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$220M Owner: How I Went From Running a One-Man Truck to Hiring Million-Dollar Techs
Get My Step-by-Step System
to Attract and Keep A Players
(Proven With 800+ Employees)
If you have trouble recruiting A players
and/or managing underperforming technicians…
you're in the right place.
My name is Tommy Mello, and I'm a home service owner like you.
In 2008, I was working all on my own.
No partner.
No employees.
And my garage door business, A1 Garage Door, was $50K in debt.
Today?
We are over $220M in revenue, with 800+ employees in 20 states.
Many things helped me become successful, but this was the No. 1 key…
Building a team of million-dollar technicians.
Technicians who bring in anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in sales revenue. Every single year.
Because we have a system of attracting and training million-dollar techs, Inc. recognized A1 as one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States. Cortec, a billion-dollar PE firm, also invested in us.
Because I love teaching what I've learned — it helps me get better at everything — I'm going to show you the very core of our system that allows us to attract A players at will, and how you can build it like we did.
But first, tell me if this is you…
Can you relate to any of this?
You made your first few hires (technicians and/or CSRs), and your business is growing, but you have at least two of the following problems…
- You're frustrated with your employees for rarely going above and beyond at work (they get the job done… and that's it)
-
You have a top performer on your team: they've been killing it and you want to know how to keep them around (vs. losing them to competitors)
-
You hire employees who don’t have what it takes for the job… and yet you keep them for way too long (you'd love to fire them, but you have no idea how you'll replace them)
- You've been trying to hire, but you haven't had much success. You put out job ads, but the candidates just seem… blah. You can't seem to attract A players.
It's frustrating, isn't it? You know that you could grow so much more with a lot less stress… if only you had great employees.
People who care about your business.
People who are just as motivated as you to bring in sales. To deliver great customer service.
And you know what?
This was my biggest problem too. In my early years of growing A1 Garage Door, I just couldn't seem to recruit A players. In fact…
I had to fire underperformers, prima donnas, and employees who stole — heck, I even had an employee stealing toilet paper from me!! 🧻
So why is it so hard to attract those A players? What I have come to realize is….
It's not because there's a lack of A players
in the home service industry.
It's because you don't have a system to attract them.
Let me tell the story of one of our million-dollar techs, Kris Baxter:
How a new employee hit $800K sales revenue in 21 weeks
Kris Baxter joined us as a junior technician.
21 weeks later, he hit $800,000 in sales revenue.
Kris's success is not a fluke. Take a look at what other million-dollar technicians at A1 Garage Door achieved last year:
How would your business be different if you have one or two million-dollar technicians?
Now, you might not even need a million-dollar technician (especially if your business is still small).
What if you had a technician who brought in $100K in sales every single year?
How much more would your business grow?
And more importantly….
It's not just about the sales revenue.
Notice how the above techs' customer satisfaction scores are all above 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Notice what my million-dollar techs say about their performance…
Even though they've achieved so much, they're still hungry to achieve even more (and they'd be insane not to… more on why later)
And that's the real value of having million-dollar technicians in your business.
They transform your culture
into a high-performance machine.
Their success inspires other employees, especially the competitive ones. They will think: "How can I be like them? How can I do better?"
Let me show you a few recent posts by A1 techs:
Because we have a system and culture that attracts and keeps million-dollar technicians, hiring has become so easy for us.
But what do we do differently?
Well, we realized two truths about hiring top performers that most owners don't know.
Let's start with the first one:
Truth #1: Most owners put a ceiling
on their employees' performance
"Are you paying people to win
or are you paying people to coast?"
Most owners do the latter without realizing it. They pay either an hourly rate or a fixed salary, which are not motivating. Why?
If you pay hourly, there's no job security. If you pay a fixed salary, there's nothing for employees to look forward to. No reason they should work harder than they do now.
And that's true even if you pay a great salary or hourly rate…
The Money = Motivation Myth
A lot of people think, "If I want to attract A players, I just have to pay them a lot more money." Give them a high salary and that should be enough, right?
Wrong.
Competitive, hard-working employees are motivated by money, of course.
But if you give them a high salary without making them work for it, you kill their motivation to go above and beyond.
Ray Fisman, an economics professor at Boston University, reviewed research on pay vs. effort, and here's what he found out:
"The goodwill of high wages took less than three hours to
evaporate completely — hardly a prescription for boosting long-term productivity."
And, take a look at this PewResearch survey of why employees quit:
A players don't just want money. They also want an opportunity to compete and win. An opportunity to grow in their careers.
A recent trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with our million-dollar technicians to celebrate their success — all expenses paid.
At A1, we address both of their motivations with our performance pay system.
Not only do we pay them a performance bonus, the bonus gets bigger as they get more results and more experience. There's no cap on how much they can make. (Our top techs make up to mid-six figures.)
In other words…
The more results they create, the more money they make, the more motivated they get, and the more our business grows. It's a win-win.
So why don't more owners do what we do?
Well, here's one thing I keep hearing from owners who refuse to do performance pay: "Performance pay is bad because your employees will hard-sell customers."
But here's the reality:
Truth #2: By not selling more, you might do your customers a disservice
A guy confronted me the other day. He said:
"I don't want to incentivize my employees to sell things that customers don't need and screw them over."
As I listened, I noticed that he had an iPhone. So I asked him: "Well, why did you buy an iPhone? Do you really need it?"
Guy: "Not really."
"Ok. Well, do you think some people will need a cool hi-tech garage door? A brand-new Tesla SUV? A chef's knife that they can show off at dinner parties?"
He reluctantly nodded.
Here's the misconception that many home service owners have,
which automatically leads to a lot less sales…
If you offer customers options that they might/might not need, you're "ripping them off." So you should just offer the very basic services. Don't offer anything "extra."
Why do they think this way?
Well, they believe that customers only care about pricing. And that's not true! Based on our experience of selling in 20 states, here's what the majority of customers really care about…
Did your employees thoroughly solve their problem?
Did they have a great experience with your employees?
If you can say yes to these two questions, trust me, customers will pay for your services — even if you charge more than your competitors. That's exactly what we've done, and customers still flock to us.
Just read what Conner, one of our technicians, wrote.
Pay attention to the fact that he took hours to build rapport and to truly solve the customer's problem.
But if Conner was getting paid hourly or a fixed salary, do you think he'd go above and beyond to deliver a great customer experience?
This is why performance pay + KPIs is such a powerful combination.
In other words, incentivize the right KPIs and you incentivize the right behavior. You measure what you manage.
At A1, we don't just measure sales revenue as part of our technicians' performance; we also measure customer satisfaction. Both are just as important in our performance pay calculation.
That's why we have thousands of positive Google reviews:
If you see the power of performance pay and you want to implement it in your business, here's the next step you can take:
Introducing Million-Dollar Techs:
The First-Ever Audiobook on
Home Service Performance Pay
Rather than going on forums and asking experts who don't understand your business, or cobbling together your own solution, here's what you can do instead:
Get Million-Dollar Techs, our performance pay audiobook that my team and I took over seven months to create and refine.
This is a condensed roadmap of what we've used at A1 Garage Door over the years, and what we've taught to our VIP coaching program members who pay $18,000 per year.
Here's what you will learn:
- Nine success principles that you need to make performance pay work for your business (principle #8 is the most important)
- The missing element in most performance pay formulas that causes owners to lose money
- The two performance pay systems that every home service business needs (a lot of people know the first system, but it's the second system that has made us the most money)
- How to set up your performance pay system in seven steps (even if you have no prior experience)
- Six morale-killing mistakes that home service owners make when setting up a performance pay system (mistake #1 alone will make your employees leave)
- The four KPIs we use to measure technician performance (you need all four, or else your techs will game the system and make you pay more than you should)
Now, as confident as I am in the quality of our audiobook content, I know that you will need support to implement your own performance pay system. That's why we're giving away the following guide for free:
Bonus Guide:
How to Sell Performance Pay
to Your Employees
Selling performance pay to your employees — even if it's a few of them — can be scary. What if they don't like what they're hearing and they leave?
Here's the good news: if you frame things the right way, you can turn your best employees into enthusiastic ambassadors of your performance pay system.
Instead of trial and error, you can copy what's worked for me: I'll share the same approach I used to get my team excited and ready to embrace performance pay.
Will You Win the Competition for Talent?
With all the fires you have to put out in your business, why should you make performance pay top priority?
That's a good question.
I have SO many answers to this…
I can go on and on about the benefits of performance pay.
I can show how you need million-dollar techs more than ever to convert your leads and stay profitable. (Leads have been drying up since last year and customers are more hesitant to spend money on home services.)
But NONE of that is the real reason why you should implement your performance pay system.
Here's the real reason…
I want you to think of your top performer.
Your No. 1 guy.
Imagine that he's surfing on Facebook after work.
He comes across a competitor's job ad…
And he goes, "Wow. Great offer."
It advertises the same position, but with the opportunity of
a) making a lot more than what he makes at your business
b) working with other A players in a fun, competitive culture
He clicks apply and gets an interview a few days later…
What will you do if he comes to you saying that he wants to resign?
How will you replace the lost revenue that you were counting on him to bring in for the rest of the year?
(Will you have to go back into the field, or work longer hours in the field?)
How will you hire someone like him again? And how long will it take?
Or, let's say that he doesn't leave right away. And he starts slacking off because he's no longer as motivated….
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
— Mike Tyson
Don't wait for reality to hit you. Take action today:
Tommy's "Sell It Right" Guarantee
Million-Dollar Techs is part of the Home Service Expert brand, the No. 1 learning resource for ambitious home service business owners, whether they are in plumbing, HVAC, garage door, or any other home service niche.
Tommy Mello, the founder of A1 Garage Doors, a $220M business, created The Home Service Expert to share his knowledge with other entrepreneurs so that they can grow their businesses just like he did.