Tommy Mello - $1 Billion Company Founder (A1 Garage Doors) | Why Control Keeps You Small

I was washing dishes under the table for $4 an hour. I moved to Arizona when I was 16. I found a really good guy. He understood a little bit about finance and just a hard worker. That was when I found an integrator and the business started to fly. What starts as a small service business can become a legacy. If you chase mastery instead of shortcuts, Tommy Mello began with a garage door company buried in $50,000 of debt and no road map. The garage door industry is one of the hardest industries. It's a low ticket average. If you look at the most billionaires, they're not happy people. I'd say 80% of them. Because they became obsessed and they're obsessed with the wrong things. You got to be able to like reflect and think, what are the main goals here? What do I want my life to look like? But you got to have purpose. You never want to lose purpose. He worked around the clock, learned every hard lesson in the book and transformed that business into a $200 million home service empire with hundreds of employees across multiple states. Tommy doesn't just teach growth, he's lived it. You need to love yourself first. And if you don't love yourself, there's no point in doing anything. You'll never show up for anything you care about. If you don't start to find that in your piece and think you deserve more. Time management is the best skill. Focus on time management. Focus on how to be more efficient with your time. And learning how to delegate, you got to ask more questions. Be more curious. We willing to do the work. No matter how good your success is, be curious. Go learn more. Tommy, welcome to Miami. Thanks for coming down. It's human here. It's a little bit more human than Arizona. I want people to know where you came from. Because you have a really interesting origin story. And interesting in the way that I think that when somebody looks like you know, at you and all you've built, they can make the assumption that you had a leg up or a help in hand or something that got you off the ground when you were young. Now I know your story. I know that you didn't come from. I'm thinking about a leg up ring. A leg up, right? I know that you didn't come from, you didn't come from a family of entrepreneurs. You didn't come from somebody who gave you a hand there. You didn't come from like a dad who got you into the family business, anything like that. You had like a pretty, a rags to riches to a degree. Yeah. So talk to me about, talk to me about your family, talk to me about where you came from and talk to me about sort of how that shaped who you are. Well, my grandpa worked at General Motors in return to 1974. 12 kids and you know, they were all raised in a small house in Royal Oak. My mom grew up in Detroit, very small house, five kids. Grandpa left my grandma, she knocked on doors, figured out a way to make it work. My parents got a divorce when I was seven and my dad went through his trials, still didn't be my best man in my wedding, amazing dad. Time had to be super competitive, no second place, we don't get a word through that. But, you know, mom worked three jobs. We went to church, they'd help us out with Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I learned if I wanted to do anything, I had a shovel snow in my lawns back then. It's hard work. And then when you turn 12, I was washing dishes under the table for $4 an hour. But I was happy to do it. I walked straight to the Brookies Clubhouse from middle school. And, you know, I moved to Arizona when I was 16. I wanted to be close to my dad, you know, puberty, my buddies in Michigan. That time I got a job as a busboy and I was a lifeguard. And then I started up, Lance gave me a business, got that at the 30,000 a month. That's the first step in entrepreneurship. It was hard because I'm allergic to grass. And what I used to go do is water conservation analysis and tell them how much water they could save because we're in the desert. And then my roommate, we were paying $700 total for rent and tempi, where ASU is. And he's like, can you paint crossroads for me? I got this great job managing the scratch for a company. I was like, what does it pay? And at this point, I'm bartending. I still got the landscaping company. I'm serving tables and going to school. But I still have time. I'm more alcoholic. So I was like, he's like a hundred bucks a door. You got to pay for the paint. So I was taking home about 80 bucks of that. And I got paint ten doors a day. I went through the yellow book called Every Single Company. I could became their number one painter. And as I'm meeting all these guys, this is 2005 and 2006. I'm like, how much are you making a year? They're like six figures. And I was like, man, I gotta look into this. My other roommate said, we should start a garage door business. I knew how to do an EIN. I knew how to get in the yellow book. I knew how to get an LLC. I understood how to pay taxes, just general stuff. But didn't really know the full grasp of business. So we made ends meet, but it was still a struggle. In 2010, I was like, look, there's a lot of debt on this business. Either you could take the business or I'll take it. But it was a going, okay? It was okay. I mean, we were paying our bills. Any cash job we took. It's over seven years so I could say that. We split amongst each other. But it was the bills kept adding up more than we were making. And so he said, listen, you could take the business, but you got to take the debt. Anything that comes later is yours. I said, fine. And I called my mom. I was like, hey, mom, I need somebody I can trust out here. So my mom and stepdad sold their home in Michigan came. And I'm three years into the business had about five good employees, but I was still running the majority of jobs. I was doing the recruiting, the training, the marketing. I didn't like doing payroll and I didn't like the phones. Actually, the phones became super annoying to me. Even though I knew it was a money job calling, I mean, I took, you know, I would book 15 calls a day, while on a ladder at the customer's house. So at this point, just you were always, I don't know, you were just okay with hard work. You were always okay with hard work. And it's so interesting because it seems like hard work got you to a certain point, but then at some point held you back too. Yeah, I always say the hustler had to die for the leader to be born. So at this point, you're doing every job in the business, more or less. Yeah, listen, I was a janitor. There was people stealing toilet paper at the time. Like I was like, Mom, what happened to all the toilet paper? We found a guy who was taking all of our toilet paper, but they were taking everything. They were stealing parts, stealing tools. You know, at this point, I didn't own the trucks. So they come up, they had to provide their own trucks. And I mean, it was, it was tough, man. I walked in. This is a couple of years in when my mom started there. So like 2012, by the way, when she moved out, I said, I'm going to get a master's degree. So I started an executive master's degree at U of A. So that 18 months, which I was doing a lot. And in 2014, and there's so many other stories, but 2014, I found a really good guy. He had taken a pile from the airlines. He was a mutual friend. He understood a little bit about finance and just a hard worker. And I said, listen, if you come in and you could be the bad cop, I'll take care of the marketing, I'll do the training, all grow the business. I need somebody that understands how to set up the CRM, basically work on the back end office, deal with the lawyers and different things we need with the CPAs. Like, dude, no problem. And that was Adam Cronenberg, amazing guy. That was when I found an integrator and the business started to fly. 2017, I started a podcast on the right CRM and met the right advisor. And that was like a triple, like that was a home run. Because the advisor taught me about system, standard operating procedures, checklist, how to build manuals. So I've repeated, I built a repeatable system. And then the podcast, I could get anybody I wanted in the home service industry, because it was early in podcasts. So they were like, yeah, I'll come on your podcast. Like I'd get a $20,000 an hour person for an hour for free. It just, it was my show. So I was like, teach me, teach me, teach me. And I take notes and every 40 podcasts I've done, I'd hired somebody. Still to this day, every 40, that's just the average for me. Every four, sometimes it's every 20, sometimes it's every 60. So the CRM works great. And I started just diving into marketing. I wouldn't visited every $100 million Hatt Shop that there is in the United States at the time. And they let me in with open arms. And they were like, dude, we've heard about you. We've heard about the podcast. I wrote a book called the Home Service Millionaire. And then a few more key hires in 2020. And you know, 2022, we did a partial exit. I sold half the business well over 500 million. And there's 100 million slotted out for 24 people at A1. That earned it. And like I think people need to understand, like the level that you're playing at now. You pay 24 people, $100 million. Yeah, well, look, at the end of the day, now the companies worth over $2 billion. And I feel like we're still in the fetal stages. Like, now that I understand the rules of the game, I understand arbitrage, how multiples work, how EBITDA works. It's like a huge amount of leverage, yeah. The garage industry is one of the hardest industries. The reason why it's a low-ticket average. It's not like an HHEC unit, you're selling for 15 grand, a roof, you're selling for 30 grand, a hot water heater, seven grand. And people are like, yeah, well, you go to home, deep bowl and buy a cheaper than that. But that's what they charge to come to your house the same day and fix a leak. You know, I got a buddy in Ohio that does really bad leaks with like under your concrete. I mean, he charged in 40, 50 grand a pop. My average ticket is 1200. So I run 25,000 jobs a month. I mean, we've got a, we've got 1,050 employees. So, and the crazy thing is we're this month, we got 54 brand new technicians. And I don't see us slowing down. So we'll probably go to 60 to 70. Next year, I'd like to hit 100 a month by probably Q4. 100 brand new guys coming on, learning the trade, getting a brand new van, getting the tools, and having the work for them to be able to support them. So what now, now you have built a business that is bigger than most people will ever build. Not many people build a two point. What was it? 2.4? It's 2.2 billion. So right now, we're at, you know, the multiples are really high in our industry because it's demand-driven. COVID doesn't slow it down. Nothing really slows down. But the point is give yourself a little bit of credit regardless of the multiples. But I will say that the teamwork makes the dream work. And, you know, I've got a lot of ideas. I'm very patient now. I'm disciplined, but my team is everything. Like, I can't take near the credit of what they do. They run the business. I'm here in Miami with you. I'm more of the thought leader, and I'm really close to my technicians and installers. Like, 17 years into the business, 17 million dollars. Like, you need some systems to get there. You can't just build that through just sheer hard work. So what is he looking at that you as a young entrepreneur at the time think is system? Like, you're saying, like, you know, you don't have security on the warehouse and people can steal your stuff. But what is the difference between a system that gets you to 17 to 20 million versus a system that gets you to 500 million over one billion? Like, there's different systems for every level. And you thought, because I know you thought you had some at the time. Yeah, so here's the deal. I'd worked 24, 7 on holidays. I was putting out fires constantly. And I was like, the problem is when you get to that level of that kind of revenue with really crappy systems, it's always a dog fight. It's always you walk in and there's always bad news. And there's a guy that's driving down a suspended license, a truck flipped over. The police are here because, you know, the drug test, we didn't get the drug tested and we hired a guy. Three months in the drug test came back. There's a foul and we hired. We didn't have, we didn't document things properly. And either there's no system in place, the wrong system or the system's not being followed. And I think it was all three of those things. And, you know, looking back, it was really, really stressful. You know, we're going to do well, well north of 300 million this year of revenue, really, really healthy bottom line. And I feel no stress. And it's who, not how? We've got the right team. We got six people on an FPNA financial planning and an analytics. We've got seven trainers. We've got just, we've got a whole fleet department. We know someone's speeding or goes to get on their cell phone. Like every single week, I get a notification of the drivers that got flagged. And a small speeding and stuff that I don't, like they get a warning. But if it comes to me, I'm reaching out to each and every one of them in a mass text and I need you guys to cool it or you're suspended for three days. And all that stuff comes to me because they really, I've worked hard to create a bond between my team, especially the guys out in the field. We have a relationship where I'm going to give my all, you got to give your all. And if you're not, this isn't the right company. Go work for a competitor. But it's interesting because you're talking about how, at 300 million top line, you still feel less stress than what you knew were like on the, on the common way, less stress. So you've obviously delegated the time. And I know, like I think you said, you will, what did you say it's, I love this quote. It was something along the lines of, you will never out delegate me. Like you will never out delegate me, which is a great quote, right? But the point, the point I want to make is, there's still some things that you find super valuable to be involved in yourself. So when somebody is speeding, it's going to you. And you're having that communication, the conversation with the person, because you built that rapport. So how do you figure out which stuff in the business you should delegate versus which stuff is still important for you to take on? So you got to ask yourself, and every single thing, could this be delegated? Could I delegate, if I said, Scott, you know how much I appreciate you and your family, what you do for this business? Could I have my executive assistant actually call you up and say that? So culture is really, really the big thing. The next thing is I'm fascinated and the love and very curious about marketing, especially in the day of large language models, like chat, GBT, and I go on and on about that. Search engine optimization, social media, TV radio billboards like, I still get involved with most of the marketing. I'm not knee-deep in it, but I'm very, very, that's the number one thing I focus on after culture. And I want to recognize birthdays and anniversaries and great days if you set a record. I'm not there to call you out. I'm there to call you up. So a lot of times I'll reach out to somebody and say, hey dude, is everything okay? You know, I just noticed you're slipping. You haven't been shown up to meetings on time. I'm looking at your first arrivals, your first jobs not been great. I'm not going in there going. I'm going to put you on a performance improvement plan. I'm going to say you are right. When you look at culture, I think that you are an incredible example of building a good culture because I've met the guys on your team and I've met the people you work with and they're incredible people. But you go above and beyond. So I'm going to say this one more time because I don't think this is something that a lot of companies do. You give $100 million to 24 employees when you had that first exit. That's like above and beyond culture. So what are you achieving with that? Like, why did you make that decision? Because you didn't have to. Nobody forced you to. I don't think the private equity firm that came in required you to do it. There's something that you did out of like the goodness of your heart. That's a significant amount of money for anybody. Well, this ownership mentality changes everything. It's called equity and set of programs. If you think about it, every public-traded company has stock options for their leadership team. Sometimes they do eSOP where it goes all the way down. I don't like an eSOP because everybody gets equity but the greatest people work and the hardest don't get enough. Explaining that just so people understand. It's a way to set up a C-Corp and ask for if they'll set up an eSOP. But what I do is an equity incentive program where it goes all the way down to the technicians now. So if they hit pinnacle, which means their KPIs are dialed in their whole scorecard, not just sales numbers, but they don't get any recalls. They get five star reviews. They drive right all the major things. They get earned their first. They are 200,000 and 75,000 dollars after that. So if you're there for four years, you're going to make 425 grand at a transaction. Now that's at a technician level, installer level. There's a lot that I tried it. Make sure it's fair for everybody. It's kind of like social security, though. Once you give it, you can't take it back. And no one's ever really happy with it. Because literally at the end of the day, if you do the math, I own 48% of the business. It's a healthy chunk of money. So I got to figure out how to be fair and make sure everybody feels like. But I want to keep them motivated to go to the next round. And because I still got an obligation to the investors, because by the way, the private equity company, they work with teachers, pensions and firemen and police officers. And they've got their life savings in there. So I got to be obligated to them as well. And the best thing is do the right thing for your internal clients, which are, you know, the employees, which I call them my co-workers. And do the right thing for the homeowners, and you'll win every time and everyone wins. A lot of businesses don't do this, though. I don't think I see many people handing out $100 million in. Every private equity does what's called profit units. But they're kind of forced to do that, because that keeps your attention. But for me, it was like, I could have been lonely at the top of the mountain, kept all the money. There would be a lot of anger and just resentment. And they work so hard. I mean, certain people probably got too much. Certain probably people didn't get enough. Some people probably didn't get anything. Because the business wasn't small. I mean, it was 400 people back then. So I like meritocracy a lot more than tenure. No one got it because of tenure. I just don't believe in till based on what they were able to do. I've got a lot of loyalty with tenure. You've worked with me. You stood by my side. Don't get me wrong. But that doesn't mean you should just you get paid. Plus you get a bonus. Like this is above and beyond, because people have the ownership mentality. And now everybody sprinting towards the same goal, the North Star. I tell me something though, when you give it that kind of money, and you are not out of the business, just so people understand, like you are still in the business. Yeah, I'm so the CEO. You sold the minority piece, correct? Technically, they're the boss. I could get fired. It would be very hard to fire me. But they can't take away my equity. But when it's not founder based of a company like mine, it tends to kind of fall apart. And my point was, when you give those kinds of those kinds of dollars away, do you retain that talent? Like the best of the best. When I don't know what the, you know, do 100 million divided by 24, it's probably not even like. No, it wasn't even. No, the first, the top five people, are they staying with you, or are you over incentivizing them to retire? Well, I'll tell you this, there's different seasons of the business. And the people at 50 million are different, at 200 million are different at 500 million. Now, I don't think I'm the smartest guy by any means, but I've learned how to delegate. I've learned how to be the face of the company. And I've learned how to negotiate like crazy. And I've learned how to keep the morale up. So as the founder, I want to be the dumbest guy when I enter the room. Like I've, if the right CEO came across my path, it'd be very hard because they'd have to understand the culture. So I might be like a co CEO or chairman of the board, but I'm not going to give up because I still haven't fulfilled my promise. I need everybody that's stuck by me to win big. And what does that mean? Everybody's got different goals. We got a full-time dream manager. I really like to know what everybody's dream is. And we're building this software understanding. Some people's dream, unfortunately, are too small. And some people's dreams are like, they're bigger than mine. And maybe they just, but when anybody says a dream, what would you do if you want $10 million? What does that even mean? I don't want to hear about the money. I want to hear about what you want to do for your family, what you want to do for your kids, what experiences you want to have. Like I want to know everything, but not a monetary number. We could back into that number. But what is it that you really want? Some people like, dude, I want to do what you did. I'm like, okay, so what does that mean? They're like, well, I want to get to at least 100 million. What would you do with that kind of money? Well, I haven't thought about that, but I know it's possible. Would you have kids? Yeah, I've got kids. Well, you don't want that because there's no way I could have raised a family and been around my wife and made her happy if I was doing that kind of stuff. Like literally I was working crazy, crazy hours and on holidays and on weekends and skipping, like I broke up with so many girls because they were like, listen, if I'm going to hang out with you, I'll just ride with you in the truck. I can't, those were our dates at the time. Like you're going to come with me on jobs. Quick question. What's your go-to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout? 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That's NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. These are a whole bunch of different ideas here, but if somebody does want to be an entrepreneur, and wants to build anything the size of what you've built, like I think a season of their life has to be unbalanced. I think that's pretty normal. I don't think I know a single person who I've had on this podcast or myself included and I never built anything as big as what you've built, where even like a, even a much smaller version of that for a couple of years, your life is chaos. And you have to be obsessed with what you're building. But you have to know when to shut off. You have to know like, okay, so now I've gotten into a certain point. That's when you outdelegate everyone. That's when you hand off stuff. Yeah, look at the end of the day working. If you look at the most billionaires, they're not happy people. Most, I'd say 80% of them, because they became obsessed and they're obsessed with the wrong things. So you gotta be able to like reflect and think, what are, what are the main goals here? What do I want my life to look like? But you gotta have purpose. You never want to lose purpose. Especially as a man, like you want to be a provider, you want to go do stuff, you want to use your brain. Like easily I could fade into the sunset and golf every day and Hawaii and then all of a sudden they just become a lush. So I still want to maintain purpose, just focus purpose. And I don't need 12 other days. I could do six hour days of focus. And I'm still exploring things and podcasting a lot. I'm learning new ideas. But I bring so many ideas now. We're not ready for all my ideas yet. But the company will grow into a company that's ready for everything I got to give. Because listen, we're just doing grozers now. 20, you know, there's certain months we were on 25,000 jobs. Well, what if the person said this on a thing about putting a pool table in here? Will you do the floors and put it in a mini split? Keep it nice and cool in here in the summer, warm in the winter? All of a sudden that ticket for 3000 turns into 20,000. And there's so much opportunities. We've maintained a lot of discipline and focus. And so I release certain things at the right time. And I think our team did get that from Jeff Bezos. There's a Jeff Bezos story about this as well. Jeff Bezos, the best story in the world. And do you know the story about the too many ideas? Well, yeah, he had a partner that basically came in early and advisor and said, hey, Jeff, you'll bankrupt us if you go to the whiteboard again. You will literally one hour in the whiteboard will bankrupt this company. And he said, well, what do you suppose I do? He goes, I want you to keep your ideas. Keep them in a file, ruthlessly prioritize, give them to us when we're ready. And I played that to my team. I played that on stage like that is me. And he's like, why don't you build a company over the years that's ready for all your ideas? And so yeah, I just took his and put my own little. Everything I do is I call it R&D, rip off and duplicate. I love it. There's no really authentic ideas here. What do you think? Because I know like when you were very young, you were hearing your parents fight about money. Oh, yeah. And you never wanted that ever in your life. And I'm assuming I don't want to put words in your mouth. I'm assuming that's why you worked hard. That's why you hustled. That's why you sort of built your own thing. I'm going to make sure that money's never a problem in my life with my family, whatever. You have more money than you need at this point in your life. I mean, you can make the argument that you can keep going and keep buying fancy new things. But I think you're doing pretty well. What drives you now? Well, you know, the weird thing is when you start out at an age here in your parents, I used to stand on the toilet because the bathroom was next to their bedroom. So I could hear through the drywall. I used to stand on the toilet and hear them argue. And just this brokeness, it was like, we don't have money. And my dad was very generous and took a shopping. It was spent at fast and he was making it. And I guess I still sometimes feel like I could lose it. And I don't really know why? Because I've seen so many people in my life. They made money then they lost it. And I'm not doing stupid stuff. I'm not a gambler. I'm not a drug user. I just, I don't go down those things. And, you know, I've got a fiance so I'm set there. This idea of success and working out or like even faith, well, like sometimes it's just continued like how much better could you get? Like I've never arrived at anything. So now it's like, how, because I gave up, I didn't go to church every Sunday. I didn't hang out with friends. I didn't see my family enough. I didn't focus on my fitness. You know, I didn't have a lot of fun. So now I'm trying to catch up for those years. You know, I really want to do a lot of stuff for a lot of people. But one thing I don't want to do is just pass out fun tickets to people I want to invest in their dreams. Especially the close people in my life, my cousins and my family like, look, look, if you're past 70, I'm going to help you out. You don't have to work anymore. But if you're my age 40 or younger, like let's invest in your ideas. I'll help you along the way. I've learned a lot in the process. And I'll tell you something stupid. I'm going to ask you a million questions. I don't need to tell you anything. I can ask you questions. You'll come to your own conclusion based on the questions I ask you. But you think that, because you mentioned, you mentioned telling that like, you know, most billionaires are not happy, which I agree with. But I think that they get too much to worry about more money, more problems. But they also, I think they've lost like that original purpose. I think there is definitely have. There's a man's search for meaning that you lose your purpose. You just, but the other thing is is like, now you think about it a billionaire. You start questioning, now this hasn't happened with me. You start questioning people that want to hang out. You start questioning family members and start showing up. She'd start breaking. Like now you got four houses. There's a problem with the roof. The hot water heater went out. You're for art. Yeah, well, you were on the money wise, the same far. And this is a fun podcast. He breaks down how you spend money. And I don't think, I mean, like I've listened to a couple of these episodes and people with massive amounts of wealth. Like they talk about their maintenance costs. On their homes, right? And it's just an insane amount. It's an insane amount. So it's like, it truly is more money, more problem. So it never ends. You know, if you do it for the right reasons, like, look, my cousin, his wife, they just had an anniversary Ryan and Cheryl. Their Fran Katie Klein was in town. We went and saw Rob Schneider perform. Like if you got the ability to do great things and enjoy, like I didn't get the house to say, look at my house. I got it because I have family there. I've got the family office. They all stay there. You always invite people. You got me over there. Listen, I'm always going to have, like that's, it's a bonding spot and I want to just have fun. And I want to do cool things. So like, ultimately, I think a lot of people are like, look what I have. And they compare, like, keep up with the Joneses. And that's never going to create happiness. And I'll tell you, there's a lot of people that buy a massive house. Even they downsize. And some people don't even like to own. They're like some of the most wealthy people in the world. Like I don't, I don't need that liability. Because it turns in, it's not a liability. Hopefully it goes up in value. The real estate does well. But shoot breaks. And ultimately, it could be a liability, especially like, you don't need much more than two. Just you get nice Airbnb's. Flying private's super cool. But you got to have internet. You got to have Elon Hockey up. Starlink? If you don't have Starlink, it's not, it's not near as fun. Like I'd rather go first class than private if I can't have the internet. The reaction that I've heard from many people that have sold for nine figures, like high eight figures. It's like this immediate fear that you're going to screw it up. You're going to screw up some, and it's like, it's stupid. Because if you just invested it in a very conservative portfolio. 5% of $200 million, you're going to be just fine, right? You're making $10 million a year. You're stressed out for some reason. You're going to screw this up or that you can't do it. I don't know if this is a universal experience. I'm sure some people have an ego and they think they're God's gift to business and that they're never going to screw anything up. But a lot of the self-aware people that I know that don't have a huge ego, very humble, successful people, like for a moment, you're worried about all the things you mentioned. Am I going to screw this up? I don't have to figure out how to invest just because I'm a good operator. I mean, I'm a good investor. I don't have to audit everybody who comes into my world because are they liking me for me? Are they going to take advantage of me? So all these rich people problems, of course, for sure. But I think that anybody who's on this journey, at some point, if you stay in this game long enough, you'll find a way to make more money than you even thought possible. Like in all seriousness, again, it's like time in the game. If you stay in the game, you will make more money than most W2s ever will earn. Listen, I'm two decades into this and I've already had success, so I'm like a guarantee now. But most businesses fail. If it was easy, everybody would do it. You give a piece of your soul away. For a temporary time, sometimes a temporary time is two years, sometimes it's 10. But there's a lot of problems. There's a lot of people that turn their back on you. A lot of backstabbing. There's a lot of people that aren't loyal. And by the way, loyalty goes both ways. There's a lot of owners that don't do shit when they sell for anybody in their company. And they say, this is my and this is my family's. We took all the risk and that's not. So it goes both ways. By the way, there's more shitty owners than there are shitty employees probably. I was alluding to that when I was talking about the $100 million being paid out. I've been part of exits. And I've seen a lot of friends exit. They don't all pay out their employees. Most don't. Oh, look, if you do, there's still somebody that thinks they got screwed. And you know, I just wish it was, I mean, my CFO calls me Santa Claus. But literally, after this, everyone's going to go figure out how to install garage doors. They're going to, look, I'll tell you this. My buddy that I'm meeting tomorrow in Naples, he's got a garage door company. He's very successful. He exited a massive HVAC company. He goes, dude, I cannot stand garage doors. He goes, it's not even in this hemisphere. He goes, the minute my non-compete something going back to HVAC. I've never met anybody that went into the garage or has been like, this is it. It's just 20 years. If you do anything for 20 years, you're more than likely to be successful if you make it through the hard times, which is hard to make payroll. And just the times when you don't want to go and you have to go when it's like a nightmare. And you're just like, dude, can anymore. I remember, we bought this new building and the bank gave me a bridge alone waiting for the, I was going to get a loan from, what is that called? Like a small business association loan, SBA. Yeah. And for some reason I got turned down and they're like, well, this bridge loan, you didn't get the SBA. How are we going to work this out? I go, well, I'm in the building. I can make payments. I kind of got a leverage here. I didn't tell them that, but I'm like, and my COO at the time, the Adam guy was talking about goes, what are we going to do? And I remember me and Adam went to my neighbor's house and we were all really good friends, still good rate friends. And Tim's, Tim's my neighbor's grabs us a beer and he's like, so how's business going and Adam goes? He shakes his head, he's like, it's bad. And like, that's winter and I'll sunken. My stomach just went hollow. Like I didn't ever say it out loud. Like I knew what was going on and it was hard, man. I was like, holy shit. Like I'm taking out equity lines to pay stuff and I try to guarantee I'm assuming too. What's that? They're personally guaranteed. Oh, everything, everything was personally guaranteed. I mean, I put it all on the line. I rolled the dice way too many times. I doubled down. I just pushed it back in. And you know, but put me in a tight spot. That's when I do my best. Like I got this switch that I'm like, all right. And that's when I turn into the bad cop and I get rid of people downsize, I close markets. I do whatever I have to do because survival of a fittest and I know how to survive. I've done it too many times. But that's not a position you want to put yourself in or a position you'll ever be in again. But that's the fight or flight that very few people have. But I think that, again, speaking to entrepreneurs, I think at any point, every entrepreneur ever has gone through a period of that. It's not that, it's not that they're all going to double down and take super high risk. Like sometimes you can take relatively low risk and things work out and you find product market fit and you scale a little bit slower or whatever. But I think that at some point there's going to be like a moment in every entrepreneur's life that is exactly like what you're describing where you just get this feeling and you're like shit. What do we do now? And I truly do believe that your ability to succeed is based on how you react in those moments. Because I was talking to this guy. He has a publicly traded holding company. So he has a whole show. Yeah, a shell and he buys companies and he's like, I thought there was going to be a good idea. He's like, Scott, every single day I get more anxiety than most people would ever deal with in their lifetime. And I allow myself five minutes to be angry or stressed or whatever and then it's just like, I got to shut that feeling off and go back to work. And there's levels of stress. It's first of all because he has a shell company and there's investors that he has to deal with when the stock goes down, whatever investors aren't too happy. Obviously, all his portfolio companies, if they work well or not, one of his portfolio companies was a crypto company. So some of his bank accounts were getting locked out and frozen. One of his other portfolio companies was creating components for the Iron Dome in Israel. So he was getting death threats right after October 7th. So he's like, it's not just business stress. That's more to it. He's like, we had to install metal detectors, arm guards at the front door of our office because people were saying they're going to come kill me. So this is extreme examples, obviously. But the point is you just learn to either deal with it or you just can't play this game. I've even thought about like, love him or hate him. Like the amount of stress that Trump deals with, I think he is immune to feeling stressed anymore. I mean, most people don't get indicted and then jump on stage the next day and give this little talk when you're running for president of the US. I don't know what was going through his mind, but that dude is a soldier. And he's, this is the difference like between a lottery winner and where I'm at is I was bred through life's challenges to be able to understand compound interest money and to be able to say, look, everything I've for the most part, like mostly everything is appreciating. It's going up in value. And like I don't go out and like even the boat I'm building, you're building a boat? Yeah, it's called a standcraft. It's an all wooden boat. It's like you're building a boat. Yeah, it's in court of lane. But like that boat is an art piece that'll go up in value. I was going to tell you, you know, Jim Carrey once said, I hope everybody gets filthy rich and becomes famous. Then they'll understand that's not the answer. And you know, there's certain people, my brother-in-law worked at GE, now he's the CEO of the family office and he would go to India. And he'd tell me stories about these little kids that were basically homeless, but they'd be in a car and the eight of them and a tiny car and just yawning out singing. And you got to understand like he really need to sit down with yourself in a quiet dark place. And just really think about what gets you going? What is those happy moments where you feel like amazing? And a lot of people that work with say, like I do it all for my family, I'm like, that's bullshit, you should be doing it for you. You need to love yourself first. And if you don't love yourself, there's no point in doing anything. Like you'll never show up for anything you care about if you don't start to find that in a piece and think you deserve more. Indeed is a success story partner. After hiring, indeed is all you need. Let me give you an example. 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If that's anybody who takes this on, you demand a people that I've interviewed that have said like, I didn't pay tax for several years because I needed that capital to go back into the business. Like just like dumb shit like that. Like I mean, these are normal stories. But for most people, this is like, what do you mean is what I got to do? Well, I just got to figure it out. Yeah, you know, taxes I remember getting my CPAs like dude, you have 300,000. I'm like, I don't even have that in my bank account. Well, let me look at those tax forms. He's like, no, but you made this. I'm like, there's not money in the account. How did I make it? He's like, well, you bought all those new trucks and you got a warehouse full of inventory. You can't write off inventory. Here's what I figured out if you're doing cash to kind of which most people should be doing a cruel. What I would do is call all my vendors in December that I'm doing marketing with, all the mailers, every single company and say, could I prepay you for six months? And I could prepay them, get a better fee. So I negotiated down 30% because you're paying them up for it. And then I'd pay it and I'd get that written out but you can't do that with inventory. You could do that with marketing. And so there was some cool stuff I was able to do. Now with when you do a cruel, that's why banks. But you learn this shit by going through the fire. I went through the fires, man. I was like, dude, I'm going through the fires. Yeah, they don't teach you this in school. No, no, no, none of this stuff. I got, I got an MBA. I didn't know any of this stuff. I was taking apart annual reports for Home Depot doing useless stuff that didn't deliver. I learned how to network. I learned how to public speak. And I hung out with the right guys in my MBA. And I learned about search engine optimization and editing videos and like, yelp and what yelp meant. And a little bit of psychology. But overall, when I do it again, probably. But I don't know if I'd, here's what I'm nervous about, AI. I mean, I'm cautiously optimistic, but the world's about to change. Like, combine the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell. Combined, so the telephone, the industrial revolution, which was able to feed and farm everything. Combined the handheld cell phone, which is a computer in your pocket. Combine all those things. Dwarfs, what AI is going to do. All of them put together times 10. Still dwarfs, what's about to happen? Yeah, I know, I know. But so tell me why? Because a lot of, you know, white collar, knowledge workers, for sure, they're going to be in trouble. Why does service based? Like, what are you scared about? Well, my whole marketing is, like, look, what we dominate on everything we do. And it's like, here's the deal. If you were going to be number one in the 90s or the early 2000s, all you had to have is the triple truck in the yellow book. You were guaranteed. If you were the first one in with the double page, then they did a triple truck with this. Can I say something to you? I know that you named it A1. Yeah, if you wanted to rank. It's like, like, anything of a medical A1. OG SEO. Yeah. Anything of a medical A1 pops up. The only thing that beats triple A, A1 comes before triple A. The only thing that beats A1 is 1A. And 1A doesn't really mean anything. A1's like A1 from day one, dude, I'm top notch. So, like, this whole world's about to change. And I'm ready for it, and I've got enough network that we're on the cutting edge of everything. We're looking at everything right now. We're learning, I don't care, Reddit, I don't care what we're doing. We're going all in on everything, thumb, tech, and Angie. And now it's like, this was our marketing. We knew how to do it. Now it's opening back up to all these things. And anybody that says they know how to beat the system, in my last for 60 days, but you gotta have an omniproach. You gotta be AB testing. You gotta be looking out. And am I worried? Not really. But am I like, wait a minute. Bill Gates just came out and said, in five or six years, you're not going to need to work. Robots are coming on next year, a $20 trillion market cap that Elon Musk, and now there's 10 other ones. I was with one of the founders of Bessimer, one of the largest investment in software companies on the planet, venture capitalists. He said, there's 10 companies working on Fusion. We're betting on one of them. Fusion is the answer to all of energy problems in the world. Which is great. Getting away from oil and everything else. Windmills are shit, solar shit. I mean, it's just all, everything. But this is like the next three years. He said in the next two, there'll be a solution. And then I was with the old CEO of Google at a Goldman Sachs event. He goes, look, Silicon Valley and San Francisco, we believe in the next three years, there's going to be things that happen that change everything. The way humans interact and do everything. And he didn't allude to what it was. But I'm like, hmm, hmm. Because I would love to live in a utopia where we could just, but I'm trained to like purpose, purposeful stuff. Like I want to do fun things that like, I win. And some of that's business, some of that sports, some of that's just working out. But like, I can't imagine a world where there's just like, well, what are you going to do today? Well, whatever we want. I mean, I have days like that. I have a lot of vacations and fun stuff. Like for the rest of your life, you lose purpose. You lose, but I want to point something out too. Like you are a service-based business. We're not going anywhere anytime soon. No, but I think that I think that most people in like service industries or like legacy industries or whatever you want to call them, I don't think that they're paying half as much attention as they should. Like I think that the average SaaS startup is paying attention to AI, is paying attention probably to if you have an issue for like shipping logistics and you're an early stage startup, you're wondering, okay, how do we incorporate our solution into like a robotic workforce, for example, and not do we deploy that like, I know there's a company figure and the CEO's bread adcock. And I think right now, if I'm not mistaken, I think it's BMW, they already have robots that are replacing people. It's basically factories. Robotics, 500,000 jobs. Amazon, yeah, warehouses. So all these forward-looking companies are researching this. But there are so many industries that are going to get screwed. So here's the predation of everybody. And by the way, I don't know what my team thinks. I think some of them know what I'm doing. But I'm out being curious and asking questions that go on in the right doors and meeting the right people. And I'm a forward thinker. And I'm not thinking next year, I'm thinking five, 10 years down the road. Like I taught I miss vehicles. What does that do for garage doors? Like I'm thinking about a lot of things. And the big are going to get massive. The early winners will start eating everybody's market share just gobbling up businesses. There will be way more losers than winners. And the winners are going to win massively. So if you're not paying attention, this is your wake up call. And you better be a forward thinker. You better be curious. You better be asking questions. You better be paying attention. You better be reading. You better be showing up to the right conferences. You better listen to podcasts. Every single thing you could do because it's the people that just put their head down and say, I'm going to go to work. They're missing out. And don't get me wrong, I enjoy focus. But you got to be exploratory. You got to be learning new things every day. Okay, so then people and I'm making an assumption people in service industry are not as forward thinking. When you talk to your peers, are they all looking into AI? Or are you? Well, I surround myself with only a select few that we can talk. Okay, but no, when I'm talking, these aren't even, you know, there's a couple companies that might be. They're in a stage. Most people I know that they're like having so many issues and so many big goals and they're falling short. The weather's not right and all these things. I will say that the business that runs solely on systems and our CSRs have scripts and we got script compliance. And we've got exact script compliance in the field where we've got tools that listen to the conversation. And like, we know if you drive wrong, we know exactly where it went to, when it shows up where it's at, like the pizza being cooked in the oven that shows you, we know all those things. So I'm so forward looking because I don't have the fires anymore. Like we don't get distractions like we used to get, but somebody's getting a phone call saying, all hell just broke loose. We don't get those calls anymore. You don't, you have the time. We have the time and I would say, look, I won't say that for everybody in my team. My COL works very hard in a lot of meetings. And that's one thing he knows he's got to do is start being shorter meetings. Instead of an hour meeting, make it 10 minutes. Yeah, he's got to take a page from your playbook and fire himself from some of the things he's probably doing. But yeah, I think that that's it. Like if you, if you, because you can build a business and be a firefighter for a significant part of the, the journey when you're building that business, but then when an opportunity comes up, you don't have the mental bandwidth to go figure it out. And then there's going to be some startup that does have the time and the energy and the mental bandwidth to go figure out that's going to take your shit. Well, how do you hire people smarter than you? And I would say most of the people, they're very, very smart on my team, the C suite. And they do a pretty good job. But one wrong hire that you put the trust and two could set you back six months. I mean, it was very hard to get my CFO, my CO and my CFO share an EA. I couldn't get him to hire an EA for years. And I'm like, guys, how are you still looking at your email? Why? People have such an issue delegating, even at that level, like you're, you're a CFO, a COO of, you know, like a, a billion dollar company. I mean, at that point, you should be having an EA. Well, the deal is is like, off your table. What are they going to do? I got to look at the email and respond, how they're going to respond for me. Like they're not going to know how to book the tickets. I don't like to sit in the aisle. I like to sit in the window. That does not mean, but everybody has, it only takes five minutes to book a flight and book a hotel in other five minutes. It only takes me about an hour to check all my emails and respond to them. And like, what are they going to do? Like, how do they know? So it takes three months to train, and that's to get somebody barely up to speed. So you're like, and then you're putting all this trust, what if they fail? What if they make a mistake? How would they know how I think? And so there's a lot of things that they go, man, if I delegated this, what if it doesn't get wrong, done right? And most people, like you should race towards people failing. Like if your EA screws up, that's a lesson learned that's never going to happen again if you hired right. And then what's, what system did you create? What, how do you make sure that no other plane gets booked? If I got, why do I have three layovers? Never do that again, then it'll never happen again. And then you never have to do it again. So it's very tough to go through the pain. And then the worst is you get somebody that's dialed and everything's perfect now. And then something happens. They quit, their husband's got to move whatever it is. And then you just lose all trust. And I've been through that and I'm like, are you better off delegating and trusting and failing? Or better off just continuing to run the road on your own? And it's so much better to put trust in people and you get screwed over a little bit. Things happen wrong, but it's all learning experience. Race towards failure. I like that. How do you find the A players? Well, usually at our size A players find us. I mean, I'm very fortunate. But in the early days, listen, you got to find the right person. It's very hard to do really great interviews. And you got to check who they work for, why they leave. You got to ask the right questions. And then here's the best news. I learned this from Kevin O'Leary. And I've done this. I did it before he even set it. So I knew I was on to something. But if you get a really important person, say, listen, we're going to try this out for 90 days. I want to make sure you love me. I'm a hard person to work for. And that would get along good. And I'll pay you more as a 1099 contractor than I will as a W-2. When you come on, you'll get all the benefits. But here's my expectations of you. It's a few pages. It's pretty clear. I want to know what your expectations are of me, how to really lead you in the right way and make sure we get along great. And if we both love each other at the end great, but let's just agree right now, if something doesn't go right, it's no big deal. I'll still tell people how amazing you are. Maybe we just don't click. So you get that trial. And you try it before you buy it for both parties. Last thing I want to go into, because you've built, again, massive business, but there were points in your journey like where you let your health go. You mentioned before where some relationships didn't work out. I know now it's just like a broad topic, but now you're a little bit closer to God than I think you wear certain parts in your journey as well. So the point is I don't like when people build and then they let their physical health, mental health, relationships, spiritual, all that go to shit. I think that that's, I think that I don't think it's necessary, but I know it happens to a lot of people. I truly do believe that there's ways to at least maintain. I don't think they're always going to be like killing it and every single bucket simultaneously, but I mean, argue with me or not, but if you agree, then what would you do differently while you were on the come-up so that you don't let all those other things sort of go by the wayside? Yeah, so there's 168 hours in a week. If you spend 60, let's just say you spend 70 working and 50 sleeping. You still got, still got 50 hours left. Every single person listen to this podcast, focus on time management, focus on setting your alarm clock versus your bedtime alarm versus your alarm clock. Focus on how to be more efficient with your time. You know, there's certain things you could do that you think take an hour, but you could get it down to five minutes. Continuous improvement on your schedule and learning how to delegate, don't dump. Delegate means here's what needs to be done. Here's why it needs to be done. Here's when it needs to get done by, here's the resource you have available. Here's what you get if you get it done. Here's the time we're going to meet up to discuss if it's getting done so you don't procrastinate. And if you delegate and document delegation correctly and it's not easy to do, these are new habits that you've got to learn. Everything comes easier and I've just got this memory, I don't forget. Like if I want to get something done, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and be like, did we get that done? And people know that about me. They're like, dude, how do you remember all this stuff? I'm like, look, I sent you this email and I don't send emails anymore. But if anything, you communicate with me through text, that's about it. I mean, maybe a Facebook message is there in there but I'm at the point now where, if I could delegate text messaging, I would. There would be like, you'd have my number, I'd probably have 150, 200 people. Because it's literally like, I get more text messages about, hey, what do you think about this? And I'm like, it's all about delegation. Well, have you read my book? Have you listened to my podcast? People like, if you were me, what would you do? I was like, go learn, study. Go find somebody that's in your industry. That's, because when you become successful, you want to, you want to pay it forward. You're like, most people are like, but you don't want to do it for the dumb people that ask dumb questions that don't listen, that tell you how good they're going to be and how amazing. And I'm going to be just like, and I'm like, dude, you come in and humble. Like, I used to walk in there with a notepad into these big shops. I'd smile, I'd be respectful, I'd buy everybody lunch, and I'd learn, I'd go hang out, watch them take inventory, watch some train, and they were like, yeah, you really enjoy this stuff. And I'm like, listen, I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to call you again until I do what you don't me to do. I'm going to first implement what you did before I call you back. And they just respected that. Everybody, all my mentors were like, you're the real deal. That's how you track the people that are actually in the right direction. Yeah, you don't disrespect their time. You act, you're just super curious. You're not bragging about yourself. You're not telling them all your dreams. You're asking really good questions. And when they ask you a question, you could respond. But so many people, they want to talk about themselves for three hours. And they never, they sit down with a guru. They never got to get the questions answered. And if you were me, what would you do? Well, you don't have any year numbers. You don't have any business plan. You don't have any KPIs. You don't have a CRM set up. I don't even know, what's the tenure of your average employee? Like, what are your goals? When they come in and they want you to just, and everybody thinks there's a silver bullet and there are no silver bullets, dude. There are not. You hire right, you take care of people. Those are not silver bullets, because you're going to make a mistake in that process. But at the end of the day, if you do want to track the people that are going to change your life, like show up with respect. You got to define, look, you met Gina, right? And I don't think you probably did this, but you probably were thinking, like, what, what do I want in a woman? You probably went through other relationships and you know what you didn't want. You know, if you really thought about it, you wrote down a list. You would read this list out loud, and be like, man, I got to become a better version of myself to even a server girl like this. And so when I want to attract the right people into the business, I wrote down 30 things I would need to become, to even be worthy to even attract them. Like a great communicator have the best benefits. Make sure that I'm doing open book management that everyone knows where we're at. And I'm communicating all the time, showing them the plan, caring about their dreams just as much as my own. Like I wrote down all these things, and it's not perfect. I would say I'm a work in progress, I always will be. But I'm always shooting for the next level to become a better leader for them. And I will say it goes both ways, though. I wanted to tell you quickly, Gina Whitman. I know I'm going back to something here. Gina Whitman sold his company EOS. It's probably one of the best management philosophies in the world, like the rocks and the way you have meetings and take off a month. And a lot of people sell their business and they feel this empty void of just pure emptiness. They make a lot of money. They're sitting on, there's gold bars everywhere. They got more than enough money to do whatever they want for anybody in their family. And yet there's this massive void of just nothingness, of just a loss of purpose, a loss of their identity. Their work has become their identity. And it happens with everybody. And all of a sudden you sell and you've got all this money. And he wrote the book Shine. And he came up with 40 alternatives of what you do. Sometimes it's Ioska trip, sometimes it's deep, you know, see a shrink. But whatever it is, like for me, I didn't lose my identity, become still a CEO. And I built other meaning in other things. I can invest in other businesses, but still my rock is still I won. And it always will be because that's my like, that's what changed everything. That's what changed a lot of people's life. But it changed my life, it changed my family's life. Listen, we added, with through browsers, we added the generational curse. That was literally a cord around my neck, my family. The generational curse, we sniped that modify. But I think that actually that answer is like, in a roundabout way, I actually think that answer is like, my question, because yes, your identity can be your business, but it can't be like your worth either. So like your identity can be your business, it's good. It's important. Like it got rid of this generational curse. But at the same time, it wasn't like the, you don't define yourself only. Like Tommy is not just a one. But I think that a lot of people just become their business, only their business. And that's why they lose purpose when they sell exit, whatever. Like even if you sold an exit, listen, I don't think that you would lose purpose. I mean, look at the end of the day, I want to use my brain. And I don't want to do it through cross repusals. No, I understand that. So how do you use your brain? And I've invested in a lot of things that I get to use my brain, but I've built so much chemistry in my business. And it took years and years and years and years. I know every single, the leaders I know so well. And I don't need to communicate. Like sometimes I can look at somebody, we automatically know what's going to happen. And that takes years in the crumb lottery that comes with that. But I will say, you know, I have a mentor, his name's Cameron Herald. And he goes, look, you know what I hate the most is when people say, what do you like to do? Oh, I like, you know, I love to work. Like I really built the job I love. I love to go into work and he goes, dude, what about your BS? He was, what'd you like to do when you were 13? He said, what were you fascinated with? Did you like to hunt? Did you like to collect baseball cards? Did you like to go to movies? Did you like to go bowling? What kind of leagues were you in? Like find out what you love outside of what you consider working. And I was like, we were having a podcast and he goes, what do you like to do? And I was like, well, no, I'm not going to tell you like to work. Do you think that it's important to have hobbies outside of what you do? Look, I think you're more balanced and you think you're balanced. The way you come across, when you talk to me, you don't sound like you're balanced at all. But I know you. And I actually think you're very balanced, which is interesting to me, because I know people that are more obsessed that don't have good relationships, that don't have good health, that don't have anything else in their life. And I actually think you have all of that. But that's what I see outside looking in. Like I see somebody who's built a nine-figure valuation business. You say that you can't do anything but work because you have to use your mind. But I think you are selling yourself short. And I think that most people would look at you and say you have incredible balance for what you built. That's my interpretation. Well, look, I will say that it's gotten better every year. And I build, I'll tell you, I got a whole file on my phone of when I turned 45, I'm 42, you might say, why 45? Well, I still got an obligation here for the next few years. But it's not going to change when I turn 49 and 364 days. It's got to be a plan. And this includes everything from meditation, daily journaling. It includes what my work life, like you got to manifest it. This is my biggest, if you could learn anything from this podcast, everything that I do is by design. It's setting a big goal. It's writing it down. And what needs to happen? You don't wake up one day and it's all there. You don't go, man, I'm at 6% body fat. First, you got to get to 15, and you got to get to 12, then you got to get to 10. And there's got to be disciplines within their macro scouting, you get the right protein. You got to have the right cardio. You got to have the right doctor to make sure your glands are, you know, the testosterone levels and everything else. So like, that's everything. If you want to be a strong Christian, you don't just wake up one day. I'd be like, man, my face is amazing. You got to go to church and you got to spend time with the Lord and you got to pray and you got to get involved with the community. So like, everything I'm doing is by design. And you wonder why, like Jeff Bezos, does it work 60 hours a week? He doesn't. Elon Musk does, but he's got five freaking companies. He spent, he goes into each one for five hours every other week. Finds the problem, solves them, stays out of people's hair. I want people to connect with you. Where do people go to get your podcast, connect you on social, where do you want to send them? TommyMello.com has all my handles. The podcast is home service millionaire. If you like home service, if not the mellow millionaire, you were on that amazing guest. You know, you're, you've got a massive following and you're just a good guy. So if you could only pass on one lesson to your kids, the most important lesson that's changed your life, what would that lesson be in life? Yeah, so on my casket, I want two things. Number one, best dad in the world, which is nothing to do with your question. And I don't have kids yet. But number two, the most curious man. And my favorite three letters that I teach everybody in my training is ASK. Ask, go for no, you got to ask more questions. Be more curious, be willing to do the work. So I think no matter how good your success is, be curious, like go learn more. Use your brain, don't let it just die. Success leaves clues. So make sure you're getting, look, there's a couple of things when you're asking, hang out with people you got a common future instead of a common past. And manifest what that future is going to be. Get into the right rooms with the people. If you really wanted to be a percent body fat, you'd probably, I would see who your top five friends you hang out with. And you guys are eating very, very clean. And if you're wanting to be like really close and you say you're religious, show me your five friends. If you want to be a drug addict and go to the strict club, look at your friends, you will become who you hang out with. So when you're curious, be curious to the right people. That's what I tell my kids is listen, get in the right circles, ask great questions, and never feel like you're there. Never feel like the day you feel like you've arrived is the day you could throw me in the casket.