice day, man. You know, the Yankees did the same thing. The Yankees, you step to shave. Like it creates, it creates camaraderie, it creates a team. It shows that you're a level above everybody else. Like you got up in the morning and actually put the time and effort into shaving your face to get squared away to come to my house.
- [41:18]
Josh
That's interesting. What other types of team building things do you do? I know you do many different things, but because you have a strong culture and I'm not just saying that. It's, it's like a high performance sports team type of vibe. Yeah, well, how do you do that? You got the shaving. So it's really.
- [41:33]
Brian Hegarty
We do. So that's one of the things we do. We have a upsell contest where the guys, they have a, like a goat statue and they, whoever has the most upsells for the week gets to go and they get the, the team that did it gets 100 bucks each. Give them $100 each in like cash, you know, for a bonus. We do Monday morning breakfast. All the technicians, everybody. And there's a reason why we do it on Monday morning. I take them out to, there's a really nice local diner by us that's got great food. Everybody meets at 7am the diner opens at 7, we're there at 7, we're done by 7:30. We got to drive two minutes, we're at the shop, everybody's in their truck and they're gone. So maybe, you know, Monday. It backs them up like maybe 15 minutes or something. But they all had a good breakfast, I'm there. I always go have breakfast with the guys, ask them how the weekend was. Some of these guys I can, I think I told you this by competitive shoot. So some of these guys I got into shooting so they'll compete with with me in these different competitions. So we'll Talk about that. And some of the other guys want to go fishing, and I take them fishing. We'll talk about fishing, you know? And it just builds in a good rapport, but it's like building a family, you know, and we always help each other out. Like, one of the guys. Kids got a. He's getting his tonsils taken out, and then he got a really, really bad. It wasn't fever. It was meningitis. Got meningitis. And he's only like, yeah, he's only like four. And he said to Tyler, my operations manager, he goes, yeah, I'm gonna take my wife over to the hospital, and then I'll be in the work. And Tyler goes, what are you talking about? He goes, well, yeah, I mean, you know, I don't want to let you guys down, and. And, you know, I need the money. I called him up. I'm like, jake, you take as much money, as much time as you want off, you're getting paid. Just don't even worry about it. He took off. Like. I don't know, it was like eight days or whatever. He took off, but I paid him for the whole thing. Like, is. I got your back, you know, and you have to. You have to do that for your guys. You can't just be like, oh, well, you know, I think.
- [43:29]
Josh
I think a lot of people have that kind of heart, but their business can't do that. Like, they don't have enough success to be as generous as they wish they could be, you know, because at the end of the day, you have to have the economics and the sales and the marketing and the systems and getting out of the truck, like you said, and the recruiting.
- [43:46]
Brian Hegarty
So here's what you got to do, though. I can tell you the number one issue and the number one thing that everyone's got to do and. And just listen up. Put your ear, like, really close to the speaker. Raise your prices. That's exactly what you need to do. Raise your prices. Sid Graph told me I need to. Everybody knows Sid, but Sid told me, yeah, you know, I. I raised my prices, and I. I raised them 20%. How many customers do you think I lost? And I said, probably, like, half of them. He says, no, I didn't even lose 5%. So what I did. I raised him another 20%. How many think I lost? And I said, I don't know. He goes, nobody. Wait a minute. You raise your prices 40, and you only lost, like, 5% of your clients? And he goes, yeah. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna try That I raised my price, I just went right to 40%, I just went right up, I went right to 40% and I didn't lose anybody. And I'm like, okay, I didn't hit the ceiling yet. We have, we continually raise our prices and we also have demand pricing. April, May and June, we charge more, period.
- [44:55]
Josh
Yes.
- [44:55]
Brian Hegarty
You know, gasoline fluctuates with the season, so does power washing. Right. And if I could keep my, if I fluctuate up and go with demand pricing and we go up 20 or 25, what I'll generally do is like save all the estimates that we didn't get. Right. And because people go, well that's too expensive or whatever it is, save them all. Where do we hit July? And then offer them a 15% discount? So I'm still up 10%. Right. And offer them a 15% discount and they take the deal.
- [45:26]
Josh
That was our system back in the, back in the day, man.
- [45:30]
Brian Hegarty
I got that from you. Demand pricing. Yeah.
- [45:32]
Josh
Supply and demand pricing is huge. I mean in some cases I've seen people double their take home profit just from doing that correctly.
- [45:41]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah. So if you can't afford to take your guys out to breakfast or you can't afford to cover your guy's pay when his kid is sick, you need to raise your prices. If you're walking around broke and you're wondering how you're going to make payroll, you need to raise your prices. Have a little confidence. You know, I was coaching a guy, he lived down in Florida and he was like, I can't raise my prices. And I'm like, dude, I'm telling you, raise your prices. So instead of raising them like 40, I mean I sent him my price sheet and said, you're way, way, way lower. He raised them like half of what I told him to raise him. He didn't lose anybody then, then I said, go try to close that gap, go up like another 10. And he closed it up and he didn't lose anybody. And I'm like, it's your own self limiting beliefs that is keeping you from making money.
- [46:25]
Josh
Yeah.
- [46:26]
Brian Hegarty
No, there's guys in the, there's guys in the power washing industry that net. I'm not talking gross salary, gross pay now, I'm talking about net, net over a million dollars a year. Net over a million dollars a year. And, and they're, they're not shy about their pricing. And one of the thing that, that happens is if you are the lowball guy, you can, you are dragging everybody else down, you're causing the problem. You're the guy. So if you think, like, I'm going to bid these condos so that I could get them cheaper, I'll bid them cheaper so that I could get them. And that way I'll keep my guys busy for three weeks and I'll still make money on it. And you're bidding it like what you think would be 10 or 20% lower than what I've been in that. What are you doing? I would let you do that every day of the week to keep all your guys busy. So I could sell all the residential work for 40% more than you're selling condos for.
- [47:17]
Josh
Yeah. Well, you told me the other day when we were talking to about how you send your pricing sheet out to your competitors.
- [47:23]
Brian Hegarty
I do send it to everybody.
- [47:24]
Josh
Every year is a mind blowing thing. Explain why you do that. Because that's super. That's genius.
- [47:29]
Brian Hegarty
Really simple. I get all my competitors. I have a whole list of all of them. And I don't really pay too much attention to my competitors. Like, I really, I don't really care what they're doing, you know, like, it's not like, on my radar. And I'm more interested in what I'm doing focused on, you know, my metrics, my team, what we're doing, how we're, how we're executing. I'm focused on that. You can't really focus on the other guy. You got to focus on yourself. Right? But what I do is I send my price sheet out to everybody. Like, if I see a sign, I'm stuck on a telephone pole, power washing and a phone number. I'll text that guy, I have my price sheet right on my phone. I'll text it to him. I get a text back. What's this? It's my price sheet. Is Brian from A plus Power Was. Why are you sending it to me? I said, because your prices are too low. Like, what the hell? What do you think? I'm sending it to you? And I had one guy, this, this guy was up in, it's like about maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes north of me, and I sent him my price sheet and he ended up calling me wanting to sell his business, right? And I talked to him and I said, did. Are you at our pricing? And he said, no. And I said, what is your pricing? He goes, well, probably like maybe 60 of what you charge. And I'm like, I'm not even interested in your company. You can't be making any money. And you got all the cheap clients. You got people who only want to pay, like, you know, 15 cents a square foot for vinyl siding. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't even want to. I don't even want it. I don't want your business. I don't want you. I don't want anything. Like, if you're going to be the cheap guy, you're going to be the cheap guy. You're going to be struggling and you're going to be stuck. And then when you get in your head that you could be, you can make a profit. Like, there's nothing wrong with making a profit. Like, zero. Making a profit. There's nothing wrong.
- [49:11]
Josh
Well, it's, it's essential for life to work, actually. I mean, profit. Think, think about this. Every single dollar that the government has, other than the ones they print, which are substantial, the dollars they collect are the result of somebody selling something to someone at a profit. That's just. At the end of the day, that's like how it works, right? There's margin and they get a piece of it, and it's what lubricates the whole economy. It's what makes life work. Profit is not bad. But, but you're right, it's a mental thing. I mean, maybe to round out the, the podcast, let's talk about mindset stuff, because I hear some people say, oh, this young generation, they're lazy. This. I, I personally don't think it's a generational thing as much as I think it's just a mentality, because there's people like Wesley Bloom, for example, who do millions of dollars, seven figure EBITDA, and he's in his 20s. I mean, he's just a killer, right? So I see young people that have that mindset. I see old people. I see every. What life advice would you give to just someone who's just going through the motions, not really getting ahead, not necessarily just raise your prices, but the way that they think, what would you just say to them?
- [50:22]
Brian Hegarty
If you're a man, here's, here's how, here's how I got the mindset. And I don't know if this will work for you, but this is how I got the mindset, right? When I was young, I think it's probably 14 or 15. My father would always read like, like motivational books and stuff like that because he was in sales and, you know, he always had to stay like positive attitude. So he was reading like Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, you know, like guys like that and Augmentino, you know, like, like that and he gave me the power of positive thinking. That's a timeless book. I would highly recommend that.
- [50:58]
Josh
Norman Vincent Peele.
- [50:59]
Brian Hegarty
What's that?
- [51:00]
Josh
Is that Norman Vincent Peele?
- [51:01]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah, Norman Principal. Yep. Power, Positive thinking. And then he gave me a book that was called the Millionaire Next Door. Yeah, you have to think about this in 75. So that's almost 50 years ago, right? So 75, a millionaire was like today probably like 5 million, maybe even 10. I don't even know. But I mean, I don't know what the correlation is. But like being a millionaire today is nothing. It's like having a quarter million dollars in 1975. And I read this book and, and this was, and he revised it again in 2000 or something like that. Like in the late 2000s or the early 2000s, he revised it again. But what, what it was about was it wasn't about like the, the doctor or the lawyer or the stockbroker being rich being a millionaire. Because we're talking about net worth. We're talking about like what if you just cashed out today, you drop dead, people sold all your stuff, how much you got left, right after paying off your debt, right? And what happened was as these people got wealthier, they moved into bigger homes where they had bigger mortgages. And you know, it's like an air kind of thing. Like, like we got to keep up with the Joneses. So you know, the Joneses kid goes to horseback riding lessons. So your kids got to go to horseback riding lessons and then you know, they joined a private club. So you got to join the private club and then you own a cabana at the beach and then the other guy got to get cabana at the beach. And it turned out that like they didn't have a really high net worth because they were spending their money on all this keeping up with the Joneses stuff. The guys who actually had the money were the, were the blue collar business owners. Those are the guys who had the money, the plumbers, the carpenters, the electricians, because they lived in a modest neighborhood. Like my, my house is not a big house. You know, I got a four bedroom house and you know, it's, it's a ranch. It's nice, it's in a good neighborhood. It's not too far from the beach. But I mean it's a modest house, right. I bought my first brand new vehicle like ever when I bought my, my country Cadillac. But I have a really nice limited Ford pickup truck and that thing's going to go with me till I'm dead. I'm probably going to get buried in it. But I love that truck. But, you know, I don't buy new vehicles. I take good vacations because I deserve them. I don't go crazy. My kids went to good schools. I saved money and paid for that. Okay? And, and I became, I'm not bragging, but I mean, I became a millionaire when I was in my 30s, right. And always maintain that I've never had a, I haven't had a mortgage in over 30 years. So what I would say is to get the mentality, read books like that, the millionaire next door, like, stop watching like the fast, like, oh yeah, you know, on the weekend I buy high rise hotels and then I sell these hotels and I make bigger hotels, you know, like, stop watching crap like that. And these guys leaning on Lamborghinis and all that because it's all fake, it's not real, right? Read books, get a plan. Figure out like how you're going to take care of your family. How are you going to grow your business, get in like war plan, getting coaching, you know, get, get in something that's going to be like focused on what you want to do and, and then make a goal. Okay, I'll give an example. Last year our goal was to grow by 25%. That was, that was my goal. We've been growing at like 10 to 12%, which means we would double. I think it's every seven years. If you grow at 10%, you double every seven years. And I'm like, you know what? I'm blowing out of this. Why, why 10%? Why don't we go for 25%? So I put all the new numbers up. I talked to my operations manager about it. I said, tyler, here's all the new numbers. This is what we're going to be doing. He goes, this is what he said, like later in the year. He goes, I thought you made the numbers that high so you wouldn't have to pay out bonuses because they get a bonus if they hit the number for the month. And he, I thought that I actually made the number that high so that I wouldn't have to pay our bonuses out, right? And I said, no, I, we actually hit the bonus number 9 out of 10 of the months that we were working. The only month we didn't hit was August. And we hit nine out of 10. And so everybody gets, depending on how, how much of a bonus. So if we hit the bonus number. So say the bonus number was a half million dollars for June, right? We do a half million Everybody gets a $300 bonus and the ops manager gets a bigger bonus. Right. Because he's supposed to be the driver behind that. Okay. If we do 10% over, then everybody gets 500 bucks instead of 300 bucks. Right? So two months they actually went 10% over and we ended up going 35% more in the, in the gross revenue and 307% more in the net. So we had a plan. We focused on it. We, we knew exactly what we had to do. I knew how many leads I had to get in. I reverse engineered it. If I want to hit 500,000, how many leads do I need to bring in? What does the close rate have to be? What does the average ticket have to be? How much production does each crew have to do per day? That's going to be their bonus number for the week. And we broke down every month like that. It is not difficult, guys. If you have QuickBooks Online, there's a budgeting program inside of QuickBooks Online that you can just punch in your numbers and it'll make you your budget. It's really not hard to do. So don't just think like, oh yeah, this year would be really nice if we did 750. How are you going to do that? 755 last year. How are you going to get to 750? Like, what's the plan?
- [56:36]
Josh
That's what our war plan software is. I haven't even shown that to you, I don't think. Maybe after the podcast, but yeah, close the gap. You got to have. You gotta.
- [56:47]
Brian Hegarty
Yeah. Find out what the gap is and then close the gap. Incentivize your employees through performance pay and incentivize your employees through bonuses to, to help you get there. Listen, you might have a great plan, like, oh, I'm going to get my business to a million. That is not your employees plan. Their plan is to work till 4, go to the gym, and then have dinner with their girlfriend. That's their plan.
- [57:08]
Josh
Right, right.
- [57:09]
Brian Hegarty
That's their plan. They're not on the same page as you. So what you got to do to get them on the same page is money. You have to pay them really well. Like really well. Pay them really well. And, and give them bonuses when they're on your page. When they're not on your page, they don't get the bonus. Yeah.
- [57:28]
Josh
Sage advice. Mr. Brian. Man, I appreciate you spending so much time with me. You're getting ready to head down to Florida to do all of your winter wonderland.
- [57:37]
Brian Hegarty
Oh, yeah.
- [57:38]
Josh
Here shortly. Are you not oh yeah, I can't wait to get.
- [57:40]
Brian Hegarty
We had snow here and I'm like, done, man. Come out. You know, all those years I spent skiing in Colorado, you know, I think I was out there for like, I don't know, it was like 17 or 18 years or whatever. I was out there in Colorado and freezing my butt off. And I still like frostbite on my fingers and my nose. Like all those years I had a great time, but I, man, I hate the winter now. I just want to get my shorts on, go hang out on my boat and go fishing, man. That's, that's my main thing.
- [58:04]
Josh
And you have any final words of wisdom for our listeners?
- [58:08]
Brian Hegarty
I would say if you don't have a coach, get a coach. Get somebody that, that is ahead of you, that you could talk to on a regular basis. Get a plan. If you don't have a bookkeeper, that's a good bookkeeper. And I mean, there's, there's bookkeepers and then there's bookkeepers and you want a good bookkeeper that'll help you understand. And if you don't understand your profit and loss statement, every single line that's on it, how, where it comes from, how it is, and what percentage of it it makes up of your gross revenue. So when you run a profit and loss statement in your company, especially if you're on QuickBooks Online, is very simple. Profit and loss by percentage of income. And run it on a cash basis because most guys that are the size of business you are will be cash, not accrual, running on a cash basis. And you'll see by percentage of income, right, you're going to get standards for that. Like my labor for my, my technicians is 20%. So if I look at that line and it says 30%, how did that become 30% of my gross when I'm only paying out 20% of the gross? How did that happen So I could keep score like daily and something like that would be like, people got double paid payrolls wrong. I don't know how else happen. I mean, you really have to like take a look at it. Like, is your insurance more than 4% of your gross? If it is reshop, your insurance is gasoline more than 1.2%? Is, is bleach more than 2%? You know, like there's all these like numbers that go with the percentages. And if you, if you don't glaze over and you just look at percentages and stop looking at numbers, when you get down to the bottom, it's going to say 30%. And now you're going to start making 30%. So if you're doing 600, you're going to be making 180, you're doing a million, you're going to be making 300. That's where the real money comes in.
- [59:59]
Josh
So good. Such good advice, man. Brian, thank you so much. I owe you one.
- [60:03]
Brian Hegarty
Ah, you know, I owe you, man. Thank you so much for helping me, Josh.
- [60:08]
Josh
Take care, Brian.
- [60:08]
Brian Hegarty
All right, buddy. See you.
- [60:13]
Josh
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